When I set out to create Aromathus all those many years ago, it was unabashedly a D&D game world. It’s magic, obviously enough, was that of D&D. This meant that it was very much of the “blow stuff up” or “heal it” varieties. And for a world that existed only as a game, that was fine.

As time passed, my interests expanded. However, they expanded not only in gaming, but into writing about my gaming, and then into writing fiction in general. These different facets can’t be separated, for they turned magic in Aromathus into what it eventually became.

Let me explain. D&D magic is that of a game. As a magic-using character gains levels, he/she is able to cast more and increasingly powerful spells. Eventually, in game terms, a magic user can summon meteor storms, cause earthquakes, heal large masses of people from the brink of death – even raise the dead. And truly powerful magic users (epic level casters in game terms) can do even more awesome feats.

When I began writing about my world, several thoughts occurred to me. First, if such magic were as common as it seems to be in an RPG game, magic users would quickly come to dominate the world – either in the act of conquering the world, or the prevention of that conquest. While I wanted a system of magic where battle magic was common (as in a D&D game), I didn’t want one where magic users would rule the world - as I imagine such powerful beings would inevitably do. I mean, look at the Jedi. The Star Wars universe is primarily (at a basic level) about the struggle between good and evil magic users for control of the galaxy. I didn’t want that, and so my magic system needed a check on truly powerful spell casters.

The second thought was that old Arthur C. Clarke adage that technology of a sufficient level becomes indistinguishable from magic. The converse would also be true. Again, In D&D, magic is very common – in one case specifically spells like teleportation. If such magic were as common in the novel world of Aromathus as it is in the game world, that world would have a very different feel from the high medieval setting I had envisioned. Consider the siege of a castle: If all you have to do to take a fortification is teleport some troops inside to take the gate, sieges would never really happen. Another example would be the D&D “fly” spell. Just think about it: cast “fly” on fifty knights. Pretty hard to hold the walls of a castle when the bad guys can simply fly on in and stab you from behind. Other examples can be found – nearly endlessly.

Now, don’t get me wrong: The style of fantasy I’m discussing is cool, and is best exhibited by a sub-genre called “steam-punk.” Bound elemental powering airships and steamships. Streets with magic lanterns instead of gas or electric ones. Medieval air forces with trained legions of dragons or griffons. But…. it isn’t what I wanted. In order to avoid “cheating the physics,” to use a science fiction term, it would have to avoid the high medieval setting I was shooting for.

Lets go back to he climatic scene of ADWD: the siege of Traazon Keep. If the castle where to be something that could survive earthquakes, aerial dragon assaults, gaseous form wizards sneaking in to assassinate the gate guards – etc, etc., etc. – the castle would have to be something that looks nothing like a medieval castle on Earth to be believable. That’s something I didn’t want to try and create – or write about.

OTOH, I did want big battles with wizards lobbing fireballs around at each other, for the simple fact that they’re cool to imagine and fun to write about.  Yet most fantasy writers seem to avoid them for the reasons I listed above – and more. So I was left with a conundrum: how do I create this world of magical battles without becoming trapped by the power it gives characters?

First, I quickly decided that powerful magic would be very rare. This would primarily be true because of both the skill required, and the cost to cast in “life energy” of powerful “high level” spells. In other words, the reason mages don’t go about teleporting armies – or even themselves – from place to place because it simply isn’t worth the price. Could a mage teleport himself across town? Sure. But the energy it would take would leave him prostrate for a week. Add people, add energy used, add unlikelihood of it occurring. Therefore, I was left with such things being possible, but very uncommon.

“But,” I hear you saying, “In a siege or war, such things would be worth the cost.” And you’re right. Therefore, I needed another check, and here I borrowed from history. One of the chief lessons of military history is that of the “arms race.” Or, put another way, anything you can do, I can do better – or at least as well. My meaning is this: say you have an archmage willing to teleport fifty knights into my camp? I have one who can either 1) Fry your men the minute they appear, or 2) summon a shield that would take you even more time and energy to bypass, or 3) trace your teleport and teleport our own men back to your spot after you finish your spell - and kill you while your lying there exhausted. And, as in all warfare, defense requires fewer troops than offense. That’s why the siege of Traazon Keep allows for Tordek and Alec to hold off a relatively much larger number or orc shamans.

