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What do you mean by "elves are a fungus"? Gnomes as terrestrial cephalopods makes more sense (clever and dexterous), but not seeing your reasoning on the elves.

So a couple days back @mazarinedrake was helpfully infodumping about Pathfinder for me, becuase I’m 2 years into a game and know dick fuck about the Lore, and APPARENTLY the elves in pathfinder??? are literally Aliens???

So that resulted in a late-night insomniac discussion of “If you were gonna design a fantasy RPG where none of the other races are Primates, what would you make them be? and I think we came up with:

Elves are a Fungus, but specifically, Elves are the fruiting bodies of a Vast Underground Superorganism, which is why there’s that bit in LOTR where the elves sometimes find other ‘adult’ elves down by the lake.  They feel a deep connection to thier surrundings, not because of some spiritual thing, but because they’re all small organs of a body that spans continents and thusly reccive cellular signals.  At the end of an Elf’s natural lifespan, they burst into a cloud of glittering spores.  

Dwarves are chemotrophic plants, like the algae that live at the bottom of the ocean at the thermal vents or alkaline lakes.  They never see the sunlight, but don’t need to becuase their metabolic process is based on exothermic chemical reactions that power thier cells.  they mine not as a traditional industry, but as a means of agriculture- they literally crave that mineral.

Gnomes are terrestrial cephlapods that started as something much like a Mimic octopus that took it Way Too Far (out of the ocean).  they’re dextrous, clever, obsessed with color, and have a society whose values are pretty much unfathomable to a bunch of pretentious monkeys.

Halflings are tiny, really ugly Birds. Maybe they originally started like crows, with thier fondness for good foods and shiny objects, but over time, they developed a coukoo-like habit of leaving thier newly-hatched babies in human homes becuase if you can fool a human family? that’s an amazing start in life for a chick.  Over time, they began to look more and more like humans as a means of camoflacge, then retained more and more neotenic features to keep humans feeding them for longer.

Humanity’s closest relative is Orcs, because they’re also mammals!  they’re terrestrial whales! Orcish tusks are simmilar to the tusks of beaked whales, and the roving bands of orcs are very similar to dolphin Pods.