wingsandsword
Legend
A thought about the D&D multiverse and elves.
In Spelljammer, one of the setting elements is the Elven Imperial Fleet, a vast and powerful fleet of ships that patrols known space. However, there is no Elven Empire, no known Elven homeworld, the Imperial Fleet nominally answers to the royalty of each "groundling" material world, yet there is Elven royalty on multiple worlds, with the Elven fleet nominally serving them all, but de facto being independent.
There's no history or origin given for the vast fleet, it's just sort of, always there, and nobody seems to question it.
Now combine that with two other elements of D&D lore, one from 2nd edition and one from 3rd edition.
I've only known of one official D&D work that stipulated the idea of an original Elven homeworld, the Complete Book of Elves. While the book itself is really, really cheesy with overpowered elements, a lore element it introduced was that somewhere in the multiverse there was an original Elven homeworld, from which Elves spread to the rest of the universe in distant, long forgotten antiquity. It doesn't touch on the idea any more, no mention of where this world is, or what it's like, or where or how Elves migrated from it to elsewhere.
Now take one more lore element, the LeShay from D&D 3rd edition, specifically the Epic Level Handbook. They're basically Epic-level super-elves, counting as both Fae and Elves for rules purposes, and being Challenge Rating 28 with nearly godlike abilities. Their description calls them the only survivors of their civilization, which fell to some cataclysm in the past that destroyed not only their civilization, but wiped it from reality as if it never existed, leaving the handful of surviving LeShay as relics outside of time.
Then it hit me.
The LeShay are the ruling class of the original elves from the original Elven homeworld. Whatever cataclysm wiped out their empire also wiped their entire homeworld from reality, and crudely tried to wipe out everything about the Elves from the multiverse, destroying their homeworld, most of them, leaving only a relative handful of LeShay (that remember their origins) along with their fleet (perhaps being in the phlogiston at the time partially protected them from the timeline shift, and they could re-populate worlds with the elves that were in the fleet at the time, but they no longer fully remember the original timeline). Now you have elves throughout the multiverse that don't remember their original homeworld, an Imperial Fleet serving an Empire they can't recall ever existing, and the handful of LeShay scattered throughout the planes and the cosmos as enigmatic figures who ruled a vast Empire that never existed for countless millennia.
Thoughts?
In Spelljammer, one of the setting elements is the Elven Imperial Fleet, a vast and powerful fleet of ships that patrols known space. However, there is no Elven Empire, no known Elven homeworld, the Imperial Fleet nominally answers to the royalty of each "groundling" material world, yet there is Elven royalty on multiple worlds, with the Elven fleet nominally serving them all, but de facto being independent.
There's no history or origin given for the vast fleet, it's just sort of, always there, and nobody seems to question it.
Now combine that with two other elements of D&D lore, one from 2nd edition and one from 3rd edition.
I've only known of one official D&D work that stipulated the idea of an original Elven homeworld, the Complete Book of Elves. While the book itself is really, really cheesy with overpowered elements, a lore element it introduced was that somewhere in the multiverse there was an original Elven homeworld, from which Elves spread to the rest of the universe in distant, long forgotten antiquity. It doesn't touch on the idea any more, no mention of where this world is, or what it's like, or where or how Elves migrated from it to elsewhere.
Now take one more lore element, the LeShay from D&D 3rd edition, specifically the Epic Level Handbook. They're basically Epic-level super-elves, counting as both Fae and Elves for rules purposes, and being Challenge Rating 28 with nearly godlike abilities. Their description calls them the only survivors of their civilization, which fell to some cataclysm in the past that destroyed not only their civilization, but wiped it from reality as if it never existed, leaving the handful of surviving LeShay as relics outside of time.
Then it hit me.
The LeShay are the ruling class of the original elves from the original Elven homeworld. Whatever cataclysm wiped out their empire also wiped their entire homeworld from reality, and crudely tried to wipe out everything about the Elves from the multiverse, destroying their homeworld, most of them, leaving only a relative handful of LeShay (that remember their origins) along with their fleet (perhaps being in the phlogiston at the time partially protected them from the timeline shift, and they could re-populate worlds with the elves that were in the fleet at the time, but they no longer fully remember the original timeline). Now you have elves throughout the multiverse that don't remember their original homeworld, an Imperial Fleet serving an Empire they can't recall ever existing, and the handful of LeShay scattered throughout the planes and the cosmos as enigmatic figures who ruled a vast Empire that never existed for countless millennia.
Thoughts?
