New Years Resolutions 2026

Let's start off this year by making some Elves!

Written by Connie Ruotsalainen

Okay! Looks like another year has come to pass which is interesting. I admittedly burnt out during WorldEmber and nothing in my life could save me or get me back on track. Oh well, there's always next year and I'm still grateful to have gotten the experience from it if nothing else. I did end up getting up to 150 words in the end which is nice and still a decent goal in and of itself.

So, we're starting off the new year as we always do with New Years resolutions challenge. I've actually done these before, as can be seen on my profile, and I have badges dating back to 2022. I haven't been the most consistent with posting, but to the surprise of many I've been here, the whole time. Though as I've been more involved recently and I've learnt more about the platform and how everything works I've been getting more inspired and thus I believe that I currently have a decent amount of inspiration to get me kicking through this event.

Since I want to try and properly work on my Elves as well as my worldbuilding for my lore around my CottageOfConnie mascot stuff, I figure that I'll tie it into this and look at the Elves and elf-like creatures that WorldAnvil has to offer. I'm currently poking around and bookmarking what's given to me by inquiring in the WorldAnvil discord. My plan in the end is to take inspiration and thoughts about other Anvilite's work, imbue it with a little research and what I like from other representations of Elves or Elf-like creatures in media, and put my own spin on it. I'll document my journey here so feel free to check back in periodically as I work on this. I'll be linking it here once it's done.

Research

So, as previously mentioned, my research is going be split into two or so parts. Firstly, we'll look at the Elves anvilites have created and what I personally like about them, and what I don't think will work for the world I'm planning to make. Then, we'll look at some TTRPGs and other media representation of Elves and we'll consider what I like and will choose to keep about those representations of Elves as well.

Anvilite Research

Since this is the core of the assignment I'm starting off my research by looking at the Elves or Elf-like cultures present in other anvilite's work around WorldAnvil. I did ask on the WorldAnvil Discord about these inspirations, and for the most part I've tried to navigate straight to the species article and to just read the species article to keep the bulk of my work here manageable.

Cow2Face - Mirateria - Elf

Cow2face’s article is an excellent piece of worldbuilding and a good starting point for what we want to create with our article. I especially like their section for subraces and how each subrace has a key job or role that they are good at.

I’m really inspired by their notes on specialisation and how their elves have a typical type of weapons which makes sense thematically with the core themes of elves and what they’re good at. In addition Cow2face includes some wonderful notes about the diverse types of populations of elves that can be found about their world and the types of settlement size that they can typically be found in. These notes are certainly something that I am considering taking into account for my future worldbuilding.

ThePinkGM / Lou - Mornvahl - Elf

Lou’s article shines by its ability to repeatedly enforce its themes in a myriad of ways such as through layout, WorldAnvil features, and easy to read sections. Firstly, Lou uses the quotation feature at the start of her article to provide us an insight into how the subraces of elves view each other. This is very immersive as it puts us immediately into the fiction and describes to us the internal conflict of these two subraces..

After a brief overview of the basics, Lou’s article then goes into the history of how her elves came to be. This layout flows nicely into the subraces of her elves and the specifics of these. Overall, I’m very inspired by how Lou uses layout, WorldAnvil’s features and key sections to communicate and reinforce her themes and worldbuilding to her audience.

Strixxline - Malkora - Lessai

While Strixxline’s article isn’t overtly about elves I do think a lot can be learned from this article and from its layout and structure. It does veer off the ethnicity template, which is an artistic choice on Strixxline’s part but not something I’d personally do for the sake of trying to keep everything standardised. The key thing to note about Strixxline’s article is actually within it’s (current as of writing this) status as an incomplete article, which gives us some insight into how Strixxline constructs an article.

Specifically what I’m inspired by here is her use of Placeholder images to create the structure and give a better idea of how a finished article may look before doing all the art. This is something seen in Lou’s article as well but I think it’s much clearly displayed here. Another trick I’m possibly going to be integrating into my workflow is Strixxline’s to-do list that you can see in the author’s notes of the article where they are using what I assume is Icons to outline and create a visual guide to where they intend to go with the article.

