Elves. Of all the races of Aromathus, they are, along with the orcs and the dwarves, the oldest. This is true not only in the timeline of Aromathus, but also in real life. What do I mean by that? It is a story both simple and complex, and one which I shall attempt to tell you all here today.

The elves of Aromathus date back to the summer of 1993, when I first began to create Aromathus. Well, actually, the tale of the elves begins even before that; as I’ve said before, I was introduced to fantasy when a friend of mine invited me to play in a D&D campaign that he was starting after school ended for the summer. I had never had much of anything to do with fantasy before that, but was game to try – especially after we went to a bookstore, and I picked up the old West End Games Star Wars RPG. The other two guys who were playing in the campaign were both Star Wars fans as well, so we soon agreed: I would give D&D a try, and in exchange, they would be my guinea pigs - both as a Game Master and in playing Star Wars.

The rest, as they say, is history, and is by and large beyond what I need to talk about to get at the story of the elves. However, the elves of Aromathus do have their beginning here, and so here we will start.

I admit I didn’t really know anything about elves at that time (beyond Keebler cookies, that is…), so I went by what my friend told me. I imagined my first character (named, for reasons I can’t recall anymore, Tarn Nohmahl) to be a woodlands guide; someone who could lead the party through the wild, was both a tracker and a hunter, and an expert with the bow.

My friend then suggested I play a elven ranger. Elves, he told me were tall, graceful people who lived in the woods. They had an affinity for the things I had talked about, received bonuses with bows, and to top it off, they could see in the dark. Add the D&D ranger’s skill with tracking and affinity to the wilds….. This sounded exactly like what I was going for, and a legend was born. Well, maybe not a legend, but the elves of Aromathus were born there.

After that, I started reading fantasy, starting first, as I’ve said, with the Dragonlance novels. Naturally, Krynn’s elves influenced our thoughts on elves strongly – I assumed that’s what elves were supposed to be like. As a result, when that same friend and I expanded his idea for a minor campaign setting into the world of Aromathus, we agreed that there where two groups of elves on our world, just as on Krynn. So, again for reasons I can’t recall, we named the two groups of elves after what became the two major cities of their kingdoms: Malinar (or grey elves,) and Thalinar, the reclusive High Elves, who had separated from their more common kinsmen in times past.

The story of the elves beyond that, though, leaves those Krynn-ish origins behind, for as I read more fantasy, my own ideas on elves began to evolve. Yet, they evolved slowly, guided by a series of events; the first (and most important) of these is when I created the original “History of Aromathus timeline” you see on this website. In short, I had already decided that Aromathus needed to have a golden age of sorts in the past, and that this age had ended long ago, giving a reason for magic items to exist in the world, ready and able for adventurers to find. And being a history major, I explained this with a timeline.

Much of Aromathus can be traced back to this decision; when I created the timeline, it contained the seeds of almost everything that makes Aromathus what is today: the split between the human empires, the wars between man and orc, in fact, all of the things that laid the foundation of ADWD’s plotline. Yet there is more there, if you look closely, and the first of these is the Drow War.

First, a little explanation is needed. If, as we’d already decided, everything in D&D had a place in Aromathus, I needed a reason for Drow to exist. I’ll be honest: the idea of drow have always fascinated me: evil elves who live in caves deep below the ground, hating the light as much as the surface elves love their forests. Yet, as they exist in D&D, a race who seemingly has no standard, no structure or law beyond killing those weaker than you, seemingly existing only to be evil; well, I’ve never believed that concept of something purely evil – even the most vile of people think they are doing good.

So I returned again to the theme of competition between deities. I did this via an assumption that the deities who hadn’t created races (especially the evil ones) would be jealous of the ones who had. I then made the next assumption: Grummish, god of war, would be impatient, and so subject to constant taunting. I then made a decision: Hadar, god of death, kept taunting his “brother” that his orcs couldn’t defeat the elves. Grummish finally got sick of Hadar’s prattle, so they made a bet: If Hadar could defeat the elves, or subvert them to his will, then those fallen elves would be his “children.” As a result, without even knowing it, I achieved two things: a “logical” reason for drow to exist, and one that was well within the “norm” of fantasy (although I didn’t know the second fact at the time.)

The Drow featured prominently in my first role playing campaigns for the simple fact that they made great villains. I used their actions in that campaign to bring the dragons back to Aromathus, and along the way decided a few things about them as well. For example, the drow of Aromathus would not be a separate race, as they were in “classic” D&D, but would rather resemble the Drow of Krynn: individual elves would become drow after turning to a life of evil. As a “reward,” they would be “gifted” by Hadar with all the traits of classic D&D drow: dark skin, magical talents, and a proclivity to worship spiders. But beyond that, they would not be “chaotic evil,” but more like the orcs: a culture based on strength and chaos, rather than a constant war of all against all. That kind of society, I felt and still feel, would not be able to exist.

Now back to the surface elves. The other primary event that shaped the elves, as it did all of Aromathus, was the arrival of the humans. At that time, the elves and the dwarves had divided up the continent between them, even though they had no desire to move much beyond their forests and mountains. Then, when the humans arrived, they mistrusted the newcomers for the simple fact that they were new and very boisterous. Even so, they allowed them access to the plains of he orcs, forming with the dwarves a treaty that would shape the great wars that occur further down the timeline. Long details made short, that treaty promised that elf and dwarf would destroy the humans if they ever made war on the elder races - specifically, “elven magic and dwarven steel” would destroy them.

Let me elaborate a little further: Even though I knew little beyond “the basics” about fantasy at the time, I quickly learned / realized that the elves simply had to be a people who were imbued with magic, for several reasons: They are a very long lived race, living for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Their forest homes are built in way that joined them together in a way humans could never achieve. They communed with the gods and ruled the continent.

Why? Elves were the first race to practice magic. Even now, in the current timeline, the elves are unrivaled masters of magic. Now that I understand what I want (and need) my elves to be, their method of fighting, for example, blends magic, swordsmanship, and archery together in a way that resembles dancing more than anything else. In fact, there is a scene early in the second novel where Tarn meets an individual taught by an elven blademaster, and he is left in awe.

Therefore, when the Averic Empire breaks the treaty, human and elf go to war. Later, even after they come to peace, elf and human have even less reason trust each other. The elves return to their forests, and now humans don’t go in unless they are asked. If not, well…. Lets just say bad things happen. Elves rule their forests in a way humans can’t even dream of.

Sure, I know that most of this is commonplace for any Tolkien-esque elven culture. But remember: The main point of Aromathus has always been political fantasy. Elves are ruled by the archmagi, and those ancient mages remember the wars of the past. As a result, the average elf is very prejudiced when it comes to humans – and vice versa. Even though humans and elves don’t fight wars like men and orcs, they have fought wars in the past. Further, the average elf would never befriend a human - their outlooks are simply too radically different, with too much bad blood between them for trust to occur easily

I will admit that elves don’t play too much of a part in ADWD, beyond the fact that two of the major characters are half-elven. I could continue to discuss them further here, but that would only be re-hashing what is, to many of you, a fairly typical fantasy elven culture. So I’ll just say in conclusion that if you remember nothing else about this article, remember that elves are more than “pointy-eared inhuman freaks,” (to channel Dr. Leonard McCoy). What makes my elves unique is that their history is intertwined with that of the other races, and this defines both their culture and the way they behave: They’re old, they're powerful, and they know it. Arrogant, yet gifted in may ways. Powerful, yet with the limitations that arrogance gives them. In short, they're elves.

Just don’t ask them to make cookies.