Relations: As has already been referenced quite a few times, dwarfs tend to live closely connected to gnomish settlements. They have mixed feelings about this: they require the intercession of the gnomes if they’re going to have much trade or interaction with the races whom the sun doesn’t hate, but they find the gnomes’ free-wheeling way of life and lack of concern for mundane things like consistency or scheduling mind-bending. Dwarfs remain completely baffled by how the gnomes get anything done or apply any sort of meaning to lives lived primarily for fun and lack of worry.
Dwarfs have fought many wars with the elfs of Dalmatia, dating all the way back to the rule of the Archmagi, a conflict over the rich farmlands of what is now Penguern that extended both races’ oppression by the Archmagi for a few centuries longer than it needed. It is worth noting that neither race operated as a monolith in these wars ~ they were a complicated knot of dwarfin tribes allying with elfin tribes against other elfs, and vice versa. They now exist as sort of frenemies writ big, evaluating each interaction to discover whether they squabble or whether they trust each other implicitly, and treating their mottled history with humor and camaraderie more than anything else. They’ve both been subjects of the Galatian king for the last two centuries, but they allied together a century before that to harry and raid Galatian villages. They hoped to prevent Galatian hegemony, and failed.
Accordingly, dwarfs tend to view the humans who dominate the southern lands with some suspicion. In truth, it is only King d’Holbach’s history of earning their trust and dedicated effort to bring them into the rest of the empire that prevented them from merely burrowing deeper into the mountains until this short-lived race’s time passed. That first century was still marked by repeated duels between dwarfin representatives and various imperial and provincial agents. If even a handful fewer of those duels had been won by the humans, they might have chosen total war instead of wary participation anyway.
Both halflings and orcs tend to live a bit far from the dwarfin homeland of Worth for them to come into common contact with these Fair Folk. That distance prevents them from having strong tendencies in their perceptions and relations with these races, although halflings do tend to display a work ethic that dwarfs find more comprehensible than the worldviews of many other races. Orcish discipline and honor can easily fall into an uncanny valley for dwarfs ~ they’re not toil, but they can look like it. Dwarfin culture as a whole, as I’ve said, hasn’t yet developed a unified reaction to this uncanny valley.
Alignments and Religion: The primary recipient of dwarfin worship is the blacksmith goddess of war and duels, the Orippan Mosaifis. In the epic poem known as the Locorrad, the merchant-god Locorrus and some of his orcs stole Mosaifis's blond hair, thinking to both demoralize a powerful warrior on the side of Galatia and to use it as a focus for evil magic. They succeeded at the first, for Mosaifis did not accompany the company questing to regain her hair and spent much of her time thereafter alone in her realm on Orippus. Her dwarfs could not bear this, to see their goddess so depressed, and so spent weeks, even months, forging her a wig of gold. They even inlaid it with enough protective magic to deflect any magic Locorrus might attempt upon her. The gods who set out to find her hair never found it, but it is said that the humans and dwarfs who accompanied them have continued the search to this day, as a secret society. Mosaifis is known to own the jewel-dropping ring, Draupnus, which is occasionally worshiped by gnomes.
Other dwarfin deities include
- Phaitos, the ethereal god of smithing, crafts, travel, and secrets, who has been getting more and more popular since the subterranean roads were completed and more and more dwarfs began living across the empire, all mixed in with the other races.
- Nafdes, goddix of death, grief, earth, the underworld, and wealth, who rules the mines that make dwarfs rich, and the feeling a dwarf gets when there is no longer a need to labor
- Shecire, goddix of the harvest, the underworld, abundance, the moon, and the undead, who is understood to be mysterious and arcane and to wield powers both stange and likely dangerous, and who is thanked every time the vegetables and fruits and grains which are her children are brought into the tunneled halls.
- Hrumdas, god of orcs, war, territory, watchfulness, sight, hearing, outcasts, barbarians, rebellion, whose image stands at every mountain door and every Worthese border, watching for potential danger.
- Scanerdus, god of earth, mountains, death, darkness, murder, the underworld, who organizes the Syndic of Ghosts far below the shallow realms of the dwarfs in the Deepest Halls.
Superstitions passed along in the warrens of the syndics largely center around keeping dwarfs safe from Soleh, whose anger is said to persist until this day. He’s rather the bogeyman, if you’re a dwarf. Worthese priests, including many dwarfs, in the Orthodox Orippan Church have formed a strong faction within the church, strong enough and different enough that some have begun to challenge their succession within the church, saying that they may be in violation of orthodoxy. This “Worthese Interpretation” is what I called the “Penguernite Interpretation” a while back, and it exhorts its followers to be Energetic and Generous rather than Forgiving and Merciful.
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