Daeni - Ink and Ivy Apothecary - Faewild Elves

Although this is another work in progress article I had to stop when I found this while trawling the Elves vs Aliens submissions and take note of this when I saw it for my own research in this article. I’m quite captivated and extremely inspired by the simplicity of their article’s design and the readability of the layout. They use two columns next to each other to each succinctly communicate two different concepts clearly and concisely and that’s something that I’m absolutely going to try and use and replicate within my own work.

Dazzlinkat - Pangorio - Feyn-Crossed Elves

Now you might call this inclusion nepotism but I absolutely had to feature my worldbuilding aunt (internet aunt, no actual relation) Dazzlinkat. Aunt Dazz made a spectacular article for their entry into the Elves vs. Aliens worldbuilding showdown event. What I’m particularly inspired by is their use of an example image of how the Elves look at the top of their sidebar for this article. Now, I’m probably going to be drawing my own image instead of using a character creator like Hero Forge because that’s just how my theming and worldbuilding flows for me but the core of the inspiration here for me is the same and I will be stealing this idea.

Media Research

Now that we've seen what other Anvilite's have done, and we've got more insight into what kind of structure and layouts are possible within WorldAnvil as well as what kind of Worldbuilding really sticks, I think it's useful to look at what the common Elves are seen in different popular media and what we can learn for them also. So let's look at some TTRPGs and other related media to see what we can glean from those.

Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition

For my insight into Elves in Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition I’m going to solely look at its entry into the 2014 Players Handbook because that’s what is primarily available to me. I am aware that there may be supplemental content in other books published for this TTRPG but I do not have access to them and I believe that the Player's Handbook is enough because of it's more accessible to a wider audience.

Quote Usage

Dungeons and Dragons starts by giving an extended quote from a book called Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, this is a book based upon Dungeons and Dragons and within the Dragonlance series of books. As we’ve seen in previous articles by Anvilites this method of starting with a quote helps the audience visualise the world and what the worldbuilding may look like in print, and this works especially well because it gives a clear example of what you can do with the Elves by showing that there’s a whole book and further reading for those who want to travel further into this world/franchise.

The quote itself does not outright describe any specific elves visually, but highlights their architecture and design of their settlements. From this description we can glean that these elves are close to nature, that they like intricate and delicate architecture, and that they have some sort of history with the Dwarves of that book. This gives us a taste of what Dungeons and Dragons Elves may be like.

Basic Overview

After the quote, the book then begins to describe the basic info of the Elven race. I found this portion a little difficult to parse at first as it is separated into four different sections, and I did not initially understand that I was supposed to read the left side fully into the next subtitle before the right side. I think that this readability issue is a good example of what I should try to avoid if I choose to separate up my own article in a similar way.

Dungeons and Dragons describes their Elves as being 'people of otherworldly grace' and 'living in the world but not entirely of it' which, paints the idea of a race that is entwined more within Nature than of corporality or grounded ideals. They are highlighted as being ancient and almost incomprehensibly beautiful with a strong emphasis on their preference towards artistry, nature and poetry. These things are very stereotypical for Elves but not a bad thing to highlight. I'll be honest it's one of my own main draws to liking the concept in general and I definitely want to convey these concepts in my own work too.

General Biological features & Dress

In the next section, titled 'Slender and Graceful', Dungeons and Dragons describes the physical attributes and expected biological traits of Elves. Dungeons and Dragons has a tendency to use Humans as the 'common' or 'standard' race in which to measure all over races against which I don't quite fully understand. While I understand there is a need to have something to measure against to give the quickest idea of how each race diverges, I feel like some of the tact of the worldbuilding is lost when this is done.

