When I introduced eladrin in my readings of the Monster Manual, I wrote that I loved that 4e decided to make a more obvious split between the “fey magician” and “woodsy archer” archetypes for elves, because previous attempts were usually a bit muddled and tended to vary too much between settings.

Well, Forgotten Realms was one of these previous attempts, since it had sun, moon, wood, and wild elves. From reading this book, I know now that these elf types form a spectrum from “more fey” to “more woodsy”, but I didn’t know this before looking it up. Other settings like Greyhawk and Dragonlance have their own proprietary classifications.

The story of elves in FR as told by this book is similar to the generic version: they arrived from the Feywild at the dawn of time as a single people and split into three separate ones over the following centuries: sun elves, moon elves, and those who would become the drow. After the war that originated the drow, some of the survivors decided to go back to nature and became wood and wild elves.

For our purposes here, Sun and Moon Elves are eladrin racial variants, while Wood and Wild Elves are elf racial variants.

Moon Elves

Moon Elves are the friendlier sort of eladrin. Their cultural wanderlust means they roamed further than their cousins and took longer to build stationary empires, but also established good relations with most of the other peoples of the world. While some of them became more isolationist after the Spellplague, you can still find moon elves living in many “mortal” kingdoms and communities. They consider themselves citizens of their nation first, and moon elves second.

With the Feywild in conjunction with the world, many moon elves have also moved over there to explore the plane anew.

Typical moon elf PCs are curious, open-minded, and bold, believing that magic can be found anywhere and good deeds should not be hidden.

They can choose to replace their skill bonuses to Arcana and History with Insight and Streetwise, and to replace the Eladrin Education feature with Elven Weapon Proficiency (longbow and shortbow).

For background picks, they can choose between the Diplomacy and Streetwise skills, and the Chondathan, Damaran, and Untheric languages. All are different human languages, I think.

Sun Elf

Sun Elves are assholes. They consider themselves superior to everyone else, even other elves. To many of them the Spellplague proved that even the non-elven gods are inferior to the elven ones, since the latter emerged mostly unscathed and the former very much didn’t. Some of them welcome their renewed connection to the Feywild, while others view the “core eladrin” newcomers from that plane as yet another inferior species.

Sun elf characters are typically patient, aloof, and incredibly racist. I think their lore in previous editions even has them engaging in genocidal plans? Even if I’m misremembering that bit I would probably still not allow sun elf PCs.

They can choose to replace their Arcana/History skill bonuses with Bluff/Insight, Eladrin Weapon Proficiency with the same Elf Weapon Proficiency moon elves get, and Eladrin Education with Wizard Implement Proficiency. This lets them use wands, orbs and staffs with implement powers from any class.

Their background picks are the Arcana, Bluff, History and Insight skills, or the Draconic language.

Wild Elf

Wild Elves are also assholes. They are described as being as xenophobic as sun elves, and even more isolationist. Their culture is all about living as close to nature as possible and venerating the primal spirits, which they believe is how the common ancestors to all elves lived in ancient times. According to them everyone else is Doing it Wrong, even other elves.

Wild elf characters are typically respectful of nature and the spirits, nomadic in honor of the wanderlust Corellon gave their people, and incredibly racist.

They can replace Elven Accuracy with Subtle Step, which lets them shift their speed once per encounter as a move action. This is very useful considering elves ignore forest-themed difficult terrain. They can also replace Group Awareness with Wild Elf Weapon Proficiency (javelin, spear, longspear).

Their associated background skills are Nature, Perception, and Stealth.

Wood Elves

Wood Elves are the most similar to core elves. They have friendly relations with other peoples, and while they also live close to nature they are not nomadic.

Typical wood elves are protective of their forest homes, but also careful and compassionate. A wood elf might let a trespasser go by if that trespass is not doing any actual harm, whereas a wild elf would kill them on principle.

They can replace Elven Accuracy with Sense Threat, which lets them roll Perception for initiative and give all allies with a lower initiative than them a +2 bonus to their own rolls.

Okay, let me stop for a moment here. This feels amazingly overpowered. The power itself is described in “natural language” not much different from the paraphrased paragraph above, so we don’t know if it’s a power or just a passive ability. In this case, though, there is no difference - you only ever roll Initiative once per fight, so an encounter power like this would get used every fight anyway.

Elf rangers, rogues and fey warlocks simply must train Perception and get this ability. With their ancestry bonuses to Wisdom and Perception, this ensures they will almost always go first, and give +2 Initiative to the entire rest of the party too. Clerics care a bit less about going first, but that Initiative bonus to all allies would still make this power nearly mandatory from a mechanics perspective. You’re more or less getting an entire warlord class feature for free.

OK, going back to their other ability: they can replace Group Awareness with Reactive Stealth, which lets them roll Stealth to hide at the same time they roll Initiative, if they have cover or concealment. Another “mandatory” pick for stealthy strikers, and better than the equivalent utility power from the Bregan Spy since you get it at level 1.

Wood elf background picks are the Diplomacy, Insight and Nature skills, and the Chondathan, Damaran, Dwarven, Giant and Goblin languages.

Impressions

Someone among this book’s authors really likes wood elves. They’re basically 100% core book elves in outlook and narrative role, but their alternate features are by far the most powerful in this entry. Making Sense Threat into a Daily power would bring it to within barely acceptable bounds, though it would still be quite a bit stronger than the similar ability we saw for Oghma’s Faithful.

Wild and Sun Elves also have a couple of interesting abilities in Subtle Step and Wizard Implement Proficiency respectively. The rest of these variant abilities are more or less equivalent to what they replace. Moon elves are the only variant here that could become proficient in both longbows and longswords regardless of class, since they can have the two proficiency traits at the same time.

Lore-wise, I would again probably not allow players to play Sun or Wild elves as written, because those two variants are racist assholes. I would still let them take their replacement features if they so wanted, while being some other type of elf or eladrin.