Dwarves always feel bloody one-dimensional in worldbuilding and I even nowadays associate a dwarven fighter as more cliched than your typical human fighter.
It does not help that in all media they're invariably sidekicks.
How do you make dwarves cool again?
Other urls found in this thread:
Make them Scottish, hate Elves and other fantasy races in general, live in mountains, be expert craftsmen, be a declining race and always be leaning on the side of the heroes.
To deconstruct the cliché you must first state all the clichés within the dwarf archetype.
So let's do that first.
see
Sounds good to me user.
replace all Dwarves with Chaos Dwarves, problem solved.
Ogrehn or Urist?
You don't need to, dwarves are fucking cool already. There's a reason why the archetype is more or less constant.
You can't. They were never cool. They've always been the preferred race of the worst kind of spergs and three hundred pound neck beards. There is no such thing as a good dwarf. Remove them and anyone who plays them and watch as your game and group instantly improves.
t. elf player
Personally I think the "underground race" should be retought from scratch.
>You don't need to, dwarves are fucking cool already
>fat ugly stubby 'nerds' that are all brawl and no brains are cool
No.
they really were never cool, you just force the fact that you thought they were cool when you were 12
I can almost see your pointed ears through the internet.
Short races were a mistake.
What wonderful memes you short fat fellows have there.
>manlets
>cool
Start by evisioning a setting where Dwarves are the only race.
Now you have to figure out how to differentiate different groups of dwarves, and different individual dwarves, instead of relying on a single overwhelming stereotype. Now you have to invent a whole spectrum of dwarves, instead of just having miners, blacksmiths and surly drunks.
When you've done that, only then can you introduce other races. And if you do that, once again, consider those other races in a vacuum - what makes one orc different from another? What makes one group of orcs different from another? No more boorish warriors - where are the sages? The smiths? The hunters? The herbalists? The wizards? The thinkers? The doers?
Continue until you have an entire setting full of races who have as much distinction and internal conflict as any human society.
But that's wrong you fucking retards.
Make them legendary craftsmen, but the things they craft are not your typical "dwarvish" large steel axes and shit, but rather very finely made artifacts that have magical properties not from some enchantments, but form the very fact they they were made with such an immesurable skill. These dwarfs have their own values and morality that humans usually don't understand, and thus dwarfs are often seen as evil or at least uncaring. They have a bit Scandinavian falvour to them, but they shouldn't be just fantasy Vikings, and many things about their culture should be just weird.
tl;dr Actual mythological dvergar crossed with Rowling's goblins.
Go back to the material that inspired them, and work with that.
Also don't be afraid to use stranger iterations of dwarves, or combine disparate elements.
Dwarves can be maggot men from the flesh of giants, who sing as they work and live uncleanly lives in forest cottages, and are really lecherous willing to sell their work in exchange for sexual favours from beautiful people.
This is actually interesting advice. If you did this you may actually be able to salvage something worthwhile out of this shit race.
>maggot dwarves living in the ground
Insect-like dwarves? Hivemind dwarves?
No.
Maggots, grown from the flesh of dead giants and given reason by the gods.
I always liked it when dwarves were the most technologically advanced race of the setting and eschewed magic in favor of science. Where everyone else needs magic to make a golem or tame a large beast to break a castle wall, the dwarves will build a fucking cannon or a tank and smash it down.
Also this is literally the best advice ITT and possibly the best thing you can do in regards to world building. A big pitfall a lot of fantasy authors do is create a race by just giving them a real-life human culture in huge overtones. If your fantasy race is "stereotypical human culture, but just not human", then they're fucking garbage.
>Scottish
>not Yorkshiremen
Shit tier
Memes are shit.
...
Dwarves are traders and craftsmen, along with being lovable cantankerous warrior drunks. When I crafted a setting, humans had gone extinct (or just didn't live in most parts of the world anymore), and I played up dwarves as stepping in as the 'gets along with most everyone, in the interest of commerce'. Worked out just fine, as we had a subrace of dwarves that were a little friendier, and had a penchant for sailing.
I think it's important to grab something the race is known for, stick to it hard, then change things from there to get a new take. Assuming you want them to resemble dwarves as people know them at all. You could always just change them to jungle-dwelling savages that wear dried dirt for armor and try to kill everyone who enters their territory or something.
well I'm guilty of this crap, time to torch my setting and start again
Teach me your ancient art, user.
It's ok, user.
A good way to repair that sort of thing is to add a what if condition, and imagine how that culture would react and adapt to it.
You'd be amazed at the sorts of things that can come as logical steps and completely change everything
One fun thing you can do to help with brainstorming is have each sub-group be led by an interesting individual, whose personality and quirks have come to define the group's outlook as a whole.
