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Just a few questions to clear some things up before I post a request:

Since Elven is not the main language spoken, would naming traditions remain Elven? How about clan names? If the First is not always of the same family, etc.

Do we have access to horses? Does the climate even allow for the other villages to possess them?

Do we have access to metals and the means to forge armour or weapons?

Is my spoken Common passable? The Amia wiki says so, but why would I know it? Will people be able to understand me? Am I taught it? (Am I taught Elven?)

How would the people of Thordstein/Howness react to one snow elf being seen alone in the respective villages? I'm assuming hostile, but am I going to be slaughtered on sight?

Evelynn wrote:

Since Elven is not the main language spoken, would naming traditions remain Elven? How about clan names? If the First is not always of the same family, etc.

Do we have access to horses? Does the climate even allow for the other villages to possess them?

Do we have access to metals and the means to forge armour or weapons?

Is my spoken Common passable? The Amia wiki says so, but why would I know it? Will people be able to understand me? Am I taught it? (Am I taught Elven?)

How would the people of Thordstein/Howness react to one snow elf being seen alone in the respective villages? I'm assuming hostile, but am I going to be slaughtered on sight?

I wrote the expanded lore on Disco's original concept, so I'll try to answer based on the vision I had at the time. I may have forgotten many points, and my opinion isn't canon anymore anyway. But here goes:

1. No opinion on naming traditions.

2. Their lifestyle is not the type that would require or encourage the domestication of horses.

3. Perhaps very simple ones. Copper and crude iron. But I rather see them using bone, skins and other materials freely available.

4. If you've dealt with people in Common. Ruleswise, every adventurer speaks Common. It's a simple and crude language anyway.

5. The relationship would be tense, and both sides keep to themselves. Attacking a snow elf on sight would cause problems they have no interest in, even in the unlikely scenario that it was deemed perfectly safe at the moment. That is, unless there are law signs in game saying it's illegal.

Will have to re-read the bit about their language to figure out the Elven questions.

As one who did play a snow elf a few years back, I'll offer my oppinions and experience for what it's worth:

Names could be elven, as no actual snow elf language exists outside 'make-believe' and the few lines written in the subrace section. then again, they could be anything else as well.

I doubt there are any horses on that island that was not brought there by amian settlers. Too cold, no summers.

Snow elves are gatherers and hunters with no settlements (that I am aware of), so metalwork is unlikely. Weapons would be fashioned from bones and wood, while armour would be made from leather, hides, and whatever else could be found in their enviroments. To work metals one need both mines and workshops, neither which exists in such cultures.

Snow elves who leave their tribes would likely learn common, so here it's up to you really. I depicted my snow elf as able to speak and understand common, though not as good as most others. More important to character concept; he was illiterate and did not speak elven on anything more than a very basic level.

Snow elves are neither trusted nor liked by anyone but as Iron points out, outright hostility would be rare as snow elves are savage fighers and likely to avenge attacks on their kin. More interesting, I think, is how other elves react to snow elves.

Thanks for the quick answers, it's really appreciated. ^^

Most everything is cleared up now for the request, I was just worried about the logistics of knowing Common more than anything.

As for how the react to other elves, or how other elves react to them, I think they're tolerated by others, since the updated Winya rules say that they'd even be allowed in the inner walls (that strikes me as a little weird if I'm honest though). I assume they'd be the more distrusting party, with others being more curious than anything.

The old law sign said the same thing too, actually. And you're completely right that snow elves will have a hard time finding trust in Winya Ravana. More so than in most places, I would think, since there's probably only a fairly small fraction of non-elves who would be able to readily distinguish a snow elf from a moon elf or wild elf.

I doubt there's a general answer to how elves treat snow elves. Most have never seen one, and local circumstances and history would determine relations. Snow elves aren't exactly fallen like dark and shadow elves, so there's no cause for categorical hostility. There's something romantic about their primitive lifestyle, but it's a barbaric and degenerate perversion of wild elf tradition. It's probably a white man's burden thing, to civilize the brutes and return them into the family. I imagine guilt also plays into it for those who know the legends of their origin. The snow elves who remember this are probably not very eager to befriend other elves.

Also, reading their history right now. Holy hell, I used to put way too much effort into this game. :shock:

Did you read the long version? It seems I already answered most of those questions in it.

Quote:

Snow elves are normally illiterate, for their tradition is passed on by word of mouth. They speak both Common and Elven, but during their interaction with the Ulutiun of the Great Glacier they also picked up the language of those humans. Eventually it evolved into a unique verbal language, called In'innatuin. It's known only to snow elves, but the vocabulary is quite similar to that of the original speech.

viewtopic.php?p=918587#p918587

Disco introduced some Inuit words in his original race description, and I explained those by influence from the Inuit rip-offs of the setting. They preserve a dialect of Elven too, and In'innatuin is probably mostly Elven structures with human vocabulary. I was young and uneducated at the time of writing and didn't know much about the evolution of languages!

