On the subject of age and perspective, in the context of the setting, a night elf of many millennia still behaves like other mortals and Tyrande especially has an impulse control problem. Some biological predisposition colouring one’s approach to an absurdly long life makes elves and draenei special cases, written and portrayed as sufficiently ‘human’ to be managable and relatable.
Vampire: the masquerade puts up an interesting argument when dealing with ancients; With a few extra decades of self interest under one’s belt, you’re a cantankerous conservative. Add a century and you’re looking at the fleeting nature of decades as trends to use and reflect upon when planning ahead, and a couple more centuries will have had you witness the fall of feudalism and the industrial revolution.
Depending on how you adapted, you may or may not blend in but your attitude to society and individuals is certainly removed from the regular mortal. Stretch this by some more centuries and you predate most major religions with an outlook to match. Once you hit the abyss of thousands of years of age, your perspective and mindset is no longer human at all, largely unable and unwilling to relate to the mentality, standards, hopes and fears of a fleeting mortal.
In the context of warcraft, such immortality and effective death of anything resembling humanity within you does not apply. Velen is older than real life agriculture, blessed with not quite ageless immortality and like the tolkien elf example, certainly has to deal with very human issues of the perpetual loss in exile.
Depending on what you’ve been up to, your perspective shifts as well. The Lightforged that’s been in the same anti-demon crusade daily for millennia might find a mundane mortal everyday life with new experiences refreshing or insufferably unpredictable.
Consider that night elves had barrow imprisonment for thousands of years as a containment solution, too. A being that doesn’t meaningfully change in a few centuries needs to be handled differently than one whose life is ruined by ten years of confinement. The reason night elves don’t lose their minds in a cage is a different matter but Illidan’s narcissism and messiah complex might have more moving parts than we know…
He was special, blessed to live for many lifetimes as god-king. Troll lifespans are actually pretty dramatically short going by old lore, which is weird because they regenerate.
I love Vampire the Masquerade’s take on immortality. Kindred growing so old that they effectively become exhausted by the act of (un)living and sinking into torpor as an escape.
Maybe night elves should start doing that, as Emerald Dreaming doesn’t count.
This is a great thread, and reminds me of a lot of the reasons I enjoyed playing my Night Elf main for as long as I did.
I think some of the ideas brought forward here could have made that character more engaging had I read them 10 years ago. Like the forgetfulness and changing skills over a lifetime rather than just being the same person for thousands of years.
So I’ve been playing a bunch of Elder Kings 2, the Elder Scrolls mod for Crusader Kings 3 because it’s 2 great flavors that taste great together and playing as the elves really clicked in my mind what even the relatively shorter ‘extended lifespans’ of elves in that game means.
If you play one of the elves in that game, even a relatively ‘normal’ one and not an immortal wizard like Divayth Fyr and your starting character begins at age 30 you will likely live long enough to see your great grandchildren come of age, human nations next door can go through multiple successions in your character’s lifetime. Polities that existed when you start might be a distant memory by the time your first character dies. It’s a reasonable strategy to just wait for a problematic neighbor in your expansion path to just die of old age.
I found myself starting to discriminate against shorter-lived NPCs not because I was planning to play an elf supremacist but because they wouldn’t be around when my plans came to fruition and I didn’t want to have to deal with vassals who kept dying out of sync with the rest of my realm or making an alliance that would. Most elf characters don’t seem to die of old age, they die either violently or die from overindulging in vices (elves are also a massive reservoir of venereal disease hilariously). Not because being an elf is particularly more dangerous than being a human but because they just have so many more opportunities to die horrible deaths so over their longer lives.
I also found myself much less willing to play the diplomatic marriage game with other elves, if I’m going to have to wait a couple of centuries years to take some land through marriage and rely on 200 years of my grandchild not being stabbed to get it… I’m just going to invade them, or arrange a series of unfortunate accidents instead.
You can completely pivot playstyles in a way you would find difficult in a regular character lifespan just because you have so much more time to do so and even with the penalties elves get to learning new things. You can do the risky power grab early in your life and then spend decades consolidating and reaping the rewards yourself, you have time to do so.
