Both Volkswagen and Areva went far beyond that.


No corporation, real or imagined, wants a free market. A free market is, in ideal, an exchange of product between a transparent producer and a well-informed consumer. No producer wants that. That would require way too much transparency. That would mean way too much effort to actually compete with competitors. Who wants that? Besides, what consumer does te necessary research to be well-informed? When you nwant a chocolate bar, you hardly ever have time to research all the relevant facts about their respective producers anyway, since you haven't got months to make your decision. Free marets are an utopian illusion, just as post-scarcity socialism is. Free market theory is the West's Marxism-Leninism.

There are hardly even reasonably liberal markets, save where they're tightly regulated and the capital's side isn't allowed to pull the usual dirty tricks to obscure the bad about their product and lie about the good stuff it supposedly does. Counterintuitively, the less a market is regulated, the less "free" as per free market theory it becomes. However, for what ends the Shadowrun megas control the markets is exactly the same as real-life corporations do.


And, since Shadowrun has viable cold-fusion power, cheap energy is there. Throwing energy at food production is a thing because fusion power uses readily available fuel and generates great output. Not entirely without radiation and waste, but manageably.


That's because higher-organized animals cannot break up cellulose. That's a high-energy substance - but breaking it up is limited to small bacteria - bacteria that live in the secondary stomachs of many larger land-living hebrivores. that's something else meat does - it translates inedible-for-humans, but very high energy carbohydrates (cellulose) into biomatter that is edible to humans. It, by proxy, allows humans to eat grass. That's the basic idea behind cattle.

Now, you could use a variation of those bacteria to break up cellulose in bioreactors and produce some edible protein too, I suppose - that process probably would be more efficient and much better controlled end-to-end by a corporation interested in dominating the food market, for sure. That's, again, where marketing and designer foods come in.


I'd not say they can't compete (under properly bad work conditions, they could in today's market too, and do throiughout China) but they're less of an automatic given than you think because Shadowrun has no enery scarcity to speak of (actually, with fusion power, generating carbon fuels from air becomes viable too - it's not exactly energy efficient, but neither is photosynthesis).


Rather, electic vehicles powered by either solar power - Shadowrun has 20% effective (and probably nightmare black) solar cells, and the real world is at around 15% in unstable laboratory prototype things - or wind, or hydro, or any combination thereof. Or, if fusion power eventually becomes viable enough, just generate carbon fuels from air. No horsecarts or steam carts necessary.

OK, maybe I missed something, but I cannot remember that Shadowrun had viable fusion - hot or cold. Fission, yes, but not fusion.

If that is true, that changes everything. Everybody can have all the high density packed food production they want! Custom bork (beef-pork hybrid)? Coming right up from a factory near you. Factory farms running aeroponic gardens two hundred feet high? No problem, (much) less than a square mile of those should feed NYC. Fusion gives you energy for running your grow lamps, pumping your air and water, managing effluent and transporting it all, not to mention extracting whatever nutrients you want from air and seawater. Oranges in the arctic? Can do. Cranberries on the equator? Easy.



Yup. Fusion ushers in the age of eat-what-you-want. Obesity suddenly became a Shadowrun problem. Fusion means forget everything I ever said about food production in Shadowrun, it's a non-stop party at food-o'-clock.

I was asked for the explanation of what gangs of labourers can do with their shovels that today's tractors can't match.

The first thing is, they're more precise. Today's tractors can't readily turn over every corner. You can run the harrow from fence to fence, but the corners tend to get missed. Another thing is that they're more detail-oriented. You can send labourers in to hack out thistles, but not the crops. Today's tractors can't do that. Another thing is that labourers can even out the land - unless your tractor has a grading attachment (and most farm equipment doesn't) that's not easy, and probably not readily possible. Labourers do it as a matter of course. Now, you might be able to replicate some of these effects with a farming drone army, and with InfiniFusion ™ you might even find that worthwhile, but for today's tractors these are pretty much out of reach.

In the SR timeline in 2027 The Los Angeles Power & Water Company begins the first use of cold fusion, using the fresh water by-produced from salt water to alleviate water shortages.

How many reactors have been switched over and which ones might still be running fission is hard to pin down, but it should be noted given the number of meltdowns at the fission facilities in the SR timeline alone, many probably made the change over.

