The METAL MONSTER

OK - so the first thing I realized with this whole humans = clerics equation, is the old school will REVOLT because

1 Clerics MUST employ naught but blunt objects

2 Mankind MUST have access to edged weapons : swords and daggers and whatnot

but yo - they really shouldn't though.

I mean, it's illegal and all that : frowned upon. You need special allocation for that like the serf you are : this feudal Japan or early Roman republic only-citizens-can-be-part-of-the-army type thing. The OCCUPIED GOVERNMENT is allowed their dueling swords perhaps: this self-regulates the hotheads. But a bunch of dudes with blades? Never. Polearms, maybe. I mean, per St. Gary, there's so many kinds. That's your brutes of a town watch there. Very handy for designating social rank : you can see WHO is a WHAT from a distance. Is that a Lucerm Hammer or a Bardiche? Feller carrying the one kind must give ample passage to the other.  You can see what's what over the largest crowd.

from https://elemud.fandom.com/wiki/Polearm

      (for further and better employment of polearm taxonomy, please review the Jeff Rients Better Living Through Polearms feature which explores anthropology via fauchard-fork).

You think yon GODS are trying to flip this social order? What part of give unto Ceasar what is Ceasar's don't you understand, Pinkos? Semi-subjugation works just fine for everyone. Play by the rules, ye level 7 Lanas! No edged weapons for you.

So onto said subjugation. It's them lizard people in'nit it that are running things . . . wrong game though. It' elves then. Gotta be the elves. Gotta be.

Everyone hates elves, as they should. That Talislanta advert with the skull headed dude is whats up. 

Exceeeeeept : what's to say dude isn't an elf anyway? He's got the pointy ears, and I'm pretty sure Elves have sharp little teeth. That's what I've been told. They eat babies and such. Lizard people anyway.

       (here I display dual ignorance and fascination of/with Talislanta : other than that the adverts in the back of Dragon magazines I found simultaneously hokey and compelling)

       (and for the curious, the truth is OUT THERE so don't just wallow in your naiveté just to go full hippo and float)

Now, there have been a lot of great OSR stuff over the years with sinister elves, because elves are sinister . . .

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/commentary/whos-boss

. . . and although the best discourse on demihumans and elfen nature is probably Scrap Princess' seminal There Was a Dog at Work Today, He Was a Special Mister Guy post, which containeth a d8 sub-table on which a hypothetical welterweight blogger who took a swing might receive the following augury :

"Star-Man : from the upper upper air, soft and silvery"

Eraldo Carugati

. . . I would posit my own layer of theory, and instead assert that Elves, rather than wisps of slender dreamstuff, are at their core

SHARPENED OBJECTS

Like - you have a blunt object : say a human. Bumbles about, lives, procreates, dies. Takes the shape of it's container. Are they really even alive? Scholars debate.

Or take a really symmetrical object, like a Dwarf, no corners whatsoever. Stacks. Stores well. Hot molten core. Changes the chemical structure of the surroundings.

The elf, on the other hand, just gets more and more elfen : ground against the wetstone of time. Everything is worked to a fine edge.

They are war machines first and foremost : probably dwarf built. Dwarves build most elegant machines. Jokes on you Dwarves! You work for your elf-machines now!  And in every fiction available the elfs are an ancient people!  Ha!

Virgil Finlay

Ancient or not, elves appear to travel in groups, like Bibical angels : odd in number : be it 3s or 7s  : usually there is a Caller who does all the talking. Maybe someone is taking notes. Really though, it's all a single elf and a bunch of mirror images. You are unlikely to encounter 2 at once because they start at each other eventually.

I get a Marvel Comics Elders of the Universe vibe from the f**kers

      (same joke, different comedy club : Eldars of the Universe ha hrmmm - keep the tomatoes coming folks, they are nourishing and the act of throwing de-seeds)

As such, they are the boss : always the little engine at the center of human civilization. With all due respect to the elusive the hidden MYSTERIES housed in Temples or monasteries that grant esoteric wings and talons to these little semi-sentient god-animals humans : there ain't no humans per se until they get them an elf of some kind to sort things out.

Think of them as the mitochondria generating energy : of the cell but not of the cell.

Or spiders. It is well established that Elves are spiders. But they are not trying to catch you in their web. You ARE the web, wheel-of-soldier-of-fortune you.

http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/webproj/212_spring_2019/Rose_Peters/rose_peters/spiderwebs.html

Anyway, Eldars of the Unnnnnnnniverse, you know :

Collector Elves High Elves

Why exactly do these critters collect cities and the like? It's a compulsion is what!

They love to have named teams of adventurers hanging around: they will fete them and give them tasks because it keeps these occupied and they can brag about.

Their cities are elegant and there is no question to whom they belong. It's out in the open. The spoils of empire are out in the open. It's the British Museum out there. With spires and bridges. Symmetry with things stuck in it. Classic Spiral Orb weavers (D).

 

Gardener Elves Wood Elves 

The wood is the thing. They might be running a woods. They possibly are running a city : but it's because it has a famous hanging garden : or has decayed in a particularly wonderful urban-blight porn way.

Or else their "city" might just be a loose collection of settlements. Funnel Web weavers (B) : not sticky : there is less compulsion involved for the inhabitants. Also, less mirror images, more actual elves - their attention is pointed at the plants and not at undermining their fellows.

