I like the idea of 'elves' descended from carnivorous plants. Anyone with a passing knowledge of botany care to fill me in on wether they should be considered closest in ancestry to runners (shrubs), red elves (primitive plants), or yellow elves (ferns?...), or even pixies (flowers)? Red elves would be my best guess, and they seem to be by far the type of elf with the most variation between species. I rather like the idea of small but vicious carnivorous pixies descended from sundews.
Speaking of elves, do any other antipodeans find themselves mildly put out by the RQ separation of tree based elves into brown (deciduous) and green (firs and other 'evergreens')? Over here the majority of our native trees are not at all related to firs, pines, etc. but are not deciduous either. If anyone coming to RQ Con Down Under makes it over to the West Coast of Australia, I will happily take you to some serious Aldryami territory.
And on yet another elven note, I really like the idea of elven trees readable only by elfsense as elven writing. I think that elves are well aware of other forms of writing, and may even use it (you use it to send messages, or keep a short term note of things), and have invented bark trees that make decent paper, even if only to have a decent trade item. But they probably consider human writing a hopelessly inadequate way of keeping historical records, because it doesn't record the emotions and feelings that surrounded the events, and so is much more liable to misinterpretation. Of course, the Aldrami system misses out all sorts of details that humans think are important (names, exact sequences of events, many details) but that isn't important to an Aldrami view of history anyway. If they want to know details, they can seek out a long lived dryad or intelligent tree spirit.
Cheers
David
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End of Glorantha Digest V2 #76
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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