Racial Appearance

[Synvallius]

I'm making a race of subterranean elf-like people who live in a large ruined complex of buildings (underground) that are filled with the artifacts of an ancient highly advanced race. They are the only sentient race in the world (there are some other things like goblins and such, but they're largely feral and unthinking), and their primary occupation is finding out about the ancient technologies, figuring out how they work, and then selling them to travelers (the world they live on is one of many).
Obviously, underground elves generally calls to mind dark elves (and originally I was just going to go with pale grey skin, white hair and red eyes) but I decided that I wanted them to look more original than that. So, if anyone has any ideas for their appearance, I'd be grateful for the help. It can be based off of realistic expectations of underground dwelling races, or it can be more fantastical and completely unrelated to their subterranean existence.

[redwizard007]

As you get closer to the area illuminated by your torch you can make out the shape of individual creatures. All are short and slight of build much like a human child of 10 or 12 years. They have short silver hair running from the crown of their heads down the side and back of their heads like most of the humanoid races but it continues down their necks and disappears into rough spun tunics while leaving the entire front of the head bare. Spindly arms end in large pale hands with five elongated fingers that would seem at home dancing over the keys of a harpsichord or weaving eldrich energies. Large, pale eyes bulge from the creature's face as it turns its visage towards you and there is no mistaking the intelligence behind his gaze.

I think I just described Gollum with hair...

[VoxRationis]

When I first read the beginning of this I thought of Skyrim's Falmer, but I'm thinking that's not what you're going for.

Well, in the real world, subterranean creatures become albinos. But this is D&D, where darkvision is a concern, so albinism isn't the cost-cutting, evolutionarily fit measure it is in real life. You could go with, depending on how prevalent darkvision-using creatures are in your setting and how much you want biological selection to have played a part in the development of your race, any number of skin tones. You could try going for a completely normal above-ground tone of tan or light brown, under the premise that cultural/sexual selection has kept albinism from setting in.

[Stellar_Magic]

Well, pale skin is more an evolutionary response to lack of sunlight then a form of camouflage, so pale skin would still work. The nature of underground caverns and caves would favor small, wiry builds... so I'd say a stature around 4 feet tall if medium, and 2-3 feet if small sized. They'd be pale and probably rather thin due to low-availability of food supplies.

Hair color and eye color is totally up to you, you can go with black or white, red or blue, and so forth... I personally like dark hair with pale complexion as it gives a bit of a clash to the appearance...

In the gloom you catch a dull blue flash from the eyeshine of something watching you from the shadows. As you step closer, you can barely make a shape out of gloom... A small figure clutching a crossbow is crouched in the tiny crevice of the rock, her pale face framed in by messy black hair that glimmers in the light of the torch. Her pale blue eyes peer at you down the sights of her weapon, a hard expression on the child-like face of the figure as she slowly starts to slip through the crevice, muscles taunt and coiled like a cat ready to pounce or flee in fright.

[Everyl]

What's the history of these elf-like people? Are they native to the world, or did they migrate there? Were they there before the ancient race fell, and did they have anything to do with that fall?

I ask mainly because, if they're not native to the tunnels and underground cities they live in, they might not display the (lack of) coloration typical of subterranean beings. Perhaps they're displaced surface-people who have lived in an alien biome for so long that they've nearly forgotten they ever lived elsewhere on a cultural level. They might actually value bright or distinctive colors, whether in hair, skin, or eyes, as a sign of what separates them from the pale, blind animals that live in their environment. Animals are pale and colorless, people have color, the more the better. A culture like that could take a very long time to lose their pigmentation because sexual selection would keep various tones in the gene pool, and it's not like they have to worry about blowing their cover when evading animals that are native to the lightless depths.

[VoxRationis]

Well, pale skin is more an evolutionary response to lack of sunlight then a form of camouflage, so pale skin would still work.


I wasn't saying that subterranean albinism was a form of camouflage. The reason subterranean creatures don't have pigmentation as a rule is that the metabolic costs of producing pigments become unfavorable when there is no light to shield against or for visual predators to use. I was saying that in a D&D setting where creatures have black-and-white darkvision that works with no light whatsoever, being pale near-white when all the rocks are dark grey or black is an evolutionary disadvantage.

