💾 Archived View for ttrpgs.com › subraces.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:50:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Referring to elves as a 'race' makes perfect sense. They're clearly different from the other humanoids, have their own features, and biological properties and oddities.[^1]
But 'sylvan elves'? The elves who live in forests, but generally act like any other elf? They're clearly just elves living in a different climate. Likewise, gnomes who lives deeper underground may well call themselves 'deep gnomes' (or be called that by others), but the D&D stats show no reason to consider them physically distinct. Even Tolkien's different types of elves, who had plenty of physical differences, gained those differences mostly due to different lived experiences.[^2]
The 'subrace' idea sounds like a post-Victorian notion of cultural differences. I don't want to get high and mighty with Gygax over this. He was born before WWII, to a community of wacky religious nuts. By the standards of his time, I'd say he's a 12th level Social Justice Paladin.
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I've just checked and D&D are still pushing this old shit, and leaning into it hard, by making sure each subrace has its own natural abilities. So we still have all the darker-skinned 'subraces', who live deep down in caves, where all the bad-guys live.
...I got nothing. Just cannot be arsed.
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Anyway - Svirfneblins! It's a fun word, and fits right in as just a different style of gnomish culture. If you move through countries in the Medieval Middle Ages, you'd find lots of different kinds of people, so having a unified 'Gnomish culture', with 'Gnomish language' seems a little odd.[^3]
And once we think of 'grey elves' as just another culture, changed over centuries to live in mountain-cities, it feels more intuitive to start throwing out other elven cultures on the fly. How would a community, stocked full of magic users, operate across an archipelago? That's definitely another culture.
Of course, none of this can hit the core books. 'Elves' will continue to have only one culture listed, otherwise the books will bloat with off-the-cuff ideas about archipelago-elves, without really helping the game along. But the gears have started to turn, so an adventure module may have to make use of the idea if I ever get the time to write another.
[^1]: Of course it's not scientifically accurate, but if someone really needs accurate scientific terminology for their elves, they can go and play Shadowrun. [^2]: And perhaps through a little Lamarkian inheritance (and even Shadowrun wouldn't have a problem with radical elvish trait-inheritance) [^3]: Of course, whatever language the local gnomes speak would probably get the name 'Gnomish' by any human locals.