Greetings!

I have several different kinds of dwarves in my world of Thandor. I have some dwarves that are more Celtic flavoured, some that are Norse flavoured--and then a group that depart from such standards. Dwarves don't have to be mono-cultural. I think the dwarves as presented in the Player's Handbook can come across as a bit dull, boring, and uninspiring. That is certainly how many people have described dwarves in D&D over the years.

Have you done different things with dwarves in your campaigns? Experimented with different cultures, different technology levels, different kinds of economies, and dare I say it--giving some dwarves different forms of religion?

I love the ancient mythology and archetypes--though some judicious variation can be good too.

What do you think?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

The dwarfish race in my world:

• has Earth Elemental ancestry, stone-colored skin, metallic hair, and gemstone eyes. The distribution of various types of stone, metals, and gems across these features roughly matches the rarity of each substance in the world.
• are the primary historians of the world, not just artisans and miners.
• use lame Russian accents instead of lame Scottish accents
• cannot use bows (dwarven shoulder sockets don't turn that way)

I was so sick of the "Our Dwarves Are All The Same" I resolved in my own system that I resolved to either find some unique angle on them, or just merge them into humans or maybe mutants as a sub-species rather than something deserving its own entry. Thankfully I found something unique.

My dwarves were molded from Men by the lords of the Demon Empire to slave in their hellish mines and they did a really shoddy job of it, their limbs and organs wear out at vastly different rates (generally beginning in their mid-20's), though to be fair, they weren't expected to live long enough for it to be an issue.

Instead the dwarves invented arcane artifices (basically steampunk cybernetics) to replace and improves their limbs and organs as they failed and then invented arcane magic (literally; they invented the Arcane Web that allows all mortals to be able to access magic) and, with the aid of the humans and the primal spirits kicked the demon's asses into the Outer Darkness and erected the Great Barrier that keeps them locked outside Creation to this day.

The old ones are basically the magitech equivalent of full conversion "borgs" from Rifts... with fighting skills honed over centuries.

Culturally, because any part could fail at any time, dwarves marry and have families very young (15-16 years of age is typical) and then turn to other aspects of life. The result is that your typical 30 year old dwarf who's just starting a life of adventure probably has grown children and nearly grown grandchildren, lending them a very different perspective on life than your your typical starting human adventurer (16-20 years old who hasn't even begun a family yet... and might even be adventuring in the hopes of amassing enough wealth to support a family).

I like my dwarves boring and Tolkienesque, but lately (a long while, actually) I've been thinking of making them more Nordic and classifying them as a type of fey, whose magic is more geared toward enchanting items of power and casting runic wards and such, rather than flashy stuff or glamour. I wanna make them equal as elves in the "superior/elder race" hierarchy, and just as long lived, rather than being this shorter lived, not-quite-as-"elder" race, like in traditional D&D. I want elves and dwarves to be more like their godlike mythical counterparts, rather than watered down D&D/Trad-fantasy versions, and to be fey beings, native to the Otherworld--appearing in the mundane world only as visitors, walking among mere mortals.

So far, I've only been able to give elves this kind of treatment in actual play, but next time I start another run of the mill fantasy world campaign, I'm upgrading dwarves as well, and maybe limiting the number of them allowed as PC races (unless I'm running a fey/Otherworld centered campaign). Those are beings from the Otherworld--mighty, awe-inspiring races that live among the gods, and don't travel with humans lightly.

I'm not a fan of reskinning fantasy races, though--particular classical ones based on real world mythology. Not unless there's something special about the setting that makes such changes work well, like in Dark Sun, where all races were radically altered in order to adapt to an unusually hostile and inhospitable environment. Otherwise I'd rather make up new races, or introduce less-used fantasy races, like lizardmen or minotaurs, as standard playable races dominant in the campign.

As ever. Depends on the dwarf.

You have dour boring dwarfs.
Rowdy dwarfs.
Grudge dwarfs.
Stupid Dwarfs.
Mining obsessed dwarfs
Mechanical obsessed dwarfs.
Spaaaaaaaaaace dwarfs!
Magic dwarfs.
Anti-magic dwarfs
Crazy dwarfs
Xenophobe dwarfs
Merchant dwarfs
Half dwarfs! With an elf no less! Get thee to a fainting couch!
Asian dwarfs
African dwarfs
Spanish dwarfs
Werebadger dwarfs!
Dwarfs every one else calls gnomes!
Weregargoyle dwarfs!
Seven dwarfs!

