I'm building an empire of lawful evil, militaristic non-dark elves and I'm looking for any ideas you fa/tg/uys and ca/tg/irls might have for me.
Any help would be great. Also, anti-stereotype /tg/ general.
Roman-like human empire?
The elves hate trees.
>>46230511
That's what I was thinking. Though even more militaristic.
>>46230465
A matriarchal society led by a beautiful and motherly elf queen. The political society is entirely female diplomats who do not gripe for power but rather represent the elven people of each separate hold fairly and justly. The queen is much like Attila the Hun however, what is elegant in diplomacy is fierce in war. She issues orders directly to the military, acting as a general in times of war and leaving domestic issues to the council of elven politicians. A brutal and pragmatic tactician, she has been known to force armies out of defensible positions by slaughtering entire towns and challenging them to defend. Her army is disciplined and organized, with hulking armored knights defending the front line and adept mages on horseback. Her strategies usually begin with horsemages skirmishing until they can draw the weakened enemy to the linemen, who can withstand the attacks of up to 5 soldiers each. Archery is almost entirely ignored because with powerful and ammunition free magic, bows are redundant and harder to cast from a mount.
>>46230465
These elves revere Corellon in his aspect of the lord of war. He is the great dominator, who defeated Bane, Gruumsh, Moradin, and Kord.
In turn, the elves of this empire worship these lesser gods as Corellon's servants, and it is not uncommon to have a unit of Gruumshi Berserker elves, wielding their spears and with their god's eye emblazoned on their foreheads; fighting along side a disciplined Moradini axe-brotherhood, who wear gorgets designed after the beard of Moradin.
Of course, in their Empire, they also have these gods' mortal servants, the Dwarves, Orcs, Goblins, and other humanoids. They are used as slave labour, to show their role in subservience to Elvenkind, even as their gods are subservient to Corellon.
>>46230759
This magical realm...
>>46230759
Pretty dope.
>>46231384
Also fairly dope.
>>46230465
I'm looking at this and thinking Genghis Khan, with a heavy focus on light infantry and stealth units that would get fairly close to the Plains Indian's Dog Soldiers. Think midrange bowmen with strong melee, capable of stealth maneuvers on the campaign-level scale. Heavy infantry and cavalry would be rare, but highly elite when it does appear, often stiffened with long-contract mercenaries.
why not aldmeri dominion
>>46230759
>A matriarchal society
stopped reading there
>>46230573
Check out the Spartans then.
While they were probably some tough customers in battle, their insane military society existed mostly to keep a huge slave class under control. IIRC the Helots outnumbered free Spartans.
>>46232972
this
>>46230465
Bosmer
>your best friend dies? Better eat his corpse and not waste that meat
>you just killed someone? Better eat them, use their skull as a helmet, and the rest of their bones as arrows
> need some clothes? Time to find a Khajiit to skin
>some idiot human offered you a salad? Spit in his face, shout REEEEEEEEEEE, and run into the woods while you shapeshift uncontrollably
>visit a market stall? Star in marvel as you wonder what kind of porous bones the stall must be made of
>someone wants you to kill someone? Decline because you've already eaten and you hate violence.
>It's a solstice? Time to join your kin Int turning into a giant shoggoth orgy as you tear through the forest eating every animal in your path, and hey was that a Nord you just bit?
>>46230465
Something I've been scribbling out for a group of elves in one of my own settings, and while they're not Evil Evil, you might have some ideas you can mine.
>Elves live a very long time, theoretically forever if nothing kills them.
>However, they require, biologically, to space out for long periods at a stretch, entering into trances that are akin to sleeping, although they're sort of aware what's going on around them when they do so. Think of that moment when you're half awake but you can't just muster up clarity to order your thoughts; and instead of it lasting a few seconds, it can last years or decades.
>These lacunae get longer and longer as the elf ages, and by the time they're about a thousand, they're spending 3/4 of their time entranced. By the time they're 2,000, it's brief moments of wakefulness and a lot of zoning out.