However what they don't say is how portable these new fusion plants are so can they be dropped easily into remote locations or for big mecha yet? unknown.

OK, I don't know how I missed that.

But here's how it changes everything, even if the fusion plants are huge and totally static:

Massive grid power, practically at maintenance prices. You can charge batteries, you can synthesise chemical fuels, you can refine and synthesise nutrients, you can power mining and refining of minerals on a massive installed scale. You can even overcome exhaustion of mineral phosphates by refining from oceanic sources. You can generate light, manage fluids, all the difficult, expensive things.

At this level, the only reason to have a farm is for scenery, the only reason to eat krill is because you're tired of beef, the only reason anyone starves is active malice on the part of someone else.

However, this breaks down if there's anywhere that your fusio-matic energ-o-rama can't reach. Then the full horror of malthusian limits applies in full. But most of the world's population lives in insanely dense cities, stuffed with vertical farms powered by fusion power, and between the Matrix and abundant food they have all the bread and circuses anyone could demand.

That's actually a staple, beginning at the latest with the Seattle Sourcebook and Shiawase Atomics' Glow City fusion plant. In terms of since when, California and Germany sourcebooks offer slightly divergent dates (2027 in CalFree, 2011 in Germany). However, by 2070, it can safely be assumed to be a staple technology, though reactors remain very large and clunky.

As for remote mecha units, well ... kinda. There's the mobile Red Wheel prison and Megiddo and Megiddo II, Proteus' cities on legs that walk up and down the danish coast, but other than that nobody has really gone anywhere with this.


Technically yes. Practically, that applies only to proper citizens. There are other social forces at work, after all. Orks are the true welfare queens and everything. Besides, someone still has to build the fusion plants, they still produce irradiated waste (just *less* so than fission reactors) and they still probably make every nature spirit really unhappy (I figure every government in Shadowrun should have adopted Iceland's policy on nature spirits anyway).

So, the food party stops at the gates of the corporate burbclave. National SINners get access to tall the stuff, but mostly stick to designer food based on soy, mycoprotein, fermented cellulose (I believe the Shadowrun term is Jalkoban?) and other base components you can have your Soy-Chef-o-Tron turn into virtually anything. The SINless? There'S always delicious rats and unprocessed base components handed out by private charity so the rich can feel all that much richer, safe in the knowledge that being poor really, really sucks.


Exactly that. Unfortunatly, a very realistic approach.


Well, your redneck runs cover this rather extensively. I don't believe the drown-in-a-bucket sized governments of Shadowrun would have either the means or the will to maintain a power grid that extends anywhere. Outside the fusion-powered sprawls, there is only wind energy and severe lack of everything.

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I don't believe the food party stops at the corporate anything. Let me explain:

You don't produce enough food. Ever. That's a road to starvation. You produce a surplus. What you don't use can always be composted, combusted, converted or somehow beneficially recycled. You produce a surplus, and do so in sufficient variety to produce an illusion of prosperity. Moreover, if you do your sums, you figure out that with energy-rich society, you can feed maybe 1,000 people per acre (bearing in mind that you can cram three seasons into a year, and optimal intercropping and tiered arrangements) - combined vertically, if you have a vertical farm, you can duplicate that every ten vertical feet or so. So in a 200 foot vertical farm, you can feed 20,000 people per acre. At 640 acres per square mile, you can feed ten million people per square mile. Even assuming that a place like NYC ballooned to 60 million people in the greater metropolitan area, despite all the plagues, disasters and conflicts, you can still feed everyone amply and affordably at a going cost of 6 square miles, with a substantial surplus on top.

So what happens to the surplus? Well, what happens today? Infamously, the US dumps staples through charity, thus massively disrupting agricultural operations across large stretches of the third world, and creating dependencies. It's not secret - it has reached the point of geopolitics (and frankly, most of the rich west does the same). So unless you're extending your notion of private charity to include megacorporate practices, I think you're missing the mark. They would deliberately, as a matter of policy and intention, spread the food wealth far and wide, and they would brand it. Those Horizon guys are great! They just brought a truckload of sorghum, canned meat, and beer! For free! To the slums! And they're handing out Horizon hats and shirts! Yay! And what the hell, they put down a few Horizon-branded prototype autodocs for everyone to use! Boy, those are some swell folks!

