Almost Everyone Hates Racial Level Limits: My Approach to Level Limits and Elves.

Part 1: A Brief Survey of Approaches

I never liked them very much either. I also have grown to dislike demihumans as PCs (or even at all really). But someone almost always wants to be an elf in my games. So, I was faced with a dilemma I needed to make elves fit into my world in a way that I enjoyed. I run what is essential OD&D using the Holmes basic rulebook for the early levels so I asked the Holmes Google Plus Group:

When you guys are playing Holmes basic and extending it, do you use racial level limits? I know this question has probably been asked before. Right? Is there a current consensus?

I got good responses. I was afraid that this topic had been done to death and no one would respond. Turns out this is one of those topics that never gets old.

Michael Thomas, the man behind BLUEHOLME, said that he did not consider level limits to be particularly Holmesian. That’s fairly authoritative so don’t feel bad if you don’t use racial level limits in your campaign (Grognardia also approves).

Two people did admit to using racial level limits in their campaign. The first, William Dowie, hews pretty close to the traditional in-universe rationale:

I just say that they are elder races, past their prime, now is the age of man

Beautiful. Leave it at that. The second person took a modified approach to racial level limits. It’s Good; you should use this rule:

  

I take racial level limits as a status of the races' current achievements. If a PC hits that top level he can keep gaining XP. Each new level costs twice it normally would (extending charts at normal progression). Once a new level is reached the whole race's level limit is now the same. So anyone coming after can get that same level at normal cost. I then give that level title the name of the character who earned it for their race. This gives some PCs glory.

It does have some implications though, it suggests that humans have achieved more prior to the start of a campaign. Does this mean that demihumans are not “elder races” but the newer races that will eventually catch up with and replace humans? That could be an interesting source of tension, as the campaign world gradually starts to see more and more powerful demihumans. This world is the opposite of the traditional “Dowie” approach. This “Strange” approach has the potential to create a world where humans are the twilight race.

Part 2:  My Proposal for Elves, Power Corrupts

My approach is this: high-level elves risk becoming goblins and elves that advance beyond their level limit definitely become goblins. The in-universe explanation is that elves that become to worldly are vulnerable to corruption (The basis of this idea is related to one of Tolkien’s Explanations for the origin of orcs.) If your campaign like mine lacks any sort of afterlife or magic land over the ocean for elves then the fate of every elf since the beginning of elves is either death or goblinhood.

The in-universe mechanism for this is the chaos alignment language. Alignment languages are another area of dnd that gets glossed over. The chaos language as I use it is a language without fixed syntax or meaning. It is vocalized id. When an elf gets to his level cap he starts to here the chaos language in his subconscious. If he retires and joins the other elves in happy elf land he can delay his transformation. If he keeps adventuring he hears the syllables and whispers growing louder, bubbling up from the subconscious. Slowly it seduces and corrupts blocking the thoughts and taking over the mind of the elf.  No longer able to think over the babble of chaos, the elf becomes a goblin. This is where goblins come from; they do not reproduce.

This approach also has far reaching implications. It either means that your world has very few goblins or that your world is old enough that there have been massive amounts of elves turned into goblins. Your world may be infinitely old. Or, there may have been a massive corrupting event in the history of your world. It also means that goblins are probably insane. It also means that locked away somewhere in a goblins brain there may be high level spells, still memorized waiting to come out.