Alternate Dwarves

So we all know the whole cliche for dwarves. Some fictions choose to focus on one specific attribute, some fictions choose to ignore some traits. But in general dwarves seem to be fairly consistent across modern fiction.

What are some of your favorite cliche-breaking dwarves?

Other urls found in this thread:

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame
youtube.com/watch?v=WEMMVHAINFM
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarfs_and_pygmies_in_Ancient_Egypt
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

In my campaign most dwarves are seafarers who embark on huge tall-masted ships seeking unknown shores.

But then there are still some who do the ol' delving deep stuff like your regular cliche dwarves

Steam-powered, nomadic, tree-dwelling dwarves who fled to the forests to avoid myriads of predators, raiders, and relatives.
This reclusive attitude towards the world has granted these dwarves tanned skin as they live above the canopy in treehouses and elaborate forts within the mighty trees themselves.
They've also managed to replace their industry and traditional metalworking for Ent-taming, guerrilla tactics against raiders, and guerrilla warfare against the elves for their tools and slaves. This time around, the elves have a reason to hold grudges.

Idiot savant Neanderthals.

Really strong, fucked up shoulders means they can't use ranged weapons very well, really smart and incredibly stupid at the same time. They can remember and count things to an inhuman degree, but unless there's a human or elf around, they will keep doing the same things over and over and over, because they don't understand the concept of improving a process. (Because Neanderthals never showed any sign of improving their technology, or changing their rituals for thousands of years, only changing things up when they came in contact with humans).

I have this kind of non-player dwarves that basically said: "fuck everything above ground, we hate it". They dug really deep until they met "people" that gave them the power to move through stone, but they lost the power to create magical weapons that are just better than anyones else weapons. They also can't move through stone as long as they don't wear any metal on them. So they created stone-armor and weapons and are really sneaky and creepy. They also learned some dark magic from these creatures below.

I dont get it.
What is the purpose of referring to them as Dwarfs if you go out of your way to make them as different as possible?
Why not create a new species for your homebrew in the first place?

Other than self-fellating about how you can subvert simple cliches and to later circle-jerk on a board about it what purpose serves this?

Because beyond what pop culture has described, what a "dwarf" is is debated. Look at the mythology of dwarfs and you'll find contention between scholars. Are they elves? Are they men with beards? Were they really short? Were they more evil and dark than good?

One of my favorite depictions of 'dwarfs' is from The Dresden Files, where they're just Svartalfs. Little, bug eyed elves who are known for making incredible works and always keeping their word.

That's just as accurate a description of a dwarf as Tolkien's.

I can explain the Dwemer to you, at least, if you want.

I like how the elder scrolls does it. They're still miners and live underground but their just an elven race and are technologically advanced

Neanderthals are tiny.
Hairy.
Bad with ranged weapons.
Really good at crafting shit, really fucking bad at inventing new things.

Neanderthals are literally dwarves. Dwarves are literally Neanderthals.

Because they're still Dwarves, instead of falling they rose. Picture "Rising" as the Dwarven equivalent of the Paladin's "Falling"
That, and I want Catachan Dwarves.

The other day, I made a pretty tg-related dream that took place in a post-apocalyptic, modern, fantasy setting. Also it was a turn-based tactical game. Dreams, man.

In it, there was a dwarven/elvish joint "city" which was a HUGE hollowed out tree (think worldtree).
At the center of the trunk was an "iron" core that was a giant forge/bunker. The wooden parts were housing and the like.
The post-apocalyptic part was that the world was attacked by firethrowing robots and the people tried to gain access to the core to hide in it, while the branches were burning all around.

I liked the idea. The elves were gatherers, archers, etc, they sustained life on and in the tree. The dwarves were heavy warriors, crafters and all that. They were close to the usual cliches, but in a symbiotic way rather than antagonistic.

I think the issue is more that dwarves tend to be underdeveloped in most setting than a fault to their archetype. Elves tend to get some focus in a lot of setting, developing their race, cities, traditions and often an elf waifu, while dwarves are reduce to one character and maybe a "lost hold" serving as dungeon. They just rarely have the occasion to shine. So I don't really think they need to "be different" but simply more developed. Though if you want to make your dwarves different anyway, good for you.