It also completely breaks the game. I definitely feel there’s something wonky about long-reign bonuses but even outside of that - almost all the ‘challenge’ in (very easy game) CK comes from (mis)handling succession and when you can reasonably expect to only have to manage 2-4 successions across a multiple century game that don’t involve murder things get a bit weird. Succession itself is much less of an issue, when you live for 2-400 years and you can pop out kids for a proportionally longer time it becomes much less pressing to get your heir and spare out, with how elves mostly die violently your initial children are quite likely to not be your eventual heirs and if you have them early they probably actually won’t be relatively that much younger than you by the time you die if you manage to live to a very old age.
I guess the reason it took me playing CK to figure this is because its different to read “this guy lived to 300 years old” in fiction than it is to see “this guy will live for 300 years” and see it play out systematically.
I have RPed several ancient characters, though I would not neccessarily claim that I have always done a good job. My most recent “ancient” character would be my old Zandalari, who was my attempt at exploring the full range of options that troll magic and voodoo might offer.
Through bargains with Loa, Voodoo and magical relics of various sorts he had managed to extend his life dramatically across centuries; albeit not at all in a glamorous elfine way. Without his relics he was so decrepit, withered and nonfunctional that he required magic for basically anything.
Whilst magic was a big reason for me to explore such a character and the character in question was undoubtedly very powerful, likely moreso than is fashionable, the way I avoided falling into the powertripping trap was by having him very rarely engage in battle and use his magical abilities primarily to help add to the collective story in the guild and enable the growth of other characters.
As can probably be surmised by now, I find the topic of ancient elves and their outlooks on life and the “younger” races to be super interesting. But even while I always try to keep it in mind, it’s so easy to forget just how otherworldly the lived experience of an elf is and how it would likely inform their experiences with each other, let alone other cultures.
An example I was mulling over was this:
There’s a young elf, barely more than an adolescent in the eyes of their native society. They’re century or so old, really still finding themselves as an adult. Even to them, the elders of the kaldorei - these ancients who have lived for thousands of years, some of them reaching five figures - are inscrutable. While not quite the same due to physical and mental development, it’s a bit like a one year old trying to understand the breadth of a centenarian’s psyche.
There’s a huge disparity in age, one that will never be experienced because the night elves can’t live for that long anymore. They will never be able to understand what it’s like to be a walking relic of a long-passed era. Likewise, after ten millennia, can that elder understand what it’s like for the youth? Probably not, the world that they were each born into is fundamentally and irrevocably different. It’s more extreme than someone born pre-WW2 trying to understand someone from Gen Z, and vice versa.
Then the youth turns around to the humans, dwarves, gnomes, et cetera that they share a faction with. They’ll look at a human elder, someone whose faced is lined, their hair grey. By all visual metrics, they should probably have a similar perspective to the elder kaldorei. But those elderly humans, even as their body breaks down and they contend with their own mortality, are younger than the young elf. That must be incredibly disconcerting for both sides.
Meanwhile, the younger humans - in their twenties, thirties, and so on - might have a similar disposition to the elf. Hunger to experience life, to prove themselves, to find love. But while the elf might spend centuries exploring these sentiments, that human is going to wither away.
Ultimately, that young elf is trapped between two worlds – one of unknowable elders and one of ephemeral lives. Who does the elf empathise with more? Can they empathise with either? Do they work to make comparisons and foster understanding between themselves and the humans, despite the breadth of their expected lives?
How do they handle the inevitability of their human friend’s death?
This gets even crazier when you look toward someone like Vereesa Windrunner. Vereesa is explicitly described as a young elf. Galadin and Giramar are half-elves. Now, while we don’t know the exact lifespan they’ll enjoy, we can assume that it doesn’t reach the same length as a full-blooded elf. Vereesa is going to see her own children age more quickly than her; she might even see grandchildren and great grandchildren, depending on if, when, and who the twins eventually choose to start families with.
How does the parent of a half-elven child perceive the expected longevity of their partner and their children?
The Mass Effect Asari have an interesting take on it – for them, it’s more about appreciating the time that they have, and always remembering those loved ones they’ve chosen from other species. But even the Asari ‘only’ live to about a thousand. Elves in Warcraft have lifespans that go up to 3000+ at least.
