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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 431249" data-attributes="member: 2067">According to the core rules: "dwarven men value their beards..." (PHB, Pg. 14), implying that dwarven women are beardless. Also, the illustration shows dwarven women as beardless. Previous editions/campaign settings have said that dwarves have had beards.It really depends.Biologically, what causes facial hair is largely related to chemicals and such in the blood at puberty -- chemicals such as Testosterone, for instance.So if dwarven women have full on beards, it implies that they're as laden with typically male juices as, say, female hyenas (who even have penises). In this situation, the women are probably *not* the typical matronly types, being as strong and aggressive and warlike as the males. They're aggressive, leading clans and dominating males. In fact, it can be largely difficult to tell the difference...there's little to no gender biases or restrictions at all. Males and females are largely the same thing -- heck, the courting process could be the Prachett-esque practice of finding out which gender the other is, and homosexuality wouldn't be that rare or that obvious.This leads, effectively, to all dwarves being a drawn out charactictature of a stereotype. They're aggressive, conformist, and highly regimented -- too lawful to even divide themselves between gendes. They are united -- male and female are largely considerations of those who can make babies and those who can't.It could even become a bit of a comparison with elves -- dwarves being as aggressive and strong as the elves are weak and timid. If dwarves have too much man-juices, maybe elves have too much women-juices, they are too much a bad stereotype of a female, all love and nurture without spine or adherence. The elves are as submissive and unassertive, passive. The dwarves are aggressive and tough. The dwarves may be even almost heartless and mechanical as the elves are nurturing and caring. You could go with an entire theme of Law = Man, Chaos = Women, and strongly divide things on gender lines, making it a strong theme of your game world.I prefer to compare the elves to orcs, myself, so I leave the dwarven women beardless. It makes the dwarves less fantastic and more human, more understandable. It also allows them to be more understandably "conservative," with well-defined gender roles and a strong sense of family and stereotype. It makes them, IMHO, more relatable to the tradition and fundamentalism, less open to new things and experiences, and more understandably insular.It's really up to you. I like my dwarven women beardless, myself. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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