[Dungeons & Dragons] Discworld Races 1 – Elves

That's what people imagine elves to be

Oh… Elves. They show up in not even three novels if I remember well, and are mentioned in a maybe two more. Of course everyone says they know the real Elves from that, but that reality of Elvishness is a bit harsh. Most of the population of the Discworld does know about Elves. They do not know the truth though, maybe some rumours, but certainly not all of it.
For the normal peasant Elves are… strange and magical. Those pointy-eared buggers that giggle a lot. Artists that can enchant with their looks, beautiful and glamorous.
For Trolls and Dwarfs and for some humans in the know this is not so.
Elves, or what people generally call Elves are the descendants of true Elves, a lifeform from another place that is sterile in itself but can procreate with humans. An entry for True Elves would be something for the monster section. Still, there obviously are remaining Elves around, some tribes and villages that can trace back their lineage to the old elves, if only by looking at their own ears.
A lot of the typical D&D tropes for Elves fit to the dot on this background: pointy-eared, rare besides some half-hidden locations, mourning a passed age, skilled in the arts, etc. It doesn’t matter that the reason for all these things is that their ancestors were vicious parasites that pretty much enslaved humans with glamour magic. In the end it comes down to Elves as the pointy-eared fellow who doesn’t get along too well with the dwarf in the party.
Elves as a race: as in rulebooks. True Elves: will be a monster entry.

Elfenblut

The adventure module I was talking about earlier: Elfenblut was the 11th adventure module in the slowly developing success story that was Das Schwarze Auge in Germany. I just realized when looking at the cover again that it was intended as a adventure for levels 11-15, which means it must have been combat intensive as hell. It technically is a mystery story, but even the detective stories had something to fight back in the early days of the game.

I never actually played or owned this module myself. The sheer amount of modules published for DSA alone barred me from that, in addition to the fact that when I got into roleplaying (the late 90s) many of the earlier adventures were out of print and did not fit into canon anymore. Only a few would get some classic reprints, but many people never saw some of the real classics, mostly because some of the earlier tries were, well, silly.
This one actually qualifies for that as well: as mentioned before the neanderthals on this cover were not supposed to be there. But when the publisher got the art and noticed they already had paid for it they threw in some cavemen into the adventure to make it appropriate.

I’m not really sure WHY, many of the earlier covers of the line had absolutely nothing to do with the contents of the adventure themselves. They looked awesome though.