What is it like to be a dwarf?

Dwarves are a mess of contradictions, and that makes them interesting.

They constantly strive to build mountains on top of maintains until they reach the stars, but they fear the outside world and the lack of a roof over their head. Squabbles and contests are at the heart of their being, but a dwarf will always come to the aid of another dwarf in need. Despite claiming to live in a meritocracy, they are the only Kin with Kings and nobility.

This has worked out for them pretty well so far, but the end of the blood mist threatens the cosy old order.

This is my personal attempt to work out how dwarves could, should, might live, given what it says in the rulebooks (except where I decided that the official account was lazy and daft). I encourage every GM to take the same attitude: pick the bits you like, ignore the stuff that doesn’t work for you, and if there’s something you bounce off, try to work out what that means dwarves in your world should look like instead. (I came up with a few suggestions in Appendix A.)

I: Where?

The most obvious weird thing about dwarves is that they live, almost exclusively, underground. This is a significant difference from all other Kin, and one that has all sorts of interesting consequences.

How can you live underground?

The great thing about living underground is that once you get a few metres away from the outside world, you don’t have to worry too much about the cold. It’s going to stay a fairly constant 10-12 degrees Celsius, so you suddenly need a lot less firewood. Similarly, one of the things that caves in the mountains are known for is water flowing through them, and even if that’s naturally intermittent (e.g. only when the snow outside is melting), you can dig wells to store the excess for the winter months.

Instead, your main problem is food. Everyone elsewhere eats plants, which need sunlight, water and some nutrients; or animals, which need plants; or more usually a combination of both. Shutting yourself away from sunlight immediately has you playing on hard mode. (But then, dwarves love a challenge.)

There’s two ways you can get plants, and from there get foodstock for your underground mushrooms, bug farms or what have you. First of all, you can dash outside briefly and grab the plants that grow there, either wild or in fields that you’ve planted yourselves. More enterprisingly, because you’re dwarves skilled in stone-singing magic and metalsmithing, you can dig narrow tunnels lined with reflecting metal up through the ceilings of your caves and then into the rock outside, capped with perfectly-transparent quartz so light always shines through, sited at an angle so snow slides off. Hooray: you can now grow crops, and you also have natural light which makes the place look pretty.

Any society worth its salt will want to tame or even domesticate wild animals, for meat, fibre, transport or other kinds of assistance (the difference: house cats are merely tamed, and are basically distinguishable from their wild counterparts; domesticated dogs in their many breeds look and behave significantly differently from wolves). Dwarves live high up, in the hills if not actually in mountains, so won’t typically have access to typical farm animals like cows; not that they’d be interested in something so docile, placid, easy to dominate and abuse, given their fierce individualistic streak.

Their relations with animals are more likely to be based on cooperation between equals: e.g. dwarves might offer bears safe havens in the caves next to their towns, protecting them during the winter, in exchange for the bears acting as guardians the rest of the year. (Maybe dwarves and bears go on hunts together from time to time? Work at that for a while and you might get yourself some bear cavalry…) Mountain goats similarly feel like the sort of independently-minded animal dwarves would approve of. There’s probably not a lot of useful eating on bats, but they’re similarly a useful security measure, and the guano can be useful for crops.

Dwarves living at lower altitudes might catch rabbits from beneath, building convenient access hatches into their warrens. They’d probably respectfully leave badgers or wombats alone, though, viewing them as kindred spirits. (The unofficial dwarven motto is, after all, “Leave Me Alone!”)

How do you travel (short distances)?

If you have a variety of caves dug into the side of mountains, you want to be able to travel from one to another without going outside: even discounting the problem of the sun hurting your eyes or skin (GM’s Guide, p. 57), outside is cold, wet, and full of wild animals and hostile Kin that you’ve spent a fair bit of time carefully building defences against. So at the very least there are tunnels, ladders carved into the rock or stairs, large sloping passageways as you get into more inhabited areas.

But I think eventually you’re going to want something more consequential. Even if you decide that roving stonesingers can conjure rock out of nowhere in situ rather than needing to schlep it from somewhere else, there’s going to be plenty of other people renovating a cave network who will end up finding themselves with a lot of heavy sand, loose rubble or misshapen rock they need to move somewhere else. And an established settlement will tend to have the hillside levels specialising in growing food (or importing it from far away lowland fields), which then needs to be sent up to the mountainside levels, and also potentially down to any more ancient levels that are now surrounded by rock on all sides.

Carrying that around on your back gets old quickly, and dwarves won’t have large amounts of spare beasts of burden kicking about. You can build hand carts, but wheels wear out and roads will eventually rut. You can build metal rails for mine carts, and let’s face it, we probably all think of Snow White-style dwarves at some point, and that means you can have a mine cart chase, which is always good. But metal wheels and metal rails also wear out eventually.

A good dwarven engineer then starts to think “there’s a lot of water flowing through this cave network, which is currently neither parched nor flooded, so we’ve got the water under control”. So I think that in well-established dwarf cave networks where the population demand is high enough, you’ll get underwater canals. Because the great thing about canals is that you can float any number of barges filled with heavy stuff along them and you never have to repair the water.

In a really large cave network, you’ve got canals at multiple levels.

This also means you can have vast underground lakes, with the roof of the cavern too high to see (but maybe there are bats or other things with glowing eyes); dwarves bustling around the edges, going out in small boats, warning travellers to beware the various winged and/or amphibian creatures that live in the lake. They’re probably also home to a fair amount of canal traffic, unless this is a naturally-occurring cavern, or a place ancient dwarven engineers designed to store excess water in from time to time. It’s a change from the expected succession of dry corridors players usually expect when they think about dungeons, and the acoustics are amazing.

