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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 8825127" data-attributes="member: 7030042">[USER=2209]@Voadam[/USER] Thank you. And thanks for your questions!Brewing is obviously one (since that's the one a player character picked). Masonry and smithing (of various kinds) are obvious choices for city life I would think. If there's a quarry or mine nearby, those would also be common; mining families who have found themselves settling in a land with no nearby mines would have to find something else to do, which might help slowly drive the adoption of "non-traditional" trades. Dwarven cities need light, so chandlers would be a possible (if perhaps rarer) trade. Less common in a "sunland" environment would be the growing and tending of "crops" of Underdark-style subterranean moulds or fungus for food, flavour, medicine, or recreation, but you might imagine a few families tending a small "garden plot" of such stuff in a cellar.I don't want to hew too closely to historical parallels, but I suspect they're unavoidable to some extent. I imagine when the dwarves first arrived, especially what with seeking refuge from calamity, it would have been somewhat like the settling of Irish in North America during and after the Potato Famine. Going with what I'm personally familiar with, many years hence, I'd probably imagine the Old Quarry community as very loosely resembling something like a North American city Chinatown more than, say, Montreal's Jewish Quarter. I do hope that the "Stone-born/Children of Stone" angle adds an "alien/fantastic" distinction.I imagine they did weather it better than others due to dwarven constitution - but not by a whole lot. If this plague is about as significant as the Black Death in Europe (so a circa one-quarter to one-third drop in population, with a two-century recovery period), which I think is a reasonable historical analogue, then any given population of dwarves probably had an average mortality rate about three-quarters that of a given population of humans.It would have probably felt far more significant to dwarves with their long lives - imagine a fifty-year-old dwarf, who probably has two or three hundred years of life to live, suddenly passing.In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the trauma of the plague has helped spur both the Radical movement among some dwarves, and fresh interest in reclaiming relics of their history from their abandoned ancestral homes if not reclaiming those homes themselves.The empire probably threatened the conquest of the Free City and other nearby regions in the past, so I am sure the Parnethian dwarves would generally be hostile to the empire's ambitions, though they might be fairly apathetic about its existence as long as it's "over there".Any dwarves who live within the bounds of the empire and haven't successfully resisted conquest would be subjugated. They'd likely be less oppressed than humans on average - without going into too much detail, the empire seems to have something akin to a caste system that the player envisioned as being enforced by food supply (reminiscent of The Hunger Games if memory recalls) - but still oppressed. I don't myself envision this empire as formally enslaving people except incarcerated prisoners; say rather that one's life opportunities are formally constrained by caste just as one's food supply is.</blockquote>

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