Bonemortar Dwarves Continued

Bonemortar dwarves have well-kept black hair and beards streaked with silver. Their skin tends to be quite pale—sometimes to the point of white—but will vary; dark tan and jaundice-yellow coloring is sometimes seen. Given their cultural history, a tendency toward dark clothing with silver, white, or yellow accents and bone or skull motifs is unsurprising. They exhibit a reticence beyond even the “dour and taciturn” dwarven stereotype. Seeing themselves as a nation under siege, too much laughing and joking is consider unseemly and occurs only in the privacy of their own apartments.

Bonemortar dwarves do not shy from horses. The height and speed horseback allows is invaluable for keeping order over their human thralls. Breeding warhorses with draft horses (similar to Clydesdales), they have created a steed with both a martial temper and the strength to carry even the most over-plated rider. Often these horses’ feathery-haired legs are incongruously augmented with steel shoes, vicious spikes, and other wicked innovations in barding. Bonemortar dwarves’ favored weapons—halberds, urgroshes, Lucerne hammers, horseman’s picks, and Lochaber axes—are all ideal for combining dwarven weapon familiarity with the realities of mounted combat.

Bonemortar Dwarf Characters
[Stats TBD]
Favored Classes: Fighter or wizard (specialists only, in the schools of abjuration or necromancy)

Dwarven defenders are highly valued by the Bonemortar clan. They also often take levels in the runecaster (Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting), true necromancer (Libris Mortis), and geometer (Complete Arcane) prestige classes.

In the later two cases, it should be noted that though the Bonemortar clerics still invoke the names of the dwarven deities, their people’s turn to dark magic has divorced them from Moradin and the Morndinsamman. Any divine favors they receive thus come from other sources—in some cases, human gods of death and undeath, but mostly from a dedication to clan and a determination to survive that transcends all wordly concerns.