Tell me about the dwarfs of your setting

There's four major groups of dwarves
- One is Wolf-riding Na-Dene (Athabaskans and Apache), some have settled towns
- One is Etruscanesque Post-Renaissance italians
- One is Bear-hunting Basques
- The last one is annoying Georgian and Tchetchens whose kingdoms are basically a major imperial borderland.

Government: A split between traditional monarchies with a council of elders and anarcho-mutalists.
Other items: major debaters, merit-based reputations, they dig and tunnel due to an ancient mandate that they must build (and people pay a lot in resources for those metals found deep down)

Burly men and women who likes to farm and mine, usualy taller and stronger than the average human. Pacific but fierce, like that barman that never talks but kicks your ass out the pub if you make a scene. They have vestigial horns and tails like cows, hooves for feet and three large fingers on their hands. Rarely a "more animal than man" is born among then, they call it a minotaur and exile it.

There are the Iron Dwarves who are xenophobic as fuck and hold themselves up in their mountain holds and only trade with the nearby humans and centaurs one week a year for raw stuff.

North Dwarves are total bros and secretly holding an ancient evil at bay in the middle of their lands

Mark Dwarves are split in two, free and slave. The dark elves enslaved them for generations but a good size group broke free and are now fighting a guerilla war against the dark elves who are basically the Italian city-states of the setting.

Tolkien dorfs with guns

dorfs are to elves as halflings are to humans

>"We live in mountains and eat rocks, or something"
Mine have agriculture in the way of edible mushrooms that taste like dirt, but are rich in vitamins and a kind of rice-like plant that grows on the light emitted by enchated crystals. They also raise goats and catch ugly-ass angler fish from underground water sources. An underground setting can be pretty kickass if you think them through.

The problem with having dwarves who live purely subterranean lifestyles is that you end up in a scenario where the dwarves never interact in any meaningful way with the world around them. Dwarves who live mostly above ground and employ agriculture means that they will frequently encounter other races, and may fight over territory and resources. If the only live underground, and are totally self sufficient, with nothing they need from anyone else, then they will just stay shut away in their mountain homes, and they will just be "that really interesting society that we will never see because nobody has any reason to go there".
Unless of course you're playing as the dwarves, in which case it will turn into "that really interesting society which you will never leave and thus will never see the rest of the equally interesting world".

These dwarves, while very self-sufficent, depend on trade for many things like lumber, finer food and liquor, textiles, surface fauna like medicinal herbs/dyes/hemp, ect. They can sustain themselves, but dwarves typically favor comfortable lifestyles.

No great clans
No mountain cityholds
No book of grudges
No THEY DUG TOO DEEP
No We be Miners dun dun dundundun
No Irish/Scottish/Welsh accents

Just plain ol' folk who grew out of hunting/gathering and settled down near a river or other natural resource. Out there in an elemental plane there's dorfs that mine gold and have great cities underground but those dorfs and these dorfs have nothing in common other than physical appearance.

Only met one. He was part of a slaver group that captured us.
We got free and killed him along with the rest of the group.

Then hijacked their boat and sailed it straight into the docks before detonating the gunpowder aboard and watched a good hundred slavers and pirates die in a very short spanse of time.

Cliché as fuck; underground keep dwelling, fungus farming, ancestor worshipping, gun inventing, armor clad midgets with axes.

In one of the campaigns I'm in, we found these artificial dwarves with a skin like chainmail who were pushed to near extinction, because despite building a great and glorius underground city, their creator was a cunt and left a portal to hell or something spewing demons all over the place before he just up and left. He stops by in his UFO every month or so to recharge his battery off their toils.

We've helped them push back the demons some and have looted and pillaged our way through the ruins of their city. They basically eat biodiesil fuel.

Pretty much pic related, except not tiny. And robo-dwarves.

Functionally immortal, dwarves become more and more stone-like as they age. The mountains dwarves live in are in fact the oldest surviving dwarves, each one a ruler and carrying their clan within their body as the mountains move from place to place with their foothill cousins.

Eventually, old dwarves get tired and lethargic, and the mountain stops moving. Clans split from this point, some choosing to stay with the mountain-corpse of their old king, while others form a new clan in the body of the next-largest foothill heir.