Thoroughly agreed! I don’t think your ancient necessarily needs to be a Tolkien elf to be credible and entertaining. My own character has seen so much that he has gained a fatalistic sense of humour; having been in the Sundering when he was young, every time an apocalypse type event occurs, he goes “First time?” (When the sky shattered above Icecrown he specifically said something like “Hey, it’s just the clouds being funny, at least the continents aren’t drifting apart, kindly stop screaming”)
I personally embraced the jaded grandpa trope and it’s a very fun one to play with
About Ancient characters who live among short lived races:
I did once play a homebrew DnD game where we were gods walking among mortals
and I played an ancient god of knowledge as someone who appreciated the time he could spend with the mortals he got to know, he had come to terms with the fact they wouldn’t be around forever and just enjoyed what time he could with them.
However he never got too close to them, because he couldn’t actually relate to their struggles, being he was an ageless immortal divine creature, he was willing to play the kind grandfather and guide, but never more then that.
in fact he detested navigating the issues that came with posing as a mortal, because it all seemed to nonsensical to him.
part of it came from the fact he could construct an entire town in a matter of hours, if he died he would return in a week to a months and time had no meaning to him.
In short most issues that plague the mind of a commoner was entirely alien to him.
I think an ancient person who has lived among short lived races could adopt a similar attitude.
they’ll be able to make friends with the great-great-great grandchildren of someone they met once.
They can keep secrets for generations or offer advice to generations later they got from that generations ancestors.
Ebonhorn/Ebyssian in Highmountain is a good example of this.
he has been the main adviser of the highmountain chieftain for generations, he passes on the knowledge from the past chieftains to the next.
Another DnD Character I played, became ageless and slowly grew distant to their aging children and party members, becoming immortal had changed them so much they no longer felt any connection to anyone and they become withdrawn.
I think both cases have their merits.
An ancient character will have to come to terms with this fact if they live among short lived races.
and they can either adopt a positive attitude or a negative one.
Alternatively there is the “goblin” bank manager in Dalaran who is implied to be a very old shapeshifter who changes their gender and form every so often and adopts a new life.
Maybe your 10.000 year old elf had enough of the druid life and wanted to try what its like to be a warrior for a few centuries, maybe your draenei wants to spend a few decades as a farmer etc.
They might still have some of their skills, but they are entirely dedicated to their new life and may not know everything about it just yet.
Jokes aside, Lazaares was my first “ancient” character (and also the first World of Warcraft RP character I had). All inspired by a quest in Draenor’s Shadowmoon (Naaru bless good ole’ Loola). I’ve had a habit of playing older characters before, but they were all humans in their 40s and above.
The real caveat is with the power-trip. I’ve always had the attitude that character can be weaker than the average, but no character should be considerably stronger. Often I see ancient characters fall into the same category as dragons & the occasional DK/DH - being pickd for the sake of overpowering others in RP for self-gratification, and not for a story to tell or stories to partake in.
The best part I found about ancient or old characters is being able to provide a semblance of wisdom or guidance to younger ones in exchange for relying on them. A sort-of mentorship relationship that lends itself from the get-go, which in turn can create lots of wonderful stories. It works with almost any kind of reliance, which is unfortunately something people seldom include in RP. Even having your sword broken and relying on another character to repair it can create some nice interaction.
Now to go point-by-point:
Always irked me, and always irked me when an ancient or old character is hot-headed. When your 11,000 years old elf keeps causing diplomatic incidents and getting into trouble, I ask myself however they even lived for that long without dying a hundred times over.
A trope I tend to play on old characters is to have them be reserved, calculating, calm and generally patient. This often came up whenever Lazaares discussed the Draenei returning to Argus and restoring their planet, to which she always calmly explained the restoration and cleansing will not happen overnight, but she expects it might take five to fifteen millennia.
I think this is largely a flavour preference. I think it’s important to abide my initial point about hot-headed characters (someone over 10,000 years old will likely have learned to keep lips sealed and not cause unnecessary danger/trouble - humans generally learned that by their 30s).
Unapologetic hatred and bigotry, when used to drive a story, can be a great tool, especially when the character is challenged about it in a narrative. I take great issue with people roleplaying bigotry as a “deadset hatred” where characters hurl abuse and harassment but otherwise don’t act on things. The other face is where characters keep a stern and formal posture, but are ready to cut corners and make decisions that might not even benefit them, but undermine or harm those they despise.
