Faefolk Confederacy

The Faefolk Confederacy is a relatively new political entity formed from kingdoms (and queendoms) nearly as old as the world itself. As an idea it was born hastily out of the threat of conquest by the EHD in 3100PF, but the political framework that makes up the constitutional body of the Confederacy only came about in the decades and centuries after, and are still in flux as new circumstances and existential dangers arise to place new and novel demands on the ad-hoc state.

Geographically it is contained mostly within the bounds of the mountain range that rings the Wodaichi Plateau with a few exceptions, most notably the Underdark inhabited by the Drow and the Faewild by the Eladrin. Entrances to the plateau are heavily-fortified, not only by fixed fortifications but by the arcanist artillerists known and feared by both the Gorzhiak tribes and the Elves' Southerly hegemonic neighbor. By a combination of arcane skill, proper foresight and preparation, and on more than one occasion, outright luck, the Elves have remained sovereign despite the unfortunate position sandwiched between two vast military powers.

The Confederacy, as its name would suggest, is more like a permanent alliance - and sometimes little more than a non-aggression pact - between the Elven states. By both design and constitution it is not intended to have any kind of enforcement power over its constituent members, the rationale being that if there is a body that should decide the direction of all Faefolk, it should be conducted exclusively by consensus. Accordingly, during peacetime, it would be accurate to say that there is almost no Confederate Government at all; only those few bureaucratic institutions necessary to keep it prepared for a quick reestablishment in the event of an emergency.

Given the peculiarities of Elven society and culture, the economic circumstances of the confederacy are relatively stable, comprised mostly of a traditional economy, albeit long since augmented and automated by arcane means. The exception to this being the Sea Elves who are increasingly interested in the wealth-creating potential of international trade and industrialization. Though originally formed to cultivate consensus and unity in the face of threats from the outside, increasingly the Elves are finding the threats to stability and unity coming from within their borders.

## History

### Pre-Flood (Unknown-0PF)

Long thought to be an insurmountable barrier between epochs, Elven history predates the Yellow Flood by some unknown amount of time due to their origin in the Faewild. Translations of Celestial writing into a proto-Elven script have been found in Eladrin archives, some precious few even making their way into academic hands. Because of the peculiar way time works in the Faewild, it is impossible to reliably date these texts beyond their existence as translations of a Pre-Flood language. Nor is much known about Elves during this period beyond the presence of a primitive script which (after cross-referencing with more reliable later translations of Celestial texts) seems to have been a sparse language with very little lexical variety or nuance (there is, for instance, only two words for "good," one of which is rendered as the superlative "best."). It also seems that these Pre-Flood Elves were not as interested in creative literary output so much as the copying and transcription of Celestial texts. As such, the nature of these proto-Elves is largely the realm of vague conjecture and popular imagination.

### Planar Migratory Period (~1-750PF)

The precise year that early Elves left the Faewild is unknown, but archaeological evidence of worked bones and polished rocks have been found on the same geological strata as the Yellow Flood, which suggests that it was likely very soon after the flood that the migratory period began. Throughout the early centuries, the Elves (who are theorized to have most closely resembled contemporary Eladrin) spread out across the Wodaichi Basin from the largest, most famous, and most well-studied portal to the Faewild: Matsuguchi, a vast rift situated in the trunk of an impossibly large pine tree nearly 500 feet in diameter. By approximately 200PF evidence of Fae inhabitance spread to encompass all of the fertile region of Yutai and along the Sylvan river.

By the mid-millennia, the long lifespans of the Elves were beginning to run their course. Both as a result of old-age, as well as the flood of metal and magical weapons coming from the Matsuguchi after the first Elves. This revelation of mortality had three profound effects on the culture of the Wodaichi Plateau. The first of these were the creation of elaborate burial mounds - the oldest examples of permanent architecture from the then nomadic and transient Faefolk. The second was the explosive development of written language and literary aesthetic as a means of expressing and encapsulating the experience of mortality in the crude material plane from what must have been a very different existence in the Faewild. The last was an importation of magic from the Faewild, initially in the hopes of securing immortality according to contemporary sources, but later wielded as a tool to establish dominance over the mundane world.

