The Origin of Dwarves (in my D&D world)

[Korto]

I assume I'll be scolded, and this moved to GEC if it really shouldn't be here.

Where Dwarves came from
I think this is pretty original. It surprised me, and I'm the one who came up with it.

Background
In my game, dwarves hate elves, and elves hate dwarves. This is a generalised, sweeping statement, and so there are always exceptions, but that's the way it is. Dwarves and elves have even gone to war on more than a few occasions, generally futile since the other side always refuses to meet "in the field", requiring attacking them at home, where they are both unassailable. Anyway, that's the way it is, and no explanation for this turn of events has ever been offered. Something else that isn't common knowledge, and the PCs don't know, is that both elves and dwarves are refugees. Both fled their homelands thousands of years ago, and ended up in the Known World.

Current Events
Due to a wrong turn the PCs took some while back, they managed to send themselves unknown millenia back in time, back to a time when elves lived in a Mayan-style civilisation. They have managed to arrive right in the middle of a civil war between the King-Priests (NO. Not of Istar) and the rebel forces of the wizard-elves (the learning and use of wizardly magic had been made a capital crime).
The rebels, the PCs discover, bulk up their forces with undead, and upon capturing a city they sacrifice all in the city to raise more undead; man, woman and child. The PCs decide they're not very nice. They also learn that elves have not only never met humans before, they've never seen a non-elf sentient race before (no orcs, halflings, etc), so a very powerful wizard elf who is a major sponsor of the rebellion takes the PCs for examination and experimentation. The PCs are currently not very happy about this.

The Point (Yes, I do have one)
Here's what I see happened, way back when. As the war goes on between the mages and clerics, one side or the other, and probably the rebels as they're already not only using necromancy (nb. the rebellion as a whole is not actually evil, as such; they're desperate), but also summoning powerful demons and bargaining with the fey, goes too far and brings down some kind of horrible cataclysm. What remains of the rebels flee, and after trials and tribulations and more than a few generations, settle down in a forest in an unclaimed land and go "back to nature" as sylvan elves, forgetting and judiciously rewriting their past. The descendants of the rebels now have no idea what actually happened.

As for the clerical side, they are forced undergound, searching for a new place to live. Exposure to the terrible energies of the cataclysm changes them over the millenia, making them tougher, more resistant to magic, as well as a wealth of other changes. Finally, in their eternal migration for a new home, they came across a beautiful mountain range, and decided to settle there. They had been transformed into dwarves.

While the common dwarf doesn't know of their ancient history, the dwarven rune-keepers keep the old histories preserved, and know them by heart. Imagine their shock and outrage when they found their ancient enemy lived bare months travel away, happy and free! Thus was started the order of Dwarven Grudgebearers, charged with bringing death to the elves, for there are some atrocities that can never be forgiven.
No-one bar the Rune Keepers (a most high and select order) is allowed to know the ancient histories, and none bar they are allowed to see the ancient dwarven High Runes or know their secret, for the secret is, those runes are Elven

[Ahriman238]

This sounds eerily similar to the elf/dwarf origin story in Oath of Swords (fantasy series by David Weber.) Except in those books both elves and dwarves were originally human, the dwarves having developed an affinity for earth/stone type magic, and the elves being human mages who sacrificed their powers for immortality. Other than that, epic, apocalyptic magical war, fleeing to a new continent, all there.

This may be an issue. In the books I'm tlaking about, all the elves basically have PTSD, the result of their long lives and living through the fall of civilization. Assuming elves are still immortal in your campaign, how do you account for the living witnesses to these events?

[Mr Bean]

This may be an issue. In the books I'm tlaking about, all the elves basically have PTSD, the result of their long lives and living through the fall of civilization. Assuming elves are still immortal in your campaign, how do you account for the living witnesses to these events?

Suicide? Merge with the Trees? Having the elves of a certain age who lived through the events going out into the wilderness never to return until there are no living relatives and the younger generations have a dozen distorted stories of those who lived it second hand, then third hand then 5th hand.