This falls under what I call reverse-metagaming. Normal metagaming is when a character wields information only learned OOC in-game. Reverse-metagaming is where a character is unable to act a certain way because the player lacks the OOC knowledge or ability. In other words, know your limits and caveats.
I enjoy corny wisdom greatly, especially when a series of wise advices, comments or decisions develops trust between characters and then you can press your more extreme thoughts under the same umbrella. Lazaares always eventually surfaced with the “Nagrand DMZ”, “Draenic superiority” and “Path of Vengeance from Stonard to the Dark Portal” ideas.
It’s a good advice to avoid pristine memories of every past event. Some of us hardly remember our high school graduation or our first day of school, so why would a Draenei clearly & 100% accurately remember something random that happened while living on Draenor?
The “overabundance of memories” was my character’s IC explanation for her senility and declining grasp on the world around her, which is an interesting notion to play with. How attached would a millennia old character be to things as simple as clothes, cities, pets, etc.?
A beloved trope of mine is ancient characters that possess skills that are completely useless in the modern world. I fondly remember an Argus-born Draenei elder I roleplayed with 2016ish who always introduced himself as “Archmage of the Conservatory”, only to reveal whenever forced into combat that he was in fact a teacher-professor and master of exterior illumination magic. So fondly I remember that I even made a character I roleplayed briefly who was an “Honour graduate of household enchantments”.
I would love to see more ancient characters with professions that are out of place. Kaldorei cosmetic enchanters, Nightborne palanquin craftsmen and Draenei atmospheric stability field engineers.
I believe this can swing both ways. World of Warcraft lore already has dozens of precedents for ancient characters switching their professions or motivations. My own Lazaares herself was an Augari enchanter first, then an arcane researcher later, eventually joining the Auchenai and then going down the less-than-stellar path they took. And this is pretty much the “official” pathway all Auchenai took, as they shared off from the Sha’tari.
I imagine many of the Kaldorei soldiers who lived to fight in the War of the Ancients have since shifted to become sentinels, druids, etc. Similarly, it’s always welcoming to see someone roleplay the novelty of Kaldorei male priests and portray them as an ex-guard, ex-civilian or ex-mage.
Now for an addition of my own…
Please don’t count years.
I don’t think it makes any sense for an immortal or pseudo-immortal being to count the passage of time. This is especially awkward when playing an elderly Draenei considering they spent the majority of their lives on planets other than Azeroth.
My preferred method is counting with “periods”. Not saying “I’m 11.473 years old”, but saying “I was born during the rise of the betrayer-Queen.” For Draenei, I’ve used an Aeon-system for reference, the Aeons being:
Pre-Duumvirate (Draenic prehistory)
Duumvirate (Velen yada yada miracle time)
Triumvirate (After demons / wakeners dying)
Long Exile (During the travels)
Draenor time (for the … is it 200 years now? Or was it 600? On Draenor)
Times of Strife (Horde rise to Argus)
Modern age (Since Legion defeat)
Meaning Thal’kiel and Archimonde are 6 aeons old Duumvirati, while Velen and Kil’Jaeden are 7 aeons or older.
Last, but not least:
The other inspiration behind my character is my 87 years old grandmother which means Lazaares will refuse to appear informal and unkempt, and will always enjoy an Argussian tome on outdated celebrity gossip, stories or millennia old fashion. She was once gifted a tome on the ten greates Jed’hin champions and their scandalous affairs by a fellow Auchenai…
These are all excellent points. Many of Acheleus, Acrona, and Loras’s thoughts echo my own brainstorming that I did when figuring out what kind of person Lintian is.
There are just a few minor things I feel I could add.
I would add that confirmation bias is a thing; people are more likely to remember and pay attention to things that confirm their existing worldview. As they get older and more set in their worldview, they might retain memories that fit into their bias, and the ones that don’t can be lost or changed.
To add to this: consider how many animals an elf would have known, loved and lost throughout their life, unless these animals are also inexplicably long-lived like Tyrande’s saber. A sad reminder that everything dies, and even immortal elves can be suddenly mortal.
Lintian was a hunter for most of her life before she set on a career change from BfA onwards. Throughout her life, she raised countless chicks and cubs as animal companions, and lost them — some to accidents, some to old age. She has mourned them all, and probably keeps mementos of them somewhere among her belongings, lest she forgets.
