Alicornutopia

It occurred to me that I should have a Q&A thread. So now I do. Ask away. ^^

Dusk looks very interesting. I’m sure we’ll see more soon, but what con you say about her? How did she stop the other elves, for example?

Dusk trivia:

She's 183 years old. Carp elves don't age past the general adulthood stage or die of old age, so this doesn't really translate to anything in human terms, but she considers herself approximately at the 'experienced young adult' stage, equivalent to mid-late 20s.

Her special interest is animal training; she trained Star to be a service animal herself and has trained a few of the other animals in the village to do advanced tricks as well. Star's reaction to Lurker yelling at Dusk is something that Dusk specifically trained, and Star knows some homebrewed hand signals - and, unlike most elven mounts, is trained to only attack when specifically commanded to.

She has fine motor skill problems to the point where using eating utensils is difficult; this is why River made cornbread for her rather than just offer her the soup.

Rain is her nephew, but they're not close. The rest of the family lives in Silver Leaf Citadel; Dusk moved to the village when she was in her 20s.

She keeps that one trap circle to use as a stim toy - spreading out in the middle of it and turning it on provides an interesting sort of deep pressure. It took her over a year of watching to get ahold of one that had the electricity part broken.

She didn't actually have confirmation until she heard Lurker talking to Elarron that kobolds are people. She suspected, because it's really obvious to her that 'doesn't talk' doesn't necessarily translate to 'isn't a person', but she didn't have any more direct evidence.

She thinks the yearly religious ritual where the maple syrup is produced is gross, and doesn't participate in it. She has the local religious leader convinced she has her own religious practice instead; what she actually does is just spend a couple days wandering around in the woods while everybody else is busy with that. (Her relationship with the elven religion is complicated, but it's not too inaccurate to call her an atheist.)

She stopped the elves from wiping out the kobolds by convincing one of the council members that they were risking destabilizing the local environment by wiping out a species they know so little about, and then gathering evidence to make a case for that as a real concern.

In the spirit of the season, could you imagine Lurker (and your other characters) discovering Christmas?

Lurker finds the idea of gifts... not confusing exactly, she'd get the idea once it was explained to her, but she has trouble reconciling the generosity with the apparent selfishness of doing ownership in the first place. She might also be alarmed about Santa, if it wasn't sufficiently clear that he's fictional. *chuckle*

Dusk has trouble with bright lights, and she's got enough of the elven cultural background going on that she'd be kind of weirded out by Christmas trees (though much, much less offended than most elves), but she'd find the rest of it pretty charming. She likes Christmas cookies and carols in particular.

What specifically would be alarming about Santa? Him being able to find you wherever you happen to be (given that kobolds don’t quite have the same concept of “home” as most people today)?

How would Dusk, or other elves for that matter, feel about fake trees?

On a completely different topic, I think one of your sandboxes mentioned Dusk thinking about maple, and getting the sap from trees. I can’t find where, though. If I’m not completely inventing this from thin air, could you talk more about how that works given elven respect for trees?

DanielH wrote:What specifically would be alarming about Santa? Him being able to find you wherever you happen to be (given that kobolds don’t quite have the same concept of “home” as most people today)?

That, and the bit where he watches children year-round - kobold kids don't grow up nearly as segregated as modern-western-culture human kids do, so that more or less works out to 'watch the whole tribe all the time', and aaaa.

How would Dusk, or other elves for that matter, feel about fake trees?

It depends on the particular elf and how they're explained. Most of them would be weirded out to the point of not wanting to be around them, though - decorating with a tinsel-covered fake corpse is still creepy even if it doesn't mean you murdered somebody.

On a completely different topic, I think one of your sandboxes mentioned Dusk thinking about maple, and getting the sap from trees. I can’t find where, though. If I’m not completely inventing this from thin air, could you talk more about how that works given elven respect for trees?

Adelene wrote:Dusk trivia:

...

She thinks the yearly religious ritual where the maple syrup is produced is gross, and doesn't participate in it.

tw: blood
They basically consider trees siblings, and the ritual is a blood-brotherhood thing - they tap the trees for sap and make syrup with it, and also bleed themselves and make fertilizer for the trees with that. I'm with Dusk that it's kinda gross, but as a religious ritual it works.

Ah, that’s why I couldn’t find it in the sandboxes.

I agree on both counts about the ritual.

I don’t play DF, but I think I’ve heard that the elves there actually do make wood products and kill trees sometimes. Is that something that you’ve carried over to these elves, and if so how does that work? Do they only use wood from trees which are already dead, for example?

Toady One's intended canon is that elves grow the wooden things they use in a nondestructive way, and I've carried that over - it came up when River asked if Elarron wanted them to grow a bed for him rather than using a hammock. My implementation is different than Toady's, though; in Carp it's an example of medical magic.

They're ideologically okay with dead-of-natural-causes wood being used for things, but they mostly don't bother with it themselves.

So the next part of the Elarron thread is Elarron meeting with one or more of the council members, and I haven't worked out enough of what the actual deal is there to know how that should go. Ask me questions to help me work out the details?

Here's what I have so far:

• There's five people on the council, plus one person who Dusk thinks is highly relevant to how the council works in practice but that River thinks isn't relevant at all.
• The five people are in charge of five different aspects of the village:
  • Religion
  • Defense
  • Magic (Petal)
  • Crafting
  • Farming (Boll)
  I think the sixth one might be the head of the traders, but I'm not sure.
• Animal husbandry is technically a religious thing, but in practice Boll has taken charge of it.
  • Boll is not actually particularly religious, he's just interested in the practicalities of it, but that's the more useful skill set.
• They're not really super cooperative with each other; this is definitely a collection of individuals with their own agendas. They do all have the village's best interests at heart, though, they just have somewhat different ideas of what that means in practice.
• Boll is the one Dusk convinced to get the council to stop going after the kobolds; he doesn't think they're people, but she pitched it as 'we don't know enough about this species to know what effects wiping them out will have', and that's definitely a line of logic he cares about. He still didn't publicly support it, though, until the whole council was on board with the idea; it was all behind-the-scenes maneuvering up to that point.
• As was mentioned in the thread, Petal is particularly interested in trade.
• The religious leader is very laid back when it comes to the details of how things get done, and pretty friendly/jovial in interpersonal interactions, but doesn't actually back down from the prescribed stance on things where it actually matters according to the religion.