Elves (1983) is like Dwarves (1982), but for elves. Shocking, I know.

I was predisposed to not like this book because it was the same writers who did Dragons of Weng T’sen. And also because it is a book about elves, and I don’t particularly care for elves. At least with dwarves, because they are essentially Scottish, I can picture them playing bagpipes, which is endlessly amusing. Elves are too uptight to be amusing. This characterization of elves does seem to try to tie them to European faerie folklore in some ways, but nothing in flipping through the book really hooked me enough to push past my inherent disinterest in elves to find out more.

There are six different brands of elves: High (not in the good way), Ice, Wood, Grey, Demi- and Dark. They live in proximity, in a region that is not part of the continent introduced in Dark Folk, but I am holding out hope that we’ll eventually see them all combined [spoiler: I’ll be waiting forever]. Each brand of elf has a different adventure, which is pegged to retrieving parts of an artifact in order to banish the dark god of the dark elves back to his dark home. I still like the six societies = six adventures, but I am not so into the convenient travelogue/scavenger hunt.

I’m mostly not interested in this book because it doesn’t really offer anything I couldn’t come up with on my own. I like the basic idea of this series, and I get that the first books were going after the low-hanging fruit, but a book of elf lore needs to be super compelling (like, I would read a sourcebook like this about the Swordfish Island elves!) or else I am just going to use the standard D&D elves, because I don’t care enough about elves to bother, you know? Same honestly goes for Dwarves and Dark Folk, even if I give them more of a pass for, you know, not being about elves.