Thursday, April 17, 2014

The Anfauglir, or Plains Elves

I'm hanging in the desert of Bishop, California, so here's more on the elven tribe who made their appearance in this narrative.

source

If an arboreal or "High" Elf is questioned about the Anfauglir, or the Plains Elves, a typical response will be a disgusted sniff, and an under-the-breath comment about "Rustics..." or "Barbarians...", as most High Elves consider them little more than a devolved group of primitives clinging to some distant cultural myth.




These observations are not entirely untrue, as travelers who encounter the tribes report them to be covered with ritual scarification and tattoos, not bearing the grace and finely worked clothing and weapons of their "cultured" cousins.  And certainly not particularly welcoming to anyone journeying through their lands.  A troop topping a hill on their riding bison or axe-beaks will take any interloper aback. 

However, anyone who has been fortunate enough to spend time around the tribes, either in their walled oases, or through encounters with their sporadic trading forays, will find them to be close-knit within their communities, and critical of their distant cousins' decadent ways. The Plains Elves are exceptionally conservative, with a deeply fundamentalist code of ethics and behavior. An occasional outcast will stumble into a frontier town, bearing the scourge marks of the Anathema, showing that they have been driven from the oases for some capital violation.
Students of elven Deep History know the Anfauglir to not be a breakaway group that left the forests, but a group that never moved in the first place.  In the elves' dialect, Anfauflir means 'Those Who Remember.'  For living on the edge of the Neferu desert, they watch over the last remnants of ancestral elven cities, lost to the shifting winds and the crawling dunes that followed them. As the trees fell to the dunes, the majority of the race found new distant, deep forests to make their home. Some say the elves were ashamed that they were not able to protect their homeland from the changing climate, forgetting about the Old Cities and their brethren who remained behind. Centering their lives around their oases and worshiping at the intermittent streams that seasonally flow from the Flint Mountains to the east, the Anfauglir hold their faith, waiting for the winds to change once again, so that they may plant their few sacred seeds to call the forests back.  
Classes:  Fighter, Mage, Thief, Druid, or the usual elfy race-as-class.
Prereqs, Stats and Specials per normal, except +1 Con (or no Con penalty, depending on the ruleset used).   
Occurrences:
Wandering:
Hunting party: (1d4+1), 50% Axebeaks/50% Mules, unarmored or leather, Compound Shortbow (1d6+1)/Short sword
Trading party (2d4), Bison-drawn carts with 1d4+1 Cavalry and 1d2 Outriders
Troops:
Foot:  (1d6+2) Hide armor (as studded leather), 50% Longbow/Longsword, 50% Javelins/Axe (add shield). 1 in 6 chance of Sergeant (3rd level, Scale armor)
Cavalry:  (5d4) 60% Mule/40% Bison, Hide armor (as studded leather), Compound Shortbow (1d6+1)/Longsword, or Javelins/Axe.  1 in 6 chance of Sergeant (3rd level, scale armor)
Outriders: (1d4+2) Axebeaks, Leather armor, Compound Shortbow (1d6+1)/Short sword

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