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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aristotle" data-source="post: 2344692" data-attributes="member: 5885">Just did some work on my dwarves... The dwarves of my setting are swarthy with dark brown or black hair. They don't live nearly as long as D&D dwarves (most of my races have basically human lifespans) but do live to be older than humans in general due to their increased hardiness. My setting is fairly young, with mortals only truly having free will the past 250 years or so, but the dwarves held the first and greatest empire after the fall of the old gods. The culture had a vaguely egyptian feel. Dwarves were responsible for the first animation of corpses (there are no true undead in the setting, animated corpses are just animated objects or lesser golems of a sort). They mummified the bodies to keep the constructs in working order for longer periods of time and wrapped them in ceremonial wraps to hide the previous identity of the corpse. They were not the all around craftsmen that D&D dwarves are, but were expert stonemasons. Why all the past tense? About 100 years after the empire was formed the dwarves angered a dragon by hunting the wyrmlings under it's protection (dragons are terrible, truly epic, beasts in my setting) which then decimated the empire in a night of smoke and fire. The orcs, long mistreated by the dwarves, came out of the mountains, conquered the decimated dwarves, and took their empire within days of the attack. All of that, for this: The majority of my dwarves (several hundred thousand strong) are slaves to the orcish empire (a cultural mix of old arabia and klingon). Every orc city has a "slave quarter" where it's dwarven slaves are kept and used for all manner of work. They live in poverty and fear. A few dwarves live free among the rocky wastes bordering the desert. They have formed tightly knit clans that are untrusting of outsiders and constantly on the run from the orcs. They are based loosely on the tribes from Dune. They are also one of the few instances of cultural atheism in my setting (believing that they were forsaken by god). That's my dwarves... broken slaves and desert wasteland freedom fighters.</blockquote>

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