Sea Elf

Sea elves are the deep-water kin of elven civilization: water-breathing builders who sank their foundations into marine trenches and never came back up. Their ancient cities rose around the deepest rifts of the ocean floor, lit by bioluminescent coral and the slow circling of serpentine dragons that adapted alongside them over centuries. On the surface, sea elves are a rumor. Below, they are a civilization.

The Underwater Sultanate of Azaaldaal is the greatest of their surviving polities: a city of gold-threaded markets, labyrinthian streets that even locals navigate by feel as much as sight, and technologies so old their origins have been argued over by three generations of scholars. The Sultan's dragon rider guard circles the city in patrols that outsiders have mistaken for sea monsters, which is not entirely inaccurate.

Sea elves who surface rarely explain why. Some are diplomats, emerging to negotiate with surface powers whose trade routes cut across contested waters. Some are exiles, carrying the particular loneliness of people whose home is, quite literally, unreachable by everyone they meet. A few are simply curious about the strange, breathable world above the waterline, and what they find there usually confirms their suspicion that surface life is, at best, an eccentricity.

Sea Elf Traits

Sea elf heroes have access to the following traits.

Signature Trait: Tidal Blood

You breathe water as easily as air and can never drown. While submerged, you don't take a bane on tests or strikes, and you don't take a bane on strikes made against creatures with concealment due to darkness.

Purchased Sea Elf Traits

You have 3 ancestry points to spend on the following traits.

Current Sense (1 Point)

You detect movement through water with the precision of sight. While submerged, you automatically know the location of any creature within 10 squares, even without line of effect to that creature.

Dragon Bond (1 Point)

Your people's long coexistence with the serpentine dragons of the deep runs in your blood. You gain an edge on Intuition tests made to sense the emotions and motivations of dragons and dragon-adjacent creatures.

Pressure Hardened (1 Point)

Centuries of life at crushing ocean depths have made you difficult to displace. You have a +1 bonus to stability.

Tidal Grace (1 Point)

Your body moves with the fluid efficiency of deep water. You have speed 6.

Tidal Resilience (2 Points)

The ocean's patience runs deeper than most forces can overcome. Whenever you make a saving throw, you succeed on a roll of 5 or higher.

Undertow (2 Points)

You have the following signature ability. Signature abilities can be used at will.

Undertow

An invisible current seizes your foe and drags them forward.

Magic, Ranged, Strike	Main action
📏 Ranged 10	🎯 One creature

Power Roll + Might or Agility:

• ≤11: 2 + M or A cold damage; pull 1
• 12-16: 5 + M or A cold damage; pull 2
• 17+: 7 + M or A cold damage; pull 3; M < STRONG, prone

On Sea Elves

The harbormaster had seen strange things in twenty years at the docks of Castanas. Ships that shouldn't float. Cargo that moved on its own. A merchant who turned out to be a golem. He had learned to maintain a professional calm about all of it, because the harbor didn't stop for anyone's astonishment.

He hadn't been prepared for someone to walk out of the sea.

She stepped up from the water as though climbing invisible stairs, her dark hair still moving as though submerged, small luminescent patterns along her jaw and collarbone fading slowly as they hit open air. She wore something between armor and a garment, layered material the color of deep water, perfectly dry. She carried a sealed cylinder of hammered gold and a look that suggested she had somewhere to be.

"Tide's out," the harbormaster said, because he had to say something.

She regarded him. Her eyes were the particular blue of water that has never seen sunlight. "I require an audience with your harbor council," she said. Her Caelian was perfect, though the rhythm of it was wrong in a way he couldn't name, like a song he'd heard before played in an unfamiliar key. "I carry a missive from the Sultan of Azaaldaal."

"Azaaldaal," the harbormaster repeated slowly.

"Yes."

He tried to remember if he knew where that was. He didn't. "Is that... far?"

She looked back at the water, then at him. "Not as far as it used to be," she said, which didn't answer the question at all.

He reached out and she handed him the cylinder without being asked. The gold was unlike any alloy he'd seen: too smooth, too perfect, stamped with a crest he didn't recognize, three coiled dragons forming a knot above a trident. "The council doesn't typically meet for... unannounced..." He trailed off. She was watching him with the patient expression of someone who had crossed an ocean floor and was not going to be derailed by a bureaucrat.

"I can't accept correspondence on their behalf," he started. "You'd need to speak with the Harbor Commissioner, or the Admiralty, or possibly..."

"I know." She was already walking toward the city gates, trailing a faint smell of brine and something else, something older and colder and deeper. "I said I required an audience. I did not say I required your permission."

The harbormaster watched her go. He looked down at the gold cylinder in his hands, then looked back up at the gate she had disappeared through.

He stood there for a moment, thinking about the way she had walked out of the water. The way the bioluminescence had faded from her skin, like a language she had simply stopped speaking.

He hadn't caught her name.