I’ve been brainstorming about ideas to add more flavor to the standard D&D/Pathfinder races, since I find them rather lacking in that area. Some specific thoughts about elves is: 1) I hate that everyone plays elves as “humans with pointy ears” [read: too human] and 2) they’re always tree-hugging hippies.
In response to these thoughts, I did a quick Photoshop concept of what a particular desert-based elf might look like. Since it’s desert-dwelling, I made two assumptions: 1) they will probably be most active in hunting and such at night, thus they will need good low-light vision and/or infravision. 2) They will need good hearing / heat regulation systems.
The result of this is the very big ears (hearing, maybe heat regulation) and the freaky eyes (I’d suspect, actually, that it’s black background with black pupils, rather than just huge pupils — the larger the light-collecting surface area of the eye/pupil, the more light, whether normal or infrared, can be collected for use in vision).
The tattoos are likely tribal identification marks showing family lineage / cast / occupation. Not sure, haven’t gotten that far.
Click the image to see the full-sized version.
