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I've always wanted to see a rendition of dark elves where the "dark" is figurative and they're just as pasty white or even whiter than regular elves and the dark actually refers to them being ultra deplorable evil fiends, like dark eldar but high fantasy
So you mean the Druchii?
"Like Dark Eldar but high fantasy"
so...Warhammer Fantasy Dark Elves? The guys Dark Eldar were a space adaptation of?
yeah underground cave dwelling creatures who never see sunlight should be white as fuck. exhibit a scandianavians and russians exhibit b actual cave animals
Like the Falmer?
Weren't they poisoned, blinded, borderline-gene-spliced, and made into the ones we now know by the dwemer?
Like, in the Dawnguard DLC, we see a falmer vampire, who turned before his race was driven underground, and has survived all this time, and he's just some dude. Granted, he's a vampire, and therefore has some vaguely-defined evil goal that means you have to kill him, but he feels like you could talk him out of his plans.
Isn't the Falmer vampire's non-vampire brother also in that quest
Yeah.
Tolkien's dark elves look identical to high elves and also aren't any more evil, the name refers to the fact that they never travelled to Valinor and thus never saw the light of the Two Trees.
I had a variation on dark elves once where it was a matter of religious differences rather than ethnic or "racial" ones. Basically one of the early elvish religions had elvish supremacism as its primary tenet due to the typical longer lifespan/"ethereal beauty"/greater magical affinity traits, but a religious schism occurred between those who interpreted it as meaning "we should enslave/exterminate/segregate non-elves" and those who interpreted it as "we should force the assimilation of non-elves as a means of raising them to elvish status", with the latter being branded as "dark elves" by the former due to living and proselytizing primarily among underground-dwelling dwarvish communities
idk if you intended this or not, but if you didn't this kind of works as a reference to the IRL origin of the term "dark elves"; In Norse mythology, the svartalfar ("black elves") were probably just dwarfs under another name.
Yeah that was intentional
So like in Warhammer and Dragonbane?
That's what they are in my Dungeon Fantasy world. They live in caves, of course they're not going to have any colour in their skin!
Arcanum too. Dark elves are just elves that are jerks.