D&D General Make Your Dwarves More Interesting

[guachi]

Add a bit of difference to Dwarves in your game:

Dwarves have skin color of a base metal (lead, copper, nickel, aluminum, zin, tin, etc.) or its alloys (brass, bronze, solder, pewter, etc). If a Copper and Zinc parent have a baby Dwarf, he just might be a Brass-skinned dwarf!

Keep a dwarf outside too long without a good scrubbing and he'll tarnish. Dwarves who want to impress on a hot date make sure to scrub up and get a nice sheen to their skin. Not too different from a human, really. Face cream? No. Polishing cream.

Dwarves may live a long time but death is inevitable. Humans sometimes incinerate their deceased loved ones and put their ashes in a special container. Dwarves do something similar. Dwarves will honor deceased ancestors by putting them in a furnace. But it's not ashes they are looking for. No! A dwarf will leave some quantity of his skin color as residue. Copper-colored skin isn't just for show. That dwarf has real copper in his skin (and blood and bones, too). Humans just have ashes in an urn. Bah! Melt Grandpa Gimli down into copper and honor him by making a mini-Gimli statute of him. Bronze heroes get turned into magic weapons, for example. Just imagine how powerful a weapon (or any other item) could be if it contained the remains of an entire line of Dwarven rulers.

 

[guachi]

My "originality" skill is fairly low so I'd be surprised if this hadn't been done before. But if it's new to you and you like it, feel free to steal it.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Dwarves in my games:

1. Do NOT have darkvision. Nearly every media/book/image of dwarves (even underground) shows them with light sources; and personally I think way too many races have darkvision (so others have lost it as well). YMMV, but that is my experience.

2. Dwarves are known as excellent crafters of ALL trades, not just smith's tools, brewer's tools, and mason's tools (those three are severely limiting IMO and too stereotypical), and so gain tool proficiency in any tool (including instruments, game sets, anything under the Tool table in the PHB).

3. Although dwarves are comfortable underground, most dwarves actually live above ground. Some groups stay for extended periods underground, of course, but even if a community has an extensive underground network, most will reside above ground and have several other buildings there as well.

4. Dwarves can exchange Dwarven Combat Training for a language, skill, or tool proficiency.

5. Dwarves can exchange the poison damage type of Dwarven Resilience for acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder (basically "elemental" types) damage instead. Dwarves with different types come from different clans or families and are related. You can also roll a d6 to determine it randomly.

6. Dwarven Stonecunning is replaced by Craftcunning, which is the same benefit but you can choose any tool proficiency to gain the benefit for. If you want the original Stonecunning you choose Mason's tools.

7. Dwarves receive a +2 CON bonus and have maximum CON 20 (other races are maximum CON 18), and only floating +1 ASI.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

1. Do NOT have darkvision. Nearly every media/book/image of dwarves (even underground) shows them with light sources; and personally I think way too many races have darkvision (so others have lost it as well). YMMV, but that is my experience.

While I agree that there is too much darkvision in D&D, I would not pick the prototypical subterranian race to be where I draw the line.

Humans don't spend all of their time in the minimal amount of light they need to function, so I don't know why we would assume fantasy races do.

 

[DND_Reborn]

While I agree that there is too much darkvision in D&D, I would not pick the prototypical subterranian race to be where I draw the line.

I get that, but again the media, etc. seems to always have them with torches or lanterns... why if they have infravision/ darkvision???

For example from 1E AD&D PHB:

Also, my other points explain why I removed it from dwarves (except Duergar still have it).

FWIW, at one point Mountain Dwarves kept it, and Hill Dwarves didn't, but later I just made it all dwarves.

Here is the thread/poll I did a while ago about darkvision:

D&D 5E - Too Many PC Races With Darkvision? (a Poll)

According to my quick run of PC races I know of (I am sure I might have missed some...), more than half of all PC races get darkvision. IMO, this is a shame because darkness is one of the greatest elements for creating mystery and suspense, etc. For exploration, it is also a key component. And...

www.enworld.org

Anyway, I get your point--not for everyone--but I like it and it works for my world.

 

[Minigiant]

My dwarves are ice dwarves and their blood, sweat, and tears freeze when exposed to air. And they can be frozen and thawed.

 

[Irlo]

I once used dwarves with stone bones and fingernails with bonuses for being in contact with earth or rock and penalties for being on water or in the air.

I don't mind the darkvision. Even dwarves will use torches. No one wants to work in dim light, which is what darkness would seem to be to them.

 

[BookTenTiger]

One idea we came up with in our campaign (which had 3 - 5 dwarf characters, depending on the session) was that Dwarves live for so long that they perceive time differently. When they are in the routines of their work, time passes quickly... years could pass as if they were days. But when something of note occurs, suddenly time snaps back to normal!

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I particularly like how Dwarves are in the Inheritance Cycle (the Eragon series) are different from Tolkien knock-off dwarves. They're extremely devoted to their gods, like D&D Dwarves, but they believe that the only way for their spirits to properly journey to the afterlife is if they're completely enclosed in stone (they actually think that if they do this, their bodies will eventually "become one with the stone", and that they'll essentially turn into stone statues if properly buried). Now that I think about it, this kind of has an Egyptian feel to it, while their language is kind of a mix of German and Russian (lots of hard consonants and u's and o's in their words, but also have a lot of compound words).

Oh, and their name for themselves basically means "Rock People".

I love dwarves and I especially enjoy them when they (in some way) subvert the Our Dwarves are All the Same trope, and I feel like Dwarves from the Inheritance Cycle are a fairly under-represented variant of typical fantasy dwarves that do a pretty good job at making themselves feel unique and belonging to their world.

Nice thread, by the way. I really like your ideas, @guachi.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

A homebrew I did years ago had dwarves who were essentially minor earth elementals native to the prime material plane. They reproduced by carving new dwarves from stone, and using a Ritual (“Moradin’s Breath”) to give them true life.

And the stone from which the dwarf was carved determined their favored class.