And please observe that while this might have some level of relevance to how rich people feel about themselves, you don't have to dip into the narcissism bucket to justify it. It's just good business. They get a loyal base of clients (in the roman sense, not the business sense), they get regular test markets for their prototypes, they get brand awareness and recognition, and all for the low, low cost of stuff they didn't really have a use for anyway, plus shipping.

And in the final analysis, why would they do this? Because unless they just want to flatten everything and torch the rubble, they don't want starving mobs. Mob invasions, complete with mass rapes, lynchings and arson, are bad for business. And there's nothing like starvation to motivate mobs. So, as long as they can, they will keep the bread and circuses coming, and try to predict and remove troublemakers. Hell, I'd expect they'd try to balance their food supply so as to reduce the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat.



However, there wouldn't be much farming in a fusion-powered society. No reason for it, out in the wilds. Why farm out in the boondocks when you can do the same, easier and cheaper in town? Why sweat and suffer if the megas are competing to feed you for free? This is why massive so-called geopolitical food charity has been so devastating to agriculture in the third world. Only a few religious and ideological nuts would bother - and they'd be a fringe element at best.

Awww, thanks.

You know, looking back on it, I guess I did vaguely remember fusion in Shadowrun, but it's one of the things that I always kind of ignored, on the basis that it's such a huge change that was not actually meaningfully reflected in the environmental material, that it can't actually have significantly affected society.

In the bigger picture, a combination of climate change and energy scarcity feels a lot more shadowrunny.

I wonder what fried eggs with shadowrunny yolks are like?

... but I digress. Energy is so fundamental to the definition of wellbeing and poverty, that my take on it was that fusion never took off for whatever reason, leaving us with primarily coal (poor quality and progressively depleting) and lots of nuclear (because the hell with scare stories, people want modern life).

With oil scarcity, grid power doesn't do a good job of driving tractors, and fission fuels are expensive enough to extract, refine, transport, maintain and apply that just synthesising liquid fuels isn't a great plan. This would be terrible for agriculture - motivating a lot of Redneck Runs.

Oh well. Thanks for the head-check, folks.

Koekepan, I've always figured the only way they could do many of the things in SR is with fusion power. As you have amply explained (very nicely too), food production on a scale needed in an awakened and aggressive world needs that energy source. Arcologies don't seem viable without some sort of cheap energy source since heat dispersal is going to be thing with those types of structures. Even things like the apparently eternally powered cyberlimbs need some sort of battery or something. Whatever runs them and also powers your cybereyes, your smartgun your commlink and a slew of other devices that don't need charges. Though why you can get a cyberarm that runs forever but your taser needs to recharge after 10 shots, I don't know. Energy in general isn't well explained in Shadowrun.
I see places with much lower populations like the NAN lands perhaps using more traditional farming techniques but that will again, depend on how deep the corporate fingers are dug into their food supply. Otherwise, yeah, megacities with fusion plants powering vertical farms must be a thing. And really, without farms in the country, there is little reason for most folks to live anywhere but in the city. That's where the jobs, entertainment and resources are all going. Add awakened monsters roaming about and other magical anomalies and regular farming takes on some pretty terrifying problems beyond resource management. Having to hire guards to keep roaming gangs or shedim or juggernauts or whatever out of your farmland and away from your crops and livestock just adds to the cost.


Jannessa I've played Nights Dark Agents. It could be vampires or it could be aliens or it could be Cthulhu-esque horrors from beyond. It's up to the GM and it provides rules and options for each of those ideas. Some interesting game mechanics ideas and a really simple resolution system make it fast to play. It was fun but once the campaign was done we were back to Shadowrun.

SR has fusion power but also energy scarcity. I'm guessing that there're a lot of illegal taps that flicker and that, for some reason, fusion is expensive to maintain. It might also be that the SR world simply has a vastly higher energy need to operate (everything's electric! Screens everywhere! Even your SHOELACES give off EM radiation!) ... regardless, there's enough energy, but not a surplus, and the poor have shortages. Rationing is talked about in many sections (Such as squatters being lucky to pull 4 hours of juice a day), so, there's another factor at work.

I just dunno what.

I need to read more of the old books. Which is, you know ... not exactly a *chore*.

Maintenance, or lack thereof, of the distribution system is probably a key factor Wak.

Sure the corp zones and the A+ sections are well maintained but they pay for it. General populace areas still get decent amounts of power, though any hit to the system can black out whole neighborhoods.

