Editing Rockseer Elf (section)

==Society==
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Rockseers believe that all they have is themselves and the riches of the earth. They are powerfully cohesive socially. Chieftains are generally elected by a conclave of the most powerful warriors and wizards on the death of the previous leader. A wise Rockseer leader does not give orders without consulting his or her advisors. Rockseers do not tolerate tyrannical leadership, nor do they suffer fools.

The lairs of Rockseers are supremely well disguised and warded. Multiple spells are always cunningly placed to prevent other creatures even suspecting the existence of such a network of caverns and passages, let alone entering them. Spies (usually thieves melding into stone) are always placed to watch out over areas close to the entry points of caverns. Some Rockseers live in caverns accessible only by stone walking or similar magic, where hundreds of feet of solid rock separate them from the outside world, with only small fissures to provide air.

Rockseers are highly unusual among elves in that they have little curiosity. Few among them have any desire to learn the ways of other folk. This is largely the legacy of a long historical sense of shame at their mythic history; they consider themselves tainted and instinctively avoid those who they think would condemn them. Once awakened, however, their curiosity can lead them to act in uncharacteristic ways, as those who stumble upon them will soon discover.

Rockseers are gem cutters and craftsmen almost without equal; even [[gnome]]s and [[dwarves]] would hesitate to claim they could better Rockseer work. They can almost scent gemlodes deep in the Underdark and think nothing of spending ten years crafting and sculpting a single gem. The truly great Rockseer wizard-artisans are able to sculpt a gem with magic into forms of almost painfully exquisite beauty, generating fractal patterns of brilliant color and radiance within the heart of the gem as it grows. A handful of such perfectly crafted gems can be used to create a helm of brilliance (divide all gem numbers required by five, and each gem can fulfil its function five times before becoming nomagical).

Rockseers are strange, alien, and fey people even by the standards of elvenkind. They are a serious people with little of the light-hearted, frolicking, bantering ways of most [[elves]]. They speak their own dialect of elvish, which high or grey elves can understand 50% of the time and [[drow]] 30% of the time. They also know fragments of [[svirfneblin]], and most can speak [[pech]]. A few have a smattering of underdark-dwarven and can communicate with [[derro]] or [[duergar]] (not that they would wish to do so, but it is useful for intelligence-gathering). Above all, they are totally isolated. They know nothing of what has transpired above ground for thousands of years. Their attitudes to surface elves are very ambivalent. All Rockseers feel a deep sense of shame for the deeds of their far-distant ancestors and assume that any surface elf they meet would automatically despise them; it will be very difficult for a visitor to convince them otherwise. On the other hand, they long to know what their brethren lost for so many lifetimes do, how they live, what they believe in, what they consider beautiful.