How do you travel (long distances)?

If you’ve got a canal network in your caves, you almost certainly have an overflow mechanism, and that may as well feed into an existing network of underground rivers, which any decent engineer will be champing at the bit to extend, smooth out, make more efficient.

At its simplest, there might be a swift-flowing underground river, big enough for a boat that fits 4 dwarves or 2 uncomfortable bigger Kin, and you hurtle downstream at breakneck speed hoping that the entire tunnel is as smooth as it looked near the entrance, and nobody skimped on the smoothing-out work further along, so you don’t have to worry about glancing up and dashing your brains out on a unexpected rocky outcrop. There’s a narrow ledge to the side where people have to walk in single file, and that’s how you travel back.

Eventually this underground river will flow into an overground river, and that’s when travel stops. On the plus side, if you were worrying about people living in caves and where the carbon dioxide they breathe goes, here’s your answer: down into the outside world, eventually.

If there are more people needing to travel, or the slope is gentler, the river has been tamed and turned into a canal with locks. The tunnels are now larger and the stonework smoothing-out has definitely been done. Gravity is neither for or against you, so the larger barges you’re in need to be propelled manually, e.g. by poles, oars or some hook, rope and pulley mechanism built into the ceiling, or are pulled by some kind of beast of burden walking along the towpath, which is now wide enough to allow two or three people to pass abreast.

Sometimes the canal will go under the river, and join up with a canal network going back up the mountain on the other side. Because it beats going outside, and it annoys the elves, that’s why.

A note on upward mobility

So you’ve got a dwarf town in a mountain: a series of caves just a few metres in from the rock edge, at a variety of altitudes, ranging from a comfortable, sprawling network of lowland caves which are nicely decorated and appointed, to a frankly precarious newly-built cave up top where you can still see chisel marks on the walls. The bad news for the people at the bottom is that eventually they’re going to have to move.

Because the thing about dwarves is that their stone-singers are constantly magicking stone out of thin air and piling it on top of existing stone. Whether you think they “forge stone seemingly out of nothing in enormous underground workshops, stone that is carried to the surface to expand the world” (GM’s Guide, p. 57) or they “[roam] the Forbidden Lands to find ripe slabs of stone from which they sing formations and pillars to expand the world according to the wishes of the god” (ibid., p. 58), dwarves are expanding mountains faster than wind and water can erode them. By necessity this will have to involve adding stone at all altitudes. If dwarves in the caves at the bottom thought they were safe from marauding humans and orcs because they were high up in the hills, guess what? Their stone-singer friends are currently building ramps from the valleys right up to their front door. Eventually their home is going to be on what people will by then refer to as “the ground”, and they’re going to start thinking about moving.

How long this will take is hard to say. You can take the standard belief that “since the age of myth, they have built and expanded the bones of the world, a sphere so large you can barely see it curving at the horizon” (ibid., p. 56), add to that the story that when Neyd first arrived in Ravenland, “the ground was either too dry or too wet, killing her plants […] the water flowed without direction since it lacked will” (Raven’s Purge, p. 19), and decide that what was going on then was that the world was then a perfectly-spherical sphere, and the reason water didn’t flow properly was that there weren’t any seas for it to flow into. This means that Neyd must be really, really old, and/or that Gods intervened to make the world bumpier, adding mountains and seas so there could be room for the sort of life that elves like.

Unless you’re running a really epic campaign, this is almost certainly not the case. But it’s what a number of dwarves believe, would like to think is true, or will loudly profess to be the obvious truth if challenged in public.

Consider this story of the Crombe clan, and “Totela’s Head, a massive man’s head carved from the slope of the mountain above Scarnehall. It is said that king Totela Goldbeard used the hammer Scarnesbane to chisel a giant portrait of himself from the cliff, so his beautiful face would be preserved for the ages. This angered the god Huge, so much so that he let beard rot destroy the king’s face and cast the hammer out into the world where it still lies hidden.” (GM’s Guide, p. 60)

Regardless of what Huge thinks, most other dwarves would agree that you do not carve stuff into the mountain above your house, where your next house is eventually going to have to be. That’s valley thinking!

Where do dwarves live (broad scale)?

If you look at the map of kins (GM’s Guide, pp. 46-57), there are three principal dwarven population centres: the mountains of the north-east in Far Vivend where some Crombes live; the mountains around the ruined Wailer’s Hold where some Meromannians still live; and most importantly, the area to the north-west, where the mountains north of the Feulenmark and the uplands of Belderand look to be home to dwarves pretty much exclusively. As well as Wailer’s Hold they’ve also lost Vond, and presumably also the mountains in the Arina Forest, but they’re still clustered together fairly well.

The blood mist never reached below ground (ibid., p. 34), so it’s safe to say that at the very least, the clans around Belderand were always able to travel between each others’ lands. Chances are there were also ancient tunnels underneath the Feulenmark and Arina Forest connecting the now-abandoned dwarven halls there, and from there onward to Wailer’s Hold. Similarly, you would expect tunnels to the spur of mountains next to the Crombe river, continuing along the mountains to the north of the Dankwood, maybe skirting the Stillmist out of politeness or maybe just delving underneath it, until resurfacing in the mountains of Far Vivend.

Dwarves have therefore been able to travel to about a third of the Ravenlands at least without stepping foot above ground at any point, and there are almost certainly disused and treacherous tunnels which can take them to a further fifth, heading south-wast from the Arina Forest to Alderstone, and South from Wailer’s Hold to the mountains between the Fangwoods and Groveland Woods, and from there into Harga.

