Bonemortar Dwarves

So my original plan was to post new subraces, tribes, cities, gods, etc. Monday/Wednesday/Friday, with the occasional commentary on Tuesdays or Thursdays when inspiration struck. Miraculously, I’ve managed to post every weekday for over four weeks. I’m going to try to keep that streak going, but in the process I may play a little bit with which content shows up on which days.

Since presenting the Dark Seldarine pantheon for your evil and neutral elves to worship is monopolizing the MWF posts, we’ll take today to look at a new clan of dwarves…

Some nations, when confronted with an undead menace at their borders, become beacons of light for the world. In these proud bastions