Race Name: Elves (Dark)

Race Description: Named for the colour of their skin as well as their preference for living underground, dark elves are a rather strange offshoot of elven-kind in general. Historically, elven sources show that a small group of elves took to worshipping one of the various 'darkness'-affiliated deities, moving away from the surface eventually and finding themselves in regular conflict with dwarves, though they moved deeper still.

A race heavily reliant on their goddess' blessings, over time they were noted to become less and less like their surface kin--plants and the open sky unnerve rather than reassure, and their vision in the dark is far superior to their near-blindness in sunlight. They are also, to the last, female: a combination of a matriarchal society, and requiring divine support to [i]not[/i] die out entirely, quickly lead to a distinct shortage of males.

It is quite likely that, if they hadn't had to rely on relationships with their male surface kin, they would gradually have become quite... nasty, but as it is they were one of the more tolerant--if more secretive--races. As a whole, they tend to rely heavily on smuggling and the like, but cultivation of mushrooms is a particular speciality of theirs, as is taming normally-hostile wildlife, since most of their homes' natural residents would normally eat a person as soon as look at them.

In built up cities, they focus on night time jobs--which has, oddly enough, given them total control of Karstberg's red light district over the previous hundred years, due to a combination of long-term planning and their nocturnal preferences.

When it comes to children, a dark elf and a non-dark elf will produce another dark elf if the child is female or the father's race otherwise, whilst other hybrids work fairly normally. This is a rare occurrence, however, as dark elven culture tends not to place much emphasis on men to any degree, and they don't have a very strong drive to reproduce, lower even than the elven norm.