- Size. Elves range from under 5 to over 6 feet tall and have slender builds. Your size is Medium.
- Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.
- Darkvision. Accustomed to twilit forests and the night sky, you have superior vision in dark and dim conditions. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can’t discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.
- Keen Senses. You have proficiency in the Perception skill.
- Fey Ancestry. You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can’t put you to sleep.
- Trance. Elves don’t need to sleep. Instead, they meditate deeply, remaining semiconscious, for 4 hours a day. (The Common word for such meditation is “trance.”) While meditating, you can dream after a fashion; such dreams are actually mental exercises that have become reflexive through years of practice. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.
- Cold Veins. You have resistance to cold damage.
- Ice magic. You know the ray of frost cantrip. Intelligence is your spellcasting ability for this spell.
No one knows exactly how the elves found a foothold in the north of Iralas - Legends tell of a long-lost elven colony that lost their connection to the other elven regions a long, long time ago.
Frost elves have adapted to their cold environments. Whether this is through a survival of the fittest, evolutionary mechanic or more arcane means, no one really knows.
Knowledge of frost elves only spread relatively recently - outside of their cold, mountainous habitats, they might simply be mistaken for odd-looking elves. Inside their domain, they are usually mistaken for ghosts, spirits, yeti or other mythological snowdwellers.
Culture
While still capable of growing far older than Human, Frost Elves possess far less longevity than their other elven cousins. Combined with their affinity for resisting the cold and their changed appearance, they speak of Prov Sta'aros - which in Common means so much as "The Blessing/Curse of the Cold/Grave", with Sta'aros serving a similar function in their language as how the word 'cold' can refer to both temperature and demeanor, except taken to an extreme.
The double meaning of prov returns in the way Frost Elves greet each other and say farewell: prov na vas, which can mean both "blessing upon you" or "curses upon you", depending on subtext, context and intonation.
Excerpt from Frost Elves: Beyond the Myth & Mountainpeaks by renowned Gnome anthropologist Tokas Farnerswerth.
Appearance
Frost elves tend to have a very pale complexion, with a light-blue or almost perfectly white-tinted skin. Their hair generally varies between light blonde, white or light-blue.