original comic by Merrivius, edited by u/deleeuwic
transcript
Elf: YOU ARE SO UGLY!
CLUMSY APE!
STUPID MAYFLY!
JUST DIE ALREADY!
Man: You say that you hate me. and yet you spend a lot of time around me.
No. perhaps
spend isn’t the
right word.
You pray for my downfall, but I don’t believe you understand.
I have already accepted my mortality, but you have not.
What will happen to you when I die?
Perhaps you’ll realize that you have let your hatred of me consume you, and you’ll find that without me, your life lacks purpose.
Maybe it will hit you that you’ve spent an age enraged by me, and have never taken a moment to look up.
You may not lose any of your endless life, but the world moves on without you.
You’ve harassed me while historical events passed us by, as people you may have cared about have came and went. You may see your immortality as a sign of perfection, but it isn’t without its flaws.
With no sense of time, you feel no urgency to change.
You can spend centuries consumed with hatred, but eventually you’ll look up and realize what you’ve missed.
Eternity is a long time to bask in your regrets.
You’ll forever be haunted by the memories you will never have.
My life isn’t permanent, but these moments will live on forever in your mind.
I have accepted the weight of my mortality, but you haven’t accepted the weight of the lack of yours.
the original is also funny
100d4 damage vicious mockery
I’m just getting to the end of reading Orconomics, and it had a somewhat novel take on this. Basically, elves live so long that their entire personality can change century over century because they meet, and subsequently outlive, so many new people.
I’m imagining the Joshua Graham bit when you ask him why you shouldn’t just butcher everyone in the Sorrows camp. “There are many reasons. I will illuminate three…” and he proceeds to hit you with one of the coldest, yet simultaneously warmest threats I’ve ever heard in an RPG just as matter-of-factly as discussing how to brew a pot of coffee over a campfire.
THAT is the Wis character nat 20’ing the Intimidation check.
In D&D, your life generally is permanent. It’s just that you’ll only spend a little of it on the material plane.
Here’s a little existential horror story to tell an elf:
When you stand in that presentation hall alongside the galaxy’s greatest scientists as they unveil the discovery of the first Black Dwarf Star, you will feel that existential dread begin to mount in your soul. The universe’s first gray hair signals what you already know, but up until now, have done your best to ignore: you will outlive everything.
Aeons will pass, and you will watch as humanity stretches thin and wide across an evaporating cosmos. In those final moments aboard the station orbiting the last known black hole, as the Habitat Control System’s voice coldly announces that the relativistic generators have run low on fuel, the mortals around you will accept their end with heartfelt, tearful goodbyes. That is their way. There once was a time you would have pitied them. Now, you envy them.
You envy them, even as the gravitational suspension array fails, and the sudden change in pressure from the ruptured hull of the last colony, buckling under its own gravity, ejects you and your crew into the faint glow of a faded accretion disc. The ethereal fire of matter and energy scorches your very being, as you spiral into the abyss.
You lose track of time as you sink into the singularity, somehow still alive. After what could just as easily have been an instant as an eternity, the heat returns in a final burst of Hawking Radiation, before you are exiled into the void of Heat Death, for the rest of eternity.
“…439059104575727262464195387 bottles of beer on the wall, (Graham’s Number) bottles of beer…”
You can’t remember what any of those words mean any more.