This general level of connectivity between dwarven settlements means that the dwarves in the north-west are like the humans in the south-west in one crucial aspect: they were never crippled by the blood mist like isolated settlements were everywhere else. If a famine, disease or natural disaster hit a settlement, help was always available from nearby. Half of the major settlements in the Ravenlands from before the blood mist are now ruins; but the dwarven population has stayed the same, if not increased. That means that there are now, proportionally, a lot of dwarves.

II: How?

Tolkien’s dwarves are miners, constantly delving in pursuit of precious metals and jewels. Ravenland dwarves, in contrast, are builders; but they too are never done.

The struggle never stops, it just gets more interesting

Whenever any new settlement starts out, with few dwarves, few resources and many natural challenges, by necessity everyone pitches in, and leaders are either explicitly chosen or emerge tacitly, leading by example and acquiring respect. There’s no time for posturing or politicking when every decision everybody makes is one that might cause the rest to die.

Eventually light wells are built, crops are harvested, water is channelled and controlled, there’s an arrangement with the nearby bears, and the answer to “what do we do next?” is no longer “what we have to if we’re going to survive” but “what can we build on top of what we have? What can we do now?”

This is not to belittle the basics, which can still be improved: find a better way to grow crops, get more light in from outside, smooth out the awkward issues in the water supply when it snows too much or not enough. Rather, it’s recognition that those basics were there to provide a foundation for the next level of pursuits: arts and crafts of every kind, engineering, eventually war, diplomacy, politics. Unlike an orc (especially a male orc) who gets good at fighting and insists that things like basket-weaving and flower-arranging are for sissies, dwarves are proud that their efforts at carving a living space out of a hostile environment resulted in their children becoming artists or scholars. That’s what all that hard work was for.

The proud dwarf builder whose child is now a cave painter has only one demand: be a good artist. Struggle with your art as much as I did with stone.

(What does dwarven art look like? You can’t go far wrong with “elf art looks like Art Nouveau; dwarf art looks like Art Deco”, but I think dwarves also go in for Lascaux-style cave paintings: multichromatic applications of various mineral-based paints straight onto the surface of the rock, taking advantage of the natural form of the rock and light from flickering candles to produce the illusion of 3D and movement.)

Dwarven contests

Remember “they are quarrelsome and strive to show off their abilities, since they live in a meritocracy where competence equals status” (GM’s Guide, p. 58) from earlier? I think this means regular contests, starting with friendly informal competition between people working together daily, and then gravitating towards increasingly-elaborate and formalised contests between areas of a city or, eventually, between entire cities or clans. Very soon after dwarves have more than enough food to go around, they’ll start organising the Great Belderannian Bake-Off.

On one level, these contents are, of course, deeply frivolous. If the settlement is starving, flooding or under attack, the local try-outs for sculptors will stop, and the engineers working on better canal mechanisms will either mothball their works in progress or turn them into pumps or siege weapons. But they’re also incredibly serious, because a Kin constantly striving to reach the stars cannot afford to put up with second-best. So if you say you’re a great farmer, hunter, builder, teacher, engineer, architect, diplomat, anything, you should be put to the test. Regularly.

The nature of contests varies. For something as inherently location-dependent as architecture, civic engineering or farming, judges will travel from city to city, looking at efforts over the past year or so: nobody’s going to ask anyone to build e.g. a monumental staircase in a fortnight and then tear it down; the best efforts at taming the lived environment operate in said environment; and the point is to better the life of all who live there, long-term, and let contestants from other parts of the world observe and learn.

Martial contests conversely will take place in identical arenas across the dwarven lands, where everything from the size of the fighting area to the type of stone underfoot is carefully regulated, and all contestants will compete against each other over a matter of days. Similarly, while of course the traps in dungeoneering courses have to be non-lethal, the course will be inspected ahead of time by adjunct team members sworn to silence, and if there’s a disproportionate level of e.g. poison traps to deadfall traps, Words will be Had.

Other contests are somewhere in-between, and will unavoidably grant slight home advantage to the team of sailors who have practiced going down the local underground river at breakneck speed (they practice regularly, so your players may have had to wait around when travelling because the local sprint teams had booked a slot), or the goatherd who knows best how to get one hundred goats from point A to point B as fast as possible without losing goats to ravines or tasty bushes, or disturbing the local gryphon or wyvern.

Remember, though: dwarven contents are fierce, but not harsh. The winners gain prestige, but the losers shouldn’t be at risk of humiliation or death. They just need to be better next time, having learned from their mistakes.

Who’s paying for all of this?

A small community, like a beginning dwarven community, and nearly all surface villages in the Ravenlands, can make do with barter, scrip or trading of favours. As it expands, there’s more to do than just survive, and there are more people than anyone can reasonably be expect to know personally.

Egalitarian dwarves realise that anybody can be unlucky, or make bad decisions – in their folk stories, those people are typically elves, tricked by dwarves – but their ancestors built an advanced community where everybody’s life could be better than theirs. So homeless dwarves begging for food in cold draughty tunnels is not just sad, it’s taboo. Even the stupidest or unluckiest dwarf gets to live in a reasonably-warm room, eat regularly, and get the occasional change of clothes.

But dwarves value personal endeavour, and they understand that while nobody must be allowed to lose too badly, some dwarves must be allowed to win, by trading the fruits of their labour to strangers, fairly, for coins.

