Different Dwarves

Call of Cthulhu Dark Ages revisited the maggot concept. Making them large sentient maggots that reanimate and inhabit dead bodies.

Rat eating, rough housing shit bags that take their love for war all the way to their cuisine. War bread or GTFO. Also all Dwarves have beards, even the females.

I kind of did this, took many of the usual traits of dwarves and broke all dwarves up into different castes/cultures, each taking some of the typical traits but also having new ones. For a small example, "typical" dwarven societies in the mountains are actually split between a sedentary caste that excels in craftsmanship and engineering as well as philosophy and art but dislike violence and things like loosing control of one's emotions and have an almost aristotelian pseudo-religion; then you also have semi-nomadic warrior and animal herder clans who spend their free time drinking and raiding and have a shamanistic religion but often are politically and economically linked to one settled dwarf city-state or another. These cultures have a symbiotic relationship, the craftsmen provide political stability and access to trade, culture, and manufactured goods; while the nomads provide a strong military to be used both defensively and against outsiders or other dwarf cities. Other dwarf groups include the underground dwellers, lava sailors, swamp dwarves who also participate in river trade routes, and a !notMedievalJews group that live in large cities all over the world.

Also, Gnomes were an ancient slave caste that lived underground in the mines for so long they became a different race.

Have Not!dwarfs things in my setting.
>they are depicted more or less traditionally on some of humanity's ancient trinkets, live in almost complete isolation in mountains
>on those trinkets, they are depicted as short and wide men
>in reality, they have similar proportions, except they are 2.5m tall
>physiology works other way around, they need much more metallic elements to function
>blood coagulates in metal-like mass
>which is why some clans have dudes who go in battle naked, blood coagulates and forms natural armour
>when they pass 50-70 years, they insert a huge halo-like ring in their skull
>metallic and mineral growths around the body, including face, and thus on the halo-like ring
>some females unironically have beards, most shave them though
>shiny hair, because much metal
>can live for thousands years, and when they decide that they left enough kids and they are tired, petrify while conserving sentience
>grow in petrified state, up to the size of a mountain
>balls with so much steel that they are considered equals by most militaristic and warloving species of the setting

That's pretty neat. Though if they have close to human proportions, why do you consider them dwarves instead of, say, halflings? Not that the name matters a whole lot when you're adding this much, but if you tell players a setting has "dwarves" they probably won't picture what you're describing.

>My last DM made Halflings and Gnomes into cultural offshoots that moved out of their mountain homes for literal greener pastures, while the Dwarven Dwarves are tradition-bound die hards with an esoteric connection to "the Stone." Which is why they're so damn heavy & stronk compared to the soyboys in the valleys.

So how exactly does it make them different from other dwarves because it sounds like you got sidetracked sucking you GMs cock and failed to explain the thing that makes them different.

>"my ___ isn't like the other setting's ___" list for worldbuilding,
Why do you you have to do it anyway?
What is wrong with Dwarves and Elves exactly?
You being a subhuman hipster who heard some schmuck on Youtube talk how X or why Y is generic because of Tolkien doesn't actually make it.

I am so tired of this meme and of uncreative people like you who are such disgusting tryhards at trying to reinvent the wheel and who just end up with ITS DWARVES/ELVES WITH JUST A DIFFERENT EARTH CULTURE APPLIED TO THEM, SEE HOW UNIQUE AND THEY ARE TOTES INTERESTING NOW.
Pro-Tip: They arent.

Faggot OP here. I suppose I gone into more detail about HOW my DM made Dwarves different, but ironically enough, I decided to keep things short to avoid retards like you bitching about me sucking my DM's dick. The only common theme between all the different bloodlines and cultures of Dwarves was their focus on keeping themselves busy with crafting. The Dwarves who still lived in the mountains were a clerical society, with different ancestral heroes venerated as guiding figures in different clanholds - a particular clan's social rituals, war doctrine & architecture might be a radical departure from the next, but all of them were... well, set in stone. Innovation was limited because the entire city had it's collective head up some long-dead 20th level character's ass. The Mountain Dwarves have lived in a stagnant society for ages, but they're too hung up in grudges and the good old days to admit it.

The Dwarves in the valleys and plains are adapting and changing to suit environmental pressures that the species simply hasn't had to deal with in a long time. Dwarves are only as strong as they are because they live in ancient cities that were built to channel elemental energy, and they have spent generations living in mild magical radiation - the knowledge of how to make such wonders still exists, but the leftover essence of creation that would be needed to make another city like this is long gone. As such, any Dwarves that spend more than a few generations away from their cities will eventually end up with the actual proportional strength of a 4'6" manlet. Without their race's literal superstrength and with excessive sunlight, an overabundance of directions for bandits to come from, and an increased need to work with non-Dwarves, "halflings" have adopted all manner of new business practices and organizational structures - you can't just default to tradition when there's no precedent for your situation, after all.

Cont. for Gnomes

Not him but this isn't actually sounding very different from standard dwarves. Personally I don't mind it, but it isn't proving the point of "but my DM does it different!"

"Halflings" split off for various economic reasons - overcrowding, ambition, irreparably burned bridges with influential individuals, etc. Villages and towns just build up over time as Dwarves trickle out of their ancestral homes to look for opportunity. Gnomes, on the other hand, were formed in a very organized schism.

Dwarves haven't had a tradition of arcane magic in along time, and that's largely because of election fraud. In summary, the Dwarven wizards set up a series of scrying mirrors and pools to allow communication across hundreds of miles for the Dwarven nobility. This magical series of communication relays proved to be extremely useful, until it was discovered that the Dwarven mages had designed them specifically to be vulnerable to outside manipulation, and that they had been controlling the inner workings of the government for centuries by collecting information and rewriting important messages. Basically, the majority of the Dwarven mages were exiled for high treason - they would have been executed if there weren't so damn many of them to punish, and if they didn't have near-godlike magical powers. The "gnomes" are the remnant of these families and schools of Dwarven mages.

A debate over whether or not this supposed breach of confidence really happened is questionable to say the least, and to this day many "gnomes" claim to have been slandered by an insane, power-hungry king that wanted to get rid of his most ardent opponents. Dwarven records partially support both claims, although there are holes in both stories.

It's a slight twist that keeps the major themes intact for the more Dwarfy Dwarves, while simultaneously inverting the tropes associated with them - you have your big manly man Dwarves living in oversized mountain holds, sure... they just happen to be roided up on arcane magic, while their hobbit-like outcasts and emigrants are not only significantly closer to their natural form, but also confronting more immediate and existential threats than their mainstream culture(s) usually have to. As I started to get into a bit in the part about Gnomes, they're basically Jews - which Tolkein had originally based his Dwarves on, but taken in a much more literal direction.