 Howdy how's it going? My name's Abby Chappie and it's time to break out that spirit glue and apply your fake ears because we're going to be diving into the race that every Mary Sue loves to play, the elf. I'm going to go over the general lore of the elves, their subraces, and everything else that you need to know about these knife-eared bastards. Keep in mind that through the ages of D&D, lore for the elves has fluctuated pretty wildly, so I'm going to be drawing mostly from the newest source of information, Moring Canan's Tomofoes. As always, keep in mind that most of this is just my opinion and if you think that I'm not being enough of an elf fanboy, let me know in the comments down below. But with that out of the way, let's begin. Part one, The Creation Myth. So long ago, there was this shapeshifting god named Coralon. Coralon was a bit of a tosser. He was super charismatic, but completely unpredictable in both his personality and his own physical form, and he had no problem breaking any promise with just about anyone to do whatever he wanted. Most of the other gods were just like, okay, he's a spaz, that's fine. But one god in particular, the orcish god Grumps, got super pissed off by Coralon's flamboyant dickery and flew into a brooklyn rage against Coralon, and from the blood that was spilled during the epic battle, the first elves came rising out of it, like, sup. At first, these elves were pretty similar to Coralon's personality, and they quickly became bros with their new god dad. But god dad played favorites and he picked out a select group from this new species and told them, you know what kids, I like your style, y'all are gods now, go make some noise. And so the partying commenced. However, there was one new elf god that found herself standing in the corner of the auditorium of life, and she texted the other elven gods about how lame everything was and how they should just blow this popsicle stand and go to her own party with blackjack and hookers, with the only price for entry being a slice of their own individuality and having to stay in one solidified form. The other gods said, hell yeah! And in one move, that one elven god had turned all the others into stoic lamos just like the elves of today, and also rose herself to a power level rivaling Coralon. The other elven gods looked at Coralon and this other newly powered god who had dubbed herself Lulf, as though they were their father and mother, the one who had created them and the one who had given them purpose, and the pantheon was thusly set in stone. But the family was about to go through a really messy divorce since Coralon got pissed at Lulf for defiling his creations and rallied half of the elven gods with him, while the others stood in Lulf's defense on the grounds that no elf should be attacked by another elf, no matter what. This began the case of Coralon v Lulf, with both gods trying to amass more followers by explaining their differing points of view. At some point, Lulf tried to undercut this legal case by just murdering Coralon in his sleep, but his followers were able to protect him, while Lulf's followers just stood by and were all like, well, we really don't know all the facts, I don't know, something about this whole thing, it just doesn't make sense, it doesn't feel like Lulf's fault. However, regardless of the extreme fence sitting, this finally caused Coralon and Lulf to decide that staying together for the kids wasn't going to work, and they went their separate ways, with Lulf and their followers moving downstate into a little house in the eternal abyss, and Coralon got stuck with a bunch of elves that might just turn on him like Lulf did. Realizing his position, Coralon took his most trusted members, created a group called the Seldereen, and left all the other elves in the halfway homes of the Feywild, Shadowfell, and the material plant. He was also still pissy about all the elves staying in one mutable form, so he made all the elves mortal as one final middle finger, and over time all the elves of the world evolved into the various versions of earfolk that we know and love today. Part two, growing up elven. Elf life is super detached from reality, due in no small part to the way that elf souls work. See, imagine a jar of jelly beans, every time a new elf is conceived, Coralon hands over one of his jelly beans to the new baby elf body, and now the elf has a soul. When an elf dies, their jellybean soul goes right back into the jar to be given to a new elf body. This fact of life for the elves shapes a huge part of their worldview. They don't tend to keep worldly possessions unless they have emotional significance, because they know that eventually they'll just reincarnate and have to get it all over again. They find the murder of an elf to be more of an inconvenience than anything else, and their punishments for it are usually more focused on repaying the friends and family of the victims, since now they don't get to hang with that version of the elf anymore. Their society revolves around reincarnation so much that it shapes an elf from the very moment they were born. You know that trance feature that literally every elf in the world gets? Well, it actually works as a point where, instead of sleeping, an elf falls into a deep meditative state and maintains a perfect connection with their inner soul. As soon as this connection is made, elves start tripping balls, and they begin receiving visions of some crazy shit. As children, all of their visions revolve around their past selves, letting them learn the type of person they are and what they should aspire to be. Eventually, at around 30 years old, the child elf will start receiving visions of their own past during their current life, which is actually the point where an elf officially transitions into an adolescent. Over time, the elf will see less and less visions of their past lives and more