Yeah see that is the problem, you get up early before you went to bed and walk 15 miles uphill bare foot in the snow to work in the mine all day before walking 15 miles uphill to the tavern so that you can fight yourself to sleep and all people can remember is your lame Scottish accent.

Dwarves are boring? Hah, you are boring.

Being boring and stereotypical is the point of Dwarves.

You can make rework them in all sorts of ways, but then they're no longer boring and stereotypical and don't fulfill their part in the game of by providing an easy option for the player who just wants to drink some beer, hit some things with an axe and put on a bad scottish accent.

Reworking Dwarves to make them interesting seems beside the point when you could just leave them out of a setting and make something new that wouldn't carry the baggage.

Quote from: TJS on October 30, 2020, 09:15:25 PM
You can make rework them in all sorts of ways, but then they're no longer boring and stereotypical and don't fulfill their part in the game of by providing an easy option for the player who just wants to drink some beer, hit some things with an axe and put on a bad scottish accent.

You can do the exact same thing with just a human.

I like my non-human species to have clearly inhuman abilities because if all your races are are just "tall/short human with a stock accent and cultural traits from a human culture"... you're better off just getting rid of them and having everyone play a human. There are plenty of human-only fantasy settings out there in fiction.

So my dwarves see in the dark because they got an arcane crystal eye. They're resistant to poison because they have a literal cast iron stomach. They shrug off forced movement because they have retractable climbing cleats in their feet. They can lift great weights because their frame has been reinforced.

My elves have supernatural powers that are common to people in dreams because they are literally the spiritual embodiments of Men's dreams.

Orcs, ogres, trolls, ettins and troglodytes have various mutations that both grant them abilities and disfigure them (orcs have bloodshot red eyes because one of their mutations is nightvision, they also have scent to go along with their pig-like nose, they have great strength accompanying their massive ape-like arms).

And so on. If you want a stocky hard drinking brawler with a Scottish accent or crafty pygmy-sized thief who fancies the simple things in life... those are just particular humans or human cultures and should be rolled up as such.

At least that's my take on species.

Dwarves are the beer of fantasy races. It isn't about making them wine or whiskey, but just a fine draft. Meaning, there's something about traditional dwarves done right. They don't have to be Tolkien, and unique twists are fine, but it is more that vintage quality of dwarfishness that I like. Earthdawn does them well.

On a side note, I was looking through a preview of the new Age of Sigmar - Soulbound book, and found their variations on dwarves rather interesting.

Saying dwarves are boring says more about the claimant than about dwarves. There's infinite room for subtle variation; they're only boring if you're looking for superficial novelty. Develop a personality, not a series of cosmetic traits, and you'll be fine.

But if you want dwarves who are different in a striking and easy to grasp way, then how about: Dwarves are baby elves.

They're born rough, crude, and stumpy. They're seeded in mountains, where they can develop in defensible mountain creches. The parental elven units watch out for them, and protect them, but take a hands-off approach to parenting. So hands-off that the dwarves don't know they're elves. Which somewhat ironic, because dwarves frequently learn to resent the elves, due of the traces of patronizing solicitude that comes out when they interact.

Dwarves don't really die, except in extreme cases. Instead, they enter a form of stasis. They become still, motionless, and more earth-like. Almost rocky. Over time, features become cruder. That's because the body of  a dwarf is more like a shell than a body. Or to use another analogy, it's the potting soil in which the elf-seed grows. In death, it just feeds the growth of the elfheart inside. Eventually the body-shell cracks, and a newly sprouted elf is born, quickly growing to full size using the nutrients in the earth-like body.

Yes, that means dwarven mausoleums are full of crude dwarf-like shapes, shattered in half, with a cavity in the middle where the elf-sprout was curled up in a ball while it grew. The dwarves have wrapped a full mythology around this, saying that the souls of dwarves were forged of living mithril, which returns to Moradin when they die. They explain this with a valkyrie-like myth, where beautiful singers cleave their corpses in twain, extract the soul, and carry it to the eternal forge.

Not true of course. The myths are based on a few scattered sightings where the elves were careless, and were spotted stealing into the catacombs to recover a newly-hatched elf.

i do all dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, fairys, pixies sprites nymphs satyrs centaurs etc, anything that fits in that category you could call fey, as they are done in that 80's tom cruise movie "Legend" (were tim curry played the huge red skinned devil looking thing called darkness). They dwell mostly in an overlapping pocket dimension contiguous with the physical world and only meddle in ours to right wrongs to the extant that much of what happens in the environment of one world casts a shadow of such into the other.