The third factor limiting the power of mages was the world itself. This is, I admit, somewhat of a writer’s fiat, but it makes sense. If everyone knows magic is common, wouldn’t you plan for that? Hence, Traazon Keep has lots of guards and wards built into it. Little things that make getting your spell to work right much harder. Add those three factors together, and most mages simply say, “Ah, not worth it. Let the peasant hordes go battle it out. I’d rather go research “x.”

Now, I know that even these limits wouldn’t really limit magic for a person willing to pay the price, so I needed to do more changes to the system used in D&D. I also knew, though, that even as I came up with the Circles of magic explained in chapter eight of ADWD (A topic for another post) as a final check that a large part of the limitation would always be writer’s fiat. In other words, what keeps the use of magic limited is simply that I want it to be. I wanted a story where fireballs and battle wizards were common, unlike most high fantasy. These types of characters are far more common in game fantasy, but I still wanted to avoid the clichés that they often invoked.

Remember: the goal of my writing is to write a military / political “high fantasy.” A “game world” where the monsters and bad guys are there to do more than be hacked apart. Therefore, I decided to couple the three factors listed above with a good bit of fiat to write my world. Fireballs? Check. Teleportation? No Check. Sleep spells? Check. Raising of the dead / mass healing? No check.

Am I always consistent with this principle? Yes. Or, at least I try to be. I know it’s not perfect. But it is thought out. And I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.

This is my second posting on the history of the Averic Empire. In my first post, I talked about some of the cultural ideas that I borrowed when I created the Empire and its culture. In this post, I will talk more specifically about the history of the Empire – as it exists in the world of Aromathus.

The Empire of Averim is far and away the largest of the many kingdoms and countries on the continent. As such, it is also the most powerful both militarily and economically. Its armies are easily the most formidable, and were they ever able or willing to unite those armies, they could quite probably take over much of the continent with ease. (Even though, for various reasons, such a thing isn’t remotely possible. But that is another topic)

But it was not always so. Originally, Averim was just one of many small city states, much like ancient Greece. These city states, descended from the Narvic colonists (who, if you will recall, were colonists themselves), spread out over the western plains, taking land from the orcs as they went. They were able to do for the simple reason that their technology – and more importantly, their tactics – where more advanced than the orcs.

For several hundred years, things proceeded as follows: A group of men would set out, seeking a better life – or just new land. After all, land was easy and cheap, assuming you could keep the orcs off it (sound familiar?...). These men started villages and towns in the same types of places they were built in our own world – by resources, by places of natural transportation such as rivers, or at the falls of rivers where ships could no longer sale upriver, or at places where farmers would gather to sell their crops, etc. Again, as I mentioned earlier, Averim City was built in just such a place, and it achieved a local prominence based on these natural advantages.

Things changed slowly (Well, fast in the eyes of the elves and dwarves, but still slowly…), and it required the initiation of a catalyst to speed things up. Such a thing occurred in the form of the first Averic emperor, Justarias.

Justaris was the kind of man who people want to follow. Gifted with a supreme knowledge of tactics, personal courage, and that great equalizer – wealth - he was responsible for many of the innovations which made Averim’s conquests possible. The first of these was the Justarian reforms – a series of commands, practices, and orders that turned what had been a citizen’s militia into a permanent, professional army.

These reforms gave structure and commonality to Averim’s army: first, unified training, in a time when Averim’s opponents didn’t train at all. Common practices for marching, fighting, and discipline of troops when they were in error. Little things like common weapons, standard unit sizes and formations – and more. In effect, it turned a good army into a great one, and Justarias’ reforms are still being felt “today” – nearly a thousand years later.

But that was just the first step. He next started on a series of campaigns –some military, some diplomatic, some cultural. In short, it was a medieval blitzkrieg on all fronts. And by fronts, I don’t mean just military fronts. As I said, Justarias’s campaign was multi-faceted. A strategic marriage between a niece and rival king, drawing a city state into an alliance. An economic barrage, where Justarias’s people move in and take over by the simple fact that Averic goods would be sold below cost, subjugating a rival by pricing their merchants out of existence. A word in the ear of a rival prince, saying that “The Grubananders across the river are evil, and you need to save their people from themselves, and we Averics will help you.” And yes, a lot of good old fashioned conquest as well. But Justarias’s conquests had a few things in common – they came from unexpected quarters, sowing confusion. They were quick, not allowing enemy nation’s time to react. And they were thorough. By the end of his reign, Justarias had taken a small city state of a few tens of thousands of people, and forged an empire of millions.