Even their environment is something that they can form attachments to. Many of the night elves of Ashenvale probably knew the trees being cut down by Hellscream’s orcs for hundreds of years. I almost cry when I see another swathe of trees I used to know and walk past every day cut down to make room for yet another construction site, and I’ve only known them for a few years!
There are a few more subjects I’d like to touch:
Dealing with boredom. At some point, your character would have seen it all. Walked every road, read every book, tried their hand at every skill they’ve ever wanted to try (which doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily decide to hone them — they might decide it’s not their thing). How would they avoid getting bored — especially if they’re an intellectual and crave meaningful mental challenges by their nature?
In my mind, this is why Lintian became a historian and traveler. Hunting and living a quiet village life were fine, but not providing enough novelty for her intellect, so she turned to books and investigating ruins of the Kaldorei Empire, trying to independently piece together ancient history from conflicting accounts.
It helps also that she’s (intentionally) not unfathomably old: just over five hundred years old. Old by the standards of humans and even dwarves, but pretty young by night elf standards. She also would score high on openness to experience in the Big Five model, which forms one of her core internal conflicts: she’s young enough to crave adventure, but old enough to know better.
Dealing with change. Modern Azeroth is pretty much the embodiment of the curse “May you live in interesting times”. Just think of how much the world has endured in the twenty in-universe years since WC3. To someone who has lived for centuries and millennia in a mostly unchanging society, this can be extremely jarring.
Again, to take Lintian as an example: she was born and grew up during the Long Vigil, long after every notable event in past kaldorei history. She was a civilian and never fought in any wars; there were no wars to fight. Then with the Third War, suddenly her established way of life was thrown out of the window, and since then there has been a war, invasion, or cataclysm every other year…
Not to mention a whole lot of new cultures to meet, many of them with ways of life that she considers strange and alien. She has accepted the existence of what we would call modernity, but remains outside of it. Even now that she lives in Dalaran, studies arcane magic, and reads The Lion’s Roar, I’ve tried to show with small things that she hasn’t quite accepted foreign cultural tenets: she walks the streets barefoot, finds most non-elven music grating to her ears, and insists on hunting for her own food. You can take the elf out of the night, but you can’t take the night out of the elf.
Mental maturity. An ancient character wouldn’t act with a teenager’s rashness and lack of foresight. Part of it is natural selection: someone who would get themselves killed by their stupidity wouldn’t have lived this long. Another part is that they’ve had plenty of time and opportunities to work out their personality problems and childhood traumas. Which is not to say they wouldn’t be flawed, just that their flaws would be ones that wouldn’t be easily weeded out by sheer life experience.
To use Lintian again as an example: she’s a relatively mature and well-adjusted individual now, but in stressful situations she still can lose her composure to emotional outbursts. And she definitely wasn’t like that in her formative years, having been more headstrong and conflict-prone in the past. The path that led from that time to her current self was fraught with mistakes and learning from them; after all, in the words of Piet Hein:
The road to wisdom? — Well, it’s plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
Finally, while we’re discussing wisdom, I’d like to focus on these bits:
Since my character is indeed a scholar, besides deciding early on what eactly she was competent at and what she wasn’t, I thought of a few bits of knowledge that I knew she was actually wrong about — partly from incomplete information and partly from her personal biases.
Mentioning Gandalf is noteworthy because he’s actually an example of an ancient character written well! Both in terms of his narrative role and his characterization.
Gandalf is by far the oldest member of the Fellowship. He actually predates the world! In the text, he certainly gives the impression of being older than he looks, but you never learn in LOTR itself just how old he is, nor what kind of being he is; the answers to these questions are contained in another book entirely, The Silmarillion.
Yet he doesn’t steal the spotlight. He guides and consoles, and only occasionally intervenes when the situation calls for knowledge only he has, but otherwise is content to let the rest of the Fellowship play to their own strengths. His speech has a certain gravitas to it, but he doesn’t speak like a bad Shakespeare parody. He has a very extensive backstory, but doesn’t share it left and right, instead only telling his friends what they need to know.
He’s also not perfect; he forgets lore he used to know, falls victim to his own too-clever-by-half-ness (if he had just read the whole inscription on the Door of Durin aloud in the original Sindarin, instead of translating, it would have opened), and makes bad calls that cost his friends dearly. His adherence to the need-to-know basis becomes a hindrance to his allies on multiple occasions when he leaves abruptly and they have to proceed without him. In short, he has character flaws, but they’re flaws that are believable for someone of his station.
