The Elves and Fey of my Setting

[DuctTapeKatar]

Ok. I have a neat idea to work with for the elves and fey of my setting, but I also kinda need some help tweaking it a bit.

The Fey of the setting essentially have a limited number of souls that reincarnate every time a Fey creature dies. The sticker us that if there aren'y any souls available, any attempt to have children ends with a stillbirth. This is due to the Fey being abandoned by their Goddess and Creator, refusing to create any more souls for them (I would go further into this, but that's another story entirely).

Though I don't want to put a hard number in place for how many souls are available, I'd say that the rough estimate is about 10 million, with some unavailable due to some of the more powerful Fey have 'larger' souls in comparison to others, so that number is skewed greatly. Elves and small fairies are considered to have a 'base' of 1 soul, while dryads may have 5-10 depending on how powerful they are, and it goes on from there. Because greater Fey require larger souls, they tend to have less children and are generally less likely to have living progeny.

The Elves of the setting have taken to hunting other Fey so that their empire can expand and prosper, but has also led to many Fey scattering to the winds and going into hiding. The Elvish Empire is essentially stuck playing conservitively while interacting with other nations and peoples, as they can't afford an all-out war with folk that don't have a population limit like they do (every elvish person slain is a soul that's up for grabs for the other Fey as well). The reason that some fairies kidnap children is to supposedly transmute their souls into a pseudo-fey, boosting the population limit, but their results are either negligible or complete failures.

Half-elves split a soul in half, making it impossible for the other half to be used to give life to a full-blooded Fey until the half-elf is dead. This becomes a larger issue if said half-elf has kids, thinning the elvish blood (and soul in turn), with the possibility of a soul becoming unattainable because of how fragmented it can become.

So, thoughts? Ideas? Critiques? I kinda want to go into how this effects Elvish society, but I'm not sure how drastic a change there would be.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

So two half elves can literally be soulmates?

That's kind of cool, actually.

[sktarq]

A few questions. It's as much to get you thinking but also stuff useful to know before giving "effect of Elvish society" feedback.

First: Half elves....
What happens to the other half of the first generation fae soul? do all human-elf breedings lead to twins?

If two half elves have kids do the kids (half elf themselves) need to use fae souls? (This will effect how elves see half elves)

Since they have a partially fae souls do half elves make better pseudo-fae souls post transmutation?

on a related but not exact note...
What about other half-templates applied too elves/fae? a Half-celestial nymph or half-Dragon elf for example?

Next, Pseudo fae souls...
Can elves create them (thus wanting to capture non-fae) or just higher order fae (possibly acting as filler for "extra soul slots" so a dryad on needs one fae soul to reproduce instead of the 5-10)?

Have you considered the idea of making humans into half-elves via a similar process? (this is an option source of half-elves in the Birthright 2eD&D setting for example) (especially if combined with half-elves make better pseudo-fae souls could lead to generational half elf farming)

What effects does the transmutation have on the soul's post life existence? As in...would they be reincarnated endlessly anyway? does this cause a problem in the gnome afterlife when a soul expected to arrive goes missing?

Onto The elves themselves Damn I do love love the "elves themselves" word pairing
In this setting how long to elves live? (default will depend on what game/edition you are playing)

The Empire...empires often imply conquered peoples, who I would presume to be non-elven. Is this the case? with an Elven ruling class and non elven peons?

How many elves live in the Empire as a percentage of the total world elf population? And how do/would non-Imperial elves live

Magic, assuming a D&D/Pathfinder base
How does this situation effect reincarnate especially but also things like raise dead if a new fae soul has been born in the period with the first was dead?

Can magic be used to "hold" a soul for a specific pregnancy? If so how? For example if need to stick certain material against the heart or capture the dying breath it would making be around a dying body very important to fae/elves?

Undead Elves/fae? can they exist? Do their souls move on to the pool anyway? does it matter what kind of undead we are talking about? (could make Mummies, Vampirism, or Baelnorn look like a powerful civic sacrifice for example)

and Finally...Half-Fae template.
Only exists in some editions, but if it does...do they need fae souls?

actually back up..do they exist?

results from experimentation in making more souls? failed transmutation?

[DuctTapeKatar]

A few questions. It's as much to get you thinking but also stuff useful to know before giving "effect of Elvish society" feedback.

Ok, that's a lot... I'll try to break it down.

Half-elves simply have half a soul. If there are twins, they might have the two halves of a soul (best-case scenario) or they might be splitting two souls in half, leaving two half-souls floating uselessly out in the aether. Its one reason I was thinking that half-elves wouldn't be tolerated for existing. Funnily enough, I was thinking of making Dark Elves essentially a clan of elves who were routed during s civil war, and to spite the empire and recoup their losses, they bred with Orcs, making their race essentially 1/3rd elves (though they are still effected by the curse, its not to the degree of other elves).

For the Pseudo-fey, I was thinking that they would be less of a 1/2 or 1/3 of a fey soul and more like something akin to 1/20th or even 1/100th of a whole soul, and even then, because they're not real fey, any progeny they have won't have a fey soul. The theme I was going for in this idea was that the Fey are essentially fighting a hopeless battle -- no matter what they do, their goddess will find some way to screw them over by making their work too exhausting to make it worthwhile or completely pointless in the end. It is not a happy setting. I also considered making goblins the result of their earlier experiments with dwarven children, but I'm still not sure what place they have in my setting, so I'm still figuring that out.

The Elvish Empire of Izkhal is situated on a large Peninsula on the eastern side of the Claw-shaped continent. It was created from a variety of elvish city-states who created a republic in order to maintain a certain degree of peace between the once-warring cities. So think Rome, except with hippogriff riders and pointy ears. A big thing that united them was their battles with other fey, since there were a lot of them back then.

For magic... well, there is no resurrection magic. If somebody dies, they're gone for good. Dead souls go through the Veil after death, and since Elvish souls are trapped in the cycle of reincarnation, they don't even get an afterlife like Dwarves or Humans. There isn't a way to hold a soul for long, no way to make sure that there is a soul on hold.

There are ways to know if a child gets a soul though. Elvish mothers can tell if the baby kicks in the womb, and there are times that, miraculously, a child is born without a soul, but another elf dies in time to slip back into the living world (without memories of course).

And half-fey should be able to exist, yes. Not sure WHY they would do that willingly, but yes, they also need fey souls.

Edit: Oh, right. Elves can live up to be 400 years old, but a majority might only see 250-300 due to disease, accidents, or sudden but inevitable betrayal.