ELVEN LANDS

Basically, all elves live in any of their three territories. There are just ten thousand elves living outside, either adventurers, high diplomats or the occasional merchant. All the rest, you'll find them here:

· VIDOLGREEN: A vast forest located at the western side of Conterria. In the distant past, before the Vortex, Vidolgreen was the only elven country; but then it was much bigger, more than twice its current size. Now a mere shadow of its former glory, it's still the largest forest in the continent; but it gets slowly smaller due to men salvaging the woods closest to their lands, something that fills elves with affliction. There's a shadow in the woods, though, a dark place in the southeast, where the forest was tainted with Hell's corruption, an expanse that is rumoured to be filled with the lost souls of elves that died fighting the infernal hordes. Apart from that, everything is a celebration of greenness and life. Elves (somewhere between half million and one million) live in the inner part of the forest, in places that none from other race has ever seen; enormous arboreal cities can hold thousands of them. Buildings are done in titanic trees as old as the world, and everything is so integrated in the natural landscape that for the untrained eye they would be all but invisible. In these cities elves live under the wise advices of a king and a queen, chosen from the elder for their intelligence and knowledge. All kings and queens are in periodical contact thanks to magical ways, and every decade or so a meeting is held in which all of them visit every city. Vidolgreen is the elven country that keeps most faithfully to the old ways of the race, and they are very happy just to live in perfect union with flora and fauna. Even so, every now and then a rogue elf would want to know more of the outer world, and the very rare elven adventurers will likely come from Vidolgreen.
The name stands approximately for "always flourishing".

· RINTOLLE: The archipelago located between Conterria and Alterria, west of Vidolgreen. It appeared when the Vortex shook the world so hard that terrorizing earthquakes made Conterria split up in two parts, and a good part of Vidolgreen quickly sank under the waters; the islands are what managed to stand above sea level. The population is low, as most of them are direct descendants of the survivors (migration is negligible): something in the vicinity of one hundred thousand inhabitants. The morphology is pretty different from Vidolgreen, as there can't be so dense woods in relatively small islands; because of that, here elven cities are constructed near the shores, with tall stone buildings of rounded shapes. In a way, they resemble the trees that had always been their homes. There they spend their long lives cultivating the arts, that they've honed to a masterful level never seen before, compiling all history in epic odes and wondrous tunes, a swansong worth of gods that will make the legacy of elves live forever. Apart from that, they've also built a small but imposing fleet of ships, that add the luxury expected from elven manufactures to a top performance. But they are just for maintaining the relations between the three elven countries.
Rintolle means "islands of remembrance", and it's a homage to the thousands of elves that died drowned when the earth cracked open.

· YANATHANIL: A small country located in the east of Alterria, southwest of Rintolle. It is the smallest of the elven lands, little more than the area surrounding a gulf and a small peninsula that houses a wood that survived from the pre-Vortex days of Vidolgreen. Population is higher than you would expect for such a small territory, but even so accounts for just under a hundred thousand souls. For the last centuries, almost since the end of the Long War, Yanathanil has been marked by a tense cold war held against the neighbouring human kingdom of Kamenstein, who yearns for the very tactical Yanathanil gulf for his own fleet of warships. This situation has affected greatly to the social and political forms of this land, up to the point that the typical elven pseudo-monarchy has been replaced by a military oligarchy based on the predominant siege mentality. They have little time for Nature or Art, always honing their military skills getting ready for what they think is the inevitable war. This state of mind, and clear xenophobia, has separated them from the rest of their race; but every elf from Yanathanil will readily give his life for their Vidolgreen and Rintolle brothers (a readiness for sacrifice that is reciprocal, too).
The word Yanathanil is usually translated as "steel-strong will", and for that reason the elves from this land are sometimes referred to as "steel elves".