As I was doodling in my sketchbook last night, I had an idea for a game about fantasy dwarves.
You have four ability scores: Beard, Stomach, Muscle, and Brain.

Beard
Beard determines your dwarfs station in dwarven society.
As you grow older, you grow a longer beard. You also grow wiser. Therefore, characters with longer beards are wiser. That means that all the other dwarves have to listen to you.
Dwarves have the longest beard of all the races, so that makes them the wisest. Humans have beards too, so they are also somewhat wise, but their beards are not as long as dwarven beards. Elves don't have any beards at all, which explains why they are so stupid.
Having a high beard score allows you to attract dwarven followers and cast dwarven magic.

Stomach
Stomach determines what your dwarfs powers of digestion.
Dwarves with stronger stomachs are able to eat stronger foods and drink more alcohol.
You are what you eat. That means that if you eat lava, you become lava. Not everybody can eat lava though. You have to have a powerful stomach to do that. You make your stomach powerful by training it. When you are a dwarven baby, you start out eating soft, weak foods like bears and monkeys. As you grow older, you work your way up the food chain, until your stomach becomes so powerful that you can eat time itself!
A powerful stomach also allows you to drink more alcohol. Dwarves need alcohol to live. A dwarf that becomes sober will immediately die from withdrawal. Therefore, the more alcohol you drink, the more alive you will become. However, if you drink too much, your body will become so full of life that it will burst and you will die. You have to train your body to drink more through years of practice. Only then can you become immortal.
Having a highstomach score allows you to eat tougher foods to heal and gain superpowers, and drink more alcohol for more life.

Muscle
Muscle determines how strong your dwarf is.
You need muscle to fight and work. The only way to gain muscle is by fighting and working. This is the paradox of strength.
Having a high muscle score gives you bonuses to attacks and allows you to carry heavier equipment.

Brain
Brain determines how skilled your dwarf is.
Dwarves are the magical artisans of the gods. That's how they pay their rent. Clever dwarves can take almost any material, even abstract concepts, and craft it into masterwork arms and armaments. They do this by etching sacred dwarven runes into the material. Learning the runes demands much education and mental discipline. As a dwarf reads and learns, its brain becomes stronger, thus allowing the dwarf to learn more words, and thus craft better items.
Having a high brain score lets you learn more languages, craft better items, and earn a higher salary.

That's about as far as I've gotten so far with this concept.

Nose - living underground your sense of smell is dominant. Can you smell food, gold, etc?

Your goal as a dwarf is naturally to acquire and hoard gold.

You want to eat as cheaply as possible (rocks are cheap if you can stomach them)

I would LOVE to see this concept expanded, Kevin. More, please!

Thanks!

So I was thinking about what such a game would be about. What would players and their characters do?
The game is about the lives of fantasy dwarves. Dwarves spend most of their lives working, fighting, and drinking. Gameplay will mostly revolve around these three activities. Just to add a bit more dimension to the dwarves, I think it might be neat if they were divided into a number of factions that fight over certain issues in dwarven society such as:
Should dwarves bless human miners, or play dangerous tricks on them?
Should dwarves become wizards?
Should dwarven women have beards?

have you thought about mythological inspirations: might be a little to serious but the Nibelungenlied is all about some pretty interesting dwarves.

masqueradeball wrote:
have you thought about mythological inspirations: might be a little to serious but the Nibelungenlied is all about some pretty interesting dwarves.

Greedy Dwarves get turned into dragons...watch out all you longbeards!

Cool idea chrono.!

Dwarves from different cultures would be cool. It might lead the game away from the whole Munchkin "we're making fun of D&D" which is good stuff, but a little overdone. Heres an idea: modern day setting, for some reason all the dwarves re-emerge into the world, whackiness ensues (not sure if whacky is what your looking for) but I would be really interested in something like this.

That could be pretty cool. It would be a good opportunity to parody White Wolf games as well.

I've been playing a lot of Fallout lately. It could be pretty neat to do a game where the dying races like elves and dwarves retreated to magical fallout shelters to escape some kind of sorcerous war, only to emerge later to find the world desolate, barren of magical energy, and ruled by the degenerate sub-dwarven humans.
The dwarves cannot stay in their shelters any longer, but they cannot walk openly on the surface either, so they must pretend to be short humans until they can find a way to reclaim the world that is rightfully theirs. Meanwhile, it seems that their ancient enemies, the tree-hugging elves, have also survived. They have been living amongst humans since the seventies, and they are plotting world conquest once again.

awesome

Do you really need Muscle? I mean, maybe, depending upon how the game works, but reading those four descriptions, I think, "meh, Muscle's boring. The other ones are much cooler."

I like Muscle. Big burliness is something I strongly associate with Dwarves. Maybe its just a D&D thing, though.