Not coins made of precious metals, though. That’s human thinking. The humans told themselves “gold is valuable”, found rich veins of gold in Glethra (GM’s Guide, p. 22), begged the dwarves to be allowed to mine it, then dug out so much that they crashed their economy, and now human coins are made of silver instead. No, dwarven coins are made of stone. Weird stone.

On coming of age, a dwarf descends into the lower depths of the mountains to where the dwelvers live, and comes back with a small collection of birthright coins of various denominations. Maybe the least valuable coins are made out of the hard, slow-growing pale stone from stalactites or stalagmites, and the more valuable are made of black obsidian, or even translucent diamond flecked with gold; this will vary from city to city, and maybe from time to time. There are symbols on the back of the coins - often geometric or runic, sometimes figurative, occasionally mysteriously unfamiliar in a nagging “I can almost tell what this is supposed to mean” sense - and typically a rubbing is taken by official record-keepers when the newly-adult dwarf returns. (“What was on the back of your coins?” is the dwarf equivalent of “what’s your star sign?”)

Some cities may allow the new dwarf to only withdraw a subset of their birthright capital, if they’re uncertain about withdrawing all the money they’ll ever get to spend all at once, and to return to the deeps later, maybe when their first child is born, or on some other significant milestone. Some cities may have banks; others may have a competitive market in individual safe and trap manufacturers. What is universal is a taboo on counterfeiting birthright coins: dwarves may appreciate cunning, but they abhor a cheat.

All major acts of creation – weapons, furniture, major art and architecture – are paid for in birthright coins. If the city has trade with the outside world, with non-dwarves a part of its economy, it may have a parallel system of metal coins for foreigners, but a foreigner wishing to contribute to the city, or to have an item made for them by one of the city’s inhabitants, must find a seller of birthright coins wishing to take their metal coins first.

When a dwarf dies, all their remaining birthright coins are taken down to the dwelvers whence they came. They might well be fine with that: two common principles are “die with no coins left” (you made do with what was given you) and “die with the same amounts of coins you started with” (the next dwarf to come of age will get a more generous endowment). Aging dwarves with a surplus of coins may decide to commission artists to make items of great beauty and prestige, which is also considered honourable and worthy of respect.

In fact, I think this sort of thinking propagates backwards into everyday life: if you can’t take it with you, then being generous is a virtue. Some dwarven artists may have established patrons (being publicly generous becomes a way of gaining or keeping support); but equally, some public art might be funded by public subscription, and even dwarves who are only moderately well-off may be happy to throw in a few coins from time to time.

Reincarnation

“The dwarves believe in reincarnation as tools of Huge, if not in the same shape as they were before. Just like the dwarves themselves use the parts of broken tools to forge new ones, they believe the god grants his battered servants new life in a more able-bodied shape, in this or some higher world.” (GM’s Guide, p. 57)

If you believe you will one day be reincarnated, then maybe you don’t feel the rush to finish your magnum opus that other Kin do. Maybe artists will leave works deliberately unfinished, for their reincarnated self to complete? Of course, working out whether someone truly is a legendary artist reincarnated is easier said than done, especially if more than one dwarf claims to be them (or they don’t, but their supporters do). Obviously skill will be one indication, but if the dwelvers gave this new dwarf coins with similar symbols as their predecessor surrendered to them, that’s also a significant omen.

Various cities and clans might have their own ways of making sure that reincarnation happens. An almost universal belief must be that a dwarf must die in, or be brought back to, Huge’s realm, so if a dwarf dies on the surface, at the very least their body must be covered by a cairn of stones. (Stone-singers might turn that cairn into the struts of more mountains later on, just to be sure.) Maybe dwarves who live in the highest mountains, far away from any lowland valleys, could develop a culture of sky burial, on the basis that the birds and flying reptiles of the mountains actually belong to Huge, not Wail, but that’s going to be a tough argument to win.

Sometimes cultures might decide that reincarnation needs to be helped along. A new settlement just starting out might decide that ritual cannibalism is the most direct and most effective way to ensure continuity and that nobody starves. Traces of this may subsist in more mature cities: the body is placed in an otherwise sealed stone tomb, flesh-eating beetles poured inside, then once the flesh is consumed, the beetles and/or the bones are then ground into powder, from which a ritual bread is made. Making sure that the body is destroyed also makes it less likely that a dwarf comes back as undead, which is hugely taboo. (Ghosts are arguably to be admired, as a sign of strength of will. But still, they should be banished so the soul can move on.)

Maybe birthing chambers are deliberately placed close to the tombs of the dead, directly above or below them, so the soul doesn’t have far to travel?

If there are permanent tombs, they are for one individual only: husband, wife and children each get their own tomb rather than being buried in one big family tomb. Of course, if someone is acclaimed as being the reincarnation of another famous ancient dwarf, then they may share a tomb.

III: Who?

All this is very well, but it doesn’t tell you as a GM who’s in charge, or what dwarves are up to now. This is where I start to engage with the dwarf section of the GM’s Guide, find it lacking, and offer alternate suggestions.

Are clans nations or sub-Kins?

Back to the map of Kins (GM’s Guide, pp. 46-47). If you add in a few missing labels, there are Beldarranians in the extreme north-west, Canides and then Meromannians as you go south-east along the mountain ridge, Crombes in the north-south mountain ridge splitting the Dankwood (right by the, ahem, Crombe river), and again in the mountains of Far Vivend, and some disgruntled Meromannians in the south-east around the ruins of Wailer’s Hold.

