The Inycompendium of Modular Worldbuilding Chunks

I'm gonna start recording my chunks of worldbuilding here, hopefully for the enjoyment of anyone who happens to be reading this forum and finds themselves interested. If you like what I'm writing, or have questions, please feel free to ask about it.

ELVES
Long ago, in aeons long past, the elves and their kin were all one people, holding court in fairyland under the watchful eye of their god Corellon, the mirror-king, and their goddess Sehanine, lady of the moon, and their other goddess Araushnee, weaver of fate. They were all proper sidhe in those days, immortal and fey.

... and then there was a bit of a falling-out. It was a bit of a complicated mess and the details are unclear, but suffice to say that there was love and betrayal and rather a lot of murder, escalating into full-scale civil war, and at the end of it Corellon and Sehanine were a couple, and Araushnee was resting in pieces, some of which escaped to the underworld under the name Lolth and took Araushnee's remaining devotees, the drow, with them.

A lot of the sidhe were rather disenchanted with fairyland in general after that, and in particular with Corellon -- who is widely agreed to have honestly just consistently screwed up terribly and/or screwed everyone else over at basically every available point over the course of the whole affair, to be frank -- and they left fairyland for the mortal world in protest; those who remained in fairyland continued on being immortal fae as they had been, and are known as eladrin, but we're not focusing on those right now. Right now, we're focusing on the sidhe who left fairyland for the mortal world, either in protest, or disillusionment, or forced exile, or even because they visited the mortal world and fell in love with the place. These are the elves, and they gave up all but the last vestiges of their fairy nature in the course of forsaking fairyland, losing their otherworldliness and gaining the "gift" of mortality, becoming subject to old age and eventual death.

So, as a result, the elves are just a little preoccupied with death, as a culture, even in modern times. Can't blame them, really; they didn't used to have any. The inevitable finality of actual death, as a mortal species, weighs on their minds pretty heavily, and their cultures each try to deal with it in different ways -- and yeah, so does everyone, but even the idea of just having to leave forever for some hypothetical afterlife is too scary and final for elves. So, as a result of that, there's a lot of ancestor-worship, ancestor-reverence, in elven culture, all geared toward keeping their honored dead from having to go away -- a system that protects and keeps your loved ones forever, and will protect and keep you in turn. There are in fact a number of such systems, actually; cultures vary, and elven cultures are no different. The three basic divisions of elven culture I've plotted out in detail, with liberal borrowing from bits of Keith Baker's Eberron setting, are the aerenal, taernadal, and kaelenal cultures -- or, conjugated differently, the areshtar, tarashtar, and kalashtar.

The Areshtar
Of the three main divisions of elven culture, aerenal cultures take the most direct route to keeping their ancestors around: when you die, your soul is bound into a spirit idol, and placed reverently into a niche set aside for you in one of the necropolis districts of an aerenal city, where you will remain, where you may converse with the "deathless" priests and guards of the necropolis, where your descendants may come to visit you at any time, and from which you may be brought out to preside over ceremonies, of which there are a great many in aerenal culture.

The problem is, mortal souls are mortal souls, not immortal souls. As mortals, areshtar are fundamentally not meant to last forever. So while a soul freshly dead is as vibrant as it was in life, spirit idols are designed by necessity to amp up the preservation magic as the soul begins to wear thin. Which keeps the soul alive for longer... but it's rather like preserving a personality in a jar of formaldehyde. They slow down, they think less, they change less. They're a fraction as alive as their former selves, rousing themselves from their very slow contemplation only for short periods.

So aerenal cultures also follow the Deathless Path, which is, in effect, not substantially different from most other religions and philosophies for most of its practitioners. It focuses somewhat on meditation, and mantras, and correct thought paired with correct willpower inevitably producing correct action. Not terribly atypical for a not-terribly-theistic religion/philosophy. But to the especially devoted practitioner, or the especially talented practitioner, it can allow you to manifest stronger effects outside of your spirit idol after death, or at higher levels manifest an entire persistent, "deathless" form, looking somewhat withered and mummified and slightly alien, but still persistently capable of moving around and doing things -- mostly as city priests or temple guards. At the very highest levels of devotion to the Deathless Path, with five hundred years or more as a devoted practitioner, a deathless priest can even transcend mortality altogether, becoming a powerful, radiant being of pure unearthly light.

This also has drawbacks. To gradually escape the bounds of mortality via the Deathless Path is to painstakingly change yourself into something other than a mortal person, something unearthly and alien enough that death no longer applies to them as a concept. The Transcendent Ones are worshipped as something like avatars of godhood when they manifest in elven country, but they are as deeply alarming as they are tangibly powerful, and you come away from your encounter with one greatly relieved that they aren't around very often.