The planar migratory period is thought to come to a close roughly around 750PF when the first large-scale arcane battle is thought to have taken place. Metallic weapons and magical residue have been recovered from the archeological site of Hajimasaki that suggest not only advanced arcane and metallurgical knowledge, but a level of organization and logistics that suggest the existence of large, centralized polities at war with one another.

### Elven Antiquity (750-1425PF)

The dates given for the beginning of Elven Antiquity are naturally approximate. Although there exist contemporary written sources, for the first several centuries until the propagation and spread of Wanmei and its fastidious observance of celestial cycles, there is a distinct lack of interest in chronology and dates among Elven writing. Emotive poetry was the dominant form of expression, even to the exclusion of historical and commercial records. Though romance and death were overwhelmingly the predominant topics, what is possible to gleam from these early, poetical texts is the presence of organized warfare, division of labor, and considerable interest in the arcane arts. Forbidden romances between high-caste nobles and lower-caste peasants feature prominently along with the presence and development of increasingly complex forms of magic - as mating display, military weapon, or productive tool.

The other major development of this period beyond complex forms of urban society was the codification of discrete philosophical beliefs. Although contemporary texts - especially polemical ones aimed at denigrating rival schools of thought - suggest an explosion of hundreds if not thousands of religious and spiritual belief systems at this time, the free-for-all intellectual brawl of what is retroactively defined as Wood Elven culture eventually distilled three major philosophies. Those being Wanmei, Fangshi, and Fojiao in chronological order. Despite eventually losing sway in its home region in the Wodaichi plateau, Wanmei became the most historically significant for three reasons. The first was as the originator and emphatic proponent of prose-style, didactic writing for use outside of the arcane manuals that the writing mode came from. Didactic prose eventually became the dominant mode of writing, overtaking the earlier poetic forms, and galvanized the Elven writing system into a codified, rigidly syntactical structure from its more free-flowing and laissez-faire Faewild origins. The second way Wanmei influenced the world was by exporting Elven culture and writing down the Sylvan river and into the region that would later be known as Zhong, leaving evidence not only of itself, but of wider intercultural and commercial exchange throughout later Elven antiquity in its wake. And lastly, in an ironic twist of fate, becoming the perennial philosophy de jure of the EHD for the next two millennia.

## Geography

The vast majority of the land encompassed within the borders of the confederacy lies on the Wodaichi Plateau roughly 10,000ft. above sea level on average and enclosed by the elliptical Wodaichi mountain range. It is home to the tallest mountain in the world, Enjuzan (Mt. Enju) with a peak 31,905ft. above sea level. From East to West from one side of the mountain range to the other, the diameter of the plateau is 998.7mi, while North to South it is 945.8mi. At the center of the plateau lies the saline Lake Kamui, itself the center of an endorheic basin which includes the numerous swamps, ponds, and bogs that encircle the periphery of the lake, all of which eventually flow through an estuary where the local flora absorbs the sodium from the water before it flows out into the Sylvan River. The result of this being that much of the center of the plateau is uninhabitable and non-arable swampland and salt flats.Thus, Elves that live in the plateau itself (primarily the Wood Elves and High Elves), either live on the island chain in the center of Lake Kamui, the deciduous forests at the base of the mountains, or along the Sylvan River.

In a ring between the outer forests and the inner swamp lies a moist, wet ground that is used exclusively for the wet-rice agriculture that the Wodaichi plateau is known for. The ground water in this region is unusually warm due to seismic activity, allowing the rice a thermal barrier and allowing it to grow at high altitudes, as well as separating it from the saline water of Lake Kamui. Denizens also enjoy the numerous hot springs, referring to this region historically as O-Yubei-Chitai or Yutai for short. Some geologists in the EHD - especially those that reject the limited time scale of several thousand years that most historians subscribe to - believe the plateau to be a single, enormous volcano caldera, although the sheer size of this basin (with an area of close to 900,000sqmi.) makes this a controversial claim.

