I'm tired of generic mountain keeps, and so I'm looking to you kind folks to help me out.
I was thinking of a more industrial type feel to the city, but unsure how/where to start. I want it to be grimy, but only because of the incredible focus on workmanship, as opposed to the more posh aspects of general life.
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Okay......pick a resource or product.
Do they harvest raw materials or do they produce finished goods?
And Im totally down to play "bounce ideas off each other" but just to lay the cards out on the table what do you want this for? Want/need a dwarven city for dnd? Or are you just doing it for the creative process. Because that effects the answers you get.
I still think those are people boating in the lave, not rocks.
How about island dwarves? Sort of like Japan.
I need a dwarven city for d&d. I'm looking for the city to create high-quality finished goods, possibly importing the materials from elsewhere.
What kinds of goods might be produced? What might the government look like?
Since its a city, how about a Venice style city, all waterways instead of roads. This also plays into Dwarves more, since it means their mode of transport is something they create (boats) rather than horses and carts. Add in a huge harbour wall, Alexandria style to create architecture focused, non montanious Dwarf sity.
Porcelain and assorted dinnerware
food dorfs
Produces industrial goods (Reapeater crossbow mechanisms, segmented armour waterwheel mechanisms, etc) Run by a council of guilds, who vote on how to run the city, but motivated by money first.
What about the Dwemer in Skyrim
The Dwemer are a little too advanced for what I'm looking for.
These are all pretty good ideas.
I love this
maybe by some caves to keep it dwarfy. maybe just workshops in them
Let's assume it's more like a forge city, rather than a mercantile one. What would everyday life be like? Would society be stratified by class? If so, what classes of society would there be?
Is.
Is that dwarf forging a sword for a mouse?
Top Tier those who own several forges, Great Families who run multiple workshops, and hold high office in the city
Below this independent forgemasters, specialists, think an artists workshop in Renaissance Italy. Command Officers in the City Watch here as well.
Then Smiths, engravers, who work for one forge or do commission work. Rich Merchants with nothing to do with forging are here, as are bureaucrats/lawyers
Then Forgeworkers, poorer merchants, foot officers of the watch, tavern owners.
Then labourers, dockworkers, unskilled labour
Then the poor/theives/something ridiculously culturally wierd to catch the party out on.
Why not get real fucking stupid with this? What if the canals are molten ore/lava being transported to various forges throughout the city?
The boats would need to be VERY well crafted to stand up to more than a few days of that.
Well the idea wa to move away from the stereotypical dwarf city, so I thought keeping it away from mountains and on the coast would make an interesting contrast. Why should dwarves hate the sea, they get to make huge feats of engineering that laugh at nature and prove their skill by being used.
Oops, I missed that bit.
Meh I did just come off playing Venice on CK2. So Im a little city state mad right now.
Guys...
SWAMP
DWARVES
Proove your architectural greatness by building a towering city in the middle of a stinking bog. I love it.
Hello sir, this is Venice Dorfs as I suggested.
Venice is literally ontop of a swamp.
You could still do it in a mountain, use underdark oceans
Maybe these swamp dorfs are famed naval craftsmen?
pic related is pretty dorfish
I Love the idea of like an Elvish fleet coming towards the the city, all perfect lines and high arches really Showy. 50 elven ships move forward, ballistas are ready. Then three turtle ships, ugly as fuck and bristling with weapons comes out of the swamp mist and just start sinking everything.
Okay what if the capital building is just in one immense cave network within the center of the swamp?
Very rare to get stone caves in the middle of a swamp. I prefer the idea of them building a huge stone tower because fuck it we can do this.
Why not Ocean dwarves while you're at it. Some fantasy bullshit cataclysm split their once mighty island into a floating, decaying archipelago, and they've slowly but surely went from island inhabitants to boat inhabitants. Like they replaced their very ground with titanic arks of wood and rock and began herding fishes and growing algae.
...
No.
Beach Dorfs.
Tan skinned, blond haired, oily beach dwarves
Like you have older dwarves complaining that only grease should be in the beard, not these funky oils the kids are using. Dwarves using glass to decorate themselves instead of metal, not in my day! rejecting the argument that Sand is just smaller rocks, its not the same as a mountain!
Dealio
SkyDorfs
The ancient dwarven city once stood at the top of a proud and indefatigable mountain. It was believed that the higher you lived on the sacred mountain, the closer you lived to The Gods.
But then, either a cataclysm happened to destroy the mountain, or the mountain slowly sunk into the earth over centuries, or the Dorfs simply got gud at skyflight.
Either way, the mountain is there no longer but the religious desire to live close to the gods remains. These dorfs have mastered the artifice of artificial floating islands, of floating ships, of floating buttresses.
