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I am thinking of making a shadow elf mage but am not very sure about the lore therein. The forum is vague and the only things I can find on them via google that are remotely the same are the shadow elves of Mystara and an AD&D 2e sourcebook called "The Shadow Elves". Are either of these the same shadow elves that are used here on Amia?

Our Shadow Elves are Amia-specific.

The wiki has a full page on their culture and history.

I was looking at making one as well (in response to this thread). It seemed like it might be somewhat lackluster solo... Perhaps some teaming up could be in order?

From what I could gather, shadow elves seemed to be a pet project that lost it's director? There isn't much on the forums, and there isn't a whole lot on the wiki either (which states it is the only information there is about them, it's Amia homebrew)... and a few contradictory things.

I'd be down to make one if you, or a couple others, wanted to work together on it.

I'd be game if we could make one tiny alteration to the lore, which is really just a small addition so it actually won't contradict FR canon entirely:

Make their imitation of the more powerful illithyri and their descent a splinter movement a good century after the drow got cursed and their skin turned black. Voila, you have shadow elves and don't screw the timeline. And a century is peanuts for elf life decisions anyway, but enough to preserve continuity. It doesn't even have to be that long after, but it should be after. Maybe the curse is exactly what prompted them down there in the first place? Seeing the Seldarine kick out one of their own, warstarter or not, would seem a horrible betrayal to some back then.

Go by what's on the forums directly in the Rules section, rather than the wiki.

I would also recommend looking up previous requests for Shadow Elves on the Request forum, there's some pretty good stuff there if memory serves about how they implemented Shadow Elf lore which could give some inspiration.

Not a single result searching shadow elf or elves in the requests... I think a few of us are gonna do this though and see where it leads. Shadow elf demon cult of (censored).

Sounds interesting, i might want to make a request char as well. PM me more about the Tribe you were thinking of making and direction you look to take them in.

The full article is under Rules & Lore -> Lore -> The Races. Specifically, here. The only official Snow Elf lore is right below it.

Make a shadow elf Beholder cult instead! Mortals who worship individual beholders, thinking them deities, actually get spells from the Great Mother. I tried to suggest some specific Underdark flavor for them, though in hindsight, not forcefully enough.

I am not sure what you mean by breaking canon, BornToKill? (Apart from the race being completely non-canon, of course.) You may be entirely right that there's some mistake in their history that makes them unlikely, mind, I'm just not sure what you're referring to. The way I reasoned it was that the High Magic curse hit the genetic group of dark elves generally, whether they were bad or not, and so it would not have turned into drow those sun, moon and wood elves that had defected to their side. They still got cast out, of course, so that's how they became "shadow" elves. Mind that the paragraph about their exile does not say anything about the exact date, so it could very well have been a hundred years after the Descent when the guilty parties had been found out and the decision made.

Casvenx: Shadow Elves were one of the random subraces added along with the human ethnicities, with very little documentation and lore behind them. We didn't really know what to do with them (or whose idea it had been to add them), so I made up some lore from scratch. They weren't so much a pet project of anyone's as a problem that needed solving with a brief article. What aspects do you find contradictory, and what areas do you feel were left too thin? Not that I'd be welcome to expand on it anymore, but I'm just curious what should have been. I specifically did not want to be too detailed, so as to just give players the flavor of the race and some basic materials to build on. Half of that stuff makes me cringe now, but in my defense, I think it was in 2007 in which case I was 18 and had no education! :lol:

Basically, you need to answer the "why aren't they drow?" question somehow is all. I figure the most elegant solution is simply making them a reactionary movement to the Seldarine curse that eventually went its own way down in the depths.

BornToKill wrote:

Basically, you need to answer the "why aren't they drow?" question somehow is all. I figure the most elegant solution is simply making them a reactionary movement to the Seldarine curse that eventually went its own way down in the depths.

I suppose that hinges on the question of whether the curse targeted just the dark elven subrace or the political opinions of Ilythiir the nation and its allies (where other dark elves would be collateral). And we know that it did affect non-Ilythiiri dark elves like those of Miyeritar (some of whom were recently restored by Eilistraee's sacrifice), and on the other hand does not seem to have affected the green elves of Miyeritar (which was not an "evil" nation anyway).

By all accounts, it seems to have been an ethnic curse. Shadow Elves were, in our lore, specifically "bad guys" who nonetheless were not tainted with Wendonai's blood and did not have any close genetic relations so they just got the this-worldly banishment part of the punishment, dodging Corellon's Skunk Ray that turned their buddies black and white.

I'd really rather not bring in genetics when you can do it with simple timing, personally. I also do not think Eilistrae's sacrifice has happened yet on Amia.

Last edited by IronAngel on Mon, May 26 2014, 19:19 PM, edited 1 time in total.

But isn't that the whole point of the Descent of the Drow and its moral ambiguity? That even if 80% of dark elves were on the baddie side, the ultimate decision was still to transform everyone with brown skin and condemn even innocents in the name of vengeance against the majority? That is how I read the story and why I think it's a trauma the elves as a people never quite recovered from. It leaves a stain on Corellon's otherwise heroic image. It is also the context for Eilistraee's decision to leave the Seldarine: her father would have made an exception for her, but since he did not make an exception for the thousands of non-guilty dark elves either, she chose to go with them and steer them away from Lolth.

Eilistraee's sacrifice has not happened, but the point was that it rests on the historical prerequisite that there were, in fact, non-Ilythiiri dark elves turned drow she could redeem. And that's not the only evidence for it, either. The sources say that the whole race was affected, and there are no brown dark elves left in the world so clearly it was the race and not the political faction that got attacked. Never have we heard of a drow who was originally of another elven subrace, either, and surely when we're speaking of nations with populations in the tens of thousands, there was some ethnic diversity even in Ilythiir.

The theme of the Shadow Elves is essentially motivated by the question of what happened to those allies of Ilythiir who were not affected by the curse but were just as guilty in the eyes of their people. They could not reclaim their standing in surface society, but neither could they go with the drow because they were not similarly cursed and were thus left stranded between worlds. That's what the race is all about, in a few words. If you were to make it a matter of heroic choice and a statement of sympathy towards the drow, the interpretation of the race would fundamentally turn upside down, don't you think?

And since there were "no exceptions", shadow elves need to be explained somehow. Because there were no exceptions and yet, they are one, if you take it 100% as written. An elven reaction out of empathy with the illithyri, with its own eventual fall from grace, seems most sensible there.

BornToKill wrote:

And since there were "no exceptions", shadow elves need to be explained somehow. Because there were no exceptions and yet, they are one, if you take it 100% as written. An elven reaction out of empathy with the illithyri, with its own eventual fall from grace, seems most sensible there.

No exceptions to what? No exceptions to dark elves being transformed. But they were not dark elves - they were sun elves and wood elves! No other "evil" parties of the Crown Wars were transformed, either. The Vyshaanti remained sun elves (except those who fled underground to become shadow elves, of course). Every political ally of Ilythiir who wasn't a dark elf remained their original subrace, as far as we know. In short, there is no canon reference anywhere of anyone other than a dark elf turning into drow. (Edit: Or if there is, I've never seen it. I could be wrong here, but I am 95% sure that the curse specifically affected a subrace and not a political group.)

Out of bad habit, I edited my above post with one last paragraph, by the way.

Shadow elves

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