Contemplator Elves Gray Elves - off in they towers. 

Tubular webs (E - arranged vertically though vs horizontal). There is probably a tripwire to tell them you are coming.

Occasionally a city will spring up around them because the talismanic nature of it and that predators stay distant. It's a must that the Gray elf will occasionally surface to terrorize the squatters and interlopers. Think Shrike Temple in Dan Simmons' Hyperion

Alex Ries

Champion Elves Sea Elves (but Warhammer style). 

Watch out for these guys. They are sailing around, or maybe on a river, except they're all Wardancers. Kraven the hunter motherfuckers. On they ships. Cutlasses and Krakens style.

If you can battle them to a draw they might offer you a position on the ship. Sheet spinners (A) : horizontally laid out over the waters. They have territories, and elegant systems of accounting. They are playing something like capture the flag with each other. If you can get the earing off Jennie Sky Eyes left ear, you now own the shorline from Skull's Point to the Geyser Grey kind of thing.

Grandmaster Elves Drow. Plots! Politics! 

Blue skin just like DEs are supposed to.

Here's your basic OSR type rambling, crumbling Viriconium city. They like all the plots and the chaos of it. Tangle webs like a black widow (C). Despite False Patrick's assertion, it's not hot hatred of your alien nature that makes them torment you, it's the sheer unpredictability of your response to pain.

Like Iron Mike said, "Everyone has a plan until you remove their face with a potato peeler"

The Underdark? F*** the Underdark. The Underdark is all our slave mentality, maaaaaan. There might be some story dudes tell themselves about their great home under the earth which they long to return, but they are running sh** from the flowershop.

It's best to think of these dudes as a Skaven analogue : a lot cleaner though. Cleanest elves of all.

that's OK, because for dirt behind the ears you got :

Possessor Elves Wild Elves.

Or is it Elves gone wild! I like the idea of an artifact that is running things here : THE ITEM ordering around the item: who has who? Or maybe each and every artifact has its own gaggle of elves gathered around it : they are degenerate weirdos.

The most varied organization, because they're out of their minds. Could have started as any other elf type, but that identity has long been subsumed. Those Spiders on Drugs webs? These guys.

WHAT R THE 0 LEVEL HUMANS?

 and if we stat them can we eat them

Vlad Ogorodnyk

so . . . the Author's notes for the first trade of DIE

(which is fantastic, by the way - the D&D cartoon extrapolated to real life : do they ever get home? and then when they do will they get sucked back in?)

           ( . . . fantastic . . . ha ha . . .)

pointed out how weird Clerics in D&D are, particularly at low levels : these small scale, almost clerical

           (in a bureaucratic sense, ha ha again. endless ha has. ha ha's built on a superstructure of ha has . . .)

miracles on order.

Gillen solves this by emphasizing a more adversarial (or transactional) relationship : Gods as bound demons. Cleric as demonologist. Or warlocks for you modernistic 5e types. Or the god is the warlock in a pact with the PC for you post-modernistic e5 types.

this is a fine dynamic, but I think loses something

           (unrepentant cleric player talking here : to me, as a kid, in a lot of ways Deities and Demigods WAS D&D -  and a curse upon your house whoever walked away with my copy containing the Lovecraft/Melniboné stuff)

Erol Otis por obvio

howsabout we, instead of approaching the problem of all these Acolytes are wandering around a mysto Sears catalogue ordering the daily Cure Light Wounds as some kind of cosmological bug

           (that breaks into absurdity as soon as you extrapolate it out to a larger scale and there’s thousands upon thousands of cats calling on tech support at whatever particular high temple),

howsabout we look at it as a feature

mainly, yon old, "How are the Humies, weak and hairless, able to at long last conquer the world?"

           (vs all these elder and Eldar races)

Theodor Kittelsen

What if the humans are God conduits? What if every one is a kind of rudimentary saint? In a way that other critters can't sniff at.

instead of the default class for a young fellow of "dungeoneering ambition" being fighter ("just out of the army gov'ner, looking for a bit of action : yeah I'll go take that coin out of the wizard's fountain ") maybe almost everyone you see is some sort of 0 level cleric . . .

most people don't get much past the cantrip-ized versions of the 1st level spells : if someone is sick, maybe you light a cistern to the Holy Virgin Neutron Star Mother : CLW (level 0 version). 

You get that chill from passing someone who is actual a dead person and whose soul is filled with the Coldness of yon dark and slimy Negative Material Plane : make the sign of the Tooth Shark and it's P fro E (level 0 version).

the effects aren't that much : it's more part of a fundamental part of the human experience - what one, as a human in these cultures where BIG MAGIC does exist out there, does.

A person whose connection to the godhead is more profound will be promptly hoovered up by organized groups as particularly "favored" by the gods and trained up to 1^st level, or perhaps they are just better energy conduits and will get there by misadventure.

          (or, considering that all the other hominid types don't have that advanced access : a lot the hoovering maybe by the other races : what's the deal with the goblins always leaving bundles of screaming mudstraw in babies' cribs anyway?  well, how else are they gonna have a tete-a-tete with Maglubiyet if they don't have a manchild to do the conversing?)

PJ Lynch