Do you NEED a setting?

When I wrote ORX, I started off writing a setting for the game, too, but quickly abandoned that idea as more and more potential settings filed into my brain. And in the case of ORX, the game gains its character and flavor from the rules, not a setting. (This is rather like Sorcerer, in that respect.)

Hence, do you NEED a setting?
Do you want to develop the game around a specific setting?

Muscle might be more interesting if it had a name more in style with the others, like Arms or Shoulders, and if it did something awesomely cool at high levels.

I think Nose is a great idea, and I'd add Feet as a measure of the dwarf's stability and connection to the earth.

Hmmm... maybe six stats then:
Beard (your social/magic stat) (with a long enough beard, you become a dwarven lord)
Hat (your knowledge/skill stat) (with a tall enough hat, you become super-dwarvenly smart)
Nose (your perception stat) (with a big enough nose, you gain psychic scent)
Gut (your hit points/defensive stat) (with a big enough gut, you have infinite drinking)
Fists (your combat stat) (with big enough fists, you become super-dwarvenly strong)
Feet (your movement stat) (with big enough feet, you become super-dwarvenly fast)

Hmmm... It might be cool to tie each of these abilities to a magic-items category.

Hmmm... what do you guys think of collaborative dungeon building where the players decide where they want to dig chambers and corridors, and the GM decides where to place hazards and buried treasures?

chronoplasm wrote:
Hmmm... what do you guys think of collaborative dungeon building where the players decide where they want to dig chambers and corridors, and the GM decides where to place hazards and buried treasures?

I like the idea for the Dwarven rpg, in particular the basic stats presented in the first post. If I was to modify that original idea in anyway then I may drop Muscle and have Stomach renamed as Girth. Girth would be both general brawn and constitution.

I'm sure that there's much opportunity for mirth in the game but I always like the opportunity to move between darkly grim and comedy. I'd want to make sure that there was the opportunity for the game to be serious at times.

Regarding setting and what the players do, I'd be thinking of qualities that dwarves admire and contrast with the qualities of their enemies. Some examples:

Dragons are thieves who steal their treasures, with a dwarf you must earn your wealth.
Elves are flighty and procrastinate whereas dwarves are resolute and steadfast.
The living dead break the order of nature, but the dwarves revere the natural order of things.
The orcs invade and fight for the sake of fighting but a dwarf fights to defend and with purpose.

Just a few quick thoughts because I like the idea.

Heh. I like Girth. Thanks.
I like your comparisons there.
I would add balrogs/demons to that list.
Balrogs are creatures of chaos who want to tear everything down and return the world to the state it was in at the beginning of time (lifeless and ever burning). Dwarves value organization and stability.

So I'm thinking of dividing the dwarves into clans, with each clan being based on a dwarves of different mythologies (Tomte, Duwende, etc.) but within those clans the dwarves are also divided up into guilds.
Some guilds...
Miners Out of combat, miners dig for stone and ores, and create habitable spaces for dwarves. In combat, miners dig through layers of defense and chip away at enemies with lots of hit points.
Farmers Out of combat, farmers grow and harvest plants and mushrooms for cooking and brewing. In combat, farmers swing their flails and scythes to mow down enemies as though they were blades of grass.
Carpenters Out of combat, carpenters cut wood and shape it into various useful constructions such as barrels or cabinets. In combat, carpenters throw their barrels and go mad with saws.

chronoplasm wrote:
Hmmm... what do you guys think of collaborative dungeon building where the players decide where they want to dig chambers and corridors, and the GM decides where to place hazards and buried treasures?

Anders wrote:
I think Nose is a great idea, and I'd add Feet as a measure of the dwarf's stability and connection to the earth.

I'm actually against all the these additional stats being added to the originally presented ones. Feels like overkill to me, and not as tightly designed as the first few promised. With the additions, it comes off more "kitchen-sink"ish, if you get my meaning. If not, imagine "I've renamed all the D&D stats to their dwarfish equivalents!"

Do you need a stat for everything? (Because, honestly, we COULD come up with stats for everything under the sun "thumbs, beards, noses, stench, guts, iron, bones, history, names, gold, axes, etc, etc, etc.") Hence, what does the game do? What is it trying to accomplish?

Both Trollbabe and ORX work quite well with just three stats. And there's a reason Trollbabe has Magic, Fighting, and Social, and NOTHING else. There's a reason ORX has Nasty, Brute, and Grok (though also Descriptors, Loot, and Fate). Are you trying to be completest? Or are you trying for a specific type of experience?

My impression was that this was more of a brainstorming session with ideas being kicked around with the understanding that they'd be pared down later. In my experience, it's easier to achieve minimalism by having an ample material to select from rather than by building it up from nothing.