D&D General I miss Mountain Dwarfs

[mellored]

Does in my world.

Mountain Dwarves have limited magic resistance but it drains their natural toughness.

Seems kind of meh, IMO.

Hill dwarves lose their magic resistance and the chains that comes with it.

How about making those chains thicker?

Magical Anathema:
Your body rejected magic of all types. Whenever you are targeted by a magic effect, beneficial or harmful, roll a d4. On a 1,2, or 3, it has no effect on you. In addition, you can not atune to any magic items.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

How about making those chains thicker?

Magical Anathema:
Your body rejected magic of all types. Whenever you are targeted by a magic effect, beneficial or harmful, roll a d4. On a 1,2, or 3, it has no effect on you. In addition, you can not atune to any magic items.

Why not go thicker still? Completely immune to magic but also cannot benefit from any magic.

In a D&D world, that's alien.

 

[cbwjm]

Ever since Tasha's and floating ability scores, I'd been more or less ignoring thenmountain dwarf subrace any way, hill dwarves and mountain dwarves were just built using the hill dwarf.

 

[Minigiant]

Some concepts for dwarven subspecies
-geokinesis, make a proper earthbender dwarf.

Volcano and glacier dwarves are cool ideas but I don’t know what abilities they’d have or why.

Mountain- Metalbender
Hill- Earthbender
Volcano- Lavabender

Seems kind of meh, IMO.

How about making those chains thicker?

Magical Anathema:
Your body rejected magic of all types. Whenever you are targeted by a magic effect, beneficial or harmful, roll a d4. On a 1,2, or 3, it has no effect on you. In addition, you can not atune to any magic items.

Great for a specific world or video game.

Too much for general D&D.

 

[Staffan]

It's almost like some people wrote, illustrated, and produced entire books to solve this exact problem...

Heritage/Culture has been a 'thing' for years now. Every company except WotC has been doing it for ages. WotC is an outlier at this point.

I think the first place I came across it was in Rolemaster Standard System (it was probably around in earlier versions too but that's where I noticed it), but there it was mostly a human thing. So a Wood Elf would have Wood Elf stats and Wood Elf background skills, but a Common Man or Mixed Man would choose a culture (plains, city, sea, hill, and so on) for their background skills and only get stats for their actual race. HARP then made it more widely applicable, but for the most part the cultures corresponded 1:1 with races (though it would allow you to make a character like Carrot Ironfounderson, who was brought up as a dwarf and then further up as a human). I think Level Up is the first game I've seen with mechanically relevant cultures that provide multiple different ones for multiple species.

Oh, wait, just thought of one that's way older than Rolemaster: Runequest. Though at least in the version I'm most familiar with (3rd), "culture" was mostly a cultural development level: primitive, nomad, barbarian, or civilized.

 

[Morrus]

Legacy IP

They have to support old settings where biological dwarves are boring.

Every heritage/culture model out there (which is pretty every F20 game except WotC's at this point) supports legacy cultures just fine. It's really easy!

 

[Minigiant]

Every heritage/culture model out there (which is pretty every F20 game except WotC's at this point) supports legacy cultures just fine. It's really easy!

Yeah but when you recreate the races of old D&D setting, the biological part of dwarves is STILL boring.

 

[Xeviat]

If you want subraces, you’re going to need to add something major to dwarven lore. We don’t want to make ability score adjustments for skin tone or beard style (which seems to be the only differences between gold and shield dwarves, and that’s actually more intrinsic difference than Dragonlance dwarves get).

I’ve considered adding strong elemental themes (fire dwarves, stone dwarves, ice dwarves, wood dwarves, etc). The only downsides are running out of elements and the fact that there’s already three major races with strong elemental themes so it’s not enough to make them stand out by itself.

If you’re not willing to use magic, your options are even more limited.

There's a YouTuber who talked about how he identifies with dwarves because he's from the Caucuses, and Mountain and Hill Dwarf reminds him of the different ancient cultures where he grew up. The mountain folk were known for their forge priests, and they knew the mystical arts of smithing.

Making Mountain Dwarves more magical could be interesting.