I have no problem depicting dwarves as tall and attractive. https://mobile.twitter.com/ospyoutube/status/1251288890025148423?lang=en

In WHFRP once, on totally random rolls we had a 5'2 150Lb dwarf scribe named Thingrim.

Personally I'm a bit enamoured with Chronopia's beast clan dwarves with their animal mask / helmets and surf board swords.  It's just a really cool look.  But the idea that you could tweak the basic short smiths who bear grudges by making them also savage and bestial works for me.

Random dwarf thoughts:

Quote from: Chris24601 on October 30, 2020, 06:48:43 PM

My dwarves were molded from Men by the lords of the Demon Empire to slave in their hellish mines and they did a really shoddy job of it, their limbs and organs wear out at vastly different rates (generally beginning in their mid-20's), though to be fair, they weren't expected to live long enough for it to be an issue.

Instead the dwarves invented arcane artifices (basically steampunk cybernetics) to replace and improves their limbs and organs as they failed and then invented arcane magic (literally; they invented the Arcane Web that allows all mortals to be able to access magic) and, with the aid of the humans and the primal spirits kicked the demon's asses into the Outer Darkness and erected the Great Barrier that keeps them locked outside Creation to this day.

The old ones are basically the magitech equivalent of full conversion "borgs" from Rifts... with fighting skills honed over centuries.

Culturally, because any part could fail at any time, dwarves marry and have families very young (15-16 years of age is typical) and then turn to other aspects of life. The result is that your typical 30 year old dwarf who's just starting a life of adventure probably has grown children and nearly grown grandchildren, lending them a very different perspective on life than your your typical starting human adventurer (16-20 years old who hasn't even begun a family yet... and might even be adventuring in the hopes of amassing enough wealth to support a family).

This is fantastic!  I may steal it.

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Runequest dwarves are literally made of metal, arranged in Plato-eque castes based on their metallic nature and tend the "world machine".  https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Mostali

Earthdawn dwarves are the culturally dominant race in Barsaive, the main game region, being culturally and technologically stable while everyone else is recovering from the magical dark ages.

I also like the strange Dark Sun riff on dwarves as hairless obsessives.

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One thing that bugs me is the idea that Tolkein-esque dwarves are "Norse", half-pint vikings or Scotsmen.  While elements of Germanic myth are certainly present there is also a Semitic influence that appears to have been entirely passed over in modern Tolkien derivatives, and much that is original to Tolkien. Its a rich mix that sadly seems to have fallen down the memory hole. 

(I know I shared this before but it's an interesting read)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/are-tolkiens-dwarves-an-allegory-for-the-jews/

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Last time I ran an OSR D&D game the niche formally occupied by dwarves was now occupied by a kind of dwarf-hobbit-gnome like demi-human called a "Svarte".  These are human genetic variants created before the collapse to fill manual labor roles for the Titans (magically and genetically enhanced super-humans).  Now a free people, they still tend to live in hollowed out hills among small clans and immerse themselves in labor from which they gain an immense satisfaction.  Contrary to myth they have no real love of gold, although they sometimes have significant savings due to a general disinterest in "the finer things".  They dress plainly and are often covered in the honest dirt of their occupations.  Their dwellings are typically rough earthen homes or carved out hills.  They tend gardens and forests more than mine precious metals (although some of them are miners).  Think Anglo-Saxon peasant, not magical craftsmen with glittering kingdoms inside mountains.

They are excellent craftsmen, but they universally tend towards simple and utilitarian design.  Svarte made things are bland and solid but last forever - like Amish furniture.  Tradition and family are the primary concerns for the Svartemen.  Leaving the clan and ones labor to travel on an adventure would be seen as akin to a spiritual death sentence.  Adventurers would be either outcasts, entrusted with a great mission, or the victims of some tragedy.  They are not natural warriors, but their toughness, skill with hammer, ax and pick, and clannish nature make them formidable if roused to war. 

I made them an NPC race for my initial game but I was willing to open the race up to PCs for future characters.  I wanted them to retain an alien "not quite human" flavor.  The more typical B/X D&D dwarf class I just reskinned as a barbarian (similar to Pundit's Scots-men). 

Agreed.  Dwarves should not be dull and boring.  They are more interesting than Elves, in certain ways.  Their commitment to hard work, willingness to fight for a good cause, and love of good Ale come to mind.