Whether the ever popular elves and dwarves or sapient non-human creatures of your own creation, many worlds include fantastical people of all sorts. Did you choose to include any in your world, and if so what are they like?
Whether the ever popular elves and dwarves or sapient non-human creatures of your own creation, many worlds include fantastical people of all sorts. Did you choose to include any in your world, and if so what are they like?
In my Pathfinder setting, I have the usual suspects. Though one notable deviation from typical elves and dwarves is their aging process. They don’t die like humans do, but as they age they still deteriorate.
As dwarves age, they slowly turn to stone. By 100 years old, they’re noticeably slower and heavier than young dwarves. By 200, they are much slower. Their skin is stony, it occasionally cracks and flakes, causing mild, but painful injury. These dwarves extremely skilled workers, but are by no means fast or quick at this age. By 300, they are heavily petrified. Dwarves this old are slow: they move, speak and think very slowly. They are so slow that interacting with them is difficult. Old dwarves are not stupid, their minds are sharp as ever, and the lifetimes of experience that they have is incredibly valuable for a ruler or trade magnate.
But this means that dwarven kingdoms with aged rulers require a complex bureaucracy around them. The king’s time is not only valuable, but they literally have less of it than a younger dwarf. Often the king will surround himself with younger trusted advisors, who themselves have more spry and quick underlings. This bureaucracy can lead to corruption, as ambitious or greedy young dwarves think they can pull a fast one on their slower leaders. A king often spends a lot of time constructing intelligent rules and systems to prevent corruption and maintain order, leaving things like foreign affairs and even rather large emergencies to trusted advisors who can respond in real time.
Elves too will age, but never necessarily die. Longer-lived than other races, they are cursed with a buildup of memories, and their connection with the arcane eventually distorts their perception both of the past and of reality. By 500 or so, they frequently are required to resign themselves to the past, reliving the best and worst moments of their incredibly long lives. This makes extremely old elves ineffective rulers. Some civilizations put an age limit on their leaders for this reason, while others insulate the ruler, rendering them more of a figurehead than a true head of state. It is also for this reason that elven conclaves are likely to be democratic in nature, to protect from a ruler that may have gone off the deep end.