TUP<br/><br/>Thanks for your comments. I agree entirely with your point of wood elven society being solely suitable for their particular economic and social mode of life. Wood elven society is much less organisationally sophisticated than "civilised" human societies. In its current form such a society is indeed incapable of large scale mobilisation (and, indeed, has no history of large public works, systematic warfare or intensive urban or agricultural settlement), nor does it seek it. Wood elves may even be psychologically unsuitable for tasks considered essential for high density/high surplus human civilisation.<br/><br/><strong>Conflict resolution</strong>is a crucial point, which can be understood by way of two central factors: first, the fact that internal competition is strongly discouraged (by way of comparison, unlike most archaic Indo-European cultures, wood elves have no "heroic code" or similar exaltation of internal hierarchy or attrition) and resource allocation is decided by consensus on the basis of the carefully considered requirements of each individual and caste; second, the universally recognised spiritual authority of druids and shamans who act as arbiters in disputes, often with assistance from the spirit world. Wood elves believe that they commune with the spirit world on a daily basis and, accordingly, take the voice of this parallel world very seriously.<br/><br/>That is not to say that in the distant past elven society<em>wasn't</em>highly violent. The existence of a segregated, ritualised warrior-caste (i.e. rangers) is perhaps the most striking reminder of this. If dark elves or drow are used in the same setting (I don't, but for the sake of argument), it would be safe to assume that their society branched off at this early stage and, in this regard, remained socially conservative.<br/><br/>Although wood elven lore is silent on this (at least to all but the wisest initiates of the higher druidic rites), based on anthropological and social evidence, a hypothetical 21st century academic would probably conclude that thousands (if not tens of thousands) of years ago, the root elven culture was an aggressive, matriarchal, pantheistic hunter-gatherer culture with a neolithic but highly sophisticated material culture specifically adapted to shape and exploit the natural environment to its advantage. Its daughter-cultures have simply adopted different strategies to dealing with this problem.