Also called Lunarians, lunar elves are the descendents of a group of elves stranded on the moon's surface about ten thousand years ago by powerful magic. They have physically and culturally adapted to the harsh environment over time but without losing their elven nature. In other words, they are not space aliens who happen to be descended from elves: they are elves who have figured out how to still be elves in unusual circumstances.
Lunar elves are well-adapted to life on the moon, but are not native moon creatures. Millennia of adaptation to lunar gravity has left lunar elves even more gracile than normal elves, with typically softer bodies and weaker muscles, although they are still of typical elven height and weight.
Their skin is pale white-gray and has an opalescent reflectivity that protects them from the unfiltered sunlight experienced on the moon, and the radiation-absorbing underlying tissue layers give them a dark brown or charcoal undertone where the skin is thinner. Lunar elf hair is typically the color of dark oil-rubbed bronze, but occasionally white, gray, platinum, or lavender. Hair is usually worn long by all genders, braided into styles that might be impractical in regular gravity.
All lunar elves have gold eyes; not the iris, but the entire surface of the eye appears as if covered by gold film. Their pupils are still visible, but are subtle in normal lighting.
Lunar elves do not need to sleep like humans, nor need to trance like other elves. They can still trance if desired, and do find it restful. Instead, a lunar elf must fall into torpor for about a week during the coldest part of the 29.5 day lunar month. They may stir briefly during this time, but do not need to eat or drink. A lunar elf can be woken from their torpor with some effort (a full-round action) but will be Fatigued until they can catch up on rest.
A lunar elf does need to breathe normal air but can survive indefinitely in a vacuum without a pressure suit, other environmental hazards aside. Day or night, a lunar elf on the lunar surface in their normal clothes is still in big trouble, but it's not a death sentence as long as they have some source of breathable air and can regulate their temperature, perhaps by getting out of the sun into a crater shadow or digging into the dusty lunar regolith.
Because of their unique origin, a lunar elf tends to feel out of place almost anywhere outside their own community, even among the Outer Planes.
A lunar elf in their village is essentially among their own large, extended family. Their personal lives are as complex and intimate as any large family's can be, but they make intentional effort to stay affable, patient, and accommodating in their business with other races; lunar elves are not slow to respond in general, but when dealing with sentient entities will almost always hear out the other party or make at least some effort to understand the entire situation before acting.
Lunar elves tend to run towards emergencies in their village in an attempt to save lives and mitigate damage. They regard this as an ordinary level of civic responsibility and not a display of exceptional heroism. A lunar elf away from home may extend the same instinct to strangers, treating any crisis as a practical problem to solve rather than waiting on anyone else to take charge.
Living in an isolated colony, lunar elves rarely see or interact with members of other races at all, but may know much about them academically. Over the years the village has been physically visited by a few extremely curious magical scholars and extraplanar outsiders willing to make the trip. Individual wizards may have summoned individual intelligent entities or established scholarly relationships using Sending spells, but lunar elves are usually a rumor of a rumor, if anything.
Usually lawful good.
There are only about 500 lunar elves in existence, almost all of whom live in a single subterranean village on the moon. Their village is like an artists' commune, research institute, farming village, druidic community, and monastery all in one, tunneled out of lunar rock with magic and maintained against the environment with thousands of years of diligence and relatively low-level spells.
The temperature in the lunar underground is a steady -20c, which is survivable but dangerous even for lunar elves without proper clothing. Most of their village is magically heated to a chilly but clement 5c. Sleeping areas and agricultural spaces are significantly warmer, but most other intelligent races will still feel uncomfortably chilly in lunar elf spaces.
Lunar elven architecture is mostly stone from necessity, but feels overall smooth and organic and unlike dwarven architecture at all. Large atriums with small gardens of rice-grass, burbling fountains of clear water, and communal amenities form most of the colony, although individual dwellings and workshops can be closed against the common areas as desired. Furniture and architectural details are mostly made of carefully worked stone, delicately elf-crafted ironwork, and elegantly woven straw wicker; why make something merely functional when it can also be beautiful?
The lunar elf village includes a druid circle with a few incredibly precious silver birch trees; these are absolutely forbidden by lunar elf druids to be used for mundane purposes like tools and furniture. Naturally fallen branches may rarely be used for ritual purposes or spell components when absolutely necessary but otherwise nothing mundane in the village is made from wood.
As far as anyone in the village is aware, the only evidence of any other creature having ever lived on the moon is a phase dragon lair of unknown habitation status on the far side. Lunar elves are reluctant to share the exact location in case they are in an unspoken stalemate with an ancient dragon they don't want to unnecessarily irritate.