The Primarchs of Warhammer 40K are a good example of this, where the defining aspects of each Space Marine chapter largely stems from some personal talent, notable quirk or favourite strategy of their founder.
Meanwhile, imagine you had three dwarven mountainhomes: one founded by a belligerent lunatic who believed his skin was actually iron, one founded by a cold-hearted schemer with a love for poetry, and one founded by a bawdy drunkard who enjoyed hunting game under the summer sun. Each mountainhome is naturally going to have wildly different history, values, priorities, and geography, simply by dint of the weirdos who first built them.
And this focus on individuals works so well, because individuals, with all their strengths and weaknesses, virtues and flaws, quirks and foibles, are interesting. Showing how their shadow is cast on of all who come after them, is interesting. Statements like "these dwarves like boats because they live next to the sea" are boring, because there's no person there. "These dwarves like boats because their ancient King Brolo spent his lifetime mastering sailing, so he could one day sail to the western horizon and capture the sun" is interesting, because there's a fucking STORY there.
well then, I got somethings lined up already, the big thing is an impossible continent populated entirely by demonkin/hosts where the majority of the continent analogous to russia would have been, the not egyptian elves have the drow breakaway cultists, for many others its as simple as integrating biological logistics into their culture
Go back to the mythological origins. Make them magical diminutive dark elves with bears. Make them use spears which are superior weapons for underground corridors than axes.
>what are Gnomes
This thread is great, keep going.
make them into ant/termites
...
- they already live underground
- give them brutal discipline and a willingness to die for the hive(/Mountainhome)
- they can survive underground because they cultivate some kind of fungus
even the dead get "buried"(recycled) in the fungus
- they also chop wood and do shit above ground to feed the fungus with it
...
maybe make the background story that they were human, a catastrophy happend in prehistoric times, they survived because they retreated underground (while humanity fucked off somewhere else). Maybe let them have a shitton of birthdefects from inbreeding and other "degeneration" from living in concentration camp conditions without every seeing the sunlight for a few hundred year.
Now their whole culture/religion revolves around this fungus that they found, which is the whole reason they survived. They sacrifice their inbred retards to it and dwarfs not deemed strong enough to survive
The second of two good posts in this thread
You are our savior user
You make Dwarves stereotypical Italian-Americans.
I made my Dwarves crazy celt nature-worshipers who paint themselves blue and run at you naked and screaming and waving an axe. Some legends claim they might have come from underground, long ago, but they'll laugh you out of the room of you suggest it and anyone who ventures into the mountain ruins never comes back, so what's the point?
This is actually cool.
In my setting they are mariners. Pirates and sea folk. Still big on crafting and stuff but they built hubs to live on at sea and most are master sailers/divers/swimmers.
I like Warhammer dwarves and their grudge based culture.
I mixed mine with elder scrolls dwemer and old ones.
So basically the long standing elf and dwarf hatred come not from "Muh racism" but from each race being influenced by an opposing elder god. The dwarves worship an old one that resides in the earth, his acolytes embed stones and metals in themselves to better feel his resonance. They bury their homes deep to avoid the gaze of the moon, which houses the moon old one worshipped by the elves. They go to war because the elves want to summon the moon to earth and bring about their book of revelations, but with more cthulu tentacle mind rape.
The dwarves use their mechanical prowess and the dark power of their gods to build mechanical guardians for their realms, and they avoids use the earth god magic to create the orc race by corrupting humans and other creatures caught in the middle of the conflict.
This orc army marches on the elves and stops the ritual but not before the moon devastates everything.
So my dwarves are corrupted and possessed, using their science to create dark creatures from the mud and other sapient races, and trying to attune themselves to their evil elder earth god.
My Dwarves fucking rock.
Play a slayer.
...
Friend of mine tried to get a simple RPGmaker game off the ground which featured similar ideas.
Antlike, hiveminded people, dogmatic and extremely durkadurka religious, living on fungi. The underground cities they inhabited all were next to underground Journey to The Center of the Earth like lakes filled with prehistoric seamonsters, but due to some memetic shifts in their religion over thousands of years, they weren't allowed to eat the meat of 'serpents'.
That was the defining factor for his dwarves. Sitting right on top of a great source of meat and instead paying huge amounts of gold to import meat from elves, humans and orcs, because of ancient rules that the royal family doesn't even understand.
screen cap for those interested in saving good advice
I ran with the idea that dwarves are akin to maggots or lice to giants. So I have a kind of dwarf for every kind of true giant.
Well, think of what natural conditions would cause a race of stocky, hairy miniature humanoids with large noses to evolve.
>And if you do that, once again, consider those other races in a vacuum
I've been doing that ever since I became competent at writing and it's nice to see someone else doing it as well.