If you read the description of clans, you’ll find that “Beldarranians are builders who honour the god Huge. Their land is the main temple for the stone singers […] roaming the Forbidden Lands to find ripe slabs of stone from which they sing formations and pillars to expand the world according to the wishes of the god” (ibid., p. 58). The Meromannians, the “Mining Clan”, meanwhile, are “very wise in the ways of the mountains”, “war-like and vengeful and are tormented by bitterness because they lost their homeland”. The Canides, meanwhile, “live on the surface of the world, and have taken responsibility for the dwarves’ duties above ground […] Their skin and hair are generally darker because they have adapted to life in the sunlight.” (ibid., p. 59). The Crombes, finally, “get along well with the elves. The other dwarf clans view them as arrogant, complacent and prone to meaningless chores such as art and singing. They also eat fish!” (ibid., p. 60).

This is almost perfectly self-contradictory. Either clans are the people of a geographical location, in which case they will by necessity be good at all the skills needed in that part of the world; or they are striated by skills, in which case you would expect to find a mixture of all clans in any settlement of anything other than trivial size.

Even the details are baffling. The Crombes are said to be weird because they eat fish, but the Coldwater and its fish-rich tributaries flow through the surface lands of the Canides, which the Beldarranians also border. Conversely, the Meromannians are said to be mountain specialists, but all dwarves live in mountains, the Canides depend on their mountain fortress of Stonegarden being impregnable, and arguably the Crombes, hemmed in by elves and elvenspring, have as much of an interest in being good at living up high as any other clan.

The Crombes, incidentally, are said to be the previous rulers of Vond, which pretty much everyone puts in the mountains above Alderstone, otherwise known as “as far as it’s possible to be from where all the other Crombes live”.

Against all of this, we’re told that “The clans of the dwarves constantly vie for position as the most able, sometimes with open conflict and coups as result. […] They are quarrelsome and strive to show off their abilities, since they live in a meritocracy where competence equals status.” (GM’s Guide, pp. 57-58)

If a clan just is the ruler of a particular land, it cannot be deposed by another clan via a coup. A coup is an internal act of violence, and by the proposed definition all other clans are foreigners. But conversely, if clans specialise in some skills, and therefore neglect others, they’re letting other clans win many contests by default, which doesn’t sound like people who squabble constantly about everything. And of course if dwarves live in a meritocracy, it’s improbable to an extreme that the royal family of Belder has been the best of them since records began.

Frankly, I want nothing of this, because I don’t like the idea that dwarven halls aren’t richly-decorated with as much art as will fit.

Cities, clans and families: it’s more complicated than that

The first fix is easy: say that a particular part of the world is ruled by a geographical branch of a particular clan, but there can be dwarves of other clans as well. Over time, immigration, accidents and random chance can alter the comparative population levels of each clan, and rulers and their domestic rivals may suffer contrasting fortunes, to the point where a city that was previously ruled by one clan only 100 years ago can be taken over by a ruler of a different clan.

The second fix follows directly on: if cities contain mixtures of clans and there’s migration between cities, knowledge of all but a clan’s most-treasured secrets will eventually spread. If you arrange marriages with people from other cities, people will take their knowledge with them; if you allow visitors from other cities, they will observe your people at work.

So, yes, Belderand may pride itself on the excellence of its stone singers, and may have more time and opportunity to build new mountains because of its envious position away from orcs, elvenspring or elves. But occasionally dwarves from outside Belderand will win stone singing competitions, like how sometimes a Sri Lankan immigrant will beat the rest of Paris at baking baguettes.

As for why the royal family of Belder has always ruled Belderand: have they? The current King is called “Turik of Belder”, but surely “of Belder” is a title, rather than a surname, in the same way that King Charles and Prince William of the United Kingdom don’t have surnames (except when they need to e.g. do business in places like France who still remember chopping the head of their King off), so it offers no useful clues to how long the current royal family has been in power. An interesting alternative is that the current royal family are descended from the original rulers, and for a while another family stole the Kingdom from them, but then they stole it back. Yet a third explanation is that it’s a family name, but one that can be stolen (e.g. force a weak King to marry his daughter to you, but you’ll take her surname) or granted (e.g. the previous King formally adopts the next King as a son, like Roman Emperors used to do).

As to why there are titles of nobility and royalty at all, in an egalitarian society: I think it’s because they’re job titles. Because somebody’s got to do it.

What do the nobility do?

In a large enough settlement, you eventually need someone to be nominally in charge, like the mayor of a town or the CEO of a company, because there’s enough stuff going on that keeping track of it becomes a full-time job. Make the settlement large enough and you need levels of leadership – and suddenly you have a King, his Dukes, their Counts and so on. (This also explains, conversely, why Tormund Halfhand is merely a warlord, not a Duke or a King: he doesn’t have a realm to rule, yet.)

If the realm is at war, they’re expected to lead the armies. During peace time, resolving disputes and setting priorities are their job: whose claim is the most justified? whose efforts shall we fund? Assuming some kind of taxation happens so poor unfortunate dwarves can be kept in a decent condition of living, and communal works like maintaining the roads and canals can be funded, the King and his nobility get to say what happens to the money left over after that.

That means directing and funding major infrastructure improvements like building new levels, improving the canals, or major works of public art that will bring pleasure to the local dwarves and prestige to the city. It can also mean commissioning fine weapons, furniture or art to add prestige to the ruler – but dwarves will be very clear that any attempt to benefit personally from these riches is cheating and grounds for removal from office. The richly-carved throne of the dwarven King, for instance, belongs to the office of the King in perpetuity, not to the current King.

