Homebrew Alfar Species Details

Elves say that in the dawn of history, there were more kinds of humans than just human. Kin to humans - they looked like humans (mostly), thought like humans (mostly), bred with humans - but did not survive the long march of years. Elves have such kin, too, but like elves, they survive.

(Elves also say that before history, in the dawn of time itself, when everything was fluid and magical, when rocks and birds could talk, that human-kin changed shape from monkeys. Elves say lots of things. Elves are dickheads.)

Magical and Uncanny

Elves are fey-touched, unearthly in their beauty and wisdom and grace. Alfar are even more so, things out of time, stepped fresh from a creation myth, too magical to be real, half immune to reality. They get bored easily; when you're so magical that you can rearrange reality to your liking, everything gets dull and meaningless. Alfar adventurers are tourists, basically; slumming it in the mud, enjoying the authenticity of causality and obeying physics and inconvenience and so on. (Alfar are also dickheads.)

Hidden Occult Realms

Most alfar live in demiplanes of their own creation, which they have poured centuries into crafting to their exact tastes, complete with impenetrable layers of gorgeous illusion, exquisitely lifelike construct or phantasmal companions, magic conjuring the answer to their every whim from nothing.

Exploration and Adventure

Alfar take up adventuring because they're ancient spoiled children going on a gap year.

Alfar Names

Alfar collect names like a toddler collecting shiny pebbles on a beach - whichever catch their eye, as many as possible, an ever-changing lineup as they grab new ones and old ones fumble through their fingers. They're equally likely to call themselves by an up-to-the-minute human slang word they picked up from a sailor yesterday as a grave, serious, magically resonant word in a language so dead that only they remember it ever existed. One name, two names, twelve: whatever they happen to want.

Alfar Traits

Your alfar character has a variety of natural abilities, the result of millennia of dilettante enthusiasm.

Ability Score Increase

Your Charisma score increases by 1, and your Dexterity score increases by 1.

Age

Alfar reach physical maturity at about the same age as humans, typically claim adulthood around the age of 100, and can live over 1000 years.

Alignment

Alfar are capricious and self-absorbed, tending to chaos. They rarely have strong convictions about the world outside themselves and their whims, and are not strongly inclined to either good or evil.

Size

Alfar range from under 5 to over 6 feet tall and have slender builds. Your size is Medium.

Speed

Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

Manavision

Accustomed to surreal dreamscapes spun from whimsy and wizardry, alfar have never needed darkvision. Instead, they have developed subtler vision, able to pick out the threads of power woven into the world. You can cast detect magic at will, with the exception that it cannot detect magic from the Enchantment or Illusion schools.

Keen Observation

You have proficiency in the Perception and Insight skills.

Glamour-spun

Centuries in solitary, solipsitic glamour-woven faerie castles are enabled by, and inure the alfar to, a weakness to illusion and suggestion. You have disadvantage on saves against being charmed, and to disbelieve illusions.

Trance

Alfar don’t need to sleep. Instead, they enter an altered state of consciousness, unlike either sleep or elven meditation; for 6 hours a day they slip into a blank, blissful state in which they neither think nor dream. (It shares the Common word “trance” with elven meditation, because humans are not interested in the details.) After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.

Languages

You can speak, read, and write Common, Sylvan, and one extra language of your choice.