That's even what I've been literally calling it in my write ups: "In a Vacuum", where I basically describe how a certain fantasy race develops or orients itself when it's the only race around, so that the reader/whoever can get a much more indepth context into the 'actual' untainted personality and aspect of a race.
It's also my gatekeeper for if I think a race is "worthy" enough to be considered a main race or otherwise playable, the mandatory goal post of any playable race being that they MUST be able to produce a civilization by themselves.
With that said though, I can't claim 100% originality on the concept, obviously.
I originally thought of the exercise whilst reading Orc Stain; I liked the idea of an "all orc setting" and began pontificating about how I'd apply it to my own fantasy and the rest wrote itself.
You don't. Leave out Halflings and Dwarves entirely and replace them with Kobolds. This adds some much needed variety to the core races.
I normally never get far enough to detail the minute parts of a setting so I never have a issue. After all sure there is a big difference between Catachan and Krieg but the sheer fact they are both imperium means they share a bunch in common.
In my setting the space dwarfs are scientist merchants who sell weapons and equipment for raw supplies, eventually actually buying out entire planets from the govenors, stripping it, converting it to a World ship, and allowing the former population to serve as Serfs to keep their planet going. They are a mysterious race, in that the other groups are actively worried about them not in the "poorly defined way".
For instance Dwarfs tend to know people by name and lineage and have extensive knowledge on human and elf life and culture. This deeply troubles the Elfs because in their many millenia of rule the dwarfs never are mentioned even once in their oldest archives.
They also may or may not be from the warp dimension their FTL drives send them to. (My way of converting underground to space)
My dwarves were the first race, created as collateral results while the god of knowledge was trying to create new weapons for the god war.
The others gods killed her and dumped her body on the material plane. The dwarves were starving, so they ate the flesh and the brain of the killed god, getting "high"with knowledge and intelligence as a result. In little time they created incredible and advanced cultures, and managed to kill a titan. The gods purged the material plane with a rain of fire, forcing the dwarves underground, cutting them off from their divine flesh supplies. They regressed to their primitive state, while the gods experimented with other races in their war aganist the titans, creating the elves.
Make elves and dwarves the alien spirits of the natural world they need to be.
Are dwarfs Scottish or German?
Honestly, I don't see what the problem is. They have archetypes, yes, but from various pieces of fiction I've seen, there's enough leeway in character types to gauge what a full-rounded Dwarven society is, more than just an entire race of Gimlis.
Listen to this man, he speaks wisdom.
>bloody
shouldve been banned for this imho
>Koboldfag
>Make them Scottish
You mean vikings with bizarrely scottish accents
>Statements like "these dwarves like boats because they live next to the sea" are boring
That's basically how actual cultures work though. People adjust to their environment, then build their whole culture around key elements of their survival. You can still build a myth around that without any person being behind it
Actual Viking Dwarves would be amusing.
Slave-trading chaotic-murderhobo sailors that live on oceanic volcano islands and hunt seal and whale.
Meh, still falls into the not!culture trap
Alternative morality system is an interesting route. Just start writing statements that will be taken as common sense to a dwarf.
>a dwarf owns whatever it makes
>a dwarf is under no obligation to give what it makes
>a dwarfs merit is in what it owns
It's a one sentence description of a culture. So there's still plenty of space to work.
Culture is also driven by the choices people make. Just because dwarves live next to the sea doesn't mean they're automatically going to become great sailors. They might have a cultural or religious fear of the sea, and everything that lives in it, and only live on the coast because there was nowhere else to go. They might not know how to build good boats, and see no benefit to learning.
Sooner or later, there's going to be someone who decides to push the envelope, consciously or otherwise. Someone who drags their people in a new direction, whether they meant to or not. Tell me about that person.
I say this because there is no quicker way to make me fall asleep than to start rambling about rain shadows and soil fertility and ocean currents, and how that affects the culture of a people. That is fucking boring. You are not writing about a faction from a 4X strategy game. You are writing about people, so tell me about people. Who noticed the rain shadows? Who discovered the fertile soil? Who found the ocean currents? Drop the cultural determinism, and tell me about PEOPLE.
>I say this because there is no quicker way to make me fall asleep than to start rambling about rain shadows and soil fertility and ocean currents, and how that affects the culture of a people. That is fucking boring. You are not writing about a faction from a 4X strategy game. You are writing about people, so tell me about people. Who noticed the rain shadows? Who discovered the fertile soil? Who found the ocean currents?
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because rambling on about the individuals would bore me more than the effects themselves. Their lives are only important for what they contributed to the bigger picture, so I don't really care if that guy happened to be an overly ambitious explorer who had a drinking problem and beat his wife on tuesdays or some shit. Someone found the ocean currents, I don't really care who.