They are on the cusp of a second Golden Age and are quickly rising to become the dominant power of the land. After their kingdoms got fucked by natural disasters, goblins, orcs, savage humans, dragons, giants, etc., the few remaining dwarf holds completely cut themselves off from the outside world. In the following centuries, they dedicated their efforts to rebuilding and repopulating.

After 800 years of isolation, the remaining dwarf holds have recaptured their former glory. The mountain halls are close to bursting with the amount of dwarves clustered inside them. This has triggered a series of "crusade-expeditions." With the Dwarven population at an all-time high, the time has come to reclaim their lost lands.

During the 800 years the dwarves have been isolated, kingdoms have risen and fallen. Human lands, elf lands, orc lands, ogres, trolls, centaurs, etc. Countless peoples and races have warred constantly over territory. The humans and elves were once the greatest, but much of their lands have been lost. The dwarves emerge from their mountains and find a land ripe for conquest.

Huge armed expeditions with thousands of Dwarven soldiers crawl beneath the surface in every direction, making their way through the ancient tunnels that once connected their empire. Old holds have been recaptured and new ones are being founded. Humans, halflings, and other peoples flock to the lands that surround Dwarven holds in the hopes of gaining Dwarven protection and trade.

Each dwarf king rules his hold differently. Some drive out the squatters, others embrace them. Whatever the case may be, the dwarves have grown rich and powerful and this upsets the elven kings and makes the human kings envious. Orc chieftains grow restless, desiring the wealth of the dwarves. Dragons have taken notice, as well.

The dwarves have learned from their past, however. Humans, elves, orcs, and dragons may discover that things will not go as they went last time.

Offshoot of Homo Sapiens
Live above ground
physically shorter
higher muscle and bone density
can't swim
smoke all the time
Work all day for a week straight
play and rest all day for a week straight
grey skin
Called "Ash Born"

Life underground in a harsh one, due to the yearly starves (the summer starve being the most prominent) this has removed much of the dwarven specie's reservations on cannibalism. The patriarchs of dwarven clans ritually mutilating themselves so that one of their arms and legs would adorn the table in times of famine.

After industrialism food no longer became an issue for rich dwarves, however their species has no reflex for fullness as other do. This leads their wealthy to become enormously fat, so much so that they can not move without assistance. This leads them to being cruel parodies of the poor who must be moved due to the sacrifice of their limbs for the family.

Maggot men that live in the Ymir Mountains, that are expert crafters, and can be easily bribed with cheese.

LMAOing at your speshul snowflake dwarves lad.
>look at me I'm different I'm not like gygax or Tolkien
Stop trying so hard to distance yourself from the original

... you know, in Nordic mythology, dwarves originated from maggots that feed on the flesh of Ymir after he was killed, right?

They're basically Tsarist Russia: hot shit back in the day, but their hidebound, staunchly traditionalist society is making them gradually become irrelevant.

Dwarves make one thing that works, or more often copy one thing that works, and then stick to it beyond all reason. The thing they make will be the best example of that thing but it'll probably be hideously out-of-date.

Like, take guns. Dwarves were really slow to adopt flintlock guns, but once they did they started making hands-down the best flintlock guns on the planet...which is great, but everyone else has moved on to percussion cap by now.

They're also likely to take credit for inventing a thing when they verifiably did not - for example, they claim to have invented the first guns, and gunpowder too, even though any archaeologist or researcher worth his salt can prove that they did not.

Some are , except the underground is like the keep/citadel of their surface hilly settlements.

Others are russians down to the bardiche/musket (with quartzlock) combo.

They also create "geode-seeds" that grow into crystal-lined, city-sized chambers in a millenia or so.

I prefer Norse Dwarfs or industrialized ones.

>Mole-People who eventually became more Human-like
>mountain strongholds
>friendly with everyone, including Elves
>utilitarian; their metalwork isn't all that pretty, but it's great quality
>geothermal crucibles can melt and alloy the setting's stronger metals
>deep mines with rare metals; mine most of the setting's gold and sell it all for food and booze

Trade barons they are, the mediators between the human kingdoms of the west and the halfling/gnome/elf lands of the east. Forced out into the deserts beyond the mountains by the goblin armies they did what they did best, traded picks for shovels and began to dig down. didn't need the shovels for long, and rather quickly hit gold and silver in absurd ammounts, far more than what they had in their previous homes. Dwarf society adapted, and those smiths who had once worked in practical metals like steel, adamantine and mythril now learned the softer stuff, crafting in gold silver and precious gems. Smiths became jewelers, and soon massive dwarven burrows dotted the desert, connected along underground rivers and gaining food through trade with whatever nomadic tribes they could fine. Ancestors would say they've lost their way, trading granite for sandstone and their proud warrior ways for those of the ways of merchants and brokers. Modern dwarves are more accepting of their new lot in life, going so far as to model their art and work after the ruins of kingdoms long past, finding a sort of joy in carrying on the artistic traditions of those who failed to survive in these harsh lands.