Justarias’s heirs, however, were not the men he was. Justarias was a man who wanted to make things better – to reduce the chaos caused by a multitude of small little city-states, each of them unable to defend themselves from their enemies. While Justarias was a conqueror, he was genuinely concerned with the welfare of his subjects. His heirs weren’t; they sought only conquest for conquest’s sake.

There were several reasons for this. A need to look strong in front of their enemies, both at home and abroad. A desire to match their predecessor’s conquests. Hubris - a vain seeking of glory – and many others. But none is more important than the pact Norazon made with Grummish.

I’ve talked about this pact before, and so won’t get into it in this post. Rather, I will discuss it’s effects, or rather, its main effect. By the time Norazon launched his invasion of the Dwarven lands, the Empire of Averim was unquestionably the strongest kingdom in the world. The orcs had been reduced to a rabble, the elves fled into their forests, and the dwarves slumbering below the mountains. And the Narvics, the only human empire even remotely approaching Averim’s size and power, only cared that they could keep trading with the mainland. This was the climate that Grummish used to his advantage.

Someday I may write a history of “The Hundred Years War,” but not today. I will say that examining the timeline will prove interesting, and give at least some idea of what the war years were like. But only some.

Consider: Aromathus’ Hundred Years War can be thought of as a total, world war – but fought with magic. Imagine a war as violent as World War Two in our own world, but instead of aircraft and tanks, you have war beasts and fireballs from flying mages. Or, even more importantly, instead of nuclear weapons, ritual battle magic. I know other fantasy authors have touched on such ideas, but I will say that I only read their take(s) on it after I came up with the idea on my own.

So, again, consider: What if a group of people were able to summon an earthquake to swallow an army? Or call down fire to burn a city to the ground? Perhaps the could summon the deep waters to swallow an entire coastline? Such things are possible for Aromathean mages, and while they do not do so at the “present” day, they certainly did during the war years.

This has two effects I want to talk about. First, there is the effect on the landscape itself. I remember that when we first made the maps of Aromathus, I stuck in a large swamp just north of the main elven forests. At the time, I did so as a joke, quipping that someone had left a magic item in there that created water during the wars, and left it on. Now, hundreds of years later, it has made a swamp, radiating out from that item – an item which no one can find today.

I will admit that it is vary much a cliché. OTOH, it does signify how magic changed both the battlefields of the wars, and the very map of the continent. Think about it: in fact, it’s rather like what we thought World War III would have been like during the cold war. Why worry about massive armies when all you need are half a dozen mages to conjure of up an earthquake or two and swallow the opposition before the battle even starts? As a result, the great wars were very, very bloody.

Now, for my second point: As the Romans of our world said, “Who watches the watchers?” Or, if mages can cause so much destruction because of their power, only another, more powerful mage can police them, right? Granted, a ruler could stop a wizard with enough troops and time, but the cost would be prohibitive, both to the wizard and the ruler. In addition, what wizard would want to spend all his days defending his place and his power? How would you ever get any research done?

And so the mage guilds and mage academies of Aromathus were born. Why? After the wars ended, it wasn’t very hard to look around and see what improperly used magic could do – and no one wanted that again. So the mages agreed – “we will police ourselves. Further, we will agree to submit ourselves to the laws of those without magic.” In short, for the good of all, mages agreed to not rule the world, and to destroy many of their most powerful spells.

So the magic today, both in war and in peace, is much less powerful than it was. Certain of the most powerful spells are considered lost, for the good of all the races. Even the elves, whose blood veritably reeks of magic, agreed to this. There are many, especially In the Empire, who say the elves remember the old ways of war magic, but the elves aren’t saying.

Today, magic is policed very strongly, for no one wants to see the war magic return – or even a wizard use his power to rule or conquer more than he should. The elves go so far as to hunt down and kill any magic user who isn’t recognized by the guilds. The Averics don’t go that far, but there the laws are strict as well. “Unlicensed magic” is very bad, generally leading to a very short life for the mage.

And so we see the Empire of Averim as it is in ADWD. Not at war with anyone, but not trusted by anyone, either. Orc clans always seeking any advantage they can. Elven leaders who remember when they, and not the conniving, lying humans ruled the plains. And Dwarven warlords who listen to their loremasters, loremasters who remind them that only dwarven vigilance – and steel – kept the humans from overrunning their clan holds in the past.