Then you get to the rougher parts, where a lot of times the crews are not being paid enough to go down there so only go in the worst of cases.
And that is not counting awakened pests that may like the taste of copper, the insulation or even the electric currents themselves.
Plus you will have folk stealing wire, running taps, etc... putting more workload on the battered sections of the powergrid network that are working at any given time.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/ar...in-fortune.html as an example of copper theft, though this is from the rail lines, but still give you an idea of what you can be dealing with.

Redlining along the Corper/SINner/SINless divides may also play into this. The more SINless live in an area, the less priority it has when the city decides where to fund upkeep and where not, that kid of thing (same with insurance premiums and hazard pay for workers, allocation of corporate partnerships, ect).

Just have a look at the real world for a second: There is no technological hindrance which dictates that only X billion people can have electricity, we could just start building powerplants in all the places which need them, feed the homeless, distribute 1 million refugees among ~750 million EU citizens, by the numbers none of that is a problem at all. But does it happen?

I always figured it as their infrastructure outside of the corp arcologies being frankly shit. It's been through multiple crashes and rebuilds, the governments are too broke to maintain it, and nobody else will take on the losses. So you end up with power setups in the Barrens that look like modern India :

http://i.imgur.com/h4lWQmJ.jpg

There is an upper limit to the crapitude of everything; if squatters live in an area where grid power is basically a pipe dream, it's far too likely that they'll do their own minigrid, with or without off-grid plans. You risk, strategically, that they stop needing you on some level. To a long term thinker this is a threat, because if they don't need you, they can afford to get rid of you. One wants a certain degree of dependency to ensure some degree of loyalty (however grudging).

Basically, living next to people who have no interest in your wellbeing, no need for what you provide them, but a hot resentment then you are in trouble unless you're willing and able to simply firebomb them out of existence. True sub-breadline poverty will end up with a warlord leading waves of the hopeless against you - and you can't negotiate with people who are watching their children starve. You have no greater horror to offer them.

Honestly, the whole system is pants-on-head retarded. The whole SINless/SINner divide is asinine; just give everybody a fucking SIN. We call that "Citizenship." Provide food and jobs, or at the least some kind of guaranteed minimum living standard that isn't "whatever you can scrape out of appalling conditions," and folks will be content.

It is the way it is because people are assholes in the Sixth World, basically.

I'm actually OK with the SINner/SINless divide. Here's why:

Governments have a long, long history of defining who is inside and outside their system (look at international management of stateless people) and those choices have been whenever possible, based on the most useful or loyal groups receiving benefit. The ends of social justice are nominally met by the apparent ability of people to obtain a SIN without too much difficulty, if they will just submit to various checks and so on - that are unpleasantly intrusive, from the perspective of many. The fact that many can not obtain SINs for one reason or another owing to institutional racism or other issues is an ugly fact of embedded social bias, but again, that's entirely normal for the history of the world.

As far as access to food is concerned, the open question would then be how much market access the SINless have, and to what extent there is a parallel system. Given various assumptions about human capacity for creation of black markets, barter systems and so on, it doesn't take a genius to guess that the SINless will find ways of muddling through. The more complex question is whether or not, and to what extent, they will be responsible for their own food production. On the whole, I anticipate that this will be heavily regional, but the bulk of the SINless will drift around metropolitan zones, where they will not create their own food (under the working assumption of Fusion Happy Food Time) but will effectively be clients of the same system that excludes them from the benefits of full membership.

One spoiler here is the comparative value of running AI (which is very energy-greedy) as opposed to SINless. On paper, with a rather unlimited source of electricity, AI's fairly cheap to run, but the social purposes behind giving SINless access to Mechanical Turk-style busywork can actually justify the overhead.

On a different note, I have decided that fried eggs with shadowrunny yolks would be bitter, carcinogenic and yet strangely compelling.

Sorry for response delay, work has been nearly every waking minute for the last few days. Finally getting a chance to visit Dumpshock again.

Anyhow...

And you see how well that worked out for them - they had to close their mines and/or pay big fines. Planning for evil instead of profit hurts your bottom line. Do it enough and go out of business. Free tip for aspiring evil corporate executives: the pros actually care about making a profit. It's hard to sit back in your fancy office and laugh maniacally after your company's gone out of business and you no longer have the fancy office anymore to plan your evil schemes in.