These Elves are noted as being 'smaller than humans than average' which I find sort of against the norm (that Elves are on Average taller) and I'm not fully sure why this is done, there is also notes about these Elves being lighter than humans, which in combination with them being described as 'hauntingly beautiful' makes me uncomfortable. I feel like this is somewhat enforcing a stereotype of 'to be beautiful you must be skinny' in a way that puts a bad taste in my mouth. In my own worldbuilding I'd like to avoid this.

Elves here are described as having 'no facial hair and little body hair' which further makes me uncomfortable in combination of the above features and with no further explanation to why this might happen biologically seems to lead to a feeling that these choices are just 'because what's beautiful' instead of having an actual worldbuilding reason for such. Rather vaguely the Players Handbook says that the Elves 'favour Elegant Clothing and simple yet lovely jewellery' which is the cotton candy of sentences due to it only really having the form of lore and has absolutely no substance of it's own when thought about for more than five seconds.

Lifespan

Under the heading of 'A Timeless Perspective' the players handbook describes the Elves' lifespan and how it may reflect their overall view of the world in which they live and how they may culturally view others. There's a good amount of detail and attention paid to how their lifespan informs their views and how younger elves may view the world differently to elder elves. This is really good worldbuilding and I really like how they've done this, not just giving us a fact but explaining how it ties in to other parts of the lore.

Settlements

Settlements are described in the next section labelled 'Hidden Woodland Realms' which describe Elves as a mainly forest-dwelling folk, this section goes onto describe roughly what life within an Elven settlement would look like. Elves seem to use alot of magic to imbue their day to day life and that helps them with living amongst nature without having to clear out vast swathes of land. These elves are noted to be rather strongly into isolationism with minimal external contact, but those that do fraternise with outsiders find a great deal of trade and strong renown with other races. This paragraph is very useful and rich with lore, and yet again is a good example of tying pieces of lore together into a larger picture.

Reasons for Adventure

The next section, 'Exploration and Adventure' isn't much use for the type of worldbuilding we want to do for this project. While giving your players an insight into the world and cultural reasons for why their character may choose or want to adventure is great for a TTRPG where you want your players to get into the head of their characters and immerse themselves into that world, this doesn't really help me for this static hobby worldbuilding where every part of it will be decided by me. So I'm going to skip it and move on to the next section.

Elf Names

Within this section there's alot of really stellar worldbuilding tidbits to chew on, and I really am fascinated by the ideas proposed here, but I fear it fails to stick the landing. While this section is primarily about Names it sews in some interesting traditions such as the fact that an Elf decides when they aren't a child and picks a new name to reflect that. I think this is really interesting and is 100% going to be something that I will incorporate into my own worldbuilding, especially as it gives me the opportunity to contrast it with the naming traditions of dwarves within my world.

The text goes on to mention that Elves also do carry family names which as combination of other Elvish words, and that Elves that assimilate to more human cultures sometimes translate their names into Common. This is a cool tidbit and does give us some variety, however I’m unsure if I’m going to be able to do this out of the gate as that may require attempting to create a whole new languages for the elves (which is on my list of things I plan to do eventually but may be out of the scope for this).

Conclusion

Dungeons & Dragons does have some interesting ideas within their elves but they also do feel very dated. There's alot more rigidity in the formula than I'd usually expect for Elves. I really don't like the strong beauty ideals as they're presented here, and I will always advocate for a range of body types present within races especially within something I want to make myself.

Daggerheart

Daggerheart's Elf ancestry is only a singular page long but it's surprisingly dense with enough information to get a character started which I love. Most of the page is dedicated to showcasing sketches of what different elves may look like in different cases. There's clearly a diverse set of body types which I love as well as different skin types and some insight into how they age.

Overview

Daggerheart starts it's overview with 'Elves are typically tall humanoids with pointed ears and acutely attuned senses' which gives us a good start to visualising their elves, I very much enjoy the fact that they clarify that this is the typical case (leaving room for edge cases and wiggle room). I also really enjoy their use of the word 'humanoids' instead of just using humans as a catch all standard to compare against. This gives a layer of equality to the races and informs that there isn't one 'true' or 'main' race that everything sprouts from.