Unlike tolkenian dwarven societies, these dwarves reproduce like rabbits. Their population is normalized by a great fraction of their people seeking unnatural heights to gain greater divinity, never to be seen again. (in an Icarus style fashion)
Those left alive are those who 'are not ready' for a divine audience, those who do not believe that flying high enough to break your machines is the one true path to enlightenment, children, the unwealthy, the infirm, the disgraced, the unclever, those who give up their claim to divinity so they may take part in their worldly city's governance, maintenance, mercantile, or protection.
Not generic dwarfs? Does that means they do something else besides pickaxing rocks?
Seriously, for the 'greatest miners of fantasy', they don't seem to know much about mining. Where's the open cast? And the dam-powered hydraulic destruction of entire scarps? Who selects the good ore?
Anyway, I had the same want once, so I came up with:
>methane pockets are piped into wall lamps
>bat herding to produce guano, used for fertilizer and making gunpowder
>underground rivers power a long row of watermills based on barbegal mills and machine de marly.
>a network of Stangenkunst transmits that sweet hydromechanical power to
>cranes, elevators, trains, hammers, saws, mills, trebuchets
Also, take away the colors and ornaments, tibetan architecture is quite dorfy.
They could cast concrete boats for this. These could follow the design of japanese fortress-looking ships, like the Nipponmaru. One could include paddlewheels like the chinese. Then you have a retangular, ugly, stony sea fortress with armored propulsion.
How about they built their own island, just because they could? Make it resemble the Gunkanjima island, built around natural resources they're extracting.
Funny you mention that.
Might not help here, but I was once imagining arctic islander dwarves for a time. Large noses to deal with cold air, small and stocky to live on cold islands, used to hunting marine mammals and working with bone more than metal, primary traders in whale oil, cities built from blocks of sea ice or carved into the glaciers.
It was probably stupid, though.
Some dwarven cities I created. Part one:
An enormous underground hall with its ceiling decorated with magical runes put in zodiacal patterns. A monorail goes across the ceiling that carries the artificial sun across it every day - an enormous sphere filled with magically concentrated magma. The hall is large enough for clouds and weather effects to form there.
A giant quartz dome on the seafloor, home to the submarine riders who mine ancient corals with wondrous properties.
A mechanised mountain filled to the brim with clockwork, constantly turning during the day so that the statue of the city's founder on its top is always facing the sun. A giant clockface cut in the middle of the mountain also makes it the world's largest clock tower.
Home of insane architects who use magical runes to create impossible architecture. They stopped caring long ago for the comfort of the dwarves who live there, only trying to one up each other with their creations. The city is an utter Escherian mess filled with Penrose stairs, doors that don't lead where they're supposed to and buildings larger on the inside than on the outside.
An entire dormant volcano cut into a ziggurat, the magma within it is used to power up its mechanisms. Its orifice has been turned into the world's largest ballistic cannon using steam created by the magma to propel tower-sized missiles and send them to any part of the world.
An enormous meteor resting within its crater that dwarves riddled with tunnels to mine meteoric iron from it. The meteor is spherical in shape, and over the centuries gyroscopic engines were installed on it, making it able to roll around if the need arises.
A giant iceberg pulled across the sea by sea serpents subdued by rune magic. Frost dragons are chained to its sides, acting like a battery of living cannons.
A mountain chiselled into a colossal statue of the ancestor of all dwarves, wherein a city is also located. It is the centre of the dwarven religion.
Part two:
A mountain hold made from a gigantic rock hanging on chains over a deep canyon. That makes any assault other than aerial assault completely impossible.
An underground city that was flooded centuries ago due to an engineering mistake, but nut abandoned because of its rich deposit of diamonds. Its dwellers live in hermetically sealed homes, always wear diving suits when outside and use primitive diving scooters to get around.
A city on a floating obsidian island in a cave filled with magma. Its dwellers use runically protected submarines to traverse the mantle and mine precious metals from the world's solid core.
A city built within a stalagmite hanging over a seemingly bottomless abyss. Since there's no floor in their cave, its dwellers constructed metal walkways on its ceiling and wear magnetic boots to walk on them when they leave their city. They also ride giant bats when they need to cover large distances.
A city carved within a gigantic subterranean fungus. Unlike most dwarves, its people mostly work in agriculture, growing edible mushrooms to export to the other dwarven holds in exchange for gold.
A city built within a dormant antediluvian leviathan that dwarven explorers found deep underground. It's so large that while its outer parts have fossilised, its innermost parts are still fleshy, though dormant, and serve as a hiding place for outlaws and exiles.
Obviously a crossbow bolt.
These are great, thanks y'all
I'm really enjoying the idea of a dwarven system of canals and locks.
This is pure dorf.
post dwarves
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