Sea Elves
Sea Elves, also known as Alu'Tel'Quessir, are an aquatic race of elves that live, survive, and thrive in underwater environments throughout Ghemjana. Sea elves originated in the World of Toril, but with the War of the Worlds and the opening of a new sphere, many felt the call of exploring new oceans and waters.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Humanoid
Genetics and Reproduction
Sea Elves reproduce much slower than humans, as they only reach fully adulthood around 100 years of age. They reach sexual maturity around 80 years and stop being sexually reproductive around 550 years. Possibly because of the longer time being sexually available, the reproduction rate of Sea Elves is much lower than other faster lived species, and a typical Sea Elf will produce 5 to six children in their lifetime. This may be more cultural than biological, as there is nothing stopping a Sea Elf from having a child every two years or so.
Additional Information
Social Structure
Sea elven society in Ghemjana was very similar to that in Toril, and is based on family and clan. Noble families and monarchs rule, but in a benign and loose fashion rather than with an iron fist. While women can and do have positions of power, sea elven society is largely patriarchal and inheritance runs first through the eldest son, then through the eldest daughter, then to second son, second daughter, etc.
The concept of private property, for the most part, does not exist among sea elves. Whatever given sea elf currently carries on their person should be considered theirs, but everything else belongs to the community as a whole. This particularly applies to tools, weapons, and other practical items. Any sea elf can take one of these items whenever it is needed and regardless of who had possessed it previously, although individuals are allowed to keep relatively private dwellings. Such communal ownership means theft is almost unknown. The exceptions to this are monarchs, who often have large and elaborate homes with limited access and many personal items. However, sea elven rulers are a reflection of their people and usually remain rather generous. The freedom to borrow items at will is not extended to outsiders, and surfacers are often watched carefully to make sure they do not try to take advantage of the cultural practice.
Sea elves hold promises sacred and would rather die than fail to complete something they had sworn to do. If they died in the process, their kin take over the responsibility to complete it. The slightest implication that an sea elf wouldn't keep his word is deeply offensive. However, promises received from non-elves are highly suspect, both because sea elves knew that other races won't honor the promises of their dead and because only other elves have the lifespan to complete any serious task.
Sea elves either went lightly clad or wore no clothes at all. Their clothes are formed from underwater plants and made with intricate designs in shades of black, brown, and green.
Geographic Origin and Distribution
Sea elves can be found throughout the water and oceans of Ghemjana, but the largest kingdoms are off the shores of Southland and Hestoria. The Hestorian Coral Kingdom of Sea Elves is located off of Tagramoor, in the Dragon Sea
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Sea elves are the least magical of the elven subraces and had fewer innate magical gifts. However, they are deeply in touch with their environment, even more so than other elves. They can detect minute changes in the currents of the water and can hear sounds underwater that surface dwellers cannot perceive. Additionally, their eyesight is much keener than that of surface races. They can see twice as far as surface elves in low-light conditions (and therefore four times as far as a human) and can see clearly enough to count soldiers in an army up to a mile away. They are able to hide in kelp and seaweed as their surface kin can in forests, and their movement is never hindered when moving through the plants.
Civilization and Culture
Culture and Cultural Heritage
Sculpture is the primary art form of sea elves, as other mediums are likely to be destroyed by the water in short order. Intricately carved reliefs cover the walls of most cities, and statues are common. Sea elves are also quite musical. Their powerful voices travel farther than expected underwater, and their thrumming songs bring to mind whale song and dolphin noises. The songs are often very long and evoke the rolling calm of the ocean. Bards are common in sea elven society.
Because they live underwater, the products of sea elven crafting often differ significantly from their counterparts on the surface. They have developed a range of waterproof magical items, and a system of writing underwater using either cured sharkskin or thick seaweed and an extremely viscous ink. They do not commonly use metal, as it is almost impossible to forge underwater and will corrode quickly. What little metal they do use is traded for or scavenged from shipwrecks. The exception to this is gold, which will not corrode and is easily shaped in its raw form. Beaten gold jewelry is common among sea elves. Most sea elven items are crafted from stone, coral, shells, and animal materials such as bone, narwhal horns, turtle shells, sharkskin, or chitin.
Sea elves commonly craft tridents of serenity, a type of magical weapon which will keep sahuagin in the vicinity of the weapon from entering a blood frenzy and are given to elves patrolling the borders of a territory. They also have developed longbows with bowstrings made of a special kelp that dampen vibrations and turbulence. Combined with specially crafted arrows, these bows function without the usual drastic loss of momentum that most ranged weapons suffer underwater.
Common Customs, Traditions and Rituals
Sea elves, when meeting a new person, will give a gift they have recently found, such as a shell, a beautiful fish, or some small trinket. The act of giving a personal item away is considered honorable, and indicates there is no hostility towards the other person. Strangers, or outsiders, rarely receive this treatment until they have proven themselves not to be a threat to the sea elf.
Common Taboos
Hoarding possessions is extremely taboo among sea elves, who see most items as communal property and owned by the collective whole rather than the individual.