IronAngel wrote:

I doubt there's a general answer to how elves treat snow elves. Most have never seen one, and local circumstances and history would determine relations. Snow elves aren't exactly fallen like dark and shadow elves, so there's no cause for categorical hostility. There's something romantic about their primitive lifestyle, but it's a barbaric and degenerate perversion of wild elf tradition. It's probably a white man's burden thing, to civilize the brutes and return them into the family. I imagine guilt also plays into it for those who know the legends of their origin. The snow elves who remember this are probably not very eager to befriend other elves.

Also, reading their history right now. Holy hell, I used to put way too much effort into this game. :shock:

Did you read the long version? It seems I already answered most of those questions in it.

Quote:

Snow elves are normally illiterate, for their tradition is passed on by word of mouth. They speak both Common and Elven, but during their interaction with the Ulutiun of the Great Glacier they also picked up the language of those humans. Eventually it evolved into a unique verbal language, called In'innatuin. It's known only to snow elves, but the vocabulary is quite similar to that of the original speech.

http://www.amiaworld.net/phpBB3/viewtop ... 87#p918587

Disco introduced some Inuit words in his original race description, and I explained those by influence from the Inuit rip-offs of the setting. They preserve a dialect of Elven too, and In'innatuin is probably mostly Elven structures with human vocabulary. I was young and uneducated at the time of writing and didn't know much about the evolution of languages!

I did read all of it, yep! Do you take me for a fool who wouldn't read her lore?! And I read the Forstakkr page, which had a lot of useful information too.

I just had extra questions from the stuff I couldn't find there! ^^

Well, it wouldn't be hard to miss that topic if you just looked at the subrace page and thought that was all there is! (But apparently the stuff has also been posted in the wiki.)

Regarding naming conventions, I'm of the opinion they would not have hereditary family names. That implies a settled society with a relatively established system of inheritance and land ownership. Since the tribe is the primary social unit and since there's no ancestral property, historical family names would be pointless. They don't have a written tradition anyway, so recording them on a long scale would be impossible. Leadership isn't hereditary either, and shamanism is always something you earn or are born to by virtue of unusual qualities (if we make the reasonable comparison to real world religious history), so the need to be identified by a family name is nonexistent. In larger tribes there might be two people of the same first name, in which case they would be identified by some personal trait or achievement (Nanuq the Small and Nanuq Sealhunter) or possibly their parent's name (Nanuq Innuk's Son).

Their hereditary family name would be the name of their tribe.

Lizzie wrote:

Their hereditary family name would be the name of their tribe.

Yes but that's not hereditary, is it? It's not determined by birth but by tribe affiliation. Assuming young males go out join another tribe or females are traded between tribes as tribute (as is the case in many tribal cultures and I think among animals too?) then they would take on that new tribe's name rather than be known by where they came from.

And since they mostly communicate within the tribe, it's not like they refer to each other by the tribe name they all share. That would be rather pointless, wouldn't it? I can see them using it as a name when they contact other tribes or races, but it's nothing like what we understand surnames to be. In general, in pre-bureaucratic societies (that is, without comprehensive census records) naming conventions would be fluid and context-specific. Or that's my uneducated gut feeling, anyway.

Allow me then to clarify what I meant:

The name that a player would type into the "Last Name" field of her character sheet, the name that a snow elf character would think of IC as filling the same function for her as a hereditary family name does for other people, would be the name of her tribe.

Ah, perhaps. I would just use the first name because it looks better, or whatever name he intends to be known by. The majority of Snow Elf adventurer PCs, like this one requested, are outcasts who give up their tribe anyway. You can't really be a contributing member of a xenophobic tribe and sail across the Trackless Sea on high adventure with a bunch of halflings and elves, unless you've been given a specific task. If we had a thriving Snow Elf tribe community, I would agree.

Snow elf PC's would also be quite different from their NPC's bretherenes, more so than other races, simply because they would interact with people outside their tribe. Thus they will be special cases where normal conventions seldom apply, except the rules about aligment and starting classes. Snow elves, if convential, are simply not adventurers.

IronAngel wrote:

If we had a thriving Snow Elf tribe community,

I can dream. ;~;

Also, I personally would've agreed with you in that surnames would be fluid, with multiple "families" making up a particular tribe, but with one of those families heading it and thus giving the clan that name? But then how would you account for:

Quote:

Upon reaching adulthood, a snow elf gains the right to challenge the chieftain for tribe leadership.

Would the whole clan adopt the new name if the challenger won?

What makes you think the clan name would be a family name, though? And as I said, what exactly would that family name even be if they don't pass through several generations? (The origins of modern family names are in lands owned and in census records, I think?)

But sure, a new leader could change the clan name. Perhaps they were named after the leader's nickname? But just as well a tribe could be called "Walkers at the Eastern Slope" in their language, based on where around Mt. Firth they live. That kind of name probably wouldn't change. I would say practices vary and you can come up with a believable story for your purposes.

Snow Elf lore clarification

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