Unless the shareholders have enough votes to oust the CEO and Board. Lofwyr doesn't have any other shareholders to worry about, as I'm pretty sure he owns all the common stock in Saeder-Krupp. Damien Knight, on the other hand, continually wishes he owned at least 51% of Ares stock so that he could tell the other shareholders to go catch VITAS and die, but he doesn't, and so has to keep fighting to keep his job.

The AAA's in Shadowrun can behave feudally not just because they're big and powerful, but because the shares of common stock are usually owned by just a small number of shareholders, typically between like 1 and 6 people on average, IIRC. That's a single king or a council of nobles at the top, not the large # of shareholders in a more publicly-traded corporation. So the common folks can't really buy in and get a vote on how things are done - the nobles dictate from on high.

No corporation right now has any interest in an actual free market, either. They would all love to be in that position. So, there's no difference of intent of corporations from the current day to the Sixth World.

It had an Essence score at some point, but doesn't anymore, and makes that big of a difference in a ghoul's diet? I call BS. By that reasoning, can I get a combat bonus from a sword that used to be an enchanted weapon focus, but isn't anymore?


Now that I'll grant you, those would very likely still be cheaper than a cloned steak. But my point is that the whole trope of "real food is rare and expensive and only for the rich in the future" doesn't fly. It's dated 80's cyberpunk, and should be retired.

I've been to a few rich estates in the country, now and then over the years. Even if they're not "city-legal," out on country estates they've got a few toys they play with they wouldn't necessarily bring into town. So, yeah, not downtown, but some distance outside of town...

Specific book and page # reference, please.



Good for him. My criticisms stand. Shadowrun's done a good job in some areas with presenting a picture of the possible future, accounting for some technologies. For instance, I love how they've presented AR, and speculated on the impact it will have on society. But it has to keep up with the times. Go back and look at the early editions of SR, and a lot of stuff in them looks really dated now. I contend that this is one such thing that's still persisted through SR4 (and I think through SR5, though I haven't read the SR5 books anywhere near as thoroughly as I've read the SR4 books).

Trying to keep ahead of the modern world, let alone 62 years ahead, ain't easy. I try, but it doesn't always pan out.

Wakshaani, I completely understand the limitation.

I realise that I may have poisoned this particular well, and it might annoy no end of grognards, but in the light of all that has happened, and the additional wranglings of the community, do you have any idea whether the editorial body have given any thought to a verisimilitude-based revisitation of the Shadowrun concept? I've continued working on one, in my amateurish illiteracy, somewhat desultorily.

If there is, and there is a thinktank of economists, sociologists and political scientists hard at work, just looking for a farmer to help out, you could always pass the word.

You mean the sword handcrafted from "virgin" natural telesma because such materials make a far better focus?

For magic in the SR universe, all the "appeal to nature" bollocks are actually true: A substance filtered from tree sap in a traditional way is better than the same substance filtered in an industrial centrifuge, which is again better than the syntehsized version of the exact same molecule. A dragon's claw clippings are worth a fortune because they once were part of a creature with magic rating "lolwut", even though technically it might be no different from a cow's horn. And ghouls have to complement their diet with a certain portion of human meat because that mean once was part of a living creature.

I'm not going to tell you that 2+2=5 is fine because there is magic. But "living" or "natural" things having certain magical properties which "artifical" materials don't simply is part of SR's view on magic -- I would guess that like a lot of SR's magic system it's a reflection of IRL hermetic beliefs, or maybe it was just a game balance measure...

I don't actually mind a lot of the weird anachronisms of SR fluff. I just put it down to the SR timeline having split from our timeline in the 90s and some things just never developing the way we have. The first Crash set things back quite a bit too and when you add in the secretive nature of the AAAs and their corporate feudalism, it shouldn't be too surprising that some of the things we see as a future or take for granted today just aren't in the SR world or else or far less developed than we think they should be.
If you've seen the TV show Fringe, think of how the two earths differ. That's how I see things in the SR world vs ours.

I doubt that's a good idea. You only end up with some timid, unimaginative Medal of Duty: Black Secret Modern War Crime Division background with some fantasy attached, like what Trollman once cooked up. The one interesting thing about Shadowrun, the one thing that sets it apart from other, similar systems, is the background. Take this away and you have clunky rules and nothing else to show for.