History
According to one sea elven myth, they once dwelled on land, their ancestors having served as an armada that was going down in a storm and was saved by an unknown goddess.
The first sea elves came to Faerûn sometime after −25,400 DR, following the migration of the gold and silver elves from Faerie. This made them the last of the elven subraces to come Faerûn. They first appeared in the Great Sea, and rather than settling down they began a nomadic existence as they explored their new home.
Around −17,000 DR, the surface elven kingdoms of Eiellûr, Syòrpiir, and Thearnytaar started the War of Three Leaves A number of the citizens of these realms fled to the Sea of Fallen Stars (known as Serôs to those who lived beneath its surface), using an Eillûran artifact known as the Sashelan Glass to transform themselves into sea elves.
Around 1625 DR, word of a new crystal sphere emerging from the feywild into its own system gave ample opportunity for many races to travel to the new land and settle there. Sea elves were no exception and a migration of several thousand elves made their way to the new world of Ghemjana (how exactly is unknown and they strictly refuse to say), arriving in the Ghemjana Year 1394. The first major kingdom was established off the coast of Southland, where an major land elven society had settled. As the years followed, several small enclaves and kingdoms sprang up, including smaller ones off of Emjarren and Hestoria.
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
Sea elves are isolationist by both their nature and the physical location of their settlements, although they are not quite as reclusive as the wild elves. Their trust does not extend far beyond their clan and others of their kind, and their communities are very tightly-knit. They cannot understand why the surface elves do not realize that community and alliances meant survival, whereas rivalry, individualism, and factionalism meant death. However, despite being extremely cautious, they were also extremely curious, and sea elves near the shore would often spend a significant amount time secretly observing the land-bound races.
Sea elves hate sahuagin and sharks more than any other creature and will often attack them on sight. They are driven to destroy them at every opportunity. Sea elven society is occasionally infiltrated by a certain type of mutated sahuagin that look almost exactly like them, known as a malenti. Interestingly, normal sahuagin only spawned malenti when they live in close proximity to sea elven communities. Tritons believe that this is because the two races are related, the sahuagin having been created by drow experiments upon sea elven captives. The elves flatly denied this shared origin, and in fact many believe that malenti did not exist at all.
They are also incredibly wary of human fisherman since sea elves who are caught in their nets were often mistaken for sahuagin and killed. Sea elves maintain neutral relations with merfolk and locathah. Tritons and marine storm giants sometimes live in harmony with sea elven settlements. Relations with the shalarin vary, as in Toril, where both species hail from, there is a history of animosity.
Sea half-elves are very rare since sea elves do not leave the water often and have little interest in interacting with humans. Additionally, the ability of sea half-elves to breathe underwater was variable, and as such even those few that do exist are often cut off from sea elven culture. However, a few sea elves remain invested in their children's lives, and will visit them when they came out onto the water. Sea elves do also sometimes reproduce with surface elves (generally sun or moon elves), which result in an elf who looks like the subrace of their surface parent except for the greenish tinge to their hair. Unlike sea half-elves or even their full blood parents, all such offspring are fully amphibious, having gills that are hidden on their necks. As such, they are fully capable of living among their aquatic kin, and those whose mothers were aquatic elves often do.
Sea elves will sometimes take in water genasi children to raise. Water genasi who serve Deep Sashelas sometimes work as emissaries between sea elves and their surface cousins. Sea elves have stories of planetouched aquatic elves (similar to water genasi) descended from servants of Deep Sashelas, but there have been no recent examples of such people.
The creatures sea elves have the closest relationship with are dolphins. Any large group of sea elves has a 50% chance of being accompanied by a number of dolphins. They hold whales in great reverence as well, with many of their settlements being built on whale migration routes so that they can interact with the creatures regularly. Young sea elves will even travel with a whale pod for a year as a sort of pilgrimage. Hippocampi and giant sea horses are the favored mounts of aquatic elves. Many other marine creatures are also tamed as mounts, beasts of burden, and pets.
Genetic Ancestor(s)
Origin/Ancestry
Elven
Lifespan
750 years
Average Height
5'4" to 5'8" for males, 5'0" to 5'6" for females
Body Tint, Colouring and Marking
Some sea elves have pale silver-green skin, while others can come in shades of turquoise and even mottled green and browns. Many are robust and tall with long limbs. Their thick skin gives them protection from the cold of deep water, keeping them comfortable at just above freezing temperatures. Their fingers and toes are generally about twice as long as a human's and have thick webbing between them. Their most distinctive feature are the gills visible in their necks and over their ribs. Compared to other elves, sea elves have deep voices and are larger and heavier.
Sea elves have eye colors including turquoise, white, black, blue, green, and rarely silver. Their hair is usually thick and somewhat stringy, and some sea elves have a rough hair texture. It could be blue-green, emerald green, blue, black, silver, or even occasionally red. Warriors clip their hair short, but other sea elves wear it long and flowing. Females in particular sometimes grow their hair up to 4 feet long.
Geographic Distribution
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