visions of the life they're living right now, eventually experiencing the drawing of the veil, which is when they stop experiencing visions of the past life entirely and are henceforth considered an adult. Once their trances end up filled with nothing but old reruns of their current life, elves get filled with a great sense of wanderlust and decide to go out and see the world. Their goal with their journeying focuses on experience and less on the things they get along the way. Sure, they can get a cool diamond necklace, but so what? It's just a static item that won't benefit them after they die. But to fight a dragon for the first time, to see a flower bloom, to get served by a wicked dance move, these are things that an elf will get to revisit during their trances over and over and over again, even beyond their mortal death. There's actually a really easy method that non elves can use to tell the relative age of an elf when they're faced with a dilemma. Early adults will jump into action immediately, eager to experience this new and exciting thing. Middle-aged elves will be lethargic about the problem, but will probably still help just in case there's something new that happens, and late adult elves will probably just fuck off to do something more interesting. Speaking of late adult elves, just like their transition from a child to an adult was marked with a change in the nature of their trance, so too is the transition from adult to crotchety old bastard. Just like how their visions faded from visions of their past lives to visions of themselves, elderly visions will now begin to bleed over into the lives of other elves, granting them new perspective and wisdom into the ways of their kin. At this point, just like their sense of wanderlust came, a new sense of nostalgia and homesickness will come over the elf, and they will travel back to whence they came to enjoy the rest of their lives with their people. But their days are truly numbered when they experience a thing called transcendence. One day, while an elderly elf is just minding its own business in a trance, downward-facing crescents will appear on their eyes, and this is Coralon's divine way of saying that it's time to come home to daddy. There is no set time for how much longer an elf has left when they experience transcendence, but it should be noted that only elves that worship Coralon get his divine heads up, so any elf that worships any other god, especially Loth, will one day just drop dead and go to whatever afterlife they deserve. But if they were devoted to the Seldereen and stayed a good little elf, their soul will upon death return to the great big jellybean jar in the sky, ready to be loaned out to a new babby body once more. Part three, like a ton of elves. So there are like a ton of elves with different subraces, and getting through them is going to be a chore. But traits that they all share would be a plus-tuted dexterity, 60-foot dark vision, proficiency and perception, immunity to sleep effects along with advantage to charm effects, and their all-too-important trance, which replaces the normal sleep rules in that elves only need to transfer half the time in order to get a long rest, and they retain their senses while they do it so that no one can get the drop on them while they're going through their acid trip down memory lane. But, past all the normal stuff, elves have six subraces, a number that is only beaten by tieflings. Suck it. So let's get right to it. Firstly, we've got the high elves. Technically, high elves generally come in two flavors, being the uptight and snooty sun elves and the kinder and down-to-earth moon elves, although mechanically they're both the same thing. Inclined towards the wizard life, high elves get a plus-wounded intelligence, elven training that gives the elf proficiency in the longsword, the shortsword, sharkbow, and the longbow, an extra language, and a free wizard cantrip of their choice. High elves are the most play them however you want, subrace of elves, since the fogginess around their overall personality means that people generally won't care if your high elf acts a bit off from normal high elves. On the flip side, wood elves are the exact opposite of their high and mighty cousins, preferring seclusion and extremely hard wood, as opposed to hoity-toity elf-ness. Stat wise, wood elves have a wisdom increase of plus-one, since trees are the epitome of wisdom. They get the same elf weapon training as high elves, they get a base movement speed of 35 feet, and they can hide, even if they're only obscured by light natural camouflage. These are the boys you want to pick for more down-and-dirty projects, and their hiding bonus is a big draw for those sneaky deaky types. But if you're an edgelord that likes to play D&D on hard mode, then it's time to fight with the drought. Honestly, there's enough lore about the drought that it would need its own video. Hint, hint. But the long and short of it is that drought society is a matriarchal survival of the fittest world, where showing weakness is tantamount to suicide, and feeling even a single beam of sunlight will daise you out to the point where you can't see straight. Drow get a plus-one to charisma, a superior dark vision of 120 feet, drought weapon training that gives them proficiency in rapiers, shortbows, and hand crossbows, inherent drought magic that gives them dancing lights, fairy fire, and darkness, and their final ability is the infamous sunlight sensitivity, which gives you disadvantage on all attacks if either you or the person that you're attacking are in direct sunlight. That last ability is an absolute bitch, and it will take a lot of finagling and proper positioning to deal with the negative effects. Just remember, the rules say direct sunlight, which means anything that casts a shadow, like trees, a wall, or just a plain sunroof, will remove the effect for