And of course, we only consider reciting Gandalf quotes as corny because they’ve been endlessly copied by now, and because LOTR formed the ethical basis for so much of later fantasy that Gandalf doesn’t sound novel, but rather like a stereotype of Deep Wisdom. Sadly, there’s no easy way out; genuine wisdom is hard to fake, and involves thinking for yourself and drawing from your own life experience rather than quoting what passes as “deep” in your culture.
This aside, if you want to RP an ancient character, do read LOTR! And The Silmarillion too if you can stomach it. Tolkien is a classic for a reason, unlike his shallow imitators, and he gave much thought to getting inside the minds of his ancient characters and portraying them believably. Some of Lintian’s demeanor towards younger races was taken from Tolkien elves, perhaps most visibly Gildor Inglorion (Sir-Not-Appearing-in-the-Film) when he meets the hobbits early in LOTR, before they leave the Shire. Her conduct around the Astranaar campfire when human, dwarven or pandaren travelers come to visit takes a few pages from that scene. You might find some inspiration in Tolkien’s writings, too.
Regarding interaction with younger races, it’s pointed out in Rise of the Lich King that humans frequently struggle to read and communicate with high elves, because they’re so formal it’s considered antiquated by this era. An act of kindness - even a flirt in the case of Kael’Thas - is frequently misinterpreted in its intent.
To add to that, elves have such an uncanny beautiful appearance to them that they appear too perfect to the human eye that it at times feels wrong which adds to the difficulty in reading them.
And that’s just humans to high elves whose age disparity is not as extreme as high elves to night elves. Even they might struggle with the oldest of night elves who are survivors of the old Empire.
Not to make my entire contribution to this thread be quotes from greater minds, but this has reminded me of a very short excerpt from “Unintended Worship” by the Syrian poet Adunis:
How many centuries deep is your wound?
An immense depth in seven words. It’s easy to imagine it being exchanged between two ancient elves in an intimate but melancholy moment. This is an aspect of long-lived characters that should absolutely be addressed more often
Not quite as high brow as my references to the Invincible animated series and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but interesting nonetheless. We can’t all be intellectuals, after all…
i like to imagine that what too a human sounds like a solioquy of the fragile nature of the soul from an elf is them in elven terms complaining their hips gone out of place again
Partly because no man has ever lived a little over a hundred years old.
We can try and imagine hundreds of years, thousands even, yet our brains require pictures and concepts to grasp the happenings of mere days, weeks, let alone years.
I recently read Xijin Liu’s Three Body Problem series- And especially the third novel in the trilogy, Death’s end, grasps with infinity and the terror of it. The characters in it each try and find a way to deal with it., with varying levels of success.
The most common way that it is handled in literature (as some did in the said book) was making characters feel distant, above or beyond your understanding. This is something even Tolkien and many others since have written races like elves as, with their lifespans spanning hundreds, sometimes thousands or even more years.
Others choose the complete opposite and make characters that never change or are recognizable regardless of time and place.
I find this interesting, as its both similar and different to the way Tolkien described his Elves. Yes, I know we are referencing him a lot but I do think very few authors have come as close as writing convincing, immortal characters as he did.
But onto the actual point: Tolkien doesn’t describe his Elves as being eternally young, but rather he describes them as timeless. Tolkien elves are a wonderous enigma to humans, because a human cannot discern anything about them from appearance; they confuse the senses because they appear to be both old and young at the same time. They defy any human understanding of time and age.
It should also be noted Tolkien was heavily influenced by his own Christian faith when he conceived his fantasy setting. Physical beauty is often seen as synonymous with spiritual purity and this is why their beauty throws people off: your senses are made to believe this beautiful person has to be good, because how could an evil being be this beautiful to look at?
Of course, some humans are (understandably) suspicious and think the Elves use this beauty to trick and deceive people into a false sense of security. The Silmarillion makes it clear Elves can sin and be pretty awful people too, so their worries are not unreasonable.
I think the same case can be said of Warcraft Elves, that besides the uncanniness of their beauty, other races may see their beauty as a trick to lower people’s guards, for good or for bad.