Not sure if this is one big meta in-joke.

user#1 Posts OG lore and race info
user#2 Claims #1 is a faggot.
user#1 Repeats statement.

You have potential for all three posts to get those magic (You)'s.

Such mystery.

To quote an user from an other Dwarve thread:
>The only tabletop fantasy setting where I have actually liked the dwarves a lot would be Trudvang.
>There they truly honor the mountains they live in. They don't mine the mountain out of greed, but they do it because they view it as something that's more similar to tender gardening. They remove what they considers impurities in the mountain and the gatherded ore that they treat as something sacred that has a potential that needs to be divined.
>Humans desiring to trade with the dwarves mistakingly regard the dwarves as greedy and selfish for not selling their smithed items and for being hoarders. However, every item that the dwarves create in their forges is believed to have a destiny in wait. It's not items they would carelessly send out into the world unless they viewed it as part of that destiny. The ore can spend many years as ingots in vaults until their destiny is revealed to the dwarves and the time is ripe.
>Their love for the mountain is so great that when a new mountain is being formed in volcanic activity, they will travel to the volcano. With them they will bring stones to be thrown into the lava. They believe that these stones contains the dwarves wellwishes, hopes and love for the newly born mountain.
>The dwarves own religion suggests that the dwarves were created by their god on an anvil as a byproduct. The sparks that flew off the anvil would become maggots and these would crawl into the ground. Deep down in the earth they would eventually become the dwarves as they are known.

Dwarves, while usually suspicious of magic, are actually quite welcoming towards necromancers, given their traditions of ancestor worship. So long, that is, that the necromancers stick to temporarily summoning the spirits of the dead for communion, and not permanently binding them to this plane of existence.

They're underground commies. No one has seen one in an official capacity for sixty years.

They got squated and are no more.

Coal black elf-clans living in mountainous retreats and hillforts who worship the gods and spirits of the literal underworld (because there's actual supernatural spirit shit going on underground) who are perpetually angry at the more pop-cultural elf-clans living in the valleys and plains because of an actual historical grudge instead of some shallow, memetic asspull like dungeons and dragons man fuck dungeons and dragons FUCK IT.

Anyway so the dwarves a.k.a. Svartalfar/Black Elves are basically the sympathetic villains and they ally with the savage giants to wreck the elf-lords' shit, relying on master crafted weaponry with runic enchantments. Dwarf-clans are furiously envious of one-another's riches and the only reason individual holds actually stop raiding eachother is when there's plains-elves to be assaulted.

Take the Hallstatt- and La-Têne-period celts if they had repelled Ceasar and in turn adapted its armour and tactics for core troops and technologically expand on hillforts/oppida and mounds so they become zikkurat-like.

Roman empire dwarfs with a heavy emphasis on military engineering. They use mostly rune covered pike, gladius or halberd formations, with the elite and hero dwarfs fighting with maces, axes and war hammers. They don't use gunpowder at all, and instead use powerful runic weapons in their place. They are an engineer and crafting race first and foremost, and were designed originally to be the laborers in a caste system of humanoids that included humans, elves, giants, ogres, cyclop and halflings. Because of this, dwarfs take more pride in their superior weapons, armor and seigecraft rather than fighting prowess. To bring a city down without having to face the enemy in melee is seen as a legendary accomplishment. When dwarfs attack a city, they almost always build a wall and a series of fortified camps. If a siege goes on for more than a few months, the dwarf camp will seem to resemble a second city surrounding the other. This arrangement keeps the dwarfs fortified from both city defenders and reinforcements from the outside.

TLDR Roman dwarfs with runic dragon mouth flame throwing canons and masters of siege warfare

Mountain nomads that travel from rich ore vein to rich ore vein. Like gypsies minus the thievery. Boisterous, fond of drinking and dancing. Close ties to their troupe.