>"fuck everything above ground, we hate it"
My standard dwarves are the opposite of that, one foot on the surface, one under. Their wealth come not just through mining but by controlling most of the passage between the two "worlds". Most of the underground stuff is quite unpleasant and dwarves are the only one you can reasonably interact with there.
So if you want to adventure in the deep, you probably will have to deal with them. They can be your starting point, your base camp, you may have to pay them a toll road, hire one of their guide, they may be the ones saving your ass... but chances are will have to deal with them.

But they also live on the surface, mostly in altitude (mountain dwarves are known for their pastoral activities) though fortified trading posts can be found all along their numerous trade routes and sometime grow into towns.

>Fuck, in all this desert there are no mountains
>Then we make the mountains
And thus they constructed the pyramids.

>dwarves
>posts super fedora elves
What did he mean by this?

Haha look how tiny his penis is

He was in the Nile!

Dwemer are my favorite dwarves AND elves

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame
Our dwarves are all the same. Literally. They've got a specieswide hivemind and the singular Dwarf personality is that of a stereotypical dwarf.

My 'dwarves' are basically a caste based desert nomad society that look like a bit of oryx and gazelle ruled by Water Buffalo in the higher castes.

Dwarves have crossbows don't they?

The Dwemer are an amazing dwarf variant. They have all the traits you'd associate with Tolkien's dwarfs and still manage to come off completely different.

>They have all the traits you'd associate with Tolkien's dwarfs
While I agree that Dwemer are far more interesting than "muh short beer drinking mechanical angery bearded man" stereotype they don't share that many similarities with Tolkien's elves

Neanderthals had limited shoulder movements.

Drawing the string of big crossbows wouldn't be a problem for them, but they'd certainly lose a lot of time having to readjust their grasp when their shoulders would lock up.

Or at least, that's what I imagine.

There was some good shit about dwarves that retained a lot of traditional dwarven features while still being different a while back, Imma see if I can dig it up (no pun intended) - I believe it involved opera

Don't call them dwarves, use the root word like Dhreugh and you get free reign to do whatever you want.

We only link "dwarf" with short because of a post-christian bastardization of the dwarves and the word stuck. The original myths never mentioned their size.

In fact, it'd be just as likely that dwarves were a kind of elf, called Svartalfar. While the Ljosalfar were said to be fair beyond compare, Svartalfar were noted for being black skinned and corpse-like.

Ugly, often deformed sexless pseudomen that have to be dug out of stone in literal dwarf mines as their creator god couldn’t replicate the reproductive system of men and elves (who were created by superior gods), so he just deposited a great but finite number of them under the earth.

kek

I like Dwarves who go back to being magic. I'm tired of dwarves in fiction always seeming to hate magic and distrust it. At least the dwarves in the hobbit had all kinds of interesting magical shit in their backstory, with its absence being explained as cultural decay.

This. I see no reason why dwarves can't be the leaders in magic in their setting.

My current setting has Duregar integrated with typical Mountain Dwarves after an Underdark city managed to free themselves from Mind Flayer corruption and mindbreak. Now they have the hair back and despise anything related to slavery, are really really into runic crafting, and regularly hold festivals and celebrations of their freedom. Their coinage even features things like broken chains and Mind Flayer heads on spikes.

It's not super in depth or unique but it's serving my purpose.

Huh, weird, I had dwarves as the inventors of opera in my post-apocalyptic setting that I shared on Veeky Forums a long time ago. I never knew somebody else had dwarves inventing it.

Yeah - if nothing else Terry Pratchett did it, and I recall it in a thread a while back - it was thought to fit with dwarves when they're being particularly grandiose

Have some music with anvils as an instrument
youtube.com/watch?v=WEMMVHAINFM

What about Yaksha or Yakshi?

In my campaign dwarves are pale maggoty people, with nearly translucent skin, tiny black eyes and rows of little serated teeth hidden behind fleshy barbels.

They are excellent at crafting things, even making perfect replicas of living animals or monsters. They are so greedy that they hide themselves deep underground to guard their secrets from other dwarves. Incredibly competitive, most dwarves will only work with immediate family members and even this is difficult.

They breed by creating a hivemother that lays dwarven eggs. These hivemothers are progenators of entire dwarven clans and are also jealously guarded.

