D&D General Make Your Dwarves More Interesting

[Irlo]

Way back in the old days, dwarves didn't reach maturity until 35-40 years of age and elves not until 100+.

I explained that while elves spent decades in glorious carefree childhood, dwarves spent decades as sullen adolescents resenting everything.

 

[Kurotowa]

Rather than physiognomical changes, one idea I've spitballed but not used yet is to shift dwarven culture to put an emphasis on tradesmen instead of craftsmen. So instead of clans and master craftsmen hoarding their finely polished works, dwarven society is a tangle of trade unions and contracts. There's the Miner's Union and the Armorer's Union and the Tavernkeeper and Hospitality Union and all the way down to the Streetsweeper's Union, and when you become an adult you contract with one for a precisely defined package of training and responsibilities and compensation. Then the different unions have contracts with each other for their overlapping relationships, and the city's Leadership Committee of union representatives selects a rotating Chair to act as governor, and religious observances are more about paying your contractual dues to the gods for their blessings with the priests as HR reps for arbitrating disputes and communicating grievances.

It's not a wildly different spin on dwarven culture, they've still got the strongly LG tendencies and emphasis on keeping their word, but it pushes them away from tropes that are worn a bit thin (and come out of some ...questionable ethnic stereotyping) and into being a bit more dynamic.

 

[Older Beholder]

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!

Lots of good ideas here, thanks for sharing.

In my homebrew I went with the (extremely basic) idea that there are Dwarven clans / houses based on the different gem stones. So when you pick a Dwarf you can also pick the gem-stone clan they belong to. This hasn't really been fleshed out, so the players are welcome to add their own ideas to what a Ruby (or whatever) clan might be like.

I've only ever had one person want to play a Dwarf in 5E, so it's never been much of an issue.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Way back in the old days, dwarves didn't reach maturity until 35-40 years of age and elves not until 100+.

I explained that while elves spent decades in glorious carefree childhood, dwarves spent decades as sullen adolescents resenting everything.

I just had this mental image of young Dwarves looking like Goths, and listening to The Smiths, The Dammned, and The Cure.

 

[MGibster]

I gotta say, one of the most interesting takes on dwarves I've seen in the last decade or so was from Dragon Age. And it wasn't so much that they were radically different from your typical fantasy dwarves, it's that they had a good story to tell. That's what makes a race interesting.

 

[Mordhau]

The Dwarves

The Dwarves you see out in the world, they may not look at it, but they're all the noble/warrior caste. You see sometime under the mountain not too long ago, there was a revolution and the worker caste rose up and caste out their rulers. The nobles all fled and took with them their wealth and have long planned to lead an army of mercenaries to take back their homelands.

But there's a reason that they haven't. They can't take back their homeland until they sort out who gets to be king when they do and their quarrels have been going on for centuries.

All dwarven exiles know their family history and it's long and complicated web of branchings, marriages, blood feuds and alliances. As mercenaries they tend to join sides in human struggles where they can oppose rival claimants. Dwarves have a reputation amongst humans of being unreliable mercenaries, willing to switch sides at the drop of a hat, but in reality they have their reasons. When Dwarves change sides it's because some distant marriage or death has led to a change in their families allegiance to one or the other of the leading rival claimants to the lost Dwarven throne, or because circumstance has provided the chance to act on an ancient bloodfeud. There is no hatred in the world so strong as that of a Dwarf for another Dwarf.

In the last days of the humans' war, one of the last scions of an ancient line died overwhelmed by sheer numbers in a siege. Now, dwarves scurry across the land, making new alliances and breaking old ones, consulting weighty genealogical tombs and negotiating marriages.

And arranging assassinations. It is said by those who live by the sword, that when a Dwarf has a job for you, it will in the end, no matter what the initial claim, be about settling a score with another Dwarf.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I just had this mental image of young Dwarves looking like Goths, and listening to The Smiths, The Dammned, and The Cure.

…come to think of it, why just the YOUNG dwarves?

A quasi Goth Dwarven society- living in darkness, dressed in darkness; grumpy, morose and possibly even jealous of Elves; a gloomy bardic tradition…

Oh, I bet they’d show the Drow and Shadar-Ki something!

 

[Shadowdweller00]

Dwarves in one of my games had been "humanized" by disturbing, deific forces from a bear-like ancestor. Although retaining many of the classic dwarven characteristics they still had functional digging claws, bad tempers, and a penchant for hibernation.

 

[GuyBoy]

And don’t give them Scottish accents.......

 

[DND_Reborn]

And don’t give them Scottish accents.......

HOW DARE YOU!?!