Wood Elves

## ​Description

Wood elves are easily identifiable by their coppery skin and green, brown, or hazel eyes. Wood elven hair is usually black or brown, although hues such as blond or copper red are also found. Wood elves tend to dress in simple clothes, with few bold colours and a greater number of earth tones that blend into their natural surroundings. Accustomed to a harsh, naturalistic lifestyle, wood elves love to wear light armour, even when they are not under immediate threat. Wood elves are roughly identical to other elves in height and build, with males larger than females.

Wood elves are often stronger than other elves, but are frequently less cerebral than High eleves, who put a greater value on education.

## Personality

As a people, wood elves are largely seen as calm and level-headed. Arousing strong emotions in wood elves is not something that is easily done, although many do have a strong aversion for large cities. To wood elves, the trappings of civilization, including the mightiest of fortresses or tallest walls, are transient and impermanent things that will eventually be overcome by the long processes of nature. To many, this attitude seems condescending, weakening the bonds between wood elves and other races especially the high elves. Additionally, wood elves can sometimes seem off-putting compared to other elves, with a gruff manner that makes them less charismatic, despite their avowed compassion and humility.

## Culture

Wood elves consider themselves the heirs of the ancient elven empires, but they share many of the cultural characteristics that marked such early realms. Although a proud people, wood elves feel that compassion is a greater virtue than strength and wood elven realms are less concerned with expansion than they are with maintaining amiable relations with their neighbors. Wood elves are not nomadic, however, as is common amongst the wood elves and instead they are organized into scattered, carefully concealed villages united under a gerontocratic hierarchy composed of village councils consisting of the most distinguished families' eldest members. These councils were often advised by local druids, whose influence play no small part in wood elven politics and who frequently serve as the webbing that bound any number of villages together as one realm.

Compared with other elves, wood elves have a notable disinterest in the arcane arts. To a wood elf, the wizard's spells are little different from the mason's castle walls or the tiller's plow—a means of controlling the natural world, which is contrary to the common ethic of living in harmony with nature rather than trying to dominate it that so many wood elves espouse. As such, wood elven adventurers are more likely to take on careers that did not require the use of arcane magic. In particular, many are drawn to the path of the fighter, the ranger, or the rogue, relying on their natural-born skill to overcome obstacles. Compared with other elves very few wood elves go on to become spellsingers or bladesingers. The one major exception to the wood elven taboo on arcane magic is the arcane archers, who count among their number several wood elves. Other wood elves from more remote areas are drawn to the ways of the barbarian while many religious wood elves become druids with clerics often seen in much the same light as wizards. Those wood elves who do become clerics might eventually become hierophants. Many wood elven adventurers also became Harpers.

### Art and leisure

Wood elves commonly feel that they are in harmony with their natural surroundings and an examination of their art helps to justify this belief. While wood elves do not wander as much as like wild animals do, wood elves do their best to have a minimal impact on their natural surroundings, a fact reflected in their architecture. Frequently, wood elven homes are made of natural fieldstone or carefully furnished wood, but on occasion wood elves are known to do without even these creature comforts, living in the limbs of mighty trees or sheltered caves, rejecting furniture or any possessions they can't carry with them. So wood elven villages resemble their surroundings that humans are occasionally known to wander through one without even noticing. Increased contact with other races since the end of the Dance of Dragons has caused some of these cultural practices to come into question.

In keeping with their naturalistic inclination, wood elves are not particularly fine metalworkers and had no interest in developing any such skills. However, wood elves were among some of the world's finest carpenters and stoneworkers, masters in the crafting of bows and arrows as well as in leather tanning. Wood elves even develop a number of specialized arrows, including those that fly further than usual as well as some that are used as signal devices. So carefully guarded are wood elven crafting secrets that even experienced fletchers from other races have difficulty emulating wood elven designs. Wood elven leather armour also often doubles as camouflage, disguising a wood elven hunter from potential enemies. Wood elven crafting often looks surprisingly elegant, although they are often made of the natural materials and use naturalistic methods.

While wood elves feel it better to have a minimal impact on their surroundings, the race has no particular aversion to meat-eating and are passionate hunters. Many hours of a typical wood elf's life are spent on the hunt, which is both a practical activity and a pleasurable one. Most of the time that wood elves are not hunting they are enjoying themselves at ease within the highest branches of their forest homes. Wood elves do not, however, commonly keep pets, but instead form bonds with local wildlife in a manner similar to those of a ranger. Wood elves are particularly fond of mountain lions, pumas, and leopards.

### Magic and Religion

Wood elves are generally uncomfortable with most forms of magic, viewing wizards and other arcane spellcasters with no small amount of distrust. Clerics and other divine spellcasters fare little better in wood elven eyes, who saw their prayers as a useless call to distant gods. However, wood elves are largely at ease with the ways of the primal magic used by druids, barbarians, shamans, and wardens, which they feel is the truest expression of supernatural power—or rather, a reflection of nature itself, used to protect the wilderness. However, wood elves are not completely adverse to arcane magic and wood elven bards, sorcerers, and wizards are far from unknown, although wood elves as a whole had no particular tradition of the Art.

Like other elves, the wood elves largely worship the Gibbor, but unlike their kin, they do not do so exclusively. Many wood elves have a special place in their heart for the gods such as Pan and Artemis, whose protection of the wilderness is something the wood elves themselves try to espouse. Among the pantheon, the wood elves commonly worship a multitude of gods. Gavreel, as the god of archery, is perhaps the one of the most popular god amongst the wood elves, who sometimes invoke her as their protector and patron deity just prior to a battle.