[b]Guild Name:[/b] Gladiator and Charioteer's Guild

[b]Guild Head:[/b] [url=http://safebooru.org//images/1181/9e5ba17adc3a743b70745b76ca6b2874ca56aeb6.jpg?1230443]Sascha the Elvenblood, undefeated gladiator.[/url]

[b]Guild Description:[/b] The last remnant of blood sports to hang around until this civilised day and age, its methods have moved with the times and recruitment is no longer 'train slaves to fight, try and keep them alive as long as possible to earn the money back'. Instead, it is the single largest provider of non-religious orphanages and education in all of Karstberg, with recruits being those who show skill [i]and[/i] are willing to be trained.

Whilst its two main activities have dropped in power, the guild itself wields considerable economic power through property holdings gained in former days of prosperity, and donations from its more successful students and orphans. Thus, it is in no danger of disappearing without being completely criminalised--and it has the ability to buy both healing and extremely potent, but short lived, defensive charms in large quantities. Thus, whilst their battles (and races) end in 'death' even more than in times gone by, gladiator turnover is actually surprisingly low.

Many gladiators, not finding great success or tiring of the constant 'death' due to superior foes, instead re-purpose their talents--magic users go for scholastic studies, whilst the more martially inclined tend to become watchmen or military. Even those who drop out are still highly trained fighters.

Tradition still reigns in the arena itself: 'life' or 'death' is determined by crowd opinion, and gladiators are often described and matched up by their weapons. Indeed, it's still the tendency to deliberately underarm one side, or give them non-standard abilities. In recent times, this has expanded to include magic as an armament selection--though even then the gladiator is expected to stick to a few specialities and not use all their potential knowledge, for the sake of fair play.

Despite substantial pressure to move out of its original holdings in the Dream District, the gladiators have refused to bow to either the pressure to relocate to the 'guild' district, or to conduct their trade outside of city walls entirely. They have, however, moved all training and administrative facilities out to more up-to-date guild areas, whilst the main race course is still the streets of the city--making race days those times when everyone tries to stay out of the way.

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[b]Race Name:[/b] Elves (Dark)

[b]Race Description:[/b] Named for the colour of their skin as well as their preference for living underground, dark elves are a rather strange offshoot of elven-kind in general. Historically, elven sources show that a small group of elves took to worshipping one of the various 'darkness'-affiliated deities, moving away from the surface eventually and finding themselves in regular conflict with dwarves, though they moved deeper still.

A race heavily reliant on their goddess' blessings, over time they were noted to become less and less like their surface kin--plants and the open sky unnerve rather than reassure, and their vision in the dark is far superior to their near-blindness in sunlight. They are also, to the last, female: a combination of a matriarchal society, and requiring divine support to [i]not[/i] die out entirely, quickly lead to a distinct shortage of males.

It is quite likely that, if they hadn't had to rely on relationships with their male surface kin, they would gradually have become quite... nasty, but as it is they were one of the more tolerant--if more secretive--races. As a whole, they tend to rely heavily on smuggling and the like, but cultivation of mushrooms is a particular speciality of theirs, as is taming normally-hostile wildlife, since most of their homes' natural residents would normally eat a person as soon as look at them. The high-fat diet that they thus subsist on, heavy in meat and dairy, means that dark elves are additionally known for being curvier than your average elf, though this is a cultural product as opposed to a genetic one.

In built up cities, they focus on night time jobs--which has, oddly enough, given them total control of Karstberg's red light district over the previous hundred years, due to a combination of long-term planning and their nocturnal preferences.

When it comes to children, a dark elf and a non-dark elf will produce another dark elf if the child is female or the father's race otherwise, whilst other hybrids work fairly normally. This is a rare occurrence, however, as dark elven culture tends not to place much emphasis on men to any degree, and they don't have a very strong drive to reproduce, lower even than the elven norm.

[b]Dark Elf Religion:[/b] Surprisingly, the goddess the Dark Elves follow predominantly is worshipped commonly on the surface: Mayon. Though some follow Reon, the lunar goddess is of much greater importance to them, with Reon considered a secondary figure who provides the heat that they rely on to see instead, but not getting quite the same focus because she also governs the light they cannot stand.