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Ay, I bet you read the title. Get it? Because it's an Elf Help book. Hahaa.

Anyway, I need some Elf Help. I'm still working on my fantasy wargame or whatever, and I need a way to make my elves Different And Interesting. Although, I haven't thought about them all that much because they're not quite as fun as some of the more whackass races. I like the idea that they're like Dwarf Fortress Elves, and they get everything they need by asking nature very politely with their innate Druid Magic. However, since the typical medieval 97% of the population would no longer in food production, I have no idea how this is going to work or what their world would look like in comparison to the rest of medieval society. I have a few ideas for how Elves might work in this world.

Explanation 1: Elves are Vegetarian Warrior Communists.

Elves, free of the hardship of attrition in their homelands and no longer "battling with nature", seek to envelop the world in wilderness so that they can provide for everyone and live in a perfect utopia where everyone gets a fair share of everything. Problem is, people are constantly fucking up the wilderness with agriculture and shit, and so Elves have arbitrarily declared war on all manner of farming peoples that decide not to integrate into their world. They consider Dwarfs to be the ultimate Capitalist Assholes because their entire society is based around chopping down all the plants and otherwise abusing and enslaving nature with agriculture, making their job as spreaders of Economic Enlightenment very, very hard.

They don't have any nobles or feudal politics, but rather a senate of family leaders and a First Citizen that gets elected for a roughly 100 year term. (Elves in this universe only live 150 years. The term length is less an official number and more "We won't reelect until you die, or you get sick of this, or we get sick of you.) Their leaders are often surrounded with a cult of personality, and every one of them has always been the craftsman working-class Philosopher King who's gonna unite the world under the flag of plenty. Much like Orcs, they spend a lot of their time planning raids and trying to take over the world, but, rather, instead of slaughter, chaos, and accruement of shinies, it's with the intent of appropriating all civilization under their benevolence. Those smug Elf Bastards.

Explanation 2: Elves are all nobles and they're constantly squabbling for power.

In medieval society, there's basically rulers, the soldiers they command, and farmers. Tons and tons of farmers. But Elves don't have any farmers. If they're hungry, they go out and conjure an apple out of a tree with their bare hands, or ritualistically massage their pet heiffer until they have a bucket of milk. In the forest, every living thing is basically your personal refrigerator. Which leaves us with only soldiers and nobles. As a result of this, Elves may think that they're all entitled to the bounty of the earth, and specially chosen by the gods to rule their homeland(s) and more.

This means, as Elves grow and appropriate into bigger and bigger primary families, eventually they form a vast series of forest-city-states and every one elf has a series of incestuous claims on every other elf. Blood feuds and family grudges are a regular part of daily life, and a 150 year life and a long memory is more than enough time to settle some old scores and create hundreds more. Elves in this way would be very xenophobic, hateful, and hold everyone but themselves largely in extreme contempt. I may save this for the Dark Elves if this isn't very good for the regular ones.

Explanation 3: Elves are basically The Federation from Star Trek.

With no need for the accumulation of Food, and with faith in the better angels of our nature, Elves maintain their status as the designated Good Guys (With a sordid and violent history nonetheless) and seek only the things that matter beyond material amenities, like the quality of art, enlightenment, social prestige, and scientific knowledge. I'm uhhh, not quite as enthused with this idea, but it feels like a good handwave until I get into an Elf Mood again.

Anyway, I'd like other perspectives. How would this stuff affect the feel of the elves? Which interpretation would you prefer? And of course point out any logistical holes you can come up with, because I like building up more than out sometimes.

I like the first one the best, only because explanation 2 is quite cliche in terms of elves, and three is just 'basically' the Federation. It also, at least to me, bleeds a lot of story potential and interesting plot devices. Just my two cents, though.

I like number one but I'm not sure why the elves need wilderness so badly. (Or by wilderness do you mean specifically forests?) Otherwise, no matter what kind of terrain you're in you're talking about a lot of weeds and useless things and things with thorns that are taking up space while not being edible. It's just common sense to want the trees and plants that are better for politely requesting food from to grow more closely together, and then congratulations, you've become the enemy.

These elves would be much cooler if they were obsessed with a particular kind of tree or mushroom and wanting to spread it all over the world, perhaps due to a compulsion they don't quite understand, IMO.

They're supposed to be like "Guardians of the plant order" so it's assumed that everything as it is has grown in a particular way so that it allows the feng shui of nature to flow better for the elves to tap into it. In wilderness that's been properly untouched by people, an elf can get food from just about any plant or tree, and they are technically allowed to introduce animals to weedy areas, because it's still contributing directly to the biological carbon cycle on an order of magnitude that chopping up "useless" plants and burning them or composting them wouldn't. Their stereotypical bronze/gold/olive skin is also photosynthetic, especially to the color green or blue, so generally leafy and tall plants of all kinds are useful to them to just shine light off of or sit among where they might not be so beneficial to other people.

And I already have compulsive Mushroom Spreaders, mostly the Mushroom People, but since they're able to use a mycelium network to connect in some way with most of nature, Elves probably also consider them natural, making warfare difficult for them. There's probably cults of  "infected" elves (and everyone else) who used their sapient Penicillin to clean a wound by accident, and now they feel the compulsive need to spread spores.