More norse dwarves/wagner than tolkien's tho, tolkien had ones like this too - petty dwarves, aka mim and his two sons
In short - little, secretive. traitorous cunts living in small, mostly blood-tied groups underground, knowing crafts and magicks but generally untrusthworty and going to wreck your shit by curses and backstabbing whenever you're unlucky enough to deal with them

They are but a myth and never existed

The dwarves that most people know are not too dissimilar to what you expect. They're a somewhat squat race of dedicated craftsmen and miners/loggers/etc. They generally live on but not in the mountainous regions, with terraced farms and townships carved into the faces of cliffs and the sides of mountains. They're generally a gregarious people who get along with nearly every other race, who trade for their (somewhat suspiciously) bountiful natural resources and their (somewhat suspiciously) advanced crafts.

The other races have reason to be suspicious, however, because these are not the real dwarves. They're the Gnomes, the Soilborn, beings of flesh and blood formed from clay by the true dwarves to interact with the surface. The real dwarves are the servitors and custodians of the world-machine, and much more like extremely advanced golems than living beings. They're not born but spawned from crystal cocoons deep in the earth at the will of the World-engine, and each one is brought into the world to do a specific sort of task, which they pursue with autistic focus and fervor.

They seem to be very irreligious at first glance, but this is due to the nature of their faith. Dwarves view their culture and traditions to be the height of morality, and dedicatedly following these traditions (which is near instinctual to most dwarves anyway) will result in a swift rebirth as the most perfect life form: a dwarf. A life of serving the World-engine and fulfilling their calling is all a dwarf could ever dream of, and so to be eternally reborn to do so is their ultimate heaven. What little they understand about surface religion terrifies and confuses them. What sort of insanity would have to take a person to seek to be forever denied the material world, to be lost and adrift in the alien realm of some "god"?

The Soilborn have a vague understanding of their heritage and origins, and hail various interpretations of the World-engine and it's agents in the world, the Omphalos, which are the leaders of True Dwarf society. They also practice ancestor worship, in a dim imitation of an ability of their forebears: the power to perfectly and totally recall the life of any dwarf who came before them. Any dwarf who dies and who's body returns to contact with the earth has their soul return to the ancestral Well of Urd inside the Omphalos, and their memories, skills, knowledge and thoughts made available to all other dwarves connected with the Omphalos, which includes basically every True Dwarf as well as particularly spiritual Gnomes. These Gnomish priests can call on the wisdom of the ancestors, but it's a difficult and arduous process as opposed to being second nature like it is for the True Dwarves

In my campaign, the dwarves are just the generic high fantasy kind, and whose main purpose is to act as meatshields against orcs and goblins for the humies.
Gay, I know.

That's cool.
Those are like mine.
Except no guns

No dwarves directly in setting. There are in the Northern hemisphere, but the world is focused around the equator and far South.

Out of the general orcs, trolls, goblins, dwarves, elves, only elves show up as undead liches based out of icy islands near the Southern pole who occasionally make raids for subjects to turn into undead slaves.

Standard dwarf appearance with Greek City state mindsets. They only ever unite when faced by the threat of the Old Ones or humans but wars between the cities are kept to a minimum and are mainly done through the market rather than through warfare, a lesson learned after three dwarven civil wars that nearly saw them wiped out.

Each Polis is headed by two government officials, The Hammer (head of the army) and the Anvil (head of civilian population and construction) who govern over an assembly of elected guild leaders.

Main fighting style is actually hoplites and pikemen rather than straight up axes, to keep with the theme and using phalanxes underground and to hold the entrances just make more sense.

They're the only race to use gunpowder, originally creating it for dynamite to clear large mines and then obviously developing it for fighting. It evens out their lack of range and mainly defensive posture.

Socially they're a very superstitious and some heya conservative people. They don't trust easily, they never let go of grudges, they have all kinds of traditions that must be upheld, there are fucking tons of dwarven charms and knickknacks handed out by shamans for everything from better digestion to staving off death in battle. But they're true to their word and dwarfs hold loyalty to the up most importance.

Rate so far? They're the first race I've actually sat down and spent time developing. It seems pretty cliche.

