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Are dark eldar immortal and how many live in there city? Just wondering also what if any are the long term goals of the dark eldar.

Are Dark Eldar immortal? Yes and no.

They can sustain themselves for millenia by feeding off of the pain and suffering of others. Vect is crazy old through this process and presumably the more affluent Dark Eldar can keep it going. The issue is that to rejuvenate takes more and more. So aging is a very minor issue to them.

Likewise, they can come back from battlefield death provided they have made a pact with the Haemonculi to rebuild them, and that enough of them is recovered to bring back. If a Dark Eldar gets turned into a puff of ash from a lascannon, there isn't enough there to build them back. But if they get shot up by bolters and their body makes it back to Commoragh, and they have the right deals in place, they will be grown again.

I would not say they are IMMORTAL, as they can die, but they have ways around it.

Not sure about the population of Commoragh, as it is more than just Dark Eldar there, but oodles of aliens as well.

Long term goals? Mostly survival and keeping their status quo.

Thanks that was very helpful i have another dark eldar question about there repopulation do they breed like eldar or are they different.

gilamonster wrote:
Thanks that was very helpful i have another dark eldar question about there repopulation do they breed like eldar or are they different.

They can breed like Eldar, but they have the traditional 'Elven Birthrate', that is to say, a low borth rate and long pregnancy period I believe.
Their 'Trueborn' units are the guys born like real boys.

Much of the population is vat grown. They are stuck in a test tube and grown at an accelerated rate so as to be useful.

Also, due to all the rape shenanigans, Cammoragh has a high number of Eldar-Human hybrids. Many, many times higher then I guess the Craftworlders, Exodites or Corsairs have.

I thought eldar/human hybrids were written out of canon. Is there somewhere that states that is not the case?

Swabby wrote:
I thought eldar/human hybrids were written out of canon. Is there somewhere that states that is not the case?

Wow there was hybrids in Canon at some point?

There was a canon at some point?

I don't think Eldar/Human hybrids have been mentioned ever since 1st Edition - but at the same time I can't recall the possibility being explicitly denied in any material published later by the GW core studio.

"Xenology" goes into some detail about Eldar physiology and, iirc, mentions how different they are "within" as opposed to their outward similarity to mankind, but then again, it's a Black Library book and it also tries to tell me that Tau have feet instead of hooves and that Orks have green instead of red blood.

Personally, I could see them exist (let's be honest, we're talking about the incredibly creative idea of Space Elves here), but to me it'd be a very rare thing, perhaps even requiring genetic manipulation to result in a viable offspring. Ultimately, it's yet another detail that every gamer/reader has to decide for themselves.

Yes there were half eldar/human hybrids in the game very early on, including a half eldar ultramarine. Rogue Trader was awesome.

There is mention of hybrids in Commoragh, but I don't believe it is explicitly stated that these are human/DEldar hybrids? Implied, perhaps, but we also know that the DEldar do a lot of genetic science, and so these might be the result of medical tampering and chimeric DNA splicing, rather than the results of the ol' in and out.

I like a bit of math that came with a thread on the Dark City which I find utterly preposterous, but fun in the same way.

'Commaragh to a hive world would be to compare a mountain to a termite mound'

Ok so an average termite mound is say 4x2x2 meters = 16 m^3
The average mountain according to ask.com is 300 m high 1200 m base so 130000 m^3

Hive worlds have around 5-20 hives per planet each hive housing 10-100 billion people.
So the bottom end of that; 5 hives, 10 billion per hive gives 50 billion people and that is the termite mound.

So the population of Commorragh on the low end using my assumptions is around 542 trillion minimum.
At the high end 100 billion per hive 20 hives per planet 21666 trillion maximum.

But we can assume that the Dark Eldar are NOT a dying species (At least not in the same way as others) and have numbers far exceeding there brethren maybe even put together. And while DE can be technically immortal by feeding on others pain or other ways (Soul trapped in a Djin blade for example, you would never 'die' as in get sucked into the warp). But the amount of souls It takes to replenish themselves after to long becomes unattainable. Vect says he remembers the fall, that would put him at around 10K in age and he takes millions of souls to replenish him. But without a doubt DE are the longest lived 'Mortal' race there is, far exceeding even the oldest humans.

I admit, the bit about feeding off souls does sound a bit like the Emperor...

The DE are the Leonardo da Vinci of soul sucking. The emperor is like a high school art student.

Ultimately we don't know. There are a LOT of them. Far more than regular Eldar. After all the original Eldar empire spanned the entire galaxy and a sizable chunk went into the webway prior to the fall.

Some recent BL stories have hinted at the vastness of Commoragh, and its just one city among many DE hang outs in the webway. It's huge, mind bogglingly so.