Although most of the land of the Confederacy is packed into the plateau, its de facto territory extends outwards from the three major mountain passes: The Oni-Tanima pass in the Northwest, the Kōyō-Tanima pass in the Southwest, and the Hokkai-Tanima pass in the Northeast. The Sea-Elven Shinjuwan Republic lying along the Eastern coast on the other side of the Hokkai-Tanima and some Wood Elven settlements flowing out of the plateau through the Kōyō-Tanima with the Sylvan River. There are also some Half-Elf, Half-Goliath settlements on the other side of the Oni-Tanima, but these have historically remained fiercely independent and outside the Confederacy's sphere of influence.

The climate of the Plateau is fairly moist despite its altitude. This is because it has a self-contained water cycle. Temperatures fluctuate heavily from severe winters to harsh summers, with the average temperature in winter hovering around 4°F and 98°F in summer, although the temperature tends to be a bit warmer along the Yutai band, and more moderate in the swamps and Lake Kamui, both of which also tend to receive a great deal of mist and fog throughout the year. In contrast, the Shinjuwan Coast outside of the plateau is temperate coniferous forest with a milder climate owing to the maritime winds.

In addition to these climates there are two other major extensions to the Faefolk Confederacy: The Underdark and the Faewild. The former is the home of the drow under Mt. Enju and is a cave system composed of several massive caverns connected by a series of caves, natural and artificial. These caverns are often several miles in both diameter and height. The Underdark also has its own separate ecosystem, although some modified crops from the overworld have been successfully grown there. The Faewild is stranger still, and Arcane scholars have deduced it to be a parallel plane to the Material Plane rather than a physical location. Both the climate and the ecosystem of the Faewild is ephemeral and subject to fluctuations with both the state of the material world and the emotions of sentient beings - a facet of the Faewild's tie to emotional states - but certain regions have become stabilized around sets of emotions and psychic energy and resemble specific seasons of the year in the Material Plane. These regions are named after the season they resemble and the court that holds sway (e.g The Region of the Summer Court).

## Political Structure

For the overwhelming majority of the time, there is no government in session in Hasukyо̄. As such, there is also no official head of state or head of government during this time, and the only continuously-functioning departments of the government are the Liaison Corps to facilitate a smooth transition to wartime preparedness and the issuing of passports, the Office of Engineering to coordinate fortifications and permanent defenses as well as the upkeep of cross-border infrastructure, and the Office of Intercultural Disputes, which handles legal matters that transcend boundaries such as extradition, trade practices, and diplomatic faux pas. During periods of crisis, the government rapidly convenes and sets up a myriad of forums, committees, sub-committees, boards, bureaus, and cabinets all under the umbrella of the single mass assembly, the Diet of Hasukyо̄.

When and how the Diet convenes and what it is permitted to do is governed by the Constitution of the Faefolk Confederacy, a legal document which outlines checks and balances approved by the five nations and mediated by the judicial review of a supreme court under the Office of Intercultural Disputes. Among some of the most important constitutional articles include those prohibiting barriers to trade within the Confederacy, the prohibition of a transnational standing army, and the full faith and credit clause from which spawns a majority of the intercultural legal disputes. Amendments to the Constitution are theoretically possible, but require - like all major decisions - unanimous agreement on the part of all five nations. The manner in which each delegation decides upon their vote is different, ranging from the Drow deferring to the personal (but usually well-advised) position of the Archmatriarchate, to the Shinjuwan Republic's complex method of run-off elections and proportional delegation numbers.

In its aim of being sluggishly indecisive and hopelessly entangled in its own constitutional web, the Confederacy is a rousing success. By design, it is supposed to be impossible to weaponize the government structure against any particular nation in the Confederation, and even, in fact, to discourage it when the government is not in session. The goal of this is to ensure that, if cross-cultural decisions must be made, they have to be in the communal interest of all Faefolk. In practice, the Elven nations are still often in competition with each other, but never to the extent that they undermine the defensibility of the entire realm.

## Military

The Faefolk Confederacy has no permanent standing army. Article 9 in its constitution expressly forbidding such an army. The call to arms of a combined force of the five Elven nations in the event of national defense requires a unanimous decision by an emergency assembly. To ensure this is a smooth and rapid process, the heads of government in all five nations have access to teleportation circles, such that if the Confederacy is invaded in the morning, the call to arms can be out by lunch. While each nation is expected to lead their own armies, special provisions exist for the establishment of temporary joint-operation units should they prove necessary - such as combined Arcanist forces or special operations. Moreover, one of the few permanent institutions in the Confederacy is the Renraku-Butai, or the liaison corps, who facilitate communication and cooperation between the disparate national armies.