In spite of their adaptations, lunar elves still look like elves. They act like elves, talk like elves, wear elf clothes, play elf music, eat elf food, and speak an obviously elvish language. Their art and customs have diverged and their material culture is bizarre from circumstance, but other elves, including wood elves, sea elves, and even drow, will nevertheless recognize them on sight as distant kin; elf culture is old. Ten thousand years on the moon does not make them a different civilization entirely in the long view.
In the first decades of meager existence on the moon, lunar elves' ancestors had to struggle and improvise and adapt. They nearly didn't survive, but persisted with grit and determination. Once settled in, they started improving their standard of living to at least that of their ancestors and having families. They do have some unique traditions and quirks from their circumstances and cultural trauma, though:
For years, lunar elves' ancestors had little in the way of writing material and often had to resort to writing on themselves or each other. Lunar elves have developed a strong tattoo culture as a result, including independent invention of the spellwrought tattoo. Similar to a spell scroll, they can be invoked by the bearer to produce a magical effect, after which the tattoo fades and cannot be used again. Some of the village's most ancient and precious works of art and scholarship are solemnly preserved as tanned elfskin, delicately preserved in accordance with the decedents' wishes and almost never shown to outsiders.
When coming of age, lunar elves, even ones who have no greater aspirations than a life of leisure, are entrusted with a bit of magic for the sake of the safety of the village itself. Almost every adult lunar elf has three spellwrought tattoos: Create Water, Mending, and Cure Minor Wounds. The exact design and placement is a matter of personal choice, but most lunar elves are proud to bear the responsibility and have them on the hands or forearms. Importantly, these are not free magical toys, but are meant to be used for emergencies. Older lunar elves may have several burned-out and subsequently replaced tattoos. Especially responsible lunar elves may also have a spellwrought tattoo of Tiny Hut or even Wall of Force.
Swordplay and archery have not been forgotten, but have taken a cultural back seat to recreational and competitive whip sport. Early in the village's history, interpersonal disputes might need to be settled with the ritual violence of a duel, but it was agreed that with such a small population any injury or death might be catastrophic to the village's overall survival. Therefore, lunar elves have developed a particular style of dueling: two combatants wear padded armor and enter an otherwise-empty lava tube with whips made from plant fiber and reinforced with finely drawn metal wire. The lunar elf fighting style mostly concerns positioning, agility, movement, dexterity, and attempting to trip, grab, disarm, throw, or otherwise subdue the opponent rather than causing them injury with the weapon itself.
Since founding, they have developed nutritionally-complete lunar rice from whatever few grass seeds were among their founders' clothes and belongings. Lunar rice is grown in partially-flooded subsurface chambers lit and warmed by magic. This is their only crop and one of the only plants of any kind available for use, but this does not mean lunar elves have a bland diet. Their agricultural and culinary traditions have developed multiple varieties of rice with unique properties, fermented and cultured condiments, cakes, breads, vinegars, seasonings, and so on. A quick lunar elven meal may be a handful of toasted rice cakes with some kind of sweet or savory sauce, and a lunar elven feast might consist of dozens of completely different soups and entrees, which would all technically be made from rice while still seeming ineffably elven in presentation and preparation.
Similarly, without access to any kind of leather, fur, silk, or other plant fiber, much of lunar elves' clothes are made out of woven or braided rice straw. Lunar elves have become adept at selecting and processing rice straw fibers into a variety of fabrics of different weaves and textures, and most elves wear simple but elegant and layered robes and cloaks, with slippers or soft boots, in a variety of hues. Lunar elves tend to wear multiple layers of robes in the relatively cold common areas outside their warmer bedchambers.
Before enough straw to work with was grown consistently, the only other material lunar elves' ancestors had access to for textile work was their own elf-hair; ancient elf-hair garments are some of the most precious objects in the village, and tell a bit of their own history through who else's hair has been used to repair them over the years; a lunar elf might be married in an heirloom gown of her own grandmother's elf-hair. Some lunar elf artisans still use locks of their own hair as decorative elements in fiber arts or as a signature on a particularly fine object; a masterwork lunar elf sword may feature a tassel made of the smith's own hair on the pommel.
Finally, another uniquely lunar elven tradition is the monthly post-torpor communal breakfast. Until the founders managed to establish an agricultural base capable of feeding the community, lunar elves' ancestors survived for years almost entirely on the "highly nourishing, if rather bland" fare from their clerics' Create Food and Water spells. These days, despite the depth of modern lunar elf cuisine, most lunar elves' first meal after awakening from their monthly torpor is magically-created food, received at the temple. This ritual reminds them every month of who they are, where they are from, and how they got there.