They bury their dead underground in a massive room together with all the rest of the dwarves from that city that have died. This is so that in the case of war, their dead can fight for them again.

Pretty typical in most reagrds. They live in mountains, are great craftsmen, and are very hidebound and traditional.

They used to have an empire on another continent, but it got conquered by dark elves, with some of the survivors managing to escape across the sea to colonies they had established. That was several thousand years ago, but dweves still dislike elves, and have heavily fortified their mountain holds in case something like that happens again (most dwarves don't actually live inside mountains, but in villages built in the foothills. However, if they get invaded, the populace can reareat inside their heavily fortified holds, which have enough supplied stored to last several years of siege). They have good enough relations with humans due to mutual trade, but don't particularly care what happens outside their own territory (when the big human empire fell apart, the dwarves just sat around waiting for the whole mess the clear, then continued trading with the newly formed nations), and don't allow non-dwarves to enter their holds.

They also have a complex system of goverment, with large amount of different officials with varying ranks and responsibilities, and revere the written word, meticulously keeping records written down in stone tablets on any notable events. Loss of much of the records of their old empire is seen as an enormous tragedy, even more than losing their homeland land and much of their population (land can be reclaimed, and people are born and die all the time, but restroyed writing can never be recovered).

Dwarfs are all-male spirits of the Earth, masters of crafting but generally too xenophobic to have anything to do with the surface. When a dwarf tribe chooses to establish a tradepost on the surface, a large town of non-dwarfs will rapidly form around it, filled with would-be merchants looking to get rich quick by dealing in dwarfgoods.

Most people do not realise that dwarfs and elves form two parts of the same race. Elves, an all-female race of nature spirits, are if anything even more xenophobic than dwarfs. But every once in a great while, elves and dwarfs will gather in secret for merriment and dating. These gatherings have grown less and less common over the centuries, as more and more of the traditional gathering spots are lost or occupied by non-dwarfs.

No, I refuse.

But thou must

I am too busy.

They have a preference for deep sea fishing and mushrooms

they also have a coloseum where they make captured greenskin fight for their amusement

they also work closely with the arcane college to perfect they're new fangled Golem technology

Viking inspiried, like the rest of the races.
Venerate dogs as their patron animals since they're good at killing all the fucking snakes that attack the land. Going so far as to tie their souls to their hounds and go into combat with magical weapons and spooky puppers. Not a fan of the snakemen, because you know, snakes.

Fuck i hate settings with centaurs, also when people say "basically the italian city states" except for a few notable exceptions, mainly rome, everyone in history ever was a bit like the italian city states, very few empires were strong enough, culturally homogenous and small enough that they could really enforce the laws and taxes that create a really central thing that was really a government

What's wrong with centaurs?

Tolkien-esque with a whole lot of Muscovite Imperial Russian thrown in. They live in massive fortress cities and compose the middle, upper, and ruling classes of Roskyan society. The lower class is filled by human serfs. While there are other dwarven cultures Roskyan, or Eastern dwarves, are the most prominent.

That's sort of cool, but,, Surely not many dwarves make it to even foothill size, do they have to eat to grow? I mean the growth must come in sudden bursts or something because there would be no way for the world to contain all the aging dwarfs if they all eventually became mountains

Non existent

They used to have great surface cities, turning entire mountains into shining citadels of science and progress.

But at one point they got so greedy and proud that they stopped worshipping the gods and the many Mountain Kings decleared themself equals to the gods.

When they didn't heed the warnings the pantheon sent the Sungod (Watchman of the Gods) to punish them, and his rays scorched their crops, and baked their great mountain cities.

In their pride and defiance of the gods, they dug their cities deeper and deeper into the earth, using their marvels of science and ingenuity to create great underground farms with fruits and mushrooms that need no light to grow.

In consequence the Dwarf Kingdoms became isolationist and hostile to any surface dwellers, believing them to be servants of the Sun, and they believe Hell is the scorching ball in the sky. The isolation also caused the smaller cities to become rather inbred and some cities are downright degenerate and primitive, fear and superstision replacing the enlightened wisdom of their ancestors.

Gondolin would be a suitable example of a Dwarf city in it's prime, but that's long past in the settings current timeline.

Liviing the Short life - some notes on Dwarven society
- by renowned explorer Hector Kingsley IV

Dwarfs are a hardy race that,as every child knows, lives mostly underground and have a innate love for precious metals and dark beer. There are some nuances of dwarven society that shatters the preconceived notion of the perpetually drunk miner however.