Personally I disagree. One of the many things that drew me to Shadowrun all the way back in high school was how, relative to D20, the firearms combat was realistic and deadly. It never seemed right to me in D20 type settings how a character could eat multiple bullets and keep running like the energizer bunny due to how hitpoints worked. In SR2, with the high damage codes and the fact that getting shot made it harder to do things, things just seemed so much more real.

I remember years ago when I used to GM SR3 one of my players once commented that once you played with SR you wonder why you weren't using the SR system all along for everything. We even ran some modern-day and historical fiction type campaigns without explicit magic using the SR3 rules for firearms and other things.

Clunky would be Phoenix Command. I spent many hours playing Phoenix Command by myself trying to get good at the rules and really appreciating the attempt at detail and realism in firearms combat. I respected how they essentially tried to implement all the posture changes and movement modifiers that you see in today's realistic FPS games but in pen and paper format, but also saw how tracking all that stuff for multiple combatants burned through tremendous amounts of my mental energy. Also, Phoenix Command, in all of its attention for detail, actually falls a little bit short in the sense that it doesn't fully incorporate some modern training practices that address and improve shooting while walking or point shooting, but rather just fully penalized those practices as if you didn't know what you were doing when you were doing it.

So, I don't know, I always thought that SR2 and 3 was excellent, intuitive, and real-feeling, and that was part of why I loved it for many years.

You don't have to throw away the background. You just have to rationalise it with an eye for verisimilitude. Hence my mention of sociologists, economists and so on.

For example, JanessaVR started this thread to address the food issue, and rapidly we got to see how there are major milieu issues raised by the food topic. Similarly, I started a thread on the topic of runner havens, how and why they might exist (also thus overlapping on the topic of extraterritoriality) and how and why they might persist, and be tolerated.

There are lots of things in the background as written that make thoughtful observers grunt with puzzlement, or even cringe. Fixing that doesn't mean ditching the whole idea.

That's the exact problem. This leads to weak, unimaginative fiction. You cannot write fantasy, let alone speculative future history, while wanting it to "sound plausible" against today's world, beliefs and suppositions. History doesn't always sound plausible, you just accept it at face value. I mean, if I had written a near-future setting in 2003 where Donald Trump is the republican candidate for presidency, just how plausible would you have thought that to be? Yet here we are.


Well, but often, it does. Take Trollman's approach to the NAN - unreasonable! not enough Indians! cannot possibly happen in America! - he replaced it with some racist garbage about Muslims, I think. Of course, you can rationalize within the context, too (for instance, interpret the "and their allies" in 1E SAIM's description as "many Latinos and African Americans who were just fed up with the Garrety/Jarman administration, who then subsequently were either adopted into the new tribes or formed their own), but, while preservative of much of the background, that's not the kind of change your approach does, as it merely interprets existing writing.

That's the issue. SR's background doesn't pass verisimilitude to the degree you'd want because it runs on different historical assumptions and a quite literally different set of physics than the real world.

Comparisons are generally flawed because in Shadowrun, the assumptions we would make are provably wrong. The NAN don't exist because of some groundswell of public sentiment, they exist because a group of angry Native Americans pulled off a massive magical terror campaign and in the end forced the government to make a treaty with them rather than roll them under. The Tirs are nation-states that are openly racist magical regimes, and yet everyone still deals with them.

Hell, Lofwyr outright owns most of a first world country.

None of these things can really be rationalized against modern assumptions. Same goes for the flow of technology, after two full on Crashes, and the brain-drain of VITAS taking out most of a generation.

Neither can this year's US presidential race. The problem may not be solely with the fiction, but with these assumptions.

Nah, this year's race makes perfect sense, historically. Both parties are starting to fracture, as has happened several times in the past, and this has led to candidates who would otherwise be outside the mainstream taking a run at it to capitalize on a voterbase getting frustrated with gridlock and feeling ill-represented.

Same reason Dunkelzahn won, actually.

Trump is a Great Dragon! It explains so much!

Including why he wrote The Art of the Deal, come to think of it, and thinking of what we don't do with dragons...

Wait, so you're telling me Donald Trump is an immortal elf?

He'd be about the frumpiest looking elf ever. Unless it's a very good mask spell.

Elves are guaranteed to be charismatic, not beautiful.
Hitler was hypnotically charismatic, and ugly as a bulldog's anus.