@Myrna Minkoff I'm sorry, but since you're obviously dead-set on questioning every setting detail that isn't mentioned† and now trying to use (incorrect) science to insist on not having to find a more appropriate appearance, I'm going to have to say that this roleplay isn't going to suit you, please leave.

† You know it's an OP, not an encyclopaedia, right?

...You literally told me to ask questions, and now I'm asking too many questions?

You realize your OP features exactly three sentences on Dark Elf habitats, right? If we're not allowed to write our own lore and we're not allowed to ask for the canon lore then how is anyone supposed to actually create a character?

@Myrna Minkoff: I did answer you. I explained they live underground, and are therefore pale due to lack of exposure to sunlight.

Elves started out fair-skinned, diet alone wouldn't change this. It's not that you're asking questions, it's that you want to contradict my answers.

If you want a dark-skinned elf so much, it wouldn't have been a dark elf.

There is a clear distinction between asking for information on something, and your current attitude of passive-aggressively insisting on filling in the blanks and how it fits in what you've been told. It makes it quite clear that even if the questions were answered fully, roleplaying with you would be a trying and extremely frustrating experience at best, one which I have no interest in GMing.

As for anyone else who might be interested in Dark Elves: living underground in a fantasy setting, the majority of their diet is carnivorous or fungal in nature, including those things that might otherwise get in from above. As the underground is as expansive as you might expect when an entire subclassification of elf has moved there, there are always a lot of geothermal or magical hotspots to provide the initial nutrition that feeds the food chain. Having their own access to magic both arcane and via beseeching deities, this tends to work out reasonably well, but does leave them quite poorly suited--like naga and some drider--to being accustomed to the cuisine of Estival.

As elves were ancestrally pale and have had no reason to consequently derive a dark skin tone to protect from the sun (along with long generations and agelessness), they're all to some degree pale, though the lack of sunlight tends to make the dark elves particularly pallid due to lack of tanning.

@Myrna Minkoff Maybe you can make a half-elf where one parent is dark-skinned and thus passed down their skin color to their kids. Just an idea.

It's not that you're asking questions, it's that you want to contradict my answers.

Pardon me for speaking up against this, but that simply isn't true. Not once have I expressed anything but a desire to fit in and get along. When your rude and incredibly condescending GM not only rejected my app, but implied that I didn't read the thread and that I wrote a "lunatic," I ignored the obvious insults and waited for the hard judgments on where I could rewrite the app to improve it. Whether they came from her or from you. When you gave me those critiques, I only asked for a bit of codification so I could redraft what needed redrafting without having to start over from scratch. I started asking permission, like I was specifically told to, and passing ideas by you instead of assuming they were greenlit, but trying to wring some actual lore out of this thread (you know, so I'm not breaking the lore, all three sentences of it) brings out even more hostility?

I apologize if I've given the impression that I'm insubordinate or that I'm undermining your authority somehow, but that's not what's happening here. I'm bringing new information to the discussion to try and persuade you of one or two of my ideas. Don't say "please discuss this with me beforehand" and "please ask questions" in your OOC if you're then going to punish me for trying to discuss and to ask questions. I'm literally doing what you ask and you're shitting in my mouth for it, so what gives?

I'd still like to join if you'll let me. And this is me outright declaring, without ambiguity, that I can follow any directions I'm given from the GM team. That said, if you never wanted me here from the beginning, there are far easier and more straightforward ways of sending that message than saying I ask too few questions one second, too many the next, telling me to discuss ideas and then punishing me for discussing ideas, then pretending I'm the one who's being belligerent here when really I don't know how I can even respond without bringing this unearned hostility down on myself. Please, if I was never welcome here at all then you can stop playing games with me and just say so.

All right, I guess at this point I'm on standby to see your decision. Over.

I think everyone's gotten a little knee-jerk here.

I think I'm going to have to drop out of this one. I like the setting, but from looking at the problems that players have faced in the character creation process so far I feel it might be a bit to ridged which coupled with how detailed and fleshed out it is means it's not quite my cup of tea. That said the premise and setting do still interest me so I might read along.

@Raineh Daze@VitaVitaAR

I'm sorry, it's just that I do have a clear, fleshed-out setting here. It's a personal work for me as well as something I think works well in RPs: When you have an established setting you know what's possible and you know what can happen. I want to keep the rules consistent and I want to keep the races consistent.

That's why I want people to ask questions and please wait for my full response. Even when I don't have something completely fleshed out at the very least I can provide a general idea of it.

That's fair. I'm sorry for coming off petulant or unruly, too.

I've been loyal to all the lore available to me, but again, look at the information that was available to a Dark Elf writer during my first drafting:

* Dark Elves can alternatively come from caves or from "far to the north in Barukstaed" (the latter is never described outside of being very dark and very snowy.)
* They're rare in Velt.
* They're good at sneaking about and killing things.

I see now that I was supposed to look at this incredibly sparse information and think "I'd better ask for more" rather than think "Oh boy, the GM is letting us get wild with our apps." (But you also see that of what little I was given, I kept all of it intact. Again, I'm not trying to overrule the GM.) A lot of conflict and confusion may be avoided in the future if that information is actually written down for us, or we're at least given a "there's a lot of lore we haven't written down so please ask to see it" disclaimer. As it stands it's an odd choice, IMO, to make players write apps first, then show them the lore they're breaking, imply they're morons for failing to follow this lore, and demand rewrites. I know I could've written a good app the first time if all of this knowledge had been available to to me ahead of my drafting the character.