Disgusting, well crafted idea man

>mfw Speak Friend and Enter

>Svartalfar were noted for being black skinned and corpse-like
I think it was the pale blueish hue of a dead man

So they looked like Prometheus engineers

Reminder that the Egyptians loved Dwarfs.

I actually went with a similar concept, having Dwarves originate from a trio of wind and wave blasted islands and as a result they're hardy sailors in addition to miners, steering great stone ships across the ocean waves.

>What are some of your favorite cliche-breaking dwarves?

Yiffy dwarves

I actually like this kind of idea, though it'd be nice if I had a good source to read more.

I pretty much just folded all of my subterranean humanoid races into one, with various cultures and divisions that represented the different types. There's no Orcs, Dwarves, and Drow. They're all depictions of the same fucking thing. The tusked brutes are just wartime propaganda, though their true forms are still misshapen by human standards. They've got a somewhat nauseating corpse-like appearance to their flesh, and large bulging eyes.

They're a lot of things, but they are rightfully famous for their metalworking and craftsmanship. They do live underground, but aren't necessarily shorter than humans. Their culture is nominally a theocracy, which has grown rather corrupt with all the backstabbing, secret dealings, and other bullshit going on behind the scenes. Crusades to take the surface world aren't too uncommon, and people on the receiving end of those will perceive them as a warlike race.

In a setting I'm working on, I gave Dwarves a few elements of other high-altitude cultures like Tibet and the Inca to add a little variety.
While they still have large underground cities built inside their mountains, the majority of dwarves live above ground, farming in terrace farms carved from the foothills of their mountains or in plateaus and small valleys.
They also have large monasteries built at the highest and most isolated peaks, where monks secluded themselves to meditate and study. Since their are so high up in the mountains, dwarf monks are the best astronomers in the world

Interestingly, they were often associated with being jewellers, goldsmiths and treasurers (the latter because it was much harder for them to get away with duplicity thanks to their distinctive appearance), and one of the forms of the god of crafts, Ptah, was a dwarf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarfs_and_pygmies_in_Ancient_Egypt

Not got any specifically Egyptian dwarves

Best Dorf is here

well the Dwarves are alternatively called Dwemer or Deep Elves

Not dwarves but Duergar (close enough).

I made them ancestor worshiping necromancers. They live lives of relative luxury having the time to craft great works, design elegant halls and become great scholars and philosophers. The tradeoff is that they toil in undeath to make life better for the living for a number of years equal to their lifespan, at the end of their 'unlifespan' they can choose to go to their final death or continue on as ancestral guardians in gilded skeleton bodies (not necessarily dwarf skeletons). They can even opt out of the servitude but believe they forgo their final resting place if they do. Kind of based them on the necropolis from Sandman, have great respect and interest in the burial cultures and views on death from all religions and species.

They worship the neutral goddess of death and hate all non-ancestor, non-consensual or evil undead embarking on crusades against undead whenever they show up in great number. Have a special variant of paladin that must slay undead and be of neutral alignment.

I remember a thread about cheese producing opera dwarves. Good shit.

source?

I took a pseudo antropological and pseudoscientific/paleontological approach to this.
Basicaly I started with: "assuming homo florensis was an actual subspecies of human; that it arose in a land similar to our japan, that is an archipelago of mainly montainous islands on a oceanic drift, and that it somehow survived competition with humans untill it reached civilization (perhaps by being very out of hand) how would it have developed, and how can I make this speculation usefull for muh elfgames?"
I had something like this: all the so called "short races" (dwarves, gnomes, haflings, "kenders") are actually ethnicities of the same race that developed from hominids alongside humanity (and elfkind on another contient, and "Yeti" or giants on another still) in a archipelago of small mountainous and vulcanic islands where resource scarcity caused the onset of dwarfism on most fauna.
The first division amongst them was between the cave-dwellers and the hunters: the first found a network of huge natural caves under the islands, with It's own ecosystem, and colonized it eventually working out how to expand them, how to dig rock and being mostly autonomous from the external world, but they still feared the frequent earthquakes thus developing architecture before the wheel. The Hunters outside further divided between agricultural and naval peoples who would lager be known as Gnomes and Haflings respectivelly. When the Haflings Made first contact with the expanding human civilizations, some adapted to live semi-parasitically in the relativelly huge human settlements doing the kind of jobs that were considered either ritually impure (leatherworking, corpse preparation...) or immoral (lending money for interest) and developed their culture as outsiders in human Lands, the kender.