Two of the nations possess a proper standing army with the combined arms of Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, and Arcana. Of the three, the Matriarchate is the most experienced and combat-ready due to their employment of caste warriors and access to raw materials. The Grand Commune similarly employs a warrior caste, but since it is voluntary their enlistment numbers are much lower. Rather than a standing army, the Shinjuwan Republic relies upon a conscription system that suffers from a long legislative and logistical delay, but in times of crisis has also found deep pockets to pull from to pay for foreign mercenaries. In addition, their navy is incontestably the strongest in the world, and can be made even stronger but war-time "Havoc Charters" which permit private citizens to act as unrestricted privateers in foreign waters, granting them full ownership of whatever they can plunder from the Republic's enemies.

The other two nations have neither a permanent standing army nor any kind of provision for levying a defense, but both are able to mount a defense if the situation arises for very different reasons. The marshes and bogs of Shoujinkoku are themselves almost impregnable, and any kind of occupation force would quickly find itself picked off by partisan insurgents. In addition, the long and prestigious history of its Arcane Academies mean that the nation possesses a deep well of accomplished wizards, sorcerers, druids, and clerics to pull from and contribute to a combined defense effort on the part of the Confederacy. The last nation, the Seelie Queendom, by its nature cannot hold or provision any kind of combined force. But the Sylvan races - largely acting independent of the Confederacy - will act as a harassing and harrying force, to demoralize and slow advances and shatter retreats. The terrain of the Faewild and its adjacency to the material plane is also sometimes used for the deployment of special forces. Due to time dilation effects, however, this can't be used for the logistics of large armies.

## Political Economies

The economy of the Confederacy is best understood as a trading sphere of wildly different economies, and thus best approached individually. Moreover, the economic and political quirks of each culture are inextricable, and thus have been described in terms of a "political economy" rather than just an economy. Though there is by law no internal tariffs between any of the individual Elvish nations, most of the nations employ loopholes to protect their domestic business interests - including sumptuary laws, state licensing, or simply willful maliciousness by patriotic bureaucrats.

### High Elven Shoujinkoku

The High Elven Shoujinkoku economy is characterized by a rigidly static, traditional, “Economy of Austerity,” wherein all citizens are expected to be more-or-less self-sufficient and fanatically self-disciplined, supplemented only by some small amount of barter. In general, the measure of a citizen is inversely proportional to the burden he or she places on the world or, in other words, the hermit ascetic being something of an ideal archetype. Any increase in environmental burden such as the establishment of a shop or the construction of a home has to be put to the consideration of a local council of sages, who must ratify the decision by a supermajority. In practice, this means that economic progress in Shoujinkoku is nearly non-existent. Although this arrangement has led to a vast material disparity between Shoujinkoku and the rest of the world, the trade-off comes in the form of the most disciplined and resilient populations in the world, with famine, drought, and pestilence being non-existent due to the extreme attention given to the local ecosystem. In addition, Shoujinkoku does have some economic leverage abroad in the form of its possession of the single most robust arcane tradition in the world, with some of the greatest wizards ever produced by other kingdoms measuring as mediocrities compared with the average High Elven arcanist. When Shoujinkoku is in need of goods and services from abroad, it is the temporary lease of a world-class wizard with which they usually pay the bill.

The High Elven political structure is equally known for its stagnancy - or, in their own words, equanimity. All decisions are dedicated down to the lowest level they possibly can, and proceed upwards in jurisdiction only when their significance is concluded as exceeding the scope of the local government. The government itself is composed of elder councils, each of which is comprised of those born in the municipality who have undergone an austerity ritual to become full-fledged sages which entails a full 12 years of meditation, eating and drinking simply, chanting religious texts, and at least ten periods of going a week without any food and water. Anyone who has not undergone this process may petition things to the government, but is not allowed to participate in the administrative process of his or her local elder council.

