In my home-brew world, an event known as the First Council kickstarted the New (and current) Era. I want to kinda give the impression that this is a world with a great past that was all lost in mysterious ways, and is now slowly rebuilding from the ashes. To that end, I've decided that the new era started about 1500-1700 years ago. pretty short by fiction standards, but long enough that the First Council still feels like it was a long time ago. The problem is elf lifespans. Elves exist in my world, obviously, but with their 700-900 year lifespans, that means that only a couple generations have passed for them since the First council. The grandson of someone who participated in the council could very well be alive today, and that kinda ruins the "old history" feel I was going for.

Do you think I should increase the time passed since the Council (which would kinda give the impression that society should've gone further), or decrease elven lifespans to about 400-500 years (elves should, after all, be the second-longest living sapient race), or do you have some other ideas?

The elves could've live(d) in a secluded place and only just some time ago (a few hundred years?) started interacting with the other races/cultures?

I don't know if this idea is helpful, it's just the first thing that popped into my mind.

You could make it really mysterious and make it so that while everyone knows about this First Council, no-one actually can remember the event. Elves that should be able to, those who lived during the time period just can't recall anything about the event. Maybe this is from powerful magic that caused whatever cataclysm sundered this ancient civilisation not only caused the empire to fall, but actually damaged the memory of it. Or maybe such an event caused elves to, temporarily, have shortened lifespans, so that those who were sheltered from the effect are very rare and almost godlike figures. Or maybe the elves have memory of the time, but there is a reason that they just refuse to actually speak of the events: it's blasphemy of the highest order-- or maybe it's because there is a monster that ended civilisation that has banished from the Prime Material plane, but yet lives in the memories of those who witnessed the time and to talk about what happened is to summon forth another cataclysm: the first time ended ancient civilisation, the next time could end the world-- or reality itself.

Just some off the cuff ideas.

Personally, I usually go with elven society just being completely divorced from human society whenever I can.  Their lifespan is just an insurmountable spanner in the works of any believable society, imo.  They either have to not take part in it, or they have to completely and utterly dominate it.  Or every government office, guild office, and military rank have to be term-limited and compound interest has to not exist.  

In your case, I'd just say that for their own reasons, the elves chose not to take place in the First Council.  Individuals may run around adventuring for whatever reason, but the movers and shakers of elven society have closed up the forests and made it clear that they aren't talking.  Maybe they know something really interesting about the old world and trying to sweet-talk that knowledge out of them would be a good storyline.  Maybe it was just the pettiness of one ruler that split them off and her son is on the throne now and might be persuaded to reopen ties.  Anyway, I just like the way Tolkien handled it.  Elves try to preserve and humans are built to change and reshape.  Our society is pure ephemera to them.

Quote from TimCurtin >>

Personally, I usually go with elven society just being completely divorced from human society whenever I can.  Their lifespan is just an insurmountable spanner in the works of any believable society, imo.  They either have to not take part in it, or they have to completely and utterly dominate it.  Or every government office, guild office, and military rank have to be term-limited and compound interest has to not exist.  

In your case, I'd just say that for their own reasons, the elves chose not to take place in the First Council.  Individuals may run around adventuring for whatever reason, but the movers and shakers of elven society have closed up the forests and made it clear that they aren't talking.  Maybe they know something really interesting about the old world and trying to sweet-talk that knowledge out of them would be a good storyline.  Maybe it was just the pettiness of one ruler that split them off and her son is on the throne now and might be persuaded to reopen ties.  Anyway, I just like the way Tolkien handled it.  Elves try to preserve and humans are built to change and reshape.  Our society is pure ephemera to them.

 If you think about it, Elves and magic are antithetical to any sort of progress at all. Think about stories about vampires, who become so old they eventually grow out of touch with society. I mean, in our lifetimes, we can see people who are extremely forward-thinking as young adults become technologically stagnant in old age. Often a theme of works with vampires is these centuries-old vampires creating a new generation as hope that they can bridge the gap between the rapidly changing moral society and themselves, who cannot see the world different than it was in their life. Elves, being effectively immortal, and possessing strong magical aptitude, would be even harder pressed to change. Not only do they live for hundreds, if not thousands of years but most of their problems can be solved with magic. Why invent the electric light, when every idiot can cast a light cantrip?  Why worry about better clothes when you can cast mend to fix what you have? These sort of problems and the desire to fix them are perhaps the main engines of innovation and perhaps also creativity itself. Elven society should almost be bestial, with materials not progressing far beyond shaped wood and sharpened stones. Why should they be able to use metalworking at all? What use do they have for the infrastructure required to develop the ability to fashion and shape metal? It would be more interesting and logical if, for elves, the most common weapon was like a +2 club, rather than ever realistically having any sort of experience with a longsword.

