Dwarfs, Dwarves and small people!

[Gelasma]

In most games dwarfs are conservative and adhere to their traditions, they aren't known to embrace change. Maybe this influences players (and games designers) to be as conservative in their expectations regarding dwarves. We are more likely to accept variant elves or halflings than variant dwarves, since our imagination of a fantasy race influences our likeliness to accept or create variants.  The same with crossbreeding between fantasy races, it's common that elves crossbreed with other races, while dwarves dont crossbreed with humans or even elves - there are no half-dwarves, 'dwelves', 'dwarflings' or 'dworks'.

I encountered this player conservativism when designing my homebrew fanatsy setting - my dwarves
life among humans, they dont wear any heavy armor, great axes or even beards, they dress like humans and freely crossbreed with them, the only thing that differs is that dwarfkin have four fingers only. When I presented this to my players they said "Oh, you destroyed the dwarfes"; I did the same with the elves (elfkin have greenish blood; the human nobles claim that they are of high-elven descent..), the comment was "Oh, nice approach towards mixing up Elves and Humans".

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Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye)
Height: (128 + 2d6) cm; Weight: (height - 80) kg.
Age: 300-400 year, or even more (i.e. the most-powerful dwarfen druid is about 900 years old)
They have only very few children, twin or quadruple births are usual; only about each fourth child is  female, and they are always single births. The dwarfen cavalier who seeks to gain the heart of one of the rare women is a common dwarfen character concept (beside the usual Gimli-like dwarf).

[Trevis Martin]

Castle Falkenstein notes dwarves as being between 4 ft and 5' 5".  No weight is given but they are described as being '...heavy set, withmassive shoulders and huge hands, all of them are nearly as wide as they are tall.' There are no dwarf females.  (Dwarfs are originally part of Faerie who traded their faerieness in order to work iron.  They breed with Faerie females.)

Average life span is given as 200 years.



regards,

Trevis

[ejh]

I can't believe Ron hasn't given us T&T stats yet.

I'll have to go look them up.

[ejh]

Dang, the copy of T&T I grabbed is missing the height/weight section, and I'm not digging through my books again for a good copy at this time of night.  I think that Dwarves were 1/2 human height but I could be wrong.

I do have aging information: like T&T elves, they start as adventurers at 3d6+50 years old, and "they aren't really getting old till they hit 200."

In the Arduin Adventure (1980), Dwarves are "3'5" to 5' tall" "100 to 190 pounds" and are "very long-lived (500 or more years)".

In Runequest (Chaoisum's old edition; my book is copyright 1978-1980) they have a SIZ of 2d6, while normal humans have 3D6.  SIZ is a combination of height and weight though, so it's kind of ambiguous what a 2D6 SIZ adds up to.  Their longevity is not mentioned.

[contracycle]

I can't believe Ron hasn't given us T&T stats yet.

That presumably because Ron's GM won't let him roll his Research pool 'till he drives to his Chantry and accesses his 4pt Library.

I just want to mentione one interesting (to me) convention which is allowing dwarves to use gunpowder.  Dwarves presumably by extension from the their traditional Forge skills (origin, north european IIRC) often have the highest technology going in the setting.  Whic is interestingly at odds with their other trad role as traditionalists.

[Thuringwaethiel]

I just want to mention one interesting (to me) convention which is allowing dwarves to use gunpowder.  Dwarves presumably by extension from the their traditional Forge skills (origin, north european IIRC) often have the highest technology going in the setting.  Whic is interestingly at odds with their other trad role as traditionalists.

Tolkien does it differently; in M-E the complex machinery and explosives are in general an 'orc thing', sometimes provided to them by innovative but less nice geniuses (Saruman for one). One exception is the fireworks of Gandalf, indicating maybe that gunpowder is all well for fun, but evil in warfare. Something like that..

But in general, yes, "conservative gunpowder" is quite confusing phenomena. Of course, the history of explosives is quite interesting by its own. There was the "greek fire", still a secret unfolded. Then the chinese came up with gunpowder, but didn't develop the warfare applications past a simple grenade. The arab merchants bought the secret, and just sold it again. Islamic soldiers used simple firecrackers to scare christian knights and their horses, but the surprise effect weared off soon. Eventually, the europeans came familiar with this strange innovation, and what do you know, soon they figured out a way to stuff it in an iron pipe and kill people far more efficiently than anyone before. Somehow that does not make me feel proud being an european myself.....

But back to dwarves. I'm not very familiar with "non-tolkien" races, but looks like there is some diversity between dwarves of different worlds, regarding technology, origin and society, f ex. However, looking above examples, their appearance seems astonishingly similar, with very little height variance, always bearded, always strong, almost identical lifespan... I can think only one another race that homogenous, namely halflings. If we'd compare elves, orcs or trolls, I guess we'd end up with enormous differences.

[M. J. Young]

It occurred to me earlier today, when my mailbox said there was another post on this thread, that it includes "and small people". Did the original poster want stats on halflings and gnomes? I'm reminded that there are also korokoburu and kender in OAD&D, but I don't think stats are available on these.

Interestingly, in my Multiverser post-fantasy setting Orc Rising, the dwarves are the most advanced technologically, although hard metals and water systems are the extent of their abilities (no explosives yet). I think it's the image of dwarfs working with metals and using tools that makes us think they would be the ones who advance to higher technologies first. Elves develop advanced eco-friendly agriculture, and humans become herders, in this scheme, which seems to fit.

--M. J. Young

[Scourge108]

In Tunnels & Trolls, IIRC, Dwarves had 2/3 the height of a human, and 3/4 the weight.  T&T taught me fractions.

[timfire]

there are no ... 'dwelves', 'dwarflings' or 'dworks'.

There were in my old homebrew Heartbreaker! I see I'm not the only one with that kind of sense of humor...

BTW, it's interesting that almost all of the dwarves are the same height, but there's a split in how much they weigh. Some have them proportional lighter, but some have them heavier than humans.