Most Lunar elves worship Silvanus or Selune but their theological relationships with the two are particularly different after millennia of seeing the cosmos from a different perspective; their clerics look up into the sky and see the world above as a distant and watchful aspect of Silvanus. Their druids commune with their actual location and feel in tune with Selune as a harsh and hard-hearted but ultimately providing mother.
Lunar elves are generally reluctant to dig into the moon with tools; it feels disrespectful to Selune even if they mostly do not believe that the moon itself is the actual body of the goddess herself. Whether stone and regolith and the gems and ores therein are commanded to move through arcane magic, or politely requested to do so with divine power, both are considered more ethical than striking steel on stone. Whether or nor they would treat Toril with the same reverence vis-a-vis it as an aspect of Silvanus or not is a matter of some theological debate.
As an isolated village, lunar elves have no special reason to know Common unless they intentionally choose to learn it. In casual conversation they tend to speak their own locally developed dialect of Elvish called Lunarian that would be mostly incomprehensible to outsiders, but also learn ancient Elvish as a matter of normal education.
There a sign-language version of Lunarian for use in airless environments; it is not nearly as complex or developed as Drow Sign Language and basically consists of spelling out Lunarian words with a small set of hand symbols: creatures who both understand Lunarian can communicate without speech but only at 1/10 normal speed.
A lunar elf's usual idea of a "full name" is their individual name with as many matrilineal surnames as required for the context; rarely more than 2, although scholarly works can get surprisingly verbose if the author expects their attributions to be unambiguous in 3000 years. Some lunar elves choose their individual name as adults, but most are fine with the one they were given.
Most lunar elves have little desire to leave the moon. In any case, traveling to or from the moon usually requires powerful teleportation magic that would be a serious, non-casual undertaking by the village's most powerful spell-casters and only done for collectively-agreed good reason. A few lunar elves have lived as hermits in small environments outside the main village, but individuals truly intend on leaving the moon entirely have managed it through other routes. Few have ever returned home.
About 1/10 of the population is spell-casters with PC class levels, mostly Wizards with a few Clerics and Druids, but anyone capable of using higher than 5th level spells is considered a rare generational talent. Lunar elf Bards are as much historians and lorekeepers as they are entertainers. Lunar elf Fighters are far more likely to be scholar-athletes focused on martial arts than professional warriors. Rogues have little need for stealth or subterfuge within the village but may dabble in the rougish arts as a hobby. Rangers, Paladins, and Sorcerers may also emerge from the community on occasion, but lunar elves have no existing culture that would lead one to being a Monk or Barbarian.
This extralight variant of mithral is more fragile, but even lighter than regular mithral. Despite the name, lunar mithral is rarely used on the moon: items made of lunar mithral, especially chain shirts, are made in small quantities for lunar elves traveling off the moon, where gravity is six times stronger than what they consider normal.
Lunar cloaks are enormous, bulky garments made out of hundreds of finely-worked reflective glass plates, wired together in overlapping layers and padded with layers of heavy rice-straw textile. The enormous weight of the cloak itself is surprisingly insignificant on the moon, where gravity is 1/6 of normal. The cloak includes a hood that covers most of the head and reaches essentially all the way to the ground.
Made for lunar elven use when traveling on the surface of the moon, the lunar cloak keeps a normal medium humanoid protected from any amount of natural solar radiation while also keeping them insulated enough to survive even in cryogenic lunar shadow, but only in an airless environment. A lunar cloak in normal atmosphere at normal temperatures will quickly cause the wearer to overheat. It does not otherwise allow an air-breathing wearer to survive without air.
The plates of a lunar cloak are individually fragile but so numerous that even a micrometeorite strike will only break a few and leave the overall garment still functional and easily repairable: the garment mundanely provides similar protection to a Protection of Arrows spell (damage reduction 10/magic against ranged weapons), with the garment itself taking any damage prevented, after accounting for its own hardness.
Garments of similar style but far less elaborate construction (20lbs of glass and wire, no stat bonuses) are sometimes worn by lunar elves purely for fashion.
This item appears to be a normal glass bottle with a mouthpiece and strap to allow it to be worn on the face. When taken to any airless environment it retains air within it at all times, continually renewing its contents. This means that a character can draw air out of the bottle to breathe. The bottle can even be shared by multiple characters passing it around. Breathing out of the bottle is a standard action, and a character can then act as long as they can hold their breath. Equipping the bottle onto the face is a standard action, but the character can breathe normally without taking separate actions afterwards.
Additionally, the enchantment has been stabilized such that if the bottle is broken, a Mending spell cast within 1 minute can return it to normal functionality rather than restoring it as a mundane bottle as usual.
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