The areshtar have escaped death, technically, but as a result, they feel the sobering weight of eternity pressing down on them every day of their lives. They've taken most of the sting out of death -- the total loss, the unknown, the cessation -- but death still happens and it still hurts, and now the dead remain forever, present and sapient but ensconced in stone, a consolation but a reminder of what you've lost.

So aerenal cultures tend to be... solemn. Areshtar tend to have a certain funereal air about them, as if they've just attended a funeral or returned from visiting a loved one's grave. And while that solemnity leads them to care a lot about propriety, it can also lead them to be staggeringly heartfelt -- a funeral is no time for rudeness or irreverence, but it does bring the clarity to be aware of your true feelings, and the awareness that being alive as you are is no time to hide those feelings -- you must face your fears, you must be clear with those you love, you must live life with determination.

The areshtar think a lot about their dead. They're right there -- how couldn't you! Your ancestors are all gathered there among you, authoritative and intimidatingly ancient and all alone together in the temple-districts of the dead. Your loved ones are still around, and will be around forever, just... separate now, even if you keep their idols in your home, like a modern long-distance relationship. And as all of the dead are sapient, and few of them can act on their own (although the nature of being a soulbound idol means it doesn't bother them as much as it would a living person), there's an added weight to it -- you keep them in your thoughts more than you would someone who is gone, you feel a pressure to interact with them regularly, to make sure they're satisfied, to do right by them.

This has a number of effects. The most apparent of them, if you're living in a place with large areshtar populations, is that the areshtar have a lot of holidays and ceremonial events. A lot. More than anyone else by a substantial margin.

• There's the six aelas shalandas, complex bimonthly holidays which involve your whole family and all of your ancestors (the ones in your region, at least), all of which focus on paying homage to the ancestors and bridging the gap between them and the present, each with five similar ceremonies conducted across the day, but each slightly different from one another in overall focus -- landa alaela focuses on the overall direction of the family now and in times before and who its leaders are and how they lead, landa neshaela focuses on what each ancestor and family member means to one another and how each member feels about each other, landa taeraela focuses on the best stories each ancestor and family member has to tell, landa ashtarela focuses on who each ancestor and family member is as a person and what they're like, and so on.
  
  
• There's the aesal shanolae, the two-day holiday at the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, presided over by the deathless priests for a dozen ceremonies and a dozen other events.
  
  
• There's morashtae shalandes, where you wear the mask of the ancestor you most admire, and walk with them for a day, with them acting through you.
  
  
• There's the ashtarnada shalandas, a set of four holidays, one at the beginning of each season, with only brief opening and closing ceremonies presided over by deathless priests, which focus on celebrating and expressing your individuality -- as for all of their propriety, aerenal cultures place a great deal of importance on your own individuality, your own agency, your own uniqueness, because what's the point of living forever if no one remembers you, and what's the point of having new areshtar if they're no different from the old? These are some of the more jubilant aerenal holidays, as you might imagine.
  
  
• (These are some of the more major of the holidays of the areshtar, but there are a significant number of others, some filling the usual niches and some uniquely aerenal. The list goes on.)

On another note: Masks are important in each elven culture, and the areshtar are no exception. Over the course of their life, each areshtar works with the living and deathless maskmakers of the Second Temple to design and craft their own mask, incorporating their personality and deeds and aesthetic tastes into a complex symbolic work of art. Many revisions of this mask will be completed over the course of an areshtar's life, and each spirit idol niche (often called a spirit creche, in the idea that over the aeons every ancestor will follow the Deathless Path to emerge from their idol as deathless, and then to emerge from their deathless forms as Transcendent Ones, although in practice not many of them do so) contains compartments for three of the more significant, and an outward-facing space above the idol for a fourth mask, such that their most significant mask is on display. There are a few holidays (among them two of the ashtarnada shalandas) and a few ceremonies where you wear one of your personal masks, and likewise a few (such as the morashtae shalandas) where you don an ancestor's mask.

To wear a mask outside of these ceremonies is not very common, but very culturally significant -- a sign that you're Very Serious about whatever it is that you happen to be doing. To wear an ancestor's mask outside of ceremony is to borrow that ancestor's strength and skill in your hour of need, and the strongest sign that you have their blessing to pursue your task (it would be a horrifying, unthinkable desecration to wear an unwilling ancestor's mask); to wear your own mask outside of ceremony is an emphatic declaration that you're pursuing your current task with absolute determination, with every single piece of what makes you who you are. In either case, it's viewed with respect and some concern: in addition to the implied seriousness of your situation, wearing your ancestor's mask overlong is concerning on a personal level, because it's somewhat like a statement that you intend to be your ancestor instead of yourself, which is understandably viewed as something like suicidal ideation; and wearing your own mask overlong is a sign that you haven't really internalized your own achievements, and in some circumstances a sign that you don't intend to live long enough to grow further or surpass those achievements.

(Next Up: the Tarashtar)
(Later: the Kalashtar)
(Later Still: the Glimmerkings and the Batrach)