Death for a DE doesn't normally happen due to old age. Typically they are killed off by rivals way before they get to the point that he pain of others no longer sustains them. Even then they can be resurrected from the slightest tissue sample.

As far as long term goals: keep alive and stay away from She Who Thirsts while causing as much pain and misery as possible pretty much sums it up.

Commoragh is described as insanely huge. It literally dwarves imperial cities like a mountain dwarves anthill. Even if it is mostly inhabited by slaves, i couldn't imagine it having DE population less than trillions.

Eldar/Human and therefore Dark Eldar/Human hybrids are not really discussed. If 40k has such a thing as a taboo... this is it.

Does that mean the they can't happen? Not really. It's a fictional setting. Use your imagination. It's pointless to discuss the genetic differences between the species since according the voodoo-nonsense of modern genetics men are genetically closer to dolphins than to females in terms of the genome. (Obviously that a numerical difference and not substantial).

As far as Eldar longevity? Who knows. They are naturally long lived by human standards, living to be thousands of years old without intervention. It's also worth noting that Human Psykers are longer lived than normal Humans. if that carries over to the elder than they could also be psychically extending their lives to absurd lengths. As well, Eldar Technology is the greatest in the galaxy (I will ignore all posts from newcron players who attempt to explain differently, rofl) which means that they likely possess something similar too or greater than the Imperial Juvenant sytem.

It is worth noting that eldar supposedly take multiple breeding acts to produce a child. They slowly accumulate DNA from the father into the mother over years supposedly. Whether this is due to the physiology of the father, mother, or a bit of both is the question. Ultimately there is no way for us to know whether eldar could be breed to humans, whether both sexes could be breed or just one, or if the resulting offspring would be viable breeding population.

The DE are interesting. They have been significantly genetically modified from the CWE. They have had all psychic ability removed...this is huge as all eldar were psykers were prefall and supposedly extremely powerful psykers capable of creating and destroying stars with a thought. We cannot be sure what all this modification and vat growth of population has done to them but it certainly appears they don't die from age and the DE population is huge. It appears they are killed by rivals, killed on raids, or devoured by slaanesh more often than anything.

Supposedly even a finger tip is enough to regrow a dead DE. How this works out I have no idea but it is there in the fluff. Considering that an eldar soul is immediately devoured by slaanesh if it touches the warp and their souls go to the warp upon death we can surmise they do not truly "die" per se until a certain amount of time or their physical form is destroyed a certain amount.

DE are actually a rather fascinating faction as it appears that if they ever even stopped fighting each other they would conquer every other faction considering their numbers and tech. Especially considering they are one of the few factions that will use other factions as fodder with no compunctions whatsoever.

Another note on prefall eldar is that it appears they depended mostly on AI tech and their psyker abilities. You will note the DE use neither of these so it is likely the tech they do use is not to the level of prefall eldar tech. The CWE are noted for only being able to use a small fraction of the psyker abilities they possessed prefall due to exposure to the warp drawing slaanesh. This is would actually make sense as to why their military tech seems so low level. They are not using military tech, rather they are using space elf Amish and space elf pleasure cult weapons tech from prefall eldar society. Eldar as we know it are not the SM or even IG of eldar society but rather cultists and conscripts. Pretty crazy, huh.

There's an Archon in the Black Library book Path of the Renegade who was several thousand years old, but seemed to be getting to the point where causing pain was having less and less of an effect on him, so he appeared continuously older. Clearly, there's a point where their lives can no longer be sustained.

Cammoragh is massive. It sprawls over a very large section of the Webway in every direction, and is partly composed of satellite realms, which are pockets of webway, or just other sections, bound permanently to the city by huge, always open Webway gates, meaning the city is even larger than just physical area of the Webway that it covers. Who knows what it's population is, hundreds of millions at the very least, though that number is largely composed of slaves and some sort of lower class that lives in the bottom reaches of the city. The actual Dark Eldar, the raiders and the Kabals, are probably much smaller in number.

On Commoragh:

The way I read the fluff is less that it's one single true 'dark city' and more that the dark city itself is a concept or series of ideals that spreads throughout thousands of cities in the webway to form one huge conglomerate.

 En Excelsis wrote:
Eldar/Human and therefore Dark Eldar/Human hybrids are not really discussed. If 40k has such a thing as a taboo... this is it.

They are actually discussed directly in rogue trader, including how most of them end up occuring.

Likewise, they can come back from battlefield death provided they have made a pact with the Haemonculi to rebuild them, and that enough of them is recovered to bring back. If a Dark Eldar gets turned into a puff of ash from a lascannon, there isn't enough there to build them back. But if they get shot up by bolters and their body makes it back to Commoragh, and they have the right deals in place, they will be grown again.

but do remember as mentioned in Path of the renegade a 40k book the dark eldar remains have to have some what of there soul hanging on to the remains or they cant be brought back.