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The Veins of the Earth are home to a variety of sentient creatures, many belonging to advanced civilizations. They are almost all insane. The two exceptions are antlings and dwarves. Skerples has already covered antlings in great depth.
Dwarves are entirely different.
Dwarves
Also known as undermen, the deep elves, dokkalfar.
Dwarves are golems. Free-willed, sapient golems, created by other sapient golems. Chiseled from stone, eyes inlaid with jewels, the essence of the Law carved and hammered into their bodies with holy blows. Dwarves are born with the knowledge of enchantment and golemancy, arts which humans labor whole lifetimes to learn. They must know them, for that is the only way to create more of their kind.
Of course, that is only the beginning. But let's leave a little to be revealed.
Biology
Material
Just as procreation is instinctual in humans, it is instinctual in dwarves. It is, however, much harder. Humans procreate accidentally. Dwarves must do it cautiously, deliberately. It is a work of both industry and art. Most often this is a collaboration by multiple dwarves, though great and eccentric dwarves sometimes dedicate themselves to creating a child in their own image and their image alone. The finances, status, environment and aesthetic sensibilities of the parent dwarves inform everything about the children.
Dwarves are first sculpted from stone. Clay is used for simple golems, but it cannot hold the intricacies of a dwarf. The kind of stone used is a major source of status, and will define how other dwarves perceive them. Stone with large amounts of impurities, or shoddy stone like slate is cheap and widely available. Dwarven parents will only use them to create children if they have no other choice and are in desperate need.
The exact choice of stone, from banded marble, basalt or granite, to more daring selections like ores, crystals or glass, is dependent on both taste and available resources.
Design
Likewise their size and shape. The name 'dwarf' is a bit of a misnomer. True, most dwarves are short and stocky. This is because they fit better in underground spaces, it's cheaper to use less stone, and great size isn't really necessary. Quickness of mind and precision of hand are the most valued qualities in dwarven society.
That said, there are many dwarves who are hardly described by the term. Dwarven soldiers in particular tend to be human-sized or larger. If they were created with underground combat in mind, they will be built compact. If they were built with surface combat in mind, they can be very large indeed. Mighty dwarven warriors have been known to wrestle trolls into submission.
The features of a dwarf are primarily aesthetic. The form of the nose, ears, lips and eyes are entirely up to what their parent was really digging at the time. Some go for classic looks, emulating the features of past rulers and heroes, like how human parents name their children after religious figures and human artists emulate the works of the old masters. Others are experimental, or even abstract. While (literally) chiseled abs and muscular physiques are the norm, you will see a variety of forms, some corpulent, some thin, some round, some angular, and a similar variation of facial types.
Bodies
Unlike the common golem, which is merely animate material, dwarven bodies are unto flesh. They are pliant and supple as actual muscle, skin indistinguishable from that of a human but for the lack of hair and pores (only very wealthy and resourceful dwarves have the ability to give their creations such details).
That said, their internal functioning is nothing like ours. They do not eat, breathe, drink or age. They have no internal organs. They do not fall to sickness or poison. Though they can be injured, they do not bleed. By that same token, they do not heal. Their hair does not grow back, their flesh does not knit itself back together. A dwarf can be repaired, but they will bears seams, magical scarring.
Beards
One of the most common features among dwarvenkind is the beard. Beyond the aesthetic value, the beard is used to denote the family history and status of the individual dwarf. The style, shape and texture of the beard is a hidden sigil that tells another dwarf the place and time of one's birth, what line of craftsmen one came from, and one's place in wider society. Knickknacks like beads added into the beard over time denote great achievements and feats, like wearing a medaled uniform.
Remember, faces are there entirely for aesthetic purposes. Dwarves don't identify each other by face, but by beard, and that tells them not only who you are, but your whole family history.
Now, not all dwarves have beards. Some parents, in daring artistic leaps, choose to forgo the beard in favor of placing the sigil elsewhere. The chest or the crown of the head is an acceptable choice, though sometimes obscured by hats and clothing. Placing the sigil elsewhere, such as on one's back, leg or the sole of one's foot, has about the same effect as having your face on one of these places.
Of course, dwarves guard their beards jealously. They cannot grow them back, after all. To cut off a dwarf's beard is akin to slicing off a person's face. The act only of a true lunatic. You can get a prosthetic beard, or render your sigil elsewhere on your body, but it's like looking at a person wearing a fake face. It's creepy, and strangers will never trust you. Even exiled dwarves only have their beards trimmed, the relevant section shorn off to reflect their banishment from society. To cut off a beard whole is to destroy a dwarf's public identity.