[Synvallius]

Alright, after much pointless agonizing I've decided to go with pale blue-grey skin and white hair, eye color however is still undecided, although I am leaning towards some hue of purple. So if anyone has any cool eye color ideas... (must I repeat the readily understood?)
In regards to lobster claws (Everyl) the world is set after a cataclysm struck a large "material plane" (the world does not use the standard planar/cosmological setting, so there is no Acheron, or Mechanus, or Celestia or anything like that) and shattered it. Several groups of powerful wizards or "magi-tech" users either used their magic or created devices that would create smaller worlds out of the fragments of the material plane. Each world works according to its own creation physics (i.e. some are almost indistinguishable from earth, others have little to no gravity, some have no light, etc.), and the elves (one of the various subraces spread across the new universe) live on a world that contains large amounts of ruins from the time before the material plane was sundered (additionally, while I'm on it, the space between the worlds is habitable, although the air there is thin, allowing more advanced races to travel between the worlds, that's how the elves can trade the stuff they find, even though they're the only ones on the world). The elves have always lived there, but they haven't always lived underground, the surface world is a large never ending expanse of swamp filled with large dangerous predators. After a while of inhabiting the surface, the majority of them went underground and began figuring out how to use the technology they found, and now they sell it to inter-planar travelers.
The in depth history is not completely done yet, but that's the main idea, however, it's not quite as important now. All I'm interested in is eyes.

[Stellar_Magic]

I wasn't saying that subterranean albinism was a form of camouflage. The reason subterranean creatures don't have pigmentation as a rule is that the metabolic costs of producing pigments become unfavorable when there is no light to shield against or for visual predators to use. I was saying that in a D&D setting where creatures have black-and-white darkvision that works with no light whatsoever, being pale near-white when all the rocks are dark grey or black is an evolutionary disadvantage.

Doesn't matter... I think one of the books revealed that Darkvision essentially works off body heat... essentially making it infrared vision, so being dark skinned wouldn't have any benefit either.

[sktarq]

One thing to point out. Caves are usually consistent and cold. Elves are generally mammals and thus warm blooded. If they have been in this situation long enough they may well have either gained a light layer of fur, lost sweat responses, etc. as for eyes it depends on the availability of artificial light. If you have an idea that the ruins may produce a glow a given colour assume the eyes are opposite or matched that glow on the colour wheel (assuming different layers of eye-shine vs non-absorption.

[Stellar_Magic]

Bioluminescent mushrooms or algae as a light source and food would be one I would use for a lot of underground environments, though truthfully getting a halfway sensible ecosystem without photosynthesis is problematic at best. Most deep cave ecosystems revolve around bacteria that find the chemical reaction of water and limestone a sustainable food source. They in turn feed things like blind cave fish and so forth.

Of the possible other adaptations to cave life that have been mentioned - a lack of sweat glans makes the most sense for a humanoid. As not only do caves tend to be cooler then the outdoors, they also tend to be much more consistent in temperature. While the temperature on the surface may plunge to below freezing or top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it will always be 30 to 40 degrees in the cave.

[Everyl]

Doesn't matter... I think one of the books revealed that Darkvision essentially works off body heat... essentially making it infrared vision, so being dark skinned wouldn't have any benefit either.

In older editions of D&D (pre-3e), Darkvision was called Infravision, and explicitly worked on the basis of being able to see in the infrared spectrum. This led to all sorts of hair-splitting and debate about what characters could and could not see with their nonhuman senses. Are the walls different enough in temperature from the air to be visible? Can undead, constructs, and/or coldblooded animals be seen in the dark with infravision? And so on.

The change to "darkvision" in 3e answered most of those questions with a simple, "Yes, of course you can see that, you just can't see color," which I'm pretty sure was the intent of the developers in earlier editions anyway. At the same time, though, by saying that the vision is in black-and-white, it implies that it's possible to see some color. Distinguishing black ink on white paper in a lightless room is pretty strange, but quirks like that are a small price to pay for never having to argue about whether something is visible in the infrared spectrum again.

There's nothing stopping you from reintroducing the infrared vision fluff in later editions. Just remember to keep it on the fluff side, and try not to waste time debating how visible zombies are in colors that we, as human players IRL, cannot actually perceive.