### Matriarchate of Lolth

The Matriarchate is a feudal theocracy with a hereditary caste system with the Archmatriarch at the top. She is followed by the clergy, the warrior aristocracy, peasants, artisans, and the "uncategorized" at the bottom, though this last category can mean anything from chattel serfs to wealthy business magnates. This order is justified by order of necessity: The clergy to ensure the satisfaction of Lolth, the warrior aristocracy to secure the borders, the peasants to grow food, artisans to create material wealth, and the uncategorized being anything that doesn't fit into this schema such as the merchant class (who are regarded as "redundant middlemen"). Each caste has sub-classes associated with it, such as categories of warriors from those that own their own household up to and including those that own land the size of small kingdoms. And while these classes nominally guide the privileges and honor accorded to an individual, in practice the uncategorized business magnates may wield greater power than their aristocratic sisters.

Different classes have different balances of levy versus taxation demands, but in general lower classes bear levy burdens and higher classes bear taxation burdens. Taxation is paid in kind with the products of a certain social strata's layer (i.e. peasants pay in crop yield, artisans pay in the fruits of their labor). While much slower growing and economically inefficient compared with the Shinjuwan market economy, this feudal system results in the largest, best-trained, and best-disciplined military amongst the Faefolk.

### Wood Elf Grand Commune

The Wood Elf Grand Commune is similar to Shoujinkoku in the sense that it operates with an extremely decentralized power structure that only collectivizes in times of crisis. Where it differs is in its "specialization" economy, operating somewhat like a voluntary, guild-based caste system. Citizens are expected to find their niche and perfect it over centuries - though they are given exactly a century at the start of their life to shop around and find it. In accordance with this, most professions are not privileged over one another, and a farmer or a fisherman of journeyman rank in his guild is nominally of equal standing to a philosopher or statesmen. Internally this largely holds true, but an arcanist, for instance, naturally has much more opportunity for accruing wealth and fame from actions outside the commune than does a potter.

The political system is also built off of these guilds, with each guild comprising a local voting bloc within a layered system. Professional statesmen and administrators create an aggregate agenda at each level - municipal, ward, prefectural, and national - and act as representatives for the constituency they come from at the next level of government. Guilds are not permitted to collude across a high level than local, but many often do anyway in the hopes of magnifying their interests across many different local agendas and increasing the probability of issues making it to the national government. Special mention should also be made of three guilds in particular which are regarded as having de facto if not de jure supremacy; those being the philosophers guild, statesmen guild, and farmers guild. The former for the privileged place philosophy holds in the Wood Elf culture and the latter from a combination of the necessity of a stable food source and a prevailing pastoral aesthetic appreciation in art. The satesmen's guild, with its control over agenda-setting, enjoys an immediacy to the government, though they are often well-watched by other guilds to make sure they don't take this privilege too far.

### Seelie Queendom

The Seelie Queendom is a borderline anarchic state where needs are met through bartering goods and services that the individual can provide. If there is anything resembling currency in the sense of a value-storing tool, it might be found in artistic works both visual and literary. If the Queen can keep goodwill among her subjects, she may receive gifts and loyalty, but otherwise will be deposed - sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently - depending on the whims of her subjects. The “courts” that comprise the Queendom will generally mobilize as feelings snowball, which occasionally results in unnecessary and pointless crusades. In spite of the nomenclature, these individual courts are best conceptualized not as centralized monarchies, but as small chiefdoms with no social identity other than emotional state demarcating them. As such, "citizens" of the Faewild are free to move to a different court in accordance with their emotional state at any time. Any discordance, however - such as an overly-cheery individual in a dreary court - results in punishment from social shaming, all the way up to execution depending, once again, on the whims of that court. The Seelie Queen, reigning in the Spring Court, is supposed to embody the feeling of motherhood, and is judged by her subjects on how well she is able to play this role and fit her subjects' expectations.