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| A Dwarven King. |
Gender
It is worth noting the topic of gender. Dwarves, strictly speaking, do not have it. They may have facial features of one gender or the other, and the secondary sex characteristics of one or the other, but more often have a mix. A dwarf may have the face of a man, the genitals of a woman, androgynous clothing and a great big beard. Dwarven scholars have an academic understanding of human sex and gender, and why it matters to them, but the average dwarf does not. They just like how these body types and those facial features go together.
Society
Alcohol
Despite not having food or a sense of taste, dwarves do have alcohol. It's a highly efficient fuel that they use for simple machines. Mind you, dwarves and their golemic creations are fueled by their chem, the magic words and runes carved into their bodies at birth.
For the longest time, they just created high-proof fungal liquor. After trading with surface folk, they found humans had a wide variety of alcohols, and valued them quite highly. Sensing an opportunity, a handful of dwarves apprenticed themselves to human brewers and winemakers. They reproduced human work, and then created new dwarves with the knowledge of the masters and a focused dwarven genius for drink. The dwarves proceeded to brew with a level of quality incomprehensible to humans.
They have refused to make it in industrial quantity for two reasons. First, they consider it an art, not an industry. Second, it keeps the prices for dwarven liquor at a premium, and gives them significant leverage over human nobles. Once one of them throws a kegger with a one of a kind microbrew, the rest suddenly want one too.
Dwarven beers, wines, meads, whiskeys, vodkas and a variety of fungal products original to them are made in small batches, with constant innovation. Every brewer maintains a team of trusted human taste-testers to tell them if it's any good.
Structure and Conformity
When you can effectively program people from birth, you'll end up with a rather conformist society. A dwarf's interests and personality are determined by their parents, carved into them along with sentience and knowledge. They are created for a specific purpose, and are expected to fulfill it.
Of course, golemancy is more an art than science, and most dwarves are slightly different than their parents expected. These quirks are normal, but are largely kept under wraps. Disagreeing with one's parents or displaying an unusual hobby is taboo. Openly defying your place in society is akin to saying that your parents failed.
The dwarven version of the Hero's Journey typically follows a young dwarf, dissatisfied with their place or bearing a secret quirk. They seek wisdom from their elders and come close to breaking from society, before reconciling and conforming to their intended role. Dwarves find this story arc reassuring and cathartic.
That said, there is an entire caste of dwarves dedicated to the opposite. Rogue dwarves are intentionally created without a place in society, and serve to shake up the system on a regular basis. Most of the time they're just silly. They go around wearing spiders as hats. Others are violent. Others are obsessed with a particular topic and do nothing but examine that.
They are a source of controlled chaos within in otherwise static system. They serve to expose and correct systemic flaws and blindspots in dwarven society, as well as advancing it faster than could occur normally. Spider-hats are enormously fashionable today. They take major risks so that others don't have to. They often don't live very long. Most don't do much of importance. But every so often, one of them makes an advancement or discovery otherwise impossible, and are remembered as heroes.
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| So this is all mine? No, it's a loan- IT'S ALL MINE! |
Religion
The dwarves don't have gods per se, but they do worship something. The chem. The magic that animates them and allows them to create more of themselves. Souls carved from stones. Mythology and doctrine varies from hold to hold, in some cases radically, but all share this base.
The earth, the whole thing, was once a dwarf. The Ur-Dwarf. A perfectly wise being, the source of all chem. It sacrificed itself and let that energy go so that the dwarven race might exist. It has a plan. It wants the dwarves to unite and become as wise as it was once.
This is a deeply, but quietly held faith, not spoken of to outsiders. Outsiders, holds most doctrine, get in the way of that purpose. The other races, at best, are distractions, and at worst, parasites upon the holy corpse. They are either to be traded with for long-term advantage, or slowly exterminated. Humans and most other surface dwellers fit the former. Almost all other underground races are in the latter. Antlings are alright though.
Dwarves are born with this knowledge, and so the activities of dwarven priests are mystical in nature. They plumb the depths of chemical (ha!) mysteries, searching for divine patterns that will guide their actions. They construct elaborate metaphysics and apply them. They are getting close to some real breakthroughs.
Justice
In a society built on conformity, trials and criminals are fairly rare. The odd rogue dwarf is dragged in when their activities cause more harm than the king is willing to tolerate. A common dwarf that breaks from their expected purpose is arraigned and pressured to return to their purpose. The king does not tolerate disobedience, and abhors an execution when not strictly necessary. Especially difficult criminals are shipped off to other fortresses, or sent to the front lines for an honorable death.
Human criminals are uncommon, though expected. If you break the law and end up in a dwarven court, you will find a trial presided over by a priest, or the king if you've really screwed up. These are the wisest people in the fortress. Wisdom does not mean kindness, and they are not on your side.
