Lore

Half-Elves are the misbegotten children of passion between Humans and Elves. Taking mostly after their human parent, with slightly pointed ears, half-elves themselves often live quite tragic lives. Though they can live nearly as long as their elven parents, they are a biological dead-end: All Half-Elves are born sterile, and cannot naturally produce children.

Among elves, half-elven children grow up quickly, and have difficulty finding peers or forming lasting, meaningly friendships.. and among humans? Half-elves develop more slowly than human children, creating a perpetual 'younger sibling' scenario that makes keeping long-term friends difficult. By the standards of elves, an adult half-elf barely has the knowledge, social experience and maturity to function as a member of society, and inversely, amongst humans, half-elves simply don't grow up fast enough, and remain concerned with childish and innocent things for far longer than their peers.

It is, perhaps because of these growing pains that half-elves - without deep and meaningful ties to members of their communities - often leave home once they reach adulthood. Many half-elves attempt to become adventurers, minstrals or traveling merchants.

Because of an often unmet need for meaningful connection and the sterility that they are cursed with, half-elves usually have a reputation for short-sightedness and promiscuity - whether deserved or not. In many societies, half-elves are seen as tragic degenerates - prostitutes, rogues, or traveling mistrals living off the charity and goodwill of communities through which they pass. Because of their comeliness, sterility and relative social isolation, half-elves are often taken as slaves or concubines by the wealthy, and authorities in many human and elven lands often look the other way when this occurs.

​

Quirks​

• Half-elf characters usually go unreliably senile before 125 years of age, their mortal minds unable to handle the length of their lives, though if taken care of, usually die of age related illness well before their second century. 

• Half-elves due to a quirk of biology cannot bear natural-born children with most species, which has prevented the clean merging of human and elven culture. Because of population decline, far-sighted elves tend to be discouraged from becoming pregnant with the offspring of humans, and the majority of half-elves are born of human mothers. Male elves are sometimes stereotyped as lotharios because of this.

• Half-elves being sterile - particularly those born of nobility - are often sexualized in Imperial culture, with euphemisms such as 'Love without consequences'. Because of this objectification, many half-elves are incredibly resentful of High Elves but tend not to get much better treatment due to the mistrust humans have for Elves in general. Half-elven children are often little more than footnotes in the memoirs of long-lived Elven Lords, so brief are their functional lives.

• Half-elf characters must be at least 40 years old. Being visibly children before this age, such characters may not be played on Orcrest.