>These trance states are not natural. The Elves were formally from a different world entirely, (as are every sapient race, it's set in a kind of interplanar trap) one with far higher levels of magic. They require drawing upon certain magical resources for ordinary brain function, which don't exist in their new home. If you supercharged the local environment to include more stuff, they'd be at full brainpower all the time.
> (This) Elf society is built around family responsibility for individuals, and groups of families negotiating with each other are the primary form of social interaction.
>Senicide is common, and is the right of the head of household. However, it's considered dishonorable to do so before the elf in question wishes to sleep. Guarding and caring for the elves in their trances is a Big Deal, and a lot of family organization revolves around the younger generations protecting the older, and having your cousins and whatever watch over you when it's your time to trance.
A degree of militarism is already built in, and I could very easily see enslaving their neighbors if they thought they could get away with it.
>>46233846
I had a similar take on elves, trying to hold onto some tropes of the fey while putting a spin on it.
>mature at same rate as humans, so you don't have a 100+ year adolescence
>Old elves trance much as you describe
>young elves are treated as expendable, because they don't have centuries of experience
>thus ancient elves would rather sacrifice the lives of 1000 allied humans than harm a single 700 y.o. elf who has gotten a little crabby in his old age and started genociding human kingdoms.
In one of our settings Elves were created by an ancient race of ogres to serve as servants but also familiars, and were partially responsible for the fall of said ogre empire. These elves on the surface look like typical high elves and have a mostly normal biology but they're purely artificial and cannot naturally reproduce, new elves are created from blood and special crystal.
The thing is the elves took the Ogre's minor magical geneticist route and ran with it, and experimented on themselves and other races for centuries.
Elves are directly responsible for creating half elves (to serve as a diplomat race), orcs (to serve as soldiers), and wood elves (to serve as soldiers in the time period after they lost control of the orcs).
The half elves are treated nicely and have never rebelled. The Wood elves were treated like shit, rebelled, and were very nearly wiped out completely. Orcs are actually pretty evil on the orc scale (no noble savage thing here) and reproduce from mud pools kind of like tolkin orcs (and VERY quickly), the primary elves quickly lost control over them.
The thing is these elves keep up a facade of being the good elves VERY well. They have maintained a campaign of hiding their deeds for thousands of years. No one knows they made orcs with the exception of about 100 of their highest order members, very few non-elves know about the blood crystal thing, only about 6 elves at any time know they used to be servants and familars, everybody just thinks they're kind of strict and snobbish and for the most part thats what they are. Beneath all of that though they are (at least in the highest rungs of their society) evil as fuck.
>>46230465
We ran a setting where dark elves were just cardassians instead of drow in personality.
just going to post this image in this thread because of the inevitable elf-loving and wanting to fuck elves.
>>46233811
Damn Cthulu elves man. Not even once.
>>46235168
STOP THOSE PEDOPHILES!
>>46230465
>lawful evil, militaristic non-dark elves
I was actually just thinking about this. They'd be sort of like how hobgoblins are now, except their imperialistic crusade is fueled by an interpretation of elven ideals, rather than goblinoid.
>>46230465
Tolkien had dark elves who were only dark in the sense of evil.
>>46230759
>white drow
>>46230465
If you make the Drow normal instead of evil and leave all else in place with other races, you'll make all the other elfish societies evil for hating them for no good reason.
There's also always notHobgoblins. They are fey after all.
>>46230465
If you're doing the Elves-as-treelovers thing then having them creating elaborate tree architecture in the middle of conquered cities/building new tree cities as administrative centers in places they consider strategically significant but the conquered people didn't. Sort of like Europeans did during the colonialism era. Bonus points if they stubbornly try to build and maintain these tree structures in environments they clearly aren't at all suited for.
>>46233665
I recall the helots massively out numbering the Spartans. Aside from the fact Spartans hated leaving Sparta for any reason I think they would be great inspiration.
>>46230573
More militaristic than romans? The guys whose politics and military were one and the same and lost 400.000 soldiers in the First Punic War? How do you plan to top that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioqSlJbgnK0