### Shinjuwan Republic

The Shinjuwan Republic refers to the political consolidation of the many Sea Elf city-states along the Shinjuwan Coast under a single legislative body that is notionally binding across the entire region. Representatives are apportioned by population in a unicameral legislature, but fixed at 400. Out of this legislature a cabinet is appointed led by a "Daishichou" or Lord Mayor. Initially, city states that didn't make the population cut were simply intimidated into compliance, but some of the larger polities quickly realized they could capitalize on this by promising de facto representation if these smaller cities would swear allegiance and allow themselves to be annexed. This trend continued into the present, and there are now only 56 recognized "cities," with agrarian hinterlands being apportioned to these city states according to complex and corruption-riddled zoning laws, such that one farming village may find itself under four different jurisdictions in as many years as the city states use them as a bargaining chip in the legislature.

Economically, the Shinjuwan Republic is a thriving mercantile network built on the profits of joint-stock trading companies and a fledgling manufacturing sector that takes advantage of the regions many fast-flowing rivers. Originally these joint-stock companies were state-run entities belonging to the individual city states, but with the massive inflow of capital, private firms began to sprout up to compete against the state trading companies. Eventually the Shinjuwan Stock Exchange was formed as a market for stocks and bonds in the various public and private trading firms of the Republic. In addition to the mercantile and capital markets, the Shinjuwan Republic also has a burgeoning entertainment and vice industry, with both prostitution and many of the substances illegal in the EHD being both legal and readily available. Unsurprisingly, given the sudden influx of material wealth, crime is also an industry unto-itself in the Republic, with the difference between crime family and trading company often very slim.

## Demographics

### Overview & Population Characteristics

Although there is no direct census information available for the Faefolk Confederacy as a whole, the individual nations within the Confederacy have census information of varying levels of rigor (ranging from a citizen registry in the Shinjuwan Republic to vague hearsay in the Eladrin Faewild) out of which a larger picture can be compiled. The current estimated population of the Confederacy is estimated to be somewhere between 148 and 157 million, with the official number being somewhere around 151 million based on the most accurate survey of the Faewild available. Because of a combination of the proliferation of healing magic and the longevity of the Elvish lifespan, the demographic curve of the Confederacy is fairly flat, with most of the downward slope being due to emigration and occasionally violence rather than famine and disease: 29.8% of the country being in the first quartile of their lifespan, 24.1% in the second, 23.9% in the third, and 22.2% in the fourth quartile. The average life expectancy (with the assumption of Elvish ancestry) is approximately 729 years.The fertility rate across the entire Confederacy is about 0.4%, although this is higher for the Shinjuwan Republic and the Archmatriarchate, and lower for the Grand Commune and Shoujinkoku.

Levels of urbanization vary by the nation in question. Even the most densely settled "cities" in the Wood Elf Grand Commune are only dubiously considered cities at all, while the Shinjuwan Republic has a nearly 10% urbanization rate. Land density averages around 94.6 people per square mile ignoring both the Underdark and the Faewild. The populations of the individual nations are given below:

 Wood Elf Grand Commune
 Archmatriarchate of Lolth
 Shinjuwan Republic
 Seelie Queendom

### Races

As the name would suggest, the Faefolk Confederacy is a largely homogeneous state where the differences between the various sub-races of Elves tend to be of greater importance. The nations that make up the Confederacy subsequently tend to also be fairly homogeneous as a matter of being nation-states, although those areas that receive a high volume of trade - especially the Shinjuwan Republic and the Sylvan River outside of the plateau - tend to be more cosmopolitan. Unique to the Confederacy are other races from the Faewild including Hags, Dryads, Pixies, and myriad others which in the chart below are simplified into the category of "Sylvan." Because this is a composite of all available demographic information across the entire Confederacy, numbers are approximate:

### Languages

The official language of the Confederacy is High Elven, which is not to be confused as the language spoken by High Elves. High Elven is a constructed language borrowing common syntax and lexicon across all the major Elven dialects in order to have a Lingua Franca of business, military, and administration across the entire Confederacy. Low Elven, on the other hand, is a catch-all term for the various dialects and languages spoken by the various Elven cultures, and the Low Elven spoken by Sea Elves will be mutually unintelligible to speakers of Wood Elf Low Elven. High Elven is, for the most part, understandable by even those who only speak a dialect of Low Elven, although its technical terms - the tools of statecraft it was designed to eloquently express - are unlikely to be understood. The language is also a point of controversy in the Confederacy, with some citizens supportive of the language being taught uniformly, and some insistence on the conservation of their linguistic heritage.

