My first sketches of my elves! They’re numbered in the order I drew them. I’m gonna continue developing the design based on #10, right now it looks too “insecty” and I’d like for the eyes to look a little less soulless. Maybe rounder shapes overall? I want them to look non-human, but still beautiful and ethereal by human standards.
I decided I wanted to completely redesign elves and dwarves for my first campaign, as they’re basically slightly modified humans in most media, and I find that boring. Humans are boring, they’re everywhere already!
Race info under the cut!
My elves get their life source from light. Mainly the sun and the moon, but artificial light, fire, and so on work too (just not as well since they’re much smaller). Therefore their homes usually have a lot of big windows, and fires/lights for dark days.
The elves communicate with each other telepathically. They can kind of “tune in” the thoughts of different members of their sort like radio stations. This, together with light being their life source, has made it so that they never developed mouths (historically, they’ve lived quite isolated). This makes it kind of tricky to communicate with other races, so they usually resort to charades or writing in those situations.
There’s two main elven races - the Sun Elves (usually just referred to as elves) and the Ghost Elves. The Ghost Elves were once Sun Elves, but live deep inside underground caves, where they’ve built quite the underground empire over the years. These elves look quite different to the regular elves. Since pretty much their only light source is bioluminescent fungi they’re constantly malnourished and suffer physical defects as a result. Their blindness is evolutionary, though, as there is no use for eyes in the constant darkness. Instead they use echolocation to keep track of their surroundings - they snap their fingers continuously, and the sound bounces off walls and objects. Their ears have become quite large as a result. Because of the lack of light, their skin has faded to ashen white.
How the Ghost Elves came to be trapped underground no one remembers, or perhaps they keep it unspoken. The Sun Elves can not communicate with the Ghost Elves like they can with each other, and those that have tried to go and investigate never returned. Most agree they’re better off left alone, and tend to ignore their existence.
