[HQ Ignorance] More Elvishness and rootlessness

[Nic Hughes]

Sam Elliot wrote:

All totally OOC:
> Thanks for your thoughts Nic (Soren, you can keep your thoughts to 
> yourself ;-)  ).
>  
> Here´s the situation - rootless just doesn´t seem to fit at all. If a 
> rootless elf is something like a broken dwarf, that´s just wrong the 
> wrong person for the Elf Nation (if such a thing exists) to have sent. 
> If it is someone who lives on the margins and can function as an 
> ambassador etc, well, it is still an outcast for want of a better 
> word. (Okay for a communicator, but not as the hero you want to send 
> to make sure things are done right.) Seeing as a big part of the 
> HQ vibe is belonging to a community, this just feels all wrong - I´m 
> not interested in such a character (personally and in this instance), 
> as Nic has guessed.
>  
I did pick up that vibe, for which reason I thought the other option 
(create a magical link to the woodland) might work better. Bottom line 
is that I think an elf will have cyclical usefulness - during parts of 
the story where we are in woodland she will stand out at other times she 
will be less effective. Not that Lunar characters are cyclically useful, 
oh no not at all. Even without the penalty (and I think you can work 
round it, see below) the simple fact is that most core Aldryami magics 
will be most useful when there are plants to work with.

To put this in perspective - a charm at the nW3 level to largely offset 
the penalty would probably cost around a third of your chargen points. A 
fetish spirit with "Journey beyond forest" would only need an ability 
rating of 10 to cancel out the penalty when released and would be just 
one ability from your narrative, I'd suggest making it the character's 
spirit ally for a character who needs to travel a lot. I have to admit I 
think these fit my image of the Aldryami more than breeding projects to 
create ambassadors but then maybe that's my vision of them.

However I never got the impression that rootless elves were outcasts. 
The difference between rootless elves and broken dwarves is that 
rootless elves are apparently part of Aldrya's plan and remain within 
Aldryami society whereas broken dwarves are in defiance of Mostal's 
plans and are outcast from Mostali society (if the recyclers do not get 
to them first). The equivalent of broken dwarves would be renegade elves.

Does that give you any ideas you could build on?

Nic