My dwarfs still live in mountains but none of that great dwarven empire crap, tunnels and accommodations are meant for dwarf only. They mine and shit and basically are the park rangers of the mountains.

City dwarfs have more trimmed, stylish, and shorter beards than mountain dwarfs and definitely have a more cosmopolitan aesthetic

In the setting I haven't developed the Dwarves Zealously worship Giants because Giants turn into mountains Months after they die. The Contintent spanning mountain is believed to be the remains of the world's largest giant. His head was said to break through the clouds. The lava that burns within the bowels of the mountain is said to be a fragment of the sun he ate before he died. The spirits and elemental born from the flames indeed seem to invoke the appearance of the sun

There's more ask if you want it

>Mesopotamian magic-wielding giant-bull riding empire dwarves who turn to stone

Aztec Dwarves. Living in gigantic pyramids instead of usual caves.

Haven't you ever heard of shrinkage?

Reminder that they still exist.

In my homebrew D&D setting Dwarves were largely a matriarchal animist tribal culture living in the hills and revered an earth mother like spirit before some dwarf dudes climbed a mountain top and encountered the sky father, who brought them "true civilization".

The transformation from one cultural paradigm to the other is a big part of their shtick. They're very Mesopotamian/Biblical in style.

Weren't the doors made by elves?

Are sea-dwarves a thing now? I've been working on a culture of pacific-islander-inspired dwarves in my setting for a while.

...

I like magic dwarves. I'm not quite sure when or why that was divorced from their concept, but it's a shame they're usually pushed out of the role by elves. I tried to alleviate that by making magic a thing for everyone, but giving every race their own approach: dwarves are the craftsmen/scientific types that view their magic as a way to understand and shape the world to their whims, elves have their hippy harmonious magic that's less about understanding and more about expressing or fulfilling a need, and humans are the crazy reckless types that push it just to see how far they can go

You might want to look into Hawaiian legends of a race of beings called the "Menehune". They're almost precisely what you need. They were believed by ancient Hawaiians to have been the original inhabitants of the islands and superb craftsmen/builders, as well as magicians. They were believed to be behind various monolithic structures found on the islands. They're said to look like small humans (i.e. dwarfs) dressed in traditional clothing who are, depending on who you ask, either capable of invisibility or just extremely good at hiding. They may help people who leave them offerings of fish or bananas (their most favorite foods), or punish those who trespass on their territories.

Mine are eusocial, too. Like mole rats. Each clan has a queen that is the size of a house, and when a worker gets promoted to ''consort' he transforms into a troll.

Live in mountain cities but it is not a cultural thing. Those were the only places fortified enough to resist barbarians when the dwarven empire declined/collapsed.

The cities are largely isolated since the descendants of said barbarians control the lower lands. Only fliers can travel with any safety and they cannot carry much.

Dwarves have developed a highly magical and labor intensive form of agriculture that lets them grow all food inside the city walls. Lots of rooftop gardens and terraces.

The few dwarves who travel abroad carry potted plants with them, either one big shrub or many small ones. These are magical and grow enough fruit every day to sustain their owner.

TL;DR dwarves as Byzantium.

H. R. Giger inspired dwarves and mountainhomes which look like xenomorph nests if the xenomorphs replaced cocooned victims with decorative engravings.

In my setting Dwarves come in two varieties, "Hill" and "Mountain." Hill Dwarves are surface dwellers known for elite heavy cavalry, small, fast, maneuverable ships that BTFO other people's larger counter parts, and philosophy.
Mountain Dwarves live in underground, where spears and short swords are more effective than axes and hammers, and so are known for elite heavy infantry. One story tells of a Mountain Dwarf Hold that left defended only by the women, was surprise attacked by Hill Dwarf infantry. The Hill Dwarves were confused when the women showed up since the army was supposed to be away, and were completely routed. They didn't find out they had fought the women until after the battle when one took her helmet off.

well to the Norse they were the maggots that sprung from a giant's body, the body forming the world...
god they were on so much mushrooms.

>dwarves eating bananas

too far