In addition to High and Low Elven dialects, there is also the Under-Speech of the Drow, which, while stemming from the same family of languages, is completely different from modern Elven in phonology, morphology, and even syntax. Sylvan is the language of the Faewild and is argued by some to be a proto-Elven of sorts, but shares more in common linguistically with celestial. Along the Sylvan River outside of the Wodaichi Plateau, Elven Pidgin is spoken where Elves have mingled for millennia with citizens of the EHD. The pidgin combines the grammar and sentence order of Zhongrenhua with an Elven lexicon and phonology and is a fully-expressive language in its own rights even though speakers of both of its parent languages consider it a bastardized form.

### Religion

As the original nexus, many of the same philosophic traditions of the EHD are also present in the Confederacy albeit in very different forms. Certain philosophies also "settled" in particular areas, unlike the widespread religious pluralism of the EHD. In the Wood Elf Grand Commune with its love for grey-area debates of the humanities and philosophy, the predominant religion is Fangshi. In High Elven Shoujinkoku it is the more austere and ascetic Fojiao. The Drow have their own monotheistic religion in Kumo-Sūhai, and the Sea Elves their religio-political ideology of Jisshōshugi. The Faewild is a vague, unorganized hodgepodge of animistic traditions with every sub-culture of its inhabitants having their own major pantheons and oral tradition. While none of these traditions are intolerant or proselytizing, the effect of each on their inhabitant culture means that the outsider will still be expected to conform to the local religious norms (such as austerity practices in High Elven Shoujinkoku) or otherwise risk the patience of their hosts wearing thin.

## Culture

### Literature

The Fae races have one of the longest literary traditions in the world, and it is in the Elven Syllabary that the Lingua Franca of the EHD, Zhongrenhua, is written. Certain Eladrin texts scholars now believe might pre-date the Yellow Flood that is supposed to have wiped the face of the world clean nearly four millennia ago, saved by the barrier between the Material Plane and the Faewild. Some of these pre-flood Eladrin texts have since been discovered to be translations of the parts of the Celestial literary canon, and it is a source of much consternation that the Eladrin jealously guard access to these texts, both from the EHD and from the rest of the Fae races.

Because of a long and insular literary tradition, Elven texts - fiction and non-fiction - are highly esoteric and conventionalized in poetic symbolism and metaphors. Moreover they are often an impossibly complex web of intertextuality and cultural subtext to the point of un-readability even to those literate in Elven. These texts usually consist of poetry anthologies, philosophical treatises, and occasionally works of epic narrative, but different Elven communities and nations produce other genres of literary works depending on their collective cultural needs. The Drow, for instance, have produced a staggering canon of exegetical religious texts, and the Wood Elves a corpus of debates transcriptions.

The exception to this proclivity for dense, insular, self-referential literature are the Sea Elves, whose primary motivation for creating and publishing literary works is profit. With a ballooning middle class with leisure time, the printed novel - often with much less literary ambition than their fellow elves' work - has become the dominant literary medium. This profit-minded medium has also spawned a variety of genres in order to capitalize on different market niches. But the one that the Sea Elves are perhaps most known for, domestically and abroad, is their erotic novellas of which nearly two million are printed and sold a year.

### Cuisine

The Elven diet unsurprisingly varies wildly, but freshness is perhaps its most identifying feature. With exception to - once again - the Sea Elves, only rice and millet are regarded as staple crops, and everything else is dependent on what grows locally. Food importation is rare in Elven cuisine and its emphasis on freshness and good ingredients - and consequent de-emphasis on spices and sauces. And rice and millet hold the place they do mostly as a convenient way of doing in-kind donation. These fresh ingredients can be as different as Drow cave fungus, Eladrin unicorn meat, and high Elven herbs and aromatics. Sea Elves differ slightly. Though their palate still privileges fresh ingredients, the scale of their industry - especially meat-packing and preservation has created a surplus of cheap, lower quality ingredients, as well as giving access to foods from abroad.