[Stellar_Magic]

The way I always figured it... Darkvision basically meant they could see into the infrared spectrum and had effective 'light amplification' abilities. This is actually the level of vision most reptiles have (better tweak my stats on them again XD). I figure that the feet number for Darkvision is just a rather simplistic way to account for better visual acuity in darkness and how much of the infrared spectrum they can see.

So a Drow can see a lot better then say... a Kobold (Darkvision 60 vs. Darkvision 120), because their eyes both amplify available light better (with the unfortunate side effect of light blindness) and they can see into the infrared so they can see even without normal light sources, essentially relying on the thermal output of the environment for ambient light.

Essentially to get an idea of what someone with Darkvision actually sees, imagine an image of a scene in normal light, composited with the same scene shot through a light amplification system (like night vision goggles), and composited with the same scene shot with an infrared camera.

It's a bit of a sensory overload, I wonder if the species with darkvision usually have more of their brains processing power allocated to vision.

[VoxRationis]

In older editions of D&D (pre-3e), Darkvision was called Infravision, and explicitly worked on the basis of being able to see in the infrared spectrum. This led to all sorts of hair-splitting and debate about what characters could and could not see with their nonhuman senses. Are the walls different enough in temperature from the air to be visible? Can undead, constructs, and/or coldblooded animals be seen in the dark with infravision? And so on.

The change to "darkvision" in 3e answered most of those questions with a simple, "Yes, of course you can see that, you just can't see color," which I'm pretty sure was the intent of the developers in earlier editions anyway. At the same time, though, by saying that the vision is in black-and-white, it implies that it's possible to see some color. Distinguishing black ink on white paper in a lightless room is pretty strange, but quirks like that are a small price to pay for never having to argue about whether something is visible in the infrared spectrum again.

There's nothing stopping you from reintroducing the infrared vision fluff in later editions. Just remember to keep it on the fluff side, and try not to waste time debating how visible zombies are in colors that we, as human players IRL, cannot actually perceive.

I'm not sure about undead, but ectothermic animals have higher body temperatures than the surrounding environment, at least when out and about. If nothing else, muscular action produces waste heat which ensures this fact. And in any case, I agree with Stellar Magic in that IR vision doesn't just mean detecting heat sources directly; it also implies being able to detect reflected IR radiation, in the same fashion as our eyes detect incident light and not just light-emitting objects.

[...]

Should they even have eyes? Maybe they lost them due to lack of use and now have blindsense/blindsight/tremorsense.

[Synvallius]

People seem to be taking the "living underground" aspect of the race too seriously, the only thing I'm really concerned about is coloration (and only for eyes at this point, although I'm fairly certain I'm going with purple now, so the main question of this thread is now resolved). And, just to offer some small extra amount of information, setting wise, the underground area has some natural light due to the magical ancient technologies, and from "magical" glowing fungus, so they would most likely be able to have eyes still, although albinism (and probably rickets, although I shan't get into that) would still probably be a possibility (also one that I shan't use).

[Tvtyrant]

In my current campaign I use an energy source called the Xoriat Force as the explanation of underdark races. The Xoriat Force is a standing flow of psionic energy that all creatures in Xoriat use to feed themselves, and all creatures of small size and smaller can live exclusively on it. The force bleeds into the Underdark and Space, so many creatures from Xoriat live either underground or in deep space, and as the force is weaker then in Xoriat they become ravenously hungry.

Many plants and fungi from the Prime have learned to eat Xoriat Force rather than convert sunlight, so they grow naturally in the Underdark and provide sustenance to less exotic life.

Specific to your request, I would make the elves look slimier. One of the things that is going to happen when you spend a lot of time in caves is you are going to get trench foot and cut up by rocks; having the elves give off a sticky mucus to prevent both of those problems would give them a definite underground feel and emphasize their differences from other Elves.

[atemu1234]

The creature you see is humanoid, tall, handsome and gray-skinned. It looks elfin, with pointed ears and a thin frame, with black hair. Its face is inhumanly beautiful, and it bears itself with grace as it looks out over the scene before you.

No need for something subterranean to be ugly as sin. Better yet, you can still stick a charisma penalty on it due to its inhuman beauty.