This is actually pretty good. Making dwarves an evil race (like the way all elves are in Discworld) or at least assholes is a pretty big break from the general cliche.
>Start by evisioning a setting where Dwarves are the only race.
I always wanted to make such setting for a book or comics or something.
Noice, saved.
We should ask Gravy how he does it
>How do you make dwarves cool again?
High technology, codes of honor and drunken gay sex inside dark mines
>"Oh, you put shackles on some elf girl and enslaved her? Cool."
>"You made some orc steak? Cool, just don't spread a disease or something"
>"Guys, I'm gathering a raiding party to sack some human villages, who wants to join?"
>"No, fuck off, I won't give you my mushrooms, get your own!"
Put 'em in Antarctica.
I see this idea of maggot men being pushed on Dwarves all the time around here. It isn't original and doesn't make any sense unless you keep the Dwarves maggot-like.
The idea of being made of the earth is a better idea. Have them be short stone-men with moss beards and a penchant for shaping metal.
I think this is the move. Go back to the basic archetypes, strip it down, and only keep the pieces that actually add something. You don't necessarily need to completely reject the cliche - cliche can be a good thing in gaming, when used right. It can help give players a sense of familiarity and orient them in the world. Just don't overdo it.
Older iterations of dwarves (esp from eastern europe) often paint them as earth elementals, which logically leads from there to the living underground thing, to the mining thing, to the craftsmen thing. This was the inspiration Tolkien pulled from, and while it has been done to death, there's a lot there to work with.
An offshoot of the "digging for treasure" meme, which was common in older legends and stories but which Tolkien reduced to a sub-theme in LOTR, is that dwarves are extremely greedy and like to hoard treasures. Tolkien played around with this idea more in his silmarillion and unpublished stuff, and of course you have dwarves as villains in things like the Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Fantasy games (most notably D&D and Warhammer) took the Tolkien dwarf and extrapolated forward to "dwarves as creatures of pure Order". The pinnacle of the type is probably the warhammer "book of grudges" dwarves, where they are honor and tradition bound even to the point of complete stupidity. Well trod territory again, but it has some interesting consequences.
Then you've got the more modernized dwarves like you see in Warcraft or Iron Kingdoms, where the writers are putting more emphasis on the "craftsmen / technology" thing and really saying, "what would a society with that focus really look like?"
Basically - take the parts you like, keep them, and toss out the rest. And the scottish viking thing - just drop that. Then make up as much as you need to glue the pieces back together.
make them knee-high and magical. yes, they can smith shit, but they can also move through stone like water, hex people, etc.
Like some sort of gnomes even
i find the Artemis Fowl books did dwarves in an interesting way. If I remember right, they were similar to moles and earthworms, eating large amounts of dirt for nutrients and shitting it back out like an earthworm while having their beards act as feelers similar to a star-nosed mole
>Older iterations of dwarves (esp from eastern europe) often paint them as earth elementals
I too went the Paracelsus way. Admittedly, I call mine gnomes, but the two races spring from the same slurry of mythologies.
I made mine Fey creatures who turned traitor because they had a hard-on for metal and man-made things, and the Fey will banish you if you so much as look approvingly at a loaf of bread. Now that they've been kicked out of fairy land, they've had to come to terms with mortal life.
The dwarf player in my group is the only one who ever takes charge and makes decisions. The other players (humans, elves, half-elves) are all passive nerds who can barely RP, let alone drive the story.
Try to avoid sour faced dourness. Have a wide range of emotions, make some manic as fuck, for example.
What's wrong with Khelgar? Why does everyone here hate Khelgar?
I did Chaos Dwarfs once. Ganondorf is best dorf.
The thing is that dwarves aren't cool. Nor are elves, or hobbits, or gnomes, or any of the rest of them. They're just humans with hats.
As much as people hate and fetishize all the monstrous and animalistic humanoids, and as annoying as that might be, at least they have the potential to be more than that.
Dorf time
That's literally just your opinion, most of the animals are just animals on two legs.
Read the five books of Moses of the Old Testament and base them off of that.
Also set your setting in some period other than the early Renaissance.
>The thing is that dwarves aren't cool. Nor are elves, or hobbits, or gnomes, or any of the rest of them. They're just humans with hats.
Actually, they're humans with fundamentally different physical properties and mindsets. If you don't make use of this, you're failing.
Even the most trite of elves is different from any human culture by virtue of the fact their cultures are designed around the idea they live for fucking ever, for example.
Dorf Fort.
That is all.
Reminder
Sometimes a cliche is perfectly acceptable for a reason.
Because it's perfect.
Thanks, user..
>It isn't original and doesn't make any sense unless you keep the Dwarves maggot-like.
You're bitching about Norse dwarves user.