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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felix" data-source="post: 3562792" data-attributes="member: 3929">Consider:The dwarves live underground and are rarely glimpsed by other races except when they venture outside.The dwarves have a mining culture and centuries to employ their expertise.The dwarves have an innate knowledge of exactly how far underground they are.Nobody knows how many dwarves there really are.Want to have an interesting dwarven culture in your campaign? Model them to the fremen from Dune. Instead of a few scattered bands of fremen like the Harkonnens thought, they existed in vast numbers easily out of sight and knowledge of other people.The fremen bribed the spacing guild to keep satilities away from the outer desert; can not dwarves bribe governments with silver, gold, mithral, and iron?The fremen easily survived passage accross the deserts by riding worms; can not dwarves also mine their own highways underground, extending for thousands of miles from mountain range to mountain range.Dwarves exist in an excellent trading environment: thier highways are paved, straight, level and smooth, possibly on rails, that allow the easy transport of goods accross the lands untouchable from brigands and theives.Dwarven culture, like the elves', seems fatalistic and dying; this only perpetuates the myth that they are few and isolated. The dwarves of the world exist in vast numbers of interconnected underground cities to whom the widest gulfs of sea present no problem that the dwarves cannot tunnel under. So why indeed does the dying dwarven culture seem that different from the elves'? Because they know what you don't: there is no power on earth that would stop the dwarves were they to choose to assualt the surface. Their re-inforcemets can arrive quickly from unthreatend cities leagues away; their enemies' strongholds tunneled under and into to hemmorage raging dwarven warriors inside the defender's walls; underground wells of beseiged cities are not safe from dwarven poison; crops are not safe from the stockpiles of salt the dwarves have come accross in their mining.We should be so lucky that the dwarves tolerate us surface dwellers.</blockquote>

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