>This is not written anywhere, it a straight consequence of the large gaps in
>the history that has been written. Specifically, pre-Deismaar, the elves
>were civilized for at least 5000 years. This means that immortal elves
>don't die except from the occasional accident (fire), and warfare. Note
>that neither of these is to likely to kill even a medium level (5th+) mage.
>Therefore the majority of elves trained in magic are going to live up until
>the wars with humans. Do you think over a period of 5000 years, as long as
>human recorded history, some of them ?might? get good at wizardry. I mean
>even giving them an advancement rate 10 times slower than a human priest, if
>a human priest will reach a maximum of 15th level in a 100 year lifespan
>(very long for humans), it will only take an elf 1000 years to match this
>achievement. The aforementioned elf has another 4000 years to acquire
>another 15 levels. It should also be noted, as I posted previously, I do not
>buy the caricature of "elves are fuckups who never get around to doing
>anything important", and therefore do not feel that elves should advance
>slower than humans do.


Actually if I am not mistaken the elves fought a losing war against the humanoids (mainly goblins and orogs) when the humans came. When the elves found out that humans "hated" humanoids as much as themselves they were pleased and did all they could to ally themselves with the humans.

As to a Wizard not being likely to kill in warfare I must say that I find that very hard to believe. If we take the 5th level wizard it is more then enough that 5 archers fire 1 round at him for him to die (statistically he has an AC of 10 which makes the archers hit him on 10+ which means that roughly half of their arrows will hit in this case 5 and last time I checked the damage for an arrow is either 1d6 of 1d8 and the magic user HD is only 1d4). Of cause there are ways for him to protect himslef but for each way he can protect himslef there are at least one way to by pass that.
Yes, a high level wizard is very difficult to kill but far from impossible.

As far as the elven 30th level argument I would say that it doesn't hold since, if I am not mistaken, one of the reasons that humans study magic is to gain long life and from what I can read either many of the human Wizards in Cerilia have found this "secret" or a large number of them have managed to get the Long Life blood ability.

>Before Deismaar, there were no bloodlines. Ergo, no human wizards,
>magicians maybe, but no human wizards.
>The only words regarding the appearance of gods in cerilia that I have read
>is that the new gods (post-Deismaar) made a pact not to ever materialize
>fully on Aebrynnis, to prevent any future Deismaar. This implies that no
>such pact was in existance before Deismaar.


Actually humans could cast "true magic" before Deismaar. Admittedly there was only a very limited number but Azrai had his Lost who were sorcerers.

Fredrik