That, folks, is Averim. A land at peace in name, but always posed at the brink of war. Now, don’t you want to see what happens next?

As one of my writing heroes was fond of saying (RIP, Robert Jordan), Read and find out….

One of the three original races of Aromathus. Originally included in the world, I will admit, because it was developed as a gaming world; a world where everything that had a place in D&D would have a home for my friends and I to play around with. And that was where it stopped for a long time.

Why is that? Well, as I said in my article on the elves, when my friend and I cooked up the world, we split the races up. At that time, I was new to fantasy, and found I liked elves. My friend, on the other hand, really liked dwarves. He tended to play dwarves in RPG campaigns, and went as far as to create several pages of background and history (which were lamentably lost at some point. Heh… The long lost history of the dwarves.) The split was natural, and so the dwarves were born.

In the beginning, he decided that, as in Dragonlance, there were two major “factions” of dwarves – the Togress (or mountain) dwarves, living in the vast and ancient clan holds of central Aromathus, and the Kragon (or hill) dwarves, living north of the plains of Grummish. They worshiped a noble god of the forge named Voluge, fought hard, and liked to drink ale. All in all, pretty typical fantasy fair.

Yet even as I became more involved with fantasy, my friend’s hobbies changed. He liked to build and tinker with wood, building furniture, a kayak, and eventually even starting on a catamaran. So as he left fantasy behind, Aromathus became more my own, by mutual consent. Yet the dwarves continued to linger incomplete. I never really cared much about them, and so they remained at the nebulous stage he’d left them – some work done, some history, but nothing like I’d done for the elves – let alone the humans.

Then I finally read Tolkien, shortly after the first Lord of the Rings movie came out, and I suddenly understood his love for dwarves.

Gimli has always been my favorite of Tolkiens hero’s. Irascible, gruff- even surly, yet an implacable for of evil, a stalwart ally, and a good friend. Here was a hero I could relate too very strongly. And so my own love affair of dwarves began.

I started playing more and more dwarves in the RPG campaigns that I’d started playing in again (With the death of TSR and the end of college, I had taken a few years off from RPG’s… but that’s another story). My first character after the pause - and still one of my favorite - was a dwarven priest of Clangaddin Silverbeard, set in Wizard’s of the Coast’s Forgotten Realms. He was a roving troubleshooter for his church, and that band of heroes – a noble half-orc barbarian, an elf wizard who liked to blow things up, and a human rogue who could never find a trap, are still some of the best characters I have ever played, or played with.

It was reading about the dwarves of the Realms (as well as watching John Rys Davies masterful performance as Gimli) that really started to shape the dwarves of Aromathus. Certainly, they will always have the flavor that my friend gave them (There is a reason that the dwarves greatest hero is called Grudging Granite Smasher. I’m just not sure what, since he’s not my hero!), and like the elves, some of that is coming from Dragonlance’s Krynn. Yet, unlike the elves, the dwarves are far more my creation, owing more to Tolkien than to anything else.

Consider the stereotypical dwarf, as we’ve already discussed. Lives under ground, and so is short. Also gruff - even surly. Greedy. Likes to drink and can really hold his liquor. On the other hand, brave and stalwart. Courageous. A fierce foe of evil.

When I began writing ADWD, I decided very early on that one of the characters would be a priest of Voluge, god of the dwarves. Yet he wouldn’t be a dwarf – he’d be human. This was my own little way of thumbing my nose at the stereotypical “game novel fantasy.” Yes, Aromathus is a Tolkien-esque world, based on an RPG world. But if it was ever going to be more than that (and I wanted it to be), I had to avoid those clichés even while honoring them.

And so two characters of ADWD were born – Logan, a human raised by dwarves (and more than a little clueless about how to interact with humans as a result), and Tordak Darkbeard, Shield Brother of Voluge. These two characters – ney, people – illustrate a great deal about the dwarves, and I’ll talk briefly about their history now.

The dwarves, as stated, are one of the three original races of the world. Created by Voluge, the soul forger, they represent his philosophy of order. This is why his people are tied so closely to the earth – for only from the earth can order come. Not like the elves, flitting from tree to tree as the spirits move them, or the orcs, who lust only for power and conquest – no, the dwarves like order.