And organising contests is the most visible and most hostage to fortune of all their tasks. How good are your organisational skills; how good is your skulduggery? These are decent proxies for logistics, tactics and spying in times of war.

So if Duke Tarquinin is in charge of organising the wrestling contest, and when hundreds of burly dwarves turn up they realise the arena isn’t to code, nobody was prepared for this many excess people turning up so the food is limited and the living quarters are cramped, they have to share the baths with the farm workers and the hot water runs out after barely an hour… well, you can be sure that the Duke will be firmly advised to abdicate, if his family is lucky enough to keep hold of the title at all.

But if Count Hugoin spots that the local clan has a number of attractive, skilled and amorous women of disreputable conduct, and decides to organise the first ever contest of courtesans, making sure that all of the determinedly-stoic emissaries from other clans are received in well-appointed chambers, where they will be fed the choicest meats, entertained by the finest musicians, before the clan’s ladies of the night make their entrance… well, you can be sure that Hugoin’s clan will gain in acclaim, and he may well be elevated in title, even if the nickname “Duke of whores” sticks to him centuries after he dies.

And the same applies at the topmost level as well. Maybe the Belderannians are rich and content and it’s easy to rule them – at the moment. But if grumbles start to mount, maybe people will start talking about how it’s time for another ruler. As to which ruler succeeds them: well, that’s the supreme test of politics.

Whoever wins this contest gets my daughter’s hand in marriage

In extremis, one contest, or maybe a bunch of contests bundled up into one, may end up having a more consequential result than just bragging rights.

This most obviously happens if the ruling King or noble dies or is incapacitated, and there is no obvious successor who would be acclaimed without hesitation. (Maybe there is a designated successor, but they feel that a formal contest would provide them more legitimacy than taking over under somewhat of a cloud.)

It can also happen that the current ruler has clearly lost the respect of the city, and enough nobles have had quiet words with them, that it’s obvious to most that if they don’t find a graceful way to step down, a less graceful way will be found for them instead.

As the heading suggests, the winner of the contest may not get to be ruler immediately, but may be eased into it gradually, starting with a position of minor importance but expected to soon take on more responsibilities. This may be somewhat of a poisoned chalice – “you think you’re up to the job of running the city, do you? Well let’s see how you cope with the job!” – that gives the current ruler the opportunity to undermine the new ruler-in-waiting and, potentially, claim their full crown back once the new guy starts making enemies.

Threats to the established order

So far I’ve described an almost social-democratic idyll, where dwarves are interestingly different from us, and arguably better than us, apart from a small number of cute foibles. There are plenty of potential obstacles, conflicts and threats, though, that can throw a spanner in the works and make things more interesting for a GM.

The most obvious one is internal: cities, and the clans inside them, constantly ebb and flow in relative power, and it’s a rare ruler who feels absolutely secure. Even a city that’s doing well may have issues, as a growing population has to fit into an increasingly-cramped space, and a city used to decorating and refining its caves now has to pivot towards building more space instead. Restless younger dwarves may be considering splitting off to form a new settlement, with all the prestige they’d get as founders, but unwilling so far to give up the comfort and luxury of an established city.

The dwarves’ famous egalitarianism may be at risk from subtle hoarding of wealth (especially metal coin wealth that isn’t surrendered on death), or newer dwarves getting less of a birthright than previous generations for some reason. If you run Stonegarden, maybe some dwarves can accompany the PCs partway so they can ask the dwelvers what’s going on with birthright coins. (They can only go as far as the immediate upper levels of the dwelvers’ caves; going any further is still taboo as per the adventure, and would see them stripped of their citizenship.)

Outside, the blood mist is no more, and that means that orcs, humans, maybe other Kin like elvenspring are looking to expand into dwarven territory. Some dwarves might have been complacent in making sure that the entrances to their cities were difficult to get at, and now they face the choice between frantically stone-singing barriers, blocking off the lower entrances, or making deals with the newcomers.

Similarly, any dwarven crops grown aboveground were previously only at risk from wild herbivores, but now there are more intelligent thieves at large. On the other hand, the protection against the blood mist underground may have made dwarves even more vulnerable aboveground, to the point where they didn’t feel comfortable cultivating anything more than a small patch of land. With it gone, dwarves may be tempted to expand their fields significantly, potentially coming into conflict with their neighbours another way.

Dwarven biologists and troll-followers will have been active to some degree during the blood mist, retreating every night into natural caves or, occasionally, crude stone-sung dungeons; but now they can wander the lands freely. Some of them might team up with elvenspring or even elves, exploring, mapping and documenting the world. The most extreme of them may be considering building cities above ground, or even away from the mountains!

All of this change, on top of the events of Raven’s Purge, is a threat to the conservative factions of dwarfdom, who would rather carry on doing the same thing forever, building more and more absolutely identical cities until they reach the sun. (If you want to annoy this kind of dwarf, point out similar to the elves they are.) The younger faction, fascinated by new opportunities, and realising how badly all the other Kin did during the blood mist, will be determined to seize new opportunities, either via mostly-peaceful expansion or deliberately war-like conquest (maybe not Vond quite yet, but the mountains of the Arina Forest would be a good staging post for the reconquest of Wailer’s Hold). Their challenge is not throwing out the baby with the bath water, and keeping hold of the egalitarian aspects of the dwarven polity that have kept the dwarves alive for so many thousands of years.

Appendix A: Rejected ideas

I’m writing this so I have an idea of what dwarves will look like in my campaign, and as such there are a few things I thought of that were both cool and contradicted everything else I wrote. If you like some of this stuff but not everything, they may work for you.