Or increase the time scale, not 1000 years but 10,000 years.

[Ahriman238]

Or mass use of memory-altering magics. There a lot of ways you can account for it, but you do have account for it, because your players will eventually ask.

[Korto]

In classic D&D, elves aren't immortal. It's not actually stated how long they live, but they do eventually die through age. In my game, since I needed a number, I decided on 1000 years.
Also, I intend to never mention just how many millenia have passed since the war, how long the elves were wandering for, how long they've been in the 'Known World' area. just that it was a very long time. The original elves are many generations dead. In fact, the elf that holds the PCs and torturing experimenting on them at the moment (as we know, non-elven creatures are not truly sentient, and do not truly feel pain. They just act in ways simulating pain, an act that can be safely ignored. Yes, he's a necromancer/dark sorcerer arsehole) is remembered in the legends as some kind of holy demi-god character like Hercules, a paragon of courage, strength, and goodness.

[Mayabird]

Or you could have them not be immortal, just relatively long lived. A lifespan of 150 years in this sort of post-catastrophe setting would still be crazy long to most peoples, enough that people sufficiently out of touch with them could think they're immortal (I'm assuming it's a typical D & D setting where sentient races are a dime a dozen), but still giving plenty of time for things to pass out of living memory and then firsthand/secondhand/thirdhand retellings.

Back to Korto, it's a pretty cool idea. Did you want any other feedback?

(PS Don't get discouraged if you think an idea is unoriginal. What matters more is if it's done well.)

[Simon_Jester]

300-400 years gives something that most people in a fantasy setting without extended lifespan will consider nigh-immortal. Imagine a medieval peasant of the year 700 AD seeing an elf who remembers what it was like before the fall of Rome- or a similar peasant of 1100 AD hearing that elf talk about Charlemagne. That said elf doesn't remember Julius Caesar is irrelevant.

[Bedlam]

In my campaign I took at idea from one of the early versions of WFRP, elves are more or less immortal, however, they have limited storage space for memory.

Every so often, normally when they trance they edit their memories to remove bits they dont want to remember, normally just boring things but also sometimes traumatic events. Then every few hundred years they compress most of their memories and start a new life with only basic memories from their previous life and it would take them several months to reaccess the stored memories.

This prevents elves becoming amazingly skilled at everything compaired to other races. If you look at it in say D&D a level one human is late teens early twenties where as an elf is in his fifties and so should be much more skilled, they've been practicing with a sword for 30 years where as the humans had less than 10 years.

[Korto]

Love feedback. Particularly feedback that goes along the lines of "OMG you're brilliant! Can I have your baby?", but, more reasoned and critical input is also acceptable. There's no-one face to face I can talk to about this stuff, since either they're not interested in fantasy and don't play D&D, or they're in my game.

As to the age thing, Mayabird mentioning it has only just made me realise how much easier things would be if elves did only live for less than 200 years. There's no game reason why they have to live so bloody long, and it causes problems (Hey, if I'm 500 years old, how come I'm only 1st level?). But I've got software set up with a 1000 year lifespan, which would all have to be reworked, can be done but I've got other things to do first... I'll keep it in mind, but it may end up on the back of a long list of jobs to do. But yeah, a lot would be easier, and I suggest to to anyone else. That forgetting memories thing sounds like an idea. I may just use that instead.

Never read Oath of Swords, although given the number of people in the world it's got to be difficult to come up with a totally original idea, particularly when you're not actually trying to, but just trying to bring together and make a coherent explanation for a number of loose story threads. "Fleeing a cataclysm" is not even original for this campaign, as another race, the currently dominant human culture, arrived in the Known World doing exactly the same thing. I found it a useful explanation of how there's a completely different culture in such close proximity, but with no motherland to call on, as there would be if they were just colonists.

