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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8569666" data-attributes="member: 5948">That would make gully dwarfdom a background rather than a race though.  Which ... may not be an entirely bad thing.The real problem for a re-invention of gully dwarves as a race is that their stupidity (in the novels) is pretty much their defining characteristic, and their entire culture (despised, filthy, collecting worthless knick-knacks etc) is predicated on that.  What else is there, to old gully dwarf canon, if you take that away?  It's HARD to reinvent gully dwarf culture as presented in old DL material and have their culture still make sense.  Gully dwarves presumably roll 3d6 for their stats like everyone else, so where do the int 18 or cha 18 gully dwarves fit in?  Probability says there'd be just as many of them as there would be for any other type of dwarf.  Sure, you may argue 'they're the adventurers' - but in that case why has nobody ever seen them out adventuring?One way you could do it is that gully dwarves were actually once a race of dwarves who lived very deep, who fought an apocalyptic secret war against vile aberrations down there (are tentacley aberrations a thing in Dragonlance?  Cos you know WotC will be wanting to squeeze them in somehow...) and won, but were afflicted by a hereditary brainphage that the aberrations released as an act of vengeance as their empire finally fell and burned.  This makes the race as a whole tragic PTSD veterans rather than That Unpopular Kid Who Picks His Nose - but it's pretty clear that WotC will never introduce any race that have any sort of mechanical disadvantage on mental abilities (or increasingly, any abilities whatsoever) regardless of how that disadvantage came about.There's maybe room to re-interpret them as being a sort of dwarven subculture that consciously rejects the sort of gold-and-axes materialism and militarism of 'typical' dwarfdom, and looks to humility over the obsessive pride, the arrogant perfectionism, the poring over ones lineage and ancient grudges that have cause dwarves so much trouble in the past.  Almost a deliberately ascetic view of things?  You're not born gully, you CHOOSE to be gully (though the kids of gully dwarves are probably more likely to take after their parents than non-gully dwarves are to adopt the lifestyle).  This way of looking at gully dwarves would mean that probably gully dwarf monks and underdark druids would likely be the most common adventurers - and it kinda raises the possibility of interesting plotlines where a dwarf clan is horribly embarrassed when one of their scions argues with his parents and 'goes Gully'It doesn't fix the incompatibility with how gully dwarves have always been written in the lore, but a race of comic relief filthy developmentally handicapped people just ain't gonna pass muster these days.</blockquote>

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