If dwarves are lazier and/or less civilised

Occasionally, the underground rivers reach points where you need to go through multiple locks in succession. Typically what happens is that one or two unlucky dwarves on the barge draw short straws and have to sit on the barge as it goes into a lock, waits for the water level to stabilise, exits the lock, and so on for hours on end. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew are carousing in the pubs and brothels that have sprung up around this area of captive bored dwarf customers.

The distance from any major dwarf settlement means that the precise answer of who has jurisdiction boils down to “effectively nobody”, so any kind of crime and other skulduggery may happen here as well. Well-meaning dwarves tell everybody to stay on the barge and try to ignore all offers, other than the kind of “offer” from a well-connected local stranger that you can’t refuse if you want your barge to remain afloat and not on fire.

If you can’t make stone from nothing

I think stone-singing creates stone out of thin air, or as near to it as makes no significant difference. If you think otherwise, and there must be a law of conservation of matter, then it follows that every time the dwarves sing stone out of nowhere, they are stealing stone from somewhere else, and eventually this might matter.

Not immediately, and arguably turning a homogenous block of stone into a much larger block of stone filled with air can make it stronger at first. (Think breeze blocks, termite mounds etc.) But maybe, eventually, dwarves trying to build mountains higher and higher might lead to them collapsing, and burying hundreds or thousands of dwarves in the resulting rubble.

You can bet your life that the resulting treacherously-unstable dungeons filled with treasure are also going to be filled with vengeful ghosts.

If the rich find more loopholes

There’s already a huge loophole in “you can’t keep it when you die”, which is metal-based foreigner coins, and there is no taboo against counterfeiting (on the basis that the victims are likely to be non-dwarves, something that is to be thoroughly applauded and admired).

You can make things worse by letting rich dwarves find more loopholes.

One obvious one is for an ageing dwarf to commission a sculptor to make a work of art made of birthright coins (and a few other bits of stone, acting as connective tissue). They promptly give it to their heir; when the old dwarf dies, the heir dismantles the statue and is now the owner of shedloads of dwarf money.

The other loophole is contract law: the old dwarf “donates” dwarf coins to a random poor dwarf, but there’s a legal agreement that he will in turn donate nearly all of them back to the old dwarf’s heir in due course.

Or maybe the old dwarf sets up a public art project, and encourages people to contribute. The project ends up massively over-subscribed, but still only produces the modest work of art it said it would. The rest of the money ended up swallowed by “unfortunately ill-advised trades”, salaries to family members, or various other types of chicanery.

If clans are as described in the book

The book divvies up between clans the various skills and interests that I think you need to build a proper dwarf city. If a city is not just ruled by, but close to entirely populated by one clan, expect dwarf cities to look very different from each other, and to be somewhat unbalanced and extreme.

Canide cities are more like human castles, with only a few ceremonial buildings completely underground. Crombe cities are richly decorated, with canals flowing through them, but that therefore means that other cities are sparse, utilitarian, and dry. Only Belderranian cities have the monumental, vast architecture you would expect to see in public places; other clans’ cities are more wretched, cramped affairs.

If contests are harsh, and not necessarily fair

If the only obstacle to cheating in contests is being exposed as cheats in real time, then expect there to be a lot more underhandedness. Opposing camps’ material will be sabotaged, their training sessions spied on, people with access to competitors bribed or blackmailed. In extremis, poison may be used; maybe just to hamper a competitors during a contest, maybe more permanent. Well-timed assassinations, made to look like accidents, will be considered.

This extends to general politics as well. Anyone in a situation of power has armed guards surrounding them, and rogues on retainer to do mischief to their rivals, and counter-thwart rival mischief (oh hey, if you were wondering why there are rogues in the Forbidden Lands after 260 years of blood mist isolation, this might be your answer).

If a city looks momentarily weak, expect neighbours to consider raising armies and taking it over, or at least sacking it and making off with valuable goods / demanding it start paying them tribute if it doesn’t want them to come back again next year. What’s even more likely than a successful frontal assault is treachery from inside, as someone is paid or suborned to open the gates from the inside.

All of this constant in-fighting means that the overall dwarven population is lower than you would otherwise expect.

Appendix B: Dwarven wonders for your campaign

All but the youngest dwarf caves should be monumental and awesome: perfectly-straight masonry, sharp edges to all stone blocks, delicate carvings everywhere, cave ceilings much higher than they strictly needed to be, so even tall elves or elvenspring look small in comparison. But some parts of dwarf cities are especially impressive. The methods used to to build them are considered to be highly-important secrets, fiercely guarded from, and coveted by, other dwarves.

Sunlight channels

Dwarf crops are typically cultivated near the mountain’s edge, with small tunnels dug into the rock, lined with reflective metal, then capped with quartz, so when the sun shines down the tunnel the light will be reflected off its edges and down onto the crops below. This is inefficient and only works part of the day.

Some dwarf stone-singers have managed to conjure up a type of quartz that transmits light directionally, like our fibre-optic cables, except that their rods of quartz are straight and a fair bit thicker than our posh sand wrapped in plastic. Not only is the transmission of light from outside almost lossless, you can then arrange a whole bundle of short directional quartz rods into a hemispherical shape, a bit like a pincushion, such that no matter where the sun is in the sky, light will hit one of the short rods and be funnelled into the larger rod at the base, and from there into the chamber below. These constructions are typically referred to as “dwarf eyes”, and they dot the sun-facing faces of some of the most ancient dwarf-inhabited mountains in great numbers.