This is why the dwarves are builders, makers, creators. To build is to leave behind. Just as Voluge made them, the dwarves are master craftsmen. Order lasts. Order is strong, and stable.

See where I’m going? I could beat this horse until it’s dead, but I think you get the point. Yes, I know it’s a standard of fantasy for dwarves to believe this, but it’s also a necessary starting point: The original three races of Aromathus have three very different philosophies: Elves are good, believing that they should always do what is right. It isn’t the how or the why of the right – simply that it is right. They have little use for law or structure, simply doing what their conscience tells them is good and pure. Orcs, as you know by now, are the opposite, believing in strength through chaos, change, and conquest.

Dwarves follow a middle road. Stability and order allow progress – slow and unchanging, yet inexorable, like a river, flowing to the future. Dwarves make the world around them better, but slowly – and then they step back to enjoy what they have made over a pint of ale.

This explains just about everything about dwarves. For example, their hatred of orcs becomes obvious – chaos is baaaaaaad. It also explains why they find elves flighty and just plain weird (at best), and often almost as bad as orcs – society needs structure, and most elves just don’t believe in that enough to satisfy your average dwarf.

It also explains why dwarves love to build and carve, and mine precious minerals. These things are permanent, unchanging. They provide order.

Yet the dwarves are not simply stoic builders. First of all, like any good builder, they know how to have fun after a hard day at work. So while a working dwarf may seem surly – after all, even when you enjoy your work, it’s still work – dwarves know how to have fun afterwards. This is why Voluge made sure that all dwarves like to feast and celebrate, and also can do so for a long time. What better way to relax and celebrate a job well done than with a few good, stout ales? And if it turns up the dainty noses of other races like elves? Well, that’s just an added bonus, even if the dwarves would never admit it.

See where I’m going? One basic concept, and everything about dwarven culture and life suddenly makes sense.

Moving beyond that, though, is their history. More than any other race, dwarves remember. Elves live longer, and so treasure history as well, but not like a dwarf. Dwarves carve things in stone. They treasure those memories, learning from them, yet allowing them to shape the way of things to come.

This is why the dwarves held men to the treaty that started the great wars, for example. Elves may have remembered the treaty, even having spoken to elders who were there, but the dwarves remember. Their elders and lore masters tell the tales to their children, so that they might tell their children in turn.

Now you can see why dwarves make such bitter foes as well as such wonderful allies, right? To this day, dwarves really don’t trust humans as a result of their oath breaking at the time of the great wars. Individually, a human may earn a dwarves’ trust, but that betrayal in the past is always there, at the back of their minds. On the other hand, when a human does earn a dwarf’s trust, he or she will be their ally to all nine hells and back.

A few other points from dwarven history are pertinent as well. The first of these was the split that occurred among the clans during the great wars. It is a testament to just how deeply the coming of men to Aromathus affected the dwarves that this split occurred. Consider: Several clans, giving up all the order and stability of the dwarves' ancient clan holds, simply packing up and leaving, venturing across the Togress mountains into lands unknown, simply to avoid the chaos caused by humans. The effects of this on the dwarves are still being felt now, almost 800 years later. As a result, the Togress dwarves resent the humans even more: trust is hard to come by.

Another point is just why dwarves dislike most magic. This also comes from their orderly nature. Think about it: What is magic, really? At its core, it’s a cheat of order, allowing a mortal to do that which he has no business doing. Divine magic – healing magic – builds and restores order. But the magic of a mage calls down fire, creates things that weren’t there – reshapes things into what Voluge never made them to be – and so a wizard’s magic is NEVER be trusted.

There is much more to the dwarves as well – some of it written down by me, some not yet. The reasons why dwarven priests speak a dead language called dwalish and have a language of runes, for example. Or why the strongest epithet a dwarf can call down relates to either the beard or gonads of Voluge. And why all dwarves speak with a Scottish accent. (Don’t ask. They just do. OK? THEY JUST DO!) Yet that is really beyond the scope of this article.

What I will say is that dwarves feature more prominently in book two of the Plains Knight trilogy than they do in ADWD, and some of the dwarves own “magic” will come through. Rest assured, the dwarves of Aromathus, while owing a lot to Tolkien, are different, as I hope you can see, and I also hope you’ll enjoy getting to know them more in the future along with me.

Just remember: No one tosses a dwarf.

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.