A world of high magic is antithetical to technological progress because magic and technology attempt to fix the same problems and with magic in place in a society, technology, which is expensive and often dangerous to develop, would never reasonable. Why waste fortunes of money developing a waterwheel to grind wheat, a process that takes a considerable amount of time, when your local wizard could likely find a cantrip to do it in a fraction of the time? A new economy starts to develop, even if we assume that magical talent is rare. Because said wizard would be incentivised to take on a few apprentices to do low-level work mending for a nice bit of currency, taking most of the money for himself as tuition.

I guess what I'm saying is that I agree, and Elves, if you think about them, do not make sense.

In my homebrew setting, elves are fierce isolationists who have strict rules regarding who is allowed to leave their forest, and they're never allowed to stay in the "mortal" world for longer than a human lifetime at a time. This is because they believe their longer lifespans, giving them more time to master arts of craftsmanship and warfare, could be seen as a threat to the shorter lived races. They actually encourage the rumor in the outside world that elves are immortal and not to be trifled with, but it is just a rumor. They're not hostile to the outside world, just highly suspicious of it, and hold their own lives as inherently more valuable than other races ("logically" to them, it would be worse to say, murder someone with 800 years of potential life than to murder someone with 80).

That's how I handle it, just as an example. 

..?

...or the elves were simply isolationist jerks and really didn't give a damn about the 'mayflies'.  They simply didn't pay any attention to the 'council', and a progressive member of the race lied and got onto their roster.  Since they were so happy to get any Elves on there at all, the council simply didn't enquire too deeply about their qualifications.

In the meantime, it could simply be that the 'mayflies' overtook the Elves with technological progress, and the newest generation are the most progressive of all the elves and actually appear to like other races.  It was that or die out completely, and you still get some elves that sound like a racist and isolationist grandpa when faced with races who don't live as long.  Can't you just imagine them shaking their walking sticks and yelling at non-elves to get off their lawn?

I am of the opinion you could be thinking of this all wrong. 

Time passes the same for everyone regardless of them being an elf, dwarf, or human. 

My grandfather was a bombardier in a B-17 during WW2. Even though that was 2 generations ago doesn't make me feel like WW2 happened yesterday.

But time doesn't pass the same for even humans. A child thinks a year is a long time, but when you reach middle age, it passes in the blink of an eye. You wake up one day and realise ten years have passed and you ask yourself where the time went. A twelve-year-old doesn't think "It seems like only yesterday that I was two." No, for them 10 years is an eternity. Is it not realistic that 1000-year-old elf sees a century but as a flash in the pan? If you lived through the Seven Years War, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Boer War, World War I and World War II, wouldn't it seem like yesterday that World War II happened? You'd have a completely different perspective.

I don't think that's a valid line of reasoning. I just turned 40 and I wouldn't say that I feel the last 5 years was a blink.

I think it would be fair to say that a childhood passes in a seemingly quick time, since you aren't really considering what is going around you, and that isn't really considering newer generations. 

By default anything your parents or grandparents have lived through is viewed by most if not all as history. So if the OP is concerned about preserving a sense of antiquity, by having a grandson or granddaughter of someone around the time of the First Council would imho convey that sense of antiquity by default.

I'd go the Tolkien route and make your elves rare, distant, and aloof. That puts an extra burden on anyone who's thinking of playing one, but it keeps the First Council as ancient history. People might say "only the elves remember" as a phrase to mean "so old everybody's forgotten," even if it's literally true!

There are two options available to you to solve this conundrum:

1. It's your homebrew world, so maybe elves in your world don't live quite as long. A 300-400 year lifespan is still wicked long, and it sets them at least four or five generations removed from the First Council. How many of us know the names of any of our great-great-great-grandparents? 