In the spirit of asking questions, I suppose my next one is just how long ago dark elves started living in Barukstaed and/or the underdark? The exact time frame of...whatever it was that split them off from the other elf subraces.

I'm sorry, it's just that I do have a clear, fleshed-out setting here. It's a personal work for me as well as something I think works well in RPs: When you have an established setting you know what's possible and you know what can happen. I want to keep the rules consistent and I want to keep the races consistent.

That's why I want people to ask questions and please wait for my full response. Even when I don't have something completely fleshed out at the very least I can provide a general idea of it.

I mean there's nothing wrong with that approach at all. I've always been a fan of the give detailed lore but leave large enough sections of it blank as to allow flexibility approach, setting tendencies and upper limits but leaving plenty of wriggle room in between. But that's only my personal opinion.

I would say that it might be worth holding off on an initial response until that more detailed one or at least mentioning there will be one in the initial response, because I can see how one might jump to the conclusion that that's all their getting and get frustrated.

for the record I didn't mind being told to fix lore stuff.

In fact, you're welcome to berate me any time GMs 😉.

@TheMushroomLordI cited a secondary article on Inuits for this post which says largely the same thing. Here is the link. It cites dead links, but a quick Google of the authors' names revealed their peer-reviewed paper on the subject, from a more reliable (and intact) .edu domain.

To respond to your comment proper, this is precisely why I just asked about the timeline, as a matter of fact. The research indicates that these permanent changes to melanin pigmentation do not happen on an evolutionary timespan, but can be visible when a people has been inhabiting the same biome/climate for as few as 500 years. So if the Dark Elves were exiled to their new homes that many years ago or longer...which I must suspect is more than merely plausible for an immortal race...

The abstract for that paper clearly identifies the primary correlation with skin pigmentation as UV levels; furthermore the conclusion continues the same premise. Pages 72 and 73 identify the alternative reason for how both native Greenlanders and the Inuit maintain a darker skin tone in such northern climates (maintain, not develop) in the high degree of Vitamin D available in their diet. Therefore, if a fair-skinned population were to move north, there would be no overriding pressure to increase pigmentation, and thus they would retain a pale skin-tone. i.e. a darker skintone moving north is the baseline taken when assessing changes in relative melanin content in humans; increased Vitamin D in the diet would not have the same effect.

Otherwise, the mass domestication of chickens would have had a really strange effect by now.

Ah sorry, I missed that quote in your prior post. Now I'm feeling pretty silly, that's one of the papers I was looking at when I looked up the subject. Thanks for that, it's interesting stuff.

One thing I would note there though is the fact that the Dark Elves are an immortal race would probably entail a much slower evolutionary rate than humans given the time between generations is likely longer. If you call a human generation 30 years then there are ~15 generations in those 500 years if elves have babies half as frequently than humans than it may take 1000 years to see a change.

Also worth noting is we're both looking at this from a very scientific perspective and a lot of science, particularly evolution breaks down in most fantasy settings.
@Myrna Minkoff

Yes, and the paper then goes on to explore why Inuits are the exception, receiving zero sunlight for months at a time, and very little sunlight elsewhere in the year, and yet being as dark as any other Indigenous American from the plains or the southwest.

Edit: @TheMushroomLord Ninja. The reason I believe elf physiology is similar enough to human physiology to warrant these comparisons is that the two species are close enough in genetic makeup to be able to breed with each other.

The abstract for that paper clearly identifies the primary correlation with skin pigmentation as UV levels; furthermore the conclusion continues the same premise. Pages 72 and 73 identify the alternative reason for how both native Greenlanders and the Inuit maintain a darker skin tone in such northern climates (maintain, not develop) in the high degree of Vitamin D available in their diet. Therefore, if a fair-skinned population were to move north, there would be no overriding pressure to increase pigmentation, and thus they would retain a pale skin-tone. i.e. a darker skintone moving north is the baseline taken when assessing changes in relative melanin content in humans; increased Vitamin D in the diet would not have the same effect.

Otherwise, the mass domestication of chickens would have had a really strange effect by now.

If I'm not mistaken does snow not often cause an increase in exposure to UV radiation due to its high reflectivity? Might that act as a selection pressure for developing a darker skin tone. Also while chickens have been domesticated for thousands of years, how long have we been able to consume their products consistently?

EDIT: @Myrna Minkoff My concerns weren't with the similarities between elves and humans in a fantasy setting but rather the validity of evolution as a whole within one.

The paper you actually linked contains no such claim and contains absolutely zero occurrences of the word Inuit, albeit mentioning that the depigmentation of Greenlanders is much slower than might be expected due to alternative dietary sources. The web article at least does give fish as an alternative source of Vitamin D, but this only explains how a population would maintain its tone. Ergo, even in the absurd case of wanting to apply real-world biology to a fantasy setting, it's a moot point.

As for Dark Elves and snow... they live underground. This isn't an "they live in the north OR in caves", it's "they live in the north in caves".

Now, please drop the science discussion, I have to read papers often enough day to day without doing it when I'm looking at fantasy.

Still, the Vitamin D was a factor for the maintenance of that darkness. The Elves, who are pale to begin with, have no swarth to maintain, so they'd keep their pallor. I eat a lot of fish and I'm still not very dark because I'm a Cajun who doesn't spend a lot of time outside, for example. I think that's the point Raineh's making.

As for snow, yeah, the high albedo can do that, but I think cave-dwelling largely negates it.

I got ninjaed don't yell at me