Since I've said that much, I'll give a brief history of the Known World, which is only a small part of a single continent of an entire world.
The first people there were human barbarians (Armeenie), although they do have legends of a far older, stranger, and incredibly powerful people before them, and there are stories of ruins. They lived in frequently violent disharmony with the "Ganik" tribes, orcs and goblins and so forth.
Then, at some point the elves and dwarves appeared (uncertain who appeared first). They made friends with the humans, who were willing to make friends, and common cause against the Ganiks, who weren't.
At some point, the elves and dwarves learn of each other, and the fighting starts. The dwarves started it. The elves had no idea why.Still don't.
About a thousand years ago, the Burkers arrived in a great fleet, bringing along the Zartogans, Norlunders, and halflings (Hin, thank-you! I'm the right size, you're too tall! Bloody humans...). They were fleeing another disaster*, and had been sailing for many years. Upon landing, they burnt the ships and all records of how to get back. They forced the Armeenie and Ganiks into the foothills of the surrounding mountain ranges, took the fertile coastal land, and built a new home for themselves with amazing similarities to medieval Europe.
A few hundred years later, they had a great civil war which broke them up into hundreds of warring microstates, where the largest kingdom has a population of around 150,000 people, and the smallest barony perhaps 100 (average size perhaps 1000 people), and the ganiks nearly threw them back into the sea over the years on at least two seperate occasions, but other than that, no worries.

*Their cataclysm was not of their making. Two senior kingdoms, steeped in magic, were at war and had been for decades. The Burkers, Zartogans, etc, were just bystanders (although the burkers did hire out mercenaries and sell weapons to both sides.) Finally, one side developed a new weapon, a self-sustaining demonic summoning where whenever a demon killed, more demons were summoned, who could then go out and kill, and summon more demons, as a chain-reaction with no single central control point. It acted as a plague where while you could stop any individual carrier, that didn't stop the others.
It never occured to the developers that it could possibly get out of control.
The Burkers don't like magic much. They use it, but are very suspicious of it.

[Mayabird]

Still, with the forgetting part, how would you make sure that everybody forgot the same bit of history? You'd think that someone would remember, if only because that person is the designated historian and has to remember it, even if they need to forget how to put their shoes on every few decades to do so.

Could 1000 years be a theoretical maximum lifespan that no one achieves anymore since the collapse of civilization? It'd be like humans dying in their 20s to 30s (or maybe even 40s!) in the Middle Ages when, if they had the benefit of modern medicine and didn't have the same hazards, they could possibly reach 120, or at least hit 80. Elves could easily reach the mid hundreds back in the day, but now that they have a much greater chance of being gored to death by wild boars or mauled by bears or just plain starving it just doesn't happen anymore. Or intertribal warfare targets leaders the most and elders tend to be the leaders. *shrugs* I don't really understand why software assuming 1000 year lifespans affects anything in the actual storytelling here.

[Korto]

The elven collapse was a long time ago, enough generations (no matter what length their lifespan) that time, and a desire to re-write their past to make themselves the heroic victims has done its work. That's the power of never stating a hard number

The programs that would have to be modified would be the NPC generator, and the family generator, off the top of my head, although possibly just the databases (although some parts of that are not simple). Also would then need to redo dwarves, and possibly halflings. A significant fear is what has to then be changed due to changes made.
It affects storytelling by causing a program I rely on to routinely give me results that are no longer accurate. Which would bug me.
Of course, even just the "forgetting" thing by rights requires the NPC generator to be modified, as it calculates level by iterating off age.

As a off-topic point, I have heard that people in the middle ages routinely lived to a reasonable old age (60's or something), as long as they made it through childhood. It was the early-childhood carnage that dragged down the average life expectancy.

[Korto]

PS. I think I'm sounding too negative, too "It can't be done!" It can be done, I'm just currently working on a Wandering Monsters Generator (with time/date/weather patterns/phases of the moon/planetary conjuctions, and possibly more), and have a few other half-finished programs, and the thought of going back over something I thought I had done-and-dusted gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies.

By the way, Mayabird, if you're interested in trying any of the programs, just ask. I try to make them modifiable for different worlds, and I may even provide the source code if asked nicely. (Best of luck working it out. I wrote it, and I have trouble understanding what the hell I was doing).