Gearing up to run Serpent's Skull and one of the PCs wants to be an elf. I looked to see what elven culture is like in Sargava...and there isn't any! In fact, from what I understand from my research, elves exist mostly in a handful of cities in northern Avistan, mostly deep in the forest and tremendously isolationist. There's a few forlorn elves out there, but that's like if an elf dies while travelling from one xenophobic enclave to another and the baby is rescued by human farmers.
Elves seem to be so rare in Golarion, one wonders why they are a core race. I'm trying to figure out how to get an elf out of their isolated communes at all--much less all the way to Sargava.
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Actually, there are small communities of elves all over the place, though they mostly keep to themselves. There are three elf ethnic groups living in the Mwangi expanse, though they all live north of Sargava and are fairly hostile toward outsiders due to ongoing conflicts with the Aspis Consortium. Sargava is an outpost of old Cheliax, however, which means that slaves are a prestige item there, and the Consortium exports "wild elf" slaves through Bloodcove, so an elf in Sargava could be an escaped slave, or he could be going there to look for an enslaved comrade, or somesuch.
Furthermore, there's a small enclave of elves living in the Shackles, though I'm not sure how much information there is on them. As I recall, they tend to be a bit more chaotic and a bit less good than most elves, and are culturally pretty far removed from Kyonin.
Then, of course, there are aquatic elves; we haven't really been given any details as to where they live, so they could turn up just about anywhere. Of course, we don't really have stats for them either, as far as I know, though you could just give the PC the effects of the aquatic template.
And for the record, Forlorn elves arise from all sorts of circumstances, and aren't necessarily orphans or raised by humans. Elves have moved into human cities all over Avistan (and, to a lesser extent, Garund) for the samre reasons that anyone else does: economic opportunity, access to exotic trade goods and urban entertainments, et cetera. Unfortunately, the children of these elves tend to become emotionally damaged as they grow up since, aside from their parents, there aren't likely many other elves around, and all of their human friends grow old and die before they even reach maturity; hence the term "forlorn".
Where did you find this stuff on other elven enclaves? I'd love to take a look at it. Thanks.
Once I knew what I was looking for it was suprizingly easy to hunt down. This is really interesting and helps a ton. It also really expands my familiarity with the setting. Hey, thanks! This should really give me what I need for the game.
I have an elven PC in my game, and he's the son of two escaped elven slaves looking for his tribe in the Mwangi expanse. I'm going to convert the Tribe of the Radiant Muse (or whatever it's called) into an elven tribe instead of human.
Gearing up to run Serpent's Skull and one of the PCs wants to be an elf. I looked to see what elven culture is like in Sargava...and there isn't any! In fact, from what I understand from my research, elves exist mostly in a handful of cities in northern Avistan, mostly deep in the forest and tremendously isolationist. There's a few forlorn elves out there, but that's like if an elf dies while travelling from one xenophobic enclave to another and the baby is rescued by human farmers.
Elves seem to be so rare in Golarion, one wonders why they are a core race. I'm trying to figure out how to get an elf out of their isolated communes at all--much less all the way to Sargava.
This is why my own campaign world is NOT humanocentric.
It actually makes it plausible to have all the core races available.
I tend to treat the whole Forlorn thing as largely an invention of the Winter Council. There are communities, cities, and entire countries of Elves out there, but the Elves of Kyonin are so desperate to justify their ancestors decision to abandon Golarion that they really try to sell the idea that all other Elves are hopeless wretches.
This is why my own campaign world is NOT humanocentric.It actually makes it plausible to have all the core races available.
I've always felt like core races were always too marginal in every setting. Elves live in the deep forest in secret communes, dwarves live in closely guarded mines deep in the mountains feasting and counting their money, half-orcs are the children of nasty business between orc raiders and humans and are hated by everyone...eventually it becomes such a stretch to have demihuman adventurers in numbers where they'd even meet each other that you just want to mandate that PC group be all humans.
That's a shame, and I blame Tolkien. If I had my druthers the core races would be the ones that live in towns side by side with humans, that the racial demographics of most towns would look similar to the makeup of most player groups.
I sort of feel like if a race is so rare that only exiles or rebels would ever be seen in human lands, you probably shouldn't include them in the races in the main book--put them in a sourcebook somewhere.
That said when I'm running a game in a published setting, for me it's all about trying to capture the feel of that setting rather than trying to "fix" it to make it into the kind of setting I would make.
I don't really have a problem with the population ratios of the core races. Seems to me like if you are the kind of person to leave your home and venture into a society that is strange and alien to you, then you would be much more likely to become an adventurer.
You are clearly well suited to adventure if you are going to leave your homeland, more so if you are leaving your isolated community.
So if you are in a city that is 85% human 15% other and your party is 25% human 75% other, well that kind of makes sense since those "others" in the town are exceptional members of their race and more likely to be adventuring than 75% of the humans in the city.
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I tend to treat the whole Forlorn thing as largely an invention of the Winter Council. There are communities, cities, and entire countries of Elves out there, but the Elves of Kyonin are so desperate to justify their ancestors decision to abandon Golarion that they really try to sell the idea that all other Elves are hopeless wretches.
That's an interesting idea, but honestly the forlorn elf thing makes far too much sense to me to ignore, and I'm honestly surprised it's not a more common trope in D&D settings.
First of all, not all elves living outside of Kyonin are forlorn; aside from the elven communities mentioned above, there are perfectly healthy populations of elves in Varisia, at Mordant Spire, in Jinin in Tian Xia, and probably many other places as well.
The problem arises only when elves grow up in communities where they're surrounded by members of the shorter-lived races (which is to say, pretty much all of them). Imagine if, by the time you had reached adulthood, you had already outlived pretty much everyone you had ever known outside of your immediate family, and you begin to get the picture.
It might actually be worse, though, since elves (being a predominantly good-aligned race) might have an even stronger sense of empathy than humans do. Furthermore, even with all of the magic that exists in the Golarion setting, people probably die from preventable causes a lot more often than they do in a modern, first world nation. As such, an elf who grew up in, say, Absalom, would have already lost a *lot* of people whom he or she cared for very deeply.
It's not surprising, then, that these forlorn elves seem morose and withdrawn, as opposed to the relatively carefree people of many all-elf communities.
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It actually makes a fair bit of sense to me that humans would outnumber some of the other races. Dwarves and elves live a long time, it's true, but they also take a very long time to reach maturity, and presumably require the same kind of care that young human children do, so it makes sense that their population would grow at a fairly glacial pace relative to the human population of a world.
Many of the "monstrous" races (goblins, orcs, gnolls, and so forth), on the other hand, seem to reproduce a good deal faster than humans. However, most of these races have other traits (being strict carnivores, inhabiting sunless or inhospitable regions, usually being chaotic evil...) that prevent them from organizing the kind of large-scale agricultural societies that sustain large human communities. One possible exception are hobgoblins, who do, in fact, control at least one fairly powerful nation on Golarion.
As for the other races, gnomes vary a lot by campaign setting, while with halflings... well, I always take their population numbers to be a rough estimate. If it were up to me, every set of population statistics in Golarion would include the line "Halflings: more than you expect." :P