2. Elves are well known for being aloof and detached in many ways from the things that worry the short-lived races. They also tend to keep secrets. So maybe an elven character may have heard stories about the First Council from their grandparents when they were young. But that doesn't mean that that elven character would divulge all that information to everyone else. Also maybe it means that the character has information, but doesn't realize that the information is important and relevant to the adventure at hand. 

But even if you leave the lifespans as written, you're looking at two full lifespans ago. That's equivalent to like something in our real world that happened about 180 years ago. How well do you remember the year 1839? How familiar does that era feel to any of us?

To give you a sense of the temporal distance you're facing, let's remind ourselves what 1839 was like.....

The slave rebellion aboard the Amistad happened.  -  The British captured Hong Kong.  -  Tea first arrived in the UK from India.  -  Congress outlaws dueling in Washington D.C.  -  Martin Van Buren was President of the US.  -  Queen Victoria was still thin.  

Two lifespans is a long time. I think you'll be fine. 

This 😁😁

Here's my thoughts on it... I feel like that's part of Elven culture and society, that ancient events are, to them, relatively recent. So having people who are the direct children or grandchildren of the people who attended the event is just part of what makes their culture different from the others. They might even lord it over the other cultures.

Quote from SigrunOfTheBorderRealms >>

, I've decided that the new era started about 1500-1700 years ago. pretty short by fiction standards, but long enough that the First Council still feels like it was a long time ago. The problem is elf lifespans. Elves exist in my world, obviously, but with their 700-900 year lifespans, that means that only a couple generations have passed for them since the First council. 

Humans can live for over 100 years, but a human generation is considered less than a 30 year period (and likely a lot less in Faerun). There's a good chance that elves do their reproducing when they are pretty young, making their generations shorter periods (assuming they even think that way). 

I mean there might be some ancient elves that were sired by ancient elves... but that would be rare. There might be some rare Faerun humans that accomplish that same feat too (thanks to magical longevity), but that's not going to change the average generation length.

What if you did it to where there lifespan change by where they were born. so a elf born in a desert may live longer than one born in a mountain range and drow have really long lifespans.

you could also say the first council never had kids.

Maybe some kind of Oath to not reproduce? It could be like Hitler's family, sort of a de facto agreement, or maybe something required by the founders of the 1st Council?

Here's an idea: 

Keep the time frame you have. If you want to make it feel like "that this is a world with a great past that was all lost in mysterious ways, and is now slowly rebuilding from the ashes".. then think of examples in our own ancient past.( Many posts are talking about a couple generations of HUMAN lifespan) 

But think of it this way: There IS a myth centered around a world flood in nearly ALL cultures around the world.( I'm not here to debate its' validity, I''ll leave that to Graham Hancock) I'm just saying that flood myth/story exists. There's obviously something to it, and associated with it is this sense of a fall from something greater. 

So work a world shattering cataclysm into the history directly after or before the First Council. Maybe the First Council is just the remnants of all the races coming together after the cataclysm to agree to live in peace, but then it goes to hell. Maybe the First Council is the pinnacle of inter-racial diplomacy, a time of magic and technological wonders, but it turns to crap and the cataclysm is the result of that, there's a giant war or whatever that ensues, and the population is depleted - and everyone just sulks away to their own corner of the world for a couple hundred years or so.     The elves that remain might recall that time before the cataclysm with fondness, and pass that reverence on... but there'd be just a few of them who remain. Same with the other races, but those events would have already turned into myth and folklore. 

(Just my two cents, feel free to run with it or turn it away if it's crap. )

Whatever happened to end that 'old era' could have hit the Elves the hardest--killing most of a generation, damaging memories, making elves who remembered it few and far between. Elves could be rare, and perhaps a lot of young elves from the generation right afterward was raised by other races, leading modern elves to be struggling to recreate their own culture with little energy or inclination left to share their known history with other races.

Quote from Astalda >>

Whatever happened to end that 'old era' could have hit the Elves the hardest--killing most of a generation, damaging memories, making elves who remembered it few and far between. Elves could be rare, and perhaps a lot of young elves from the generation right afterward was raised by other races, leading modern elves to be struggling to recreate their own culture with little energy or inclination left to share their known history with other races.

 I really like this idea for dealing with the consequences... make the moment even more impactful because of the nature of elven lifespans which would be deeply affected by this event in a way that has never happened before or since.