you. Also, if you've seen the spellcaster section of my combat guide, you'd know that you can cheat the system by casting primarily save or suck spells, since disadvantage doesn't mean diddly when you're not the one rolling. But, if you want to dive into a sub race that barely anyone picks because those people are lame, the Sea Elf is exactly what it presents itself as. It is an elf. It lives in the sea. It has everything it wants in this world. Sea elves increase their constitution by one, they have a natural swim speed of 30 feet, they can breathe both air and water, they can speak aqua and can inherently talk to fish, and their elf weapon training includes a spear, trident, light crossbow, and a net. People look at the sub race weird because it isn't trying to be a super special snowflake like the rest of the elves, but the fact that it isn't played as often as the others means that playing it will make you the most original elf around. Now, if we really want to talk about special snowflakes, the Eladron has had fans clamoring for it since the DMG came out with a prototype version of the sub race. These elves were stranded in the Feywild when Korolan left to go get some milk, and their resultant evolution ironically made them the closest thing to how elves were back before Lulth did her dickery. In a sense that Eladron chews which of the four seasons they want to represent at the end of every long rest, and their form changes with them as a result. Eladron get a plus one to Charisma, and their only other ability, which is admittedly a really cool gimmick, is that they can teleport up to 30 feet once per short rest, with an additional effect coming at third level which is based off of the season that the Eladron represents. Spring can teleport someone else instead of themselves, summer explodes into fire, autumn charms people, and winter scares people. The Eladron have always been a fan favorite in the community, and I'm really glad that they've finally been officially written up for people to play. However, on the flip side of the Eladron, instead of bright colors and extreme expression of the Feywild, we switch to the stoic non-emotion of the Shadar Kai of the Shadowfell, with enough edge to almost make the Drow Blush, if the Drow were capable of adding any color in life at all to their appearance. The Shadar Kai are what happens when you lock elves in the Shadowfell for years upon years, and just let them marinate. They're full weight of emotion and happiness, and they've denounced all the Elven gods in favor of serving the Raven Queen. If that last sentence doesn't make all your clothes turn black and grow spikes and chains, I don't know what will. In any case, the Shadar Kai get a constitution bonus of plus one to show how tough they are, they get a natural resistance to necrotic damage since the Shadar Kai are like totally dead inside, and they get a blessing in the form of the Raven Queen which lets them teleport 30 feet so that they can get away from all these posers. Then at level three they get resistance to all damage until the start of their next turn whenever they teleport, and they even appear ghostly and ethereal because life is pain and agony is darkness and I don't know, some other edgy words. I'm serious, I'm fully expecting all of my known drow players to jump on the subrace like it was the last pair of foresail skinny jeans at the hot topic. And finally, grouped up in this video, because I am not making an entire guide about the half elf, we have my personal favorite subrace in the game to the point where like half of my characters are some form of half elf, and I even play a half elf at my local LARP. Fun fact, do the whole reincarnation thing that the elves got going on, there's a lot of debate over whether half elves are half a soul, or maybe they're a soul being punished by Coralon, or maybe just a human soul in an elf body, or just an elven soul in a vaguely human body. Really, nobody's sure, but the social stigma around half elves vary from culture to culture. Anyway, since half elves aren't technically elves, they don't share all the same elf features as the rest of their distant relatives, so all of these features I'm about to say are completely unique to half elves. They get a plus two to Charisma, as well as two plus ones to any other stats. They get darkvision and the same resistances to charms and sleep that the elves have. They get skill versatility, which gives you proficiency in two skills, and an extra language after elven. The Skag also introduced the choice to really pimp out your elven heritage by letting you trade in your skill versatility for different features from the other elven bloodlines. Wood elves let you take either their elf weapon training, their faster movement speed, or their ability to hide a natural camouflage. High elves give you their cantrip, or you could take the same weapon training and just say it came from a high elf. Drow will let you take their magic, and Sea elves give you their swim speed. You also have the choice of taking the universal elf trait of keen senses, which gives you proficiency and perception, but you should literally never ever ever do this, because you're essentially trading in two free proficiencies of your choice for one free proficiency that you're being told how to use. Personally, if I ever want to play a drow, I always run a half drow with the magic power, since anything that lets me circumvent that stupid sunlight sensitivity is super cool in my book. But that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, leave a like and comment if you did, subscribe if you want to be a cool dude, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can slowly make my entire world revolve around D&D. Also, if you want to stay up to date on all of your diving news, I keep a link to my Discord and Twitter in the description below. But yeah, Davy out!