Your crimes will be tallied, and you will represent yourself. If you can make yourself useful, the dwarves will send you on a quest. Your bodies will be carved with geas runes. You will not be taken as slaves. Humans aren't good enough slaves to be worth the hassle.
If you have someone looking out for you that the dwarves would rather not anger, they will consider letting you off. If they think a lack of consequences will lead to more shenanigans in the future, they'll run the numbers and make their decision. Precedent is secondary to results. The ends justify the means.
Lifespan
Dwarves, understandably, live for a very long time. They don't fall sick, they don't age, they don't starve. A dwarf will just keep on chugging unless its physical body is destroyed beyond repair. Barring rare accidents (tragic) or battlefield death (limited to soldiers, who are programmed to happily sacrifice themselves for the greater good) they will keep on working and living.
By way of illustration: a classic dwarven tragic opera tells the story of two young kings, a human and dwarf, who embark on a journey of heroic conquest, finding brotherhood and friendship along the way. The human king slowly ages and finally dies at the conclusion, with the dwarven king at his bedside. Human audiences often find it bittersweet, but heartwarming. Dwarven audiences consider it terrifying.
Dwarves do, however, decay. The chem which carves life into them degrades over time. Centuries, sometimes millennia for well made dwarves, but nevertheless they degrade. Everyone knows it. Nobody talks about it. It begins with forgetfulness. Then changes in personality. They act erratically, until they no longer recognize their own children and spit on the work they once held sacred.
Rather than face this fate, most dwarves choose to go go elsewhere as they near the end of their lives. Some seek out an honorable death fighting the enemies of dwarvenkind. Others journey to isolated monasteries where they enter a sort of stasis, slowing the decay, and awaiting the day they may be needed again. Dwarven rulers make a great show of inaugurating their successors and traveling throughout the world seeking adventure.
Here's a secret. One of those you could build a campaign off of. The chem is shrinking. Whatever source of power the dwarves tap into when creating their children is finite, and they're brushing up against the borders of it even as the number of dwarves and their golemic creations increase exponentially. Dwarves are living shorter lives by the generation. Some have noticed.
Golems
Knowing that the dwarves are masters of golemancy, it would be odd that they do not create lesser golems to serve them. Odder still is the truth. In a dwarven settlement, everything is golems.
Everything.
The house you live in? Golem. The pack scarab you're riding? Golem. The dwarven armor you're wearing? Golem.
They vary widely in intelligence. The animals they create are about as intelligent as actual animals. They're more versatile than machines, able to improvise and complete simple tasks in a general domain. The inanimate items aren't intelligent, but are capable of moving and changing their structure slightly. A house can bend to better weather an earthquake. Armor can loosen to allow its wearer to move more easily or slip it off quickly.
The distinction between the dwarves and their pets is sapience. Most creations are not granted this gift. The carving of abstract thought is expensive and time consuming, and is usually reserved for humanoids. There are some exceptions. Uplifted golems, or dwarves sculpted in extremely unorthodox ways.
This extends far beyond what an explorer might expect.
The Under-Emperor
Visitors to dwarven holds may notice that their names are quite odd. Instead of location, the name given is that of the emblem, typically some kind of animal or other creature. The Citadel of the Iron Elephant, the Fortress of the Horned Squid, and so on. Humans believe these to be a reflection of city identity. Not so.
Visitors will also notice the strange construction of these holds. They spiral in beautiful symmetrical patterns and then break off unexpectedly. They don't follow an external logic, and any pattern you think you see will break down with the next area. Humans believe the construction to be another form of art. Not so.
Remember. Everything is golems.
Dwarven fortresses are not an exception. They are massive golems deep in the earth, with tens of thousands of dwarves living inside of them. Their name is not a circular reference, but a literal description of its shape. Intelligence, after all, must be embodied. In times of dire need, the fortress itself may animate, though this is supremely rare.
Their primary purpose is governance. A human entering a dwarven court would think the figure on the throne is the king. That's what they call themselves, but they do not rule. Just as medieval kings were thought to be conduits to God, the dwarven kings are intermediaries with the intelligence of the fortress. It is very busy, and cannot waste its time with the sheer noise of day to-day life. So the king appoints a justice system to deal with ordinary events, personally takes charge of more complex issues, and appeals to the spirit of the fortress only with the most important and difficult of questions.
These are the Under-Emperors. Superintelligences working to predict the shape of the world. They direct the actions of the hold, and delegate down the line. But that's not the end of it.
Endgame
The dwarves have a goal. To connect the Under-Emperors together. To seize the earth's core and render it intelligent, according to dwarven Law. They war with their neighbors and expand constantly for this reason. They curry favor with the surface folk only insofar as it furthers this goal. It is the common destiny of dwarfkind.