Daggerheart then goes on to describe further into the biological traits of their Elf race, there's obviously the pointed ears part mentioned which is very standard (and almost, dare I say even required for elves in some form or another?) but I find this section compelling because it then adds to the standard trait by specifying that as an Elf gets older their ears will begin to droop. This is really cool as it shows us that there's a range and a cycle to how an Elf ages and gets older. This is 100% an idea that I will be stealing for my work.

After this there's a mention also about Elf heights but the key thing I want to highlight here and contrast with the D&D Elves is the notion of "Elves come in a wide range of body types, they are fairly tall with heights ranging from 6 feet to 6 and a half feet." I know I mentioned before but I really like how Daggerheart approaches these things. In the next section it will go on to say "All Elves have the ability to drop into a celestial trance rather than sleep." Which is a very good clarifying statement. I really enjoy that Daggerheart makes it clear what's common but not absolute, and what's absolute and applies to everyone within their races. I find that the Dungeons and Dragons book leaves things open, but it's also incredibly ambiguous what's just a common trait and what actually is 'set in stone as it were'.

Mystic Form

After dedicating themselves to the study or protection of the natural world for a prolonged amount of time, the Elves in Daggerheart may undergo a set of changes to their physical appearance known as a 'mystic form'. The specifics of what these changes may involve seems to be on a case-by-case basis but the Core rule book gives examples such as growing leaves in their hair, eyes that flicker like fire or celestial markings. It is said that these traits can be inherited, and that due to the long lifespans of Elves in Daggerheart, that the traits of the mystic form may shift and change further as time goes on and they deepen their dedication.

Since Wyrmhart is heavily based upon Daggerheart and I do indeed love it so much I am going to probably find a way to include mystical forms although I'll need to find a way to put it into my own words and put my own spin on it. I like the ideas it presents as well as the concepts of being rewarded for dedication to protection or study.

Conclusion

Although I do have an incredible amount of bias towards Daggerheart, I think that it's more the egg than the chicken. My love for it comes because it skilfully navigates discussion of these topics where other rule books such as the Player's Handbook for D&D struggle and I admire it alot for that. There's alot of space to work with here and there's alot of lore tidbits to chew on. I think we can make something good with just this alone but there's two more inspirations to cover so we shall continue on.

Final Fantasy XIV

Placeholder text so I can copy and paste over the top of it easily and so it's easier for me to highlight in the future.

Lord of the Rings

Placeholder text so I can copy and paste over the top of it easily and so it's easier for me to highlight in the future.

The Process

Planning the Article

Since we don't want to get trapped in an endless cycle of scope creep, we should try to determine what we actually want to achieve with our article. We'll be using the to-do list method that we saw Strixxline using earlier, but we're going to try and implement it here in our own way.

Outlining the Task

Setting Expectations

Making a To-Do List

Article Creation

Figuring out Pronunciation

I'm a big proponent of accessibility features in things such as this and I do strongly believe that WorldAnvil's Pronunciation section is a very good accessibility feature for people trying to figure out your worldbuilding so I try to use it on all of my articles even if I think it's obvious to me.

I work out the IPA mainly by, in some ways, by cheating. I use a website called the IPA translator, and I simply write the word I want to translate into the English section, and then I copy and paste the result into a separate website called the IPA reader just to check that it sounds more or less what I'm going for. I usually check with the British English voice as that's my native accent and so if it sounds like how I'd say it, I consider that done.

Results

This article isn't done yet so my results aren't done either. I've submitted it to the Event page to make sure that it has been submitted before the deadline date. Follow this world or the Wyrmhart world and check back later to see this article once I've actually finished making it!

Event Type

Official

Deadline

Feb 7th 2026

Goal

One article of worldbuilding & one generic article of explanation