Day 5 was the first day of #RPGaDay the stopped me cold. "Burden"
Picture this: The early 90's, 2nd Edition AD&D is in full speed, splat books firing out. It is not surprising that min-max elves populated the table. And too be honest, I'm not a big fan of elves to begin with, and as DM, the deluge of thinly veiled variants of the same thing was getting me pissed off.
So when I expanded my campaign past high school, I didn't ban elves, I simply made them difficult to play at the table.
The Elden Burden of Western Talaishia
Queue your Kipling here.
I'm sure in the ancient times of the Empire, the elves simply signed non-aggression pacts with the barbarian hordes of the east as they overran the First Ferasean Empire. Hundreds of years later, the elven tribes in the east simply shrank in numbers that hating them was a non-issue.
A couple hundred years later, the barbarian incursion happens again. Civilization is ruined, but there is hope. The mountains of Markovia and Skyforge to difficult to traverse, leaving the wooded Elven Kingdom of Agenmoor as the portal defending the far western empire from total destruction.
For reasons left in the mind of the elven leaders, they simply LET the barbarians through their kingdom, and let a good portion of them return east with nary a trouble.
So the Elden Burden. Already a race deteriorating from the inside, now their greatest partner, humankind, hates them with the power of a million wizards.
After generations of teaching, elves are hated by all people. Full blown discrimination, slurs involving pointed ears, and heaven forbid if you area half-elf.
All the min-maxing in the world succumbs to the dark side of human nature.
We still had our levy of elf characters show up, and most embraced the "hard work and heroism will win them over!"
It doesn't help when your elf, Torm Touchberry, is an ass-grabbing thief, or your virtuous elven cleric, Markuus was simply obnoxious at all times, to all people.
It's a heavily biased and rewritten history, recalled in episodes #71-80 of the Lost Dispatches of Feraso., but in the village of Eding's darkest hours, the PCs bailed on them, letting the goblins put half of the place to the torch. The campaign broke down shortly thereafter, but the non-elf PCs stayed away from the Barony. Torm and Markuus took the burden as members of the adventuring party, and as elves, taking the lashes, the prison time (The local Lord was feeling generous as he needed competent bodies of any sort. Torm's player kept going for awhile, taking the lashes, training with the militia, keeping out of trouble.
But the time my next campaign started, ten years cannonically after the last one, Torm was a sergeant in the militia, finally earning some respect, but full of the racial hostility towards the elves in the new group.
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| Torm Touchberry, the Early Years... |
Once the new elves won Torm over, their acceptance was quicker, although they went with the "keep you nose clean, stay humble" track
My Hackmaster games were placed 70-80 in the future, and the racism of the people was tapered a bit, with more elven heroes, but also the recent fall of Agenmoor to the shadow elves...
And nobody came to help them.
When I moved that the next Hackmaster campaign to Eastern Talaishia, the rampant racism was never there. Those larger groups were either far removed from human contact, or simply shrank well prior to the second barbarian incursion.
Of course, there are tons of elf refugees from the fall of the kingdom, and their strange dialects, differeing culutres and drain on resources might un-surface some old hostilities amongst the peasantry.
Alternate Question: What burden is a character willing to carry until the end?
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