This is all very chem-intensive. There may not be enough chem in existence to accomplish this goal. If not, the dwarves will find a way to make more. A handful of rogue dwarves believe that ritual sacrifice of other sapient creatures can increase the total supply of chem. They have begun to experiment.
It is up to the GM how far along the dwarves are in this goal, and whether it is possible. Perhaps it is a fools errand, or millennia off, and it won't affect the campaign. Or it is merely years away. If they succeed, the other races of this world, surface and underground, will consider this an apocalypse. To the dwarves, it will be apotheosis.
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| The short ones don't end up on the battlefield. |
Samples
Here are a few samples of dwarves, items and plots, ready to slot into a variety of campaigns.
Sample Dwarves
Medam, the Judge
Most dwarves are imperfect. The Law is carved into them, but a small chip here or there results in differing judicial opinions. Medam, however, is not.
Medam is the perfect judge. The Law is strong with him. He sees the plan of the Ur-Dwarf clearly, and converses regularly with the Under-Emperors. He does not judge individual cases, as they are beneath him.
50% chance that he is a charismatic and delusional rogue dwarf.
He appears as a diminutive human woman carved of white marble, dressed in robes of gold and orange with a beard shaped like a law tablet, wearing a gilded tarantula.
Medam: HD 2 HP 10 DEF 10 ATK 8 MOR 11 SAV 6
Noru of the Squids
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| There's a real dearth of warsquid art |
Noru was carved for a very specific purpose. To lead the dwarves of the Horned Squid clan to victory against the merman incursion. He was carved of ocean stone. His face and beard were as a squid, and studded with merman ears. His legs had spurs to hold onto the flaps of his warsquid better. He was first revealed to the world in their final battle against the mermen, where he led a suicidal attack that routed their army. But as the clan celebrated, he refused to return, and pursued his quarry into deep water, armed with only his lance, harpoon, and trusted mount, Inky.
He was not seen again. But neither were the mermen. Some say he destroyed his enemies and yet roams the oceans, his parameters for 'merman' becoming looser by the day. Perhaps that's why ships keep going missing along that route...
Noru: HD 4 HP 20 DEF 14 ATK 12 MOR 10 SAV 8
Inky: HD 7 HP 60 DEF 16 ATK 14 MOR 8 SAV 4
Konrick the Forge Golem
Forge golems are simple creatures, with an animal intelligence created for menial and non-magical smithing. Their bodies are animate metal, their heads blazing furnaces. All except for this one.
The dwarf Albrig, a master smith, was condemned for his numerous blasphemies against the priests, and barred from creating children. He was watched closely, and when he mysteriously disappeared, he was thought to have no heirs. Until his forge golem was found to speak and act independently. He had uplifted it, piecemeal. It was confused, but willfull. It was an abomination, but one eager for a place, and so it was brought back into the fold.
In reality, it had inherited its masters cunning and fractured knowledge of the Law. It knows its masters location, and works to build influence for his return. It is beardless, and is known on sight by its sigiled scarf.
Konrick: HD 3 HP 25 DEF 12 ATK 10 MOR 6 SAV 5
Sample items
Golem Plate: This dwarven plate mail is statted as chain +2. It provides that protection while allowing its wearer to move freely and easily. Forged from steel, the chest carved with the face of a roaring alkalion.
Fungal Brew: A cask of hardened shroom-wood, bearing the words 'Warble & Sons Brewery'. It is a very expensive limited fungus brew, easily recognized and desired by wealthy Veins residents. A glass confers +2 CHA for an hour. Drinking more heavily results in a CON-4 check vs Hallucination.
Royal Forge Tools: The smithing tools of an ancient dwarf ruler. Still in perfect condition, gorgeously embossed and tingling with magic. A surface smith could make +1 weapons and armor with this. Dwarves treat their tools like reproductive organs. Holding someone else's in public is obscene. Stealing a long-dead king's is... well, good luck explaining this to anyone.
Sample quest hooks
An antling expedition accidentally burst into a dwarven hold while tunneling into hell. The dwarves are very angry, and have retaliated violently. The antlings don't know why they're so angry. It turns out they broke a sensitive piece of the fortress and now the whole thing is going haywire.
A renowned dwarven brewer has a lucrative order for a wine snob in the Veins. Good news, he has the order ready. Bad news, the customer is currently riding the Civilopede. Half delivery, half train heist.
The dwarves want detailed maps and intelligence on the substratal regions because none of your business. They've established contact with a Deep Janeen named the Lady Sedimentary of the Flawless Fault. Do what it wants (deliver a prank message to another of its kind, signed by a third, and adequately communicate how funny the resulting carnage is).
Lovely stuff!
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