(That might mean they face south, but if you agree with me that expected weather patterns put the Ravenlands in the southern hemisphere, they face north. This has the advantage that travellers coming to such an impressive dwarf hall will quite possibly be coming from the south or south-east and won’t see them, so the surprise at the amount of light deep underground will be that much greater.)

This doesn’t just let dwarves grow more crops than they could have with simpler reflective methods; they can grow them in stranger ways. With this amount of sunlight available, dwarves could build the equivalent of vertical hydroponic farms, merely substituting thick sheets of quartz for glass. (Maybe some crops like grains or fruit trees that need proper soil rather than hydroponics can use the excess light that shines through or past the tanks the leafy greens and tomatoes grow in.)

If you can send sunlight down quartz rods, you can also block it, or deflect it with movable reflective surfaces, and suddenly you have spotlights, which you can use to dazzle and impress visitors. And with enough effort, you can send sunlight deep into the lower levels, where nobody expects it.

Dwarf optics and machinery

Another thing you can do with transparent stuff like glass or magically-produced quartz, is make lenses. This will dramatically increase the productivity of your scientists and other writers, because it means you can make spectacles for old dwarves whose eyesight is getting worse with age, and get another 10-20 years out of them when they’re at their intellectual peak, rather than have them complain that they can’t see well enough to read any more.

Regardless of plausibility, I think all ageing dwarves with glasses should have the half-moon types which mean they can alternately peer over them (they’re old so they should have resolutely-unplucked really bushy eyebrows) and look down their nose through them at you while pondering things. Ideally they’re also puffing on an unnecessarily-long and spindly pipe, as well as stroking their beard.

Mastering glass is one of the things that unlocked a ridiculous number of scientific breakthroughs in our world: not just things like telescopes and microscopes, but simple things like transparent test tubes and beakers that let you look at things as you do chemistry to them. Depending on what you want to do with your campaign, you can either sweep this under the carpet or mutter that it’s not ready yet, or you can have dwarves be working at all sorts of interesting technological developments. If the latter, a foreshadowing sign is that dwarves start to wear brown and stick brass gears on their clothing for no good reason.

A water-powered constantly-moving multiple-levels-high paternoster

A paternoster is a very simple lift, and one that could easily be built by a Kin with good mining skills. All it takes is a steady supply of motive force from e.g. an underground river, a minor amount of gearing to make sure it travels at a constant speed, and a couple of lift shafts (one going up, one going down; they join at the top and bottom to form a loop). It’s unnerving to visitors, because the thing never stops and doesn’t have any guardrails or anything, so you have to hold your nerve and step onto this moving ledge and hope for the best. Given that it’s a passenger-only lift, it’s probably optimised for speed and energy-efficiency, so not amazingly sturdy, which just makes first-time visitors even more nervous.

The underground garden

“The dwarves have the ability to shape old, dead but sturdy trees into stone pillars, an art which is not appreciated by the elves.” (GM’s Guide, p. 57). I personally think that elves would consider this as a homage and arguably a propaganda coup: to have the dwarves internalise elf forms to such a degree that they model their own art on them!

What I think would be a more subtle assertion of dwarven superiority would be to replicate an entire section of the aboveground, not just in wonderfully-carved stone, but in minerals and gems as well.

I think this has been done. There is a vast open space in one of the dwarf halls where every attempt has been made to replicate a vista of the aboveground. There are trees, bushes and grasses, flowering plants, vines and mosses, all faithfully reproduced in stone, down to the colour, if not the bendiness. (This is the dwarven equivalent of “Is it cake?”) It may have been too hard to reproduce wild animals, but the ambient noises of the wind in trees and birds and insects can be heard (this might be the result of dwarven Foley artists, though, in which case genuine aboveground visitors may get an Uncanny Valley feeling).

If you think dwarves are experts at tiny, delicate clockwork machines, there should be a jewelled butterfly or a grasshopper that visitors can marvel at before it takes off in flight and disappears.

There is a sun in the sky that slowly moves (quite how it emits light is hard to say, but if this isn’t the same people who have directional quartz rods, maybe it’s just a bunch of oil lamps?), and maybe also a moon for night-time vistas. This feels like the sort of place that a King should choose to entertain his guests in, and maybe the first indication that such an event is happening could be grumblings from the garden staff that they’re going to need to test the moon because it hasn’t been used for ages.

If an important guest from outside is going to be treated to a “picnic” in the garden room, it would be rude for the jewelled butterfly not to perch on their finger briefly and inject a deadly poison, leading security staffs to scramble and wonder who could have had access to the garden room mechanisms.

A magnificent waterfall cascading into an underground lake

Waterfalls don’t feel like the sort of thing that people turning underground rivers into canals for shipping would be in favour of, but maybe there were a number of smaller streams that weren’t big enough to do anything about, and they eventually combined into a larger river course? At some point, some engineer said “you know, given where we’re planning our transport hub, there’s already a fair bit of water trickling down from above”, a passing-by artist said “this is an opportunity we cannot waste!”, and things snowballed on from there.

Regardless of how manufactured the waterfall was originally, many subsequent attempts have been made to make it look even more magnificent. Rocky contours have been altered to make the water flow more even or to bring more small streams in; some precious light has been channelled in so there are slight rainbows in the air if you look at the waterfall from the right angle; plants and fungi have been planted and animals encouraged to make their home here, so the thunderous crushing of water is accompanied by the eerie sounds of nature.

There is obviously a more-or-less-hidden chamber behind the waterfall. I mean that goes without saying.