1) The Pickaxe.
The pickaxe is central to dwarven beliefs and culture, not just as tool or weapon of war, but as a symbol for the prosperity of the entire dwarven way of life. A miner or underground dwarf usually owns a utilitarian pickaxe that has been passed down through generations, whereas with the increasing number of dwarves migrating to above-ground cities there has been a boom in demand for small, but exquisitely crafted, miniature pickaxes (often called pocket pickaxe or concealed pickaxe) with some as small a child's toy for every-day carry in situations where a regular pickaxe is far too unwieldy or conspicuous.

2) Down Underground
The urge to be surrounded by earth and rock runs deep in the dwarven psyche and to associate being undergrond with safety is one of the first things a young dwarf learns. If you were to seek out a dwarven inn of pub in a city of hamlet it is far more likely that is will be a door above ground that leads down into a well-lit excavated underground area that for it to be a building above ground.

3) Dwarven Song and Music
The dwarven race is well known in higher musical circuits for their soloists and choirs. Many a dwarven choir has performed their art for royalty and nobility alike. Dwarven song (called Dvaergasång) is often keyed close to what we humans call the barytone or bass vocal ranges. Dwarven music often contains almost march-like rhythms featuring percussion and stringed instruments, which makes for a very martial feel when played in high spirits, or sad dirge when played in mourning.

4) Dwarfish Culture
To be dwarfish and be acknowledged as a dwarf by others is not as much about being short of stature, growing a beard or have a sense for metalwork. To truly be dwarfish is more of a general disposition and following the ancient laws and traditions chiseled into the arch-block in the entrance to every dwarven mine-fortress.

I went more commie russia. Try to do a Russian accent, all of that.

By the way, if anyone has any good Russian accent videos or even humorous phrases running around that might apply i would appreciate it.

"My dwarves sing and are not totally stereotypical, but almost, look i made up a name to make it super immersive!"

They are ruled by a council formed by the guildmasters of all the guilds. Most respected and traditional guilds have the most power (like the stoneworking guild, the scholar guild ). The king is elected by the council.

Three noble families bicker over the control of the empire. One argues for military might, even during times of peace. Another for further economic expansion, with greater emphasis on trade and commerce. The last argues for the importance of magical superiority, and how only by understanding the magic of the world can the dwarven people prosper.

Dwarves are highly curious and respectful of magic. They are the only non-theistic people, believing magic to be a natural phenomena of the world, rather than a divine or supernatural occurrence. Dwarven scholars and archivists are known to travel the world and learn about the magic of other cultures and peoples across the world, so that they might truly understand its power.

Dwarven innovations such as currency have also started to spread across the land, with the silver Koyn being accepted in many economic centres.

Dwarven craftsmanship is highly respected, as their skill with metal is unparalleled. Whether it's silver cooking ware, steel weaponry or golden jewelry, Dwarven metal working is highly sought after.

Dwarven architecture is impressive, if only for how haphazard it is. Dwarven city are giant mazes of tunnels and mine shafts, with teams of Dwarves chiseling into bed-rock of their mountain holds in search of riches. After clearing their allotted bit of the mountain of all wealth, the emptied out chambers and caverns are often converted into establishments and accommodation. This gives all Dwarven cities a ant colony like structure, with long established businesses and families living near the surface.

Basically, crazy paranoid neurotics who can't stand being near anyone who isn't close family. They live in dwarf-holds, highly-fortified underground strongholds, which have expanding defences - typically farms on the surface which are surrounded by walls and traps, then a more secure set of fortifications to withdraw to when under attack, and even the interior of the hold is designed with defence in mind, with traps in every corridor and significant effort put into ensuring that enemies take losses with minimal dwarf risk. They focus on traps and static defences due to their low numbers - any attack on a dwarf-hold is a long, drawn-out siege where the attackers typically won't even see a dwarf until they break into the innermost fastness of the hold, deep underground.

Only 15 to 30 dwarfs live in any given dwarf-hold; any more and the hold quickly descends into a mess of murder as each dwarf tries to kill the others whom he is sure are conspiring against him. A given dwarf-hold is populated by an extended family, which is why the members are ok with sharing, but even so they will insist on personal security against betrayal. Each dwarf will insist on their own quarters, which they'll then heavily personalise with security traps, barricades to prevent others from getting in, and more. They won't waste any time on making it nice, of course - that's time they could be preparing for the inevitable betrayal and fight to the death! A typical dwarf-hold has almost no art or luxuries, and consists of a bunch of paranoid loons sitting in the dark and constantly watching each other for signs of betrayal.

cont.

Not getting involved in your world building and no idea about the threats they face, but that sounds like a retarded defensive strategy.

I like the silliness of all this. But I wonder how they interact with other dwarfs, if they ever do it.

continuing.

Clusters of dwarf-holds form clans, which will trade within themselves much more frequently than with outsiders. Even so, it's common for a hold to be isolated for a decade or more, even from their clan. Young adults (at age 50-ish) will eventually want to leave, growing to fear the rest of their dwarf-hold in an odd psychological trait that is the only thing saving dwarf-kind from extinction, and will usually form their own dwarf-hold with a couple others from their clan, met during trade meets or the like.

Their religion and art is heavily influenced by their paranoia - they believe the End of Days is coming, as a sort of glorified zombie apocalypse, when their only hope will be their defences and might of arms. Their art, such as it is, consists of deeply emotive carvings focused on the themes of fear, betrayal, and inevitable doom, thanks to their warped psyche and religious beliefs.

They are considered greedy and overly aggressive by other races due their strongly isolationist tendencies and unwillingness to trust outsiders even a jot, but they don't actually care about gold or precious gems - it's just that when they see others wanting them so much, they start wondering what they want it for, and that leads down a long, often-trodden path of paranoia and believing that the outsiders must want the gold to use to kill the dwarf somehow. All they really value in and of itself is weaponry to better defend themselves, building materials to better build defences and traps, and maybe food as an afterthought, though they won't ever trade for food directly - they wouldn't trust it not to be poisoned.

So, dwarfs are rare as adventurers due to their crazy paranoia, and when they are around they are pretty tightly-strung. They prefer to use ranged weapons and traps, as that reduces the risk of them dying, which is important given how few of them there are.

Like dwarves from Deep Sounding

They breed by finding the right stone and carving it into the shape of a dwarf inside.

Female dwarves are rare, as Muradin created them when trying to impress the elven goddess of love fertility and wisdom.

She scorned his advance and his children, but imbued in them was the sense of adventure to which that goddess also had. Hence most dwarves adventurers are either a) exiles and therefore criminals or b)women.

Given the lawful neutral to lawful good standing of most dwarf holds, it could also be said women are the root of many of their woes. Also the source of much of the help dwarves may give the outside world in my universe.

Furthermore, where dwarves men are functionally ken dolls, dwarves females are biologically compatible with humans, even if such a notion would ever be considered by the dwarves lass.

Yeah, it's kinda silly, but that's the point. I wanted dwarfs that offered a very stark contrast to the usual gruff-but-warm, ale-swigging guy who is the best of friends once you bond with him, while still retaining the cosmetic features of being miners, short, living underground/in mountains, and so on.

As to the defensibility, I was inspired by crusader castles and the like, with massive walls, boiling oil poured over the attackers, carefully planned kill-zones, and so on. The advantage of having such static defences is that you can hold off a much larger force without taking losses in actual fighting, so a garrison of 100 can hold off an attacking force of 1000 for much longer than if they fought head to head.

The disadvantage the dwarfs has is low numbers in any given hold, which is kinda countered by having much more holds than would otherwise be the case, so losing one hold is not as big a blow as, say, losing one village would be for the local human kingdom. They would do better by having larger holds with more dwarfs, but they don't need to do so to still be believably alive. And the real advantage of this is that I can make the psyche of the dwarfs what I want - by limiting their numbers per hold, I can make them more paranoid, thus sticking more closely to the concept.

Combined their knowledge and power with that of the elves to make a magical record of their culture, history, and lore that could survive the impending universal reboot.

It succeeded, but due to new magic rules being in place in this universe, the device instead combined all the info on Elves and Dwarves and created a new race to embody their ideals and carry on their legacy.

So, some kind of slightly shorter and broader elves with dwarf-like ears and shorter livespan? Combining the elven and dwarvish traditions by building their homes out of a mix of both rock and wood?

Everything is for sale. Everyone is defacto property of the toppest dwarf who owns whatever city they live in. Buying and selling is completely casual business regardless of the topic of sale. Want to know what having a kid is like? Someone is probably renting out theres in the market. Getting tired of your wife? I hear Havvard is offering the newest series of Maidens for low low prices. Don't feel like selling your mom? Yeah I get that, they're pretty nostalgic to keep around. Try to hold your breath on this street, friend. I hear the landowner is charging a copper piece for every breath taken.

Stealing is the greatest crime imaginable and to even be charged of such is a huge slander to someones name. Therefore every single purchase is written down and kept in a safe spot. They've wiped out entire forests trying to make enough paper for their receipts. Of course older dwarves or those who have made extremely major and proud purchases have a few things written in stone.

More like, freakishly tall Dwarves/muscular elves with a mastery of arcane and smithing. Their metalcraft is considered a heartbreaking work of art, literally. And it will have a pleasing pseudo-Norse organic aesthetic.

So, something like Marvel's version of Asgard.

They have beards and live under the mountains in deep mines.
they have Viking helmets, but during ceremonies and holidays they wear pointy red hats and blue shirts.
they are all males. to reproduce, they sculpt a new dwarf from stone and give it life with a magic Hammer. they can breed with humans fine, though

I forgot, they like beer, gold and explosions.

Sounds like someone hasn't played a fookin' dwarf! That, or there's an unnatural amount of tree lovin' 'ere!

As fer why we use axes, IT'S TO CUT DOWN YER' GODDAMNED PANSY TREES YA' TREE HUGGER! Just cause it pisses yee off~

Is this a new copypasta?

The only one we've seen so far is a public librarian.

They are jews because everything adds up.

They had a SRS BZNSS prophecys about a war destroying their nation forever, so in the moment a tiny border war with a random human noble flared up, they razed all their shit, quickly retreated and sealed up all their underhomes for 250 years.

Then their isolated and cramped societies completely dependent on trade(you gotta SELL your masterwork craftsmanship to someone) collapsed, their tiny communities live in ghettos in human cities infested with various levels of retarded(like their lorekeepers going full hasidic) hated by everyone, even themselves. They also make golems, eat tasteless flatbread, has to obey a billion obtuse religious rules, wear beards and silly hats and have names ending in -berg. Dwarf moneylenders are also famed for their avarice and noses in-setting.

It turned out the wild dwarves who got isolated about two thousand year ago missed out on the whole religious thing, doesnt conform to any stereotypes and like to live in small agricultural villages with nothing special going on Even their creator deity forgot about them.

They are decedents of humans, like every other race.

At some point I was trying to make a setting where I put different fantasy races in our evolutionary tree, but I couldn't make it satisfying enough.

I liked orcs as closely related to pigs though.
I think I just went with dwarves as animated rock and gnomes as animated crystals.
Not sure what I ended up with elves, or if I gave up there. I have one vague memory of saying they were created by a god, who based the design on humans it had seen in a vision from the future. To explain why elves and humans are similar, but why elves were also older.

Any experienced loremasters and autists care to chime in pls?

They're elves, with some slight cultural differences. But if you even remotely fucking suggest that they're the same as elves they'll kill you.

If you want them to seem more dorfy you could replace pikes with halberds, but no real point for that I suppose.

How is gunpowder used in addition to their phalanxes?

Does anyone really like dwarves as just short stocky Norsemen? My dwarves fucking love water, we swarm from our mountains, get on our fucking boats crammed with dwarves, and go rape and pillage and stick all our newly acquired shit back in our mountain. Whenever I leave mountain, I must always rape.

> two and eleven
> not turning goblins into slave labor for your mines

Romans. Everybody though their empire fell, but they just retreated underground. Now they're reclaiming their old lands and smashing against the expanding borders of not!King Arthur.

Naft/bomb throwers mainly.

I'm considering adding in arquebusiers and cannons but I don't know how much that could throw the balance off on them and make them a little too powerful.

Pike and shot dwarfs sounds fun tho

They are bitter bigots.

Every city that has met a tragic end has a mountain there to hide its secrets.

The dwarf druids made those mountains.

They live there as a reminder for generations to come what happens when you dream too big.

Their faith believes under every mountain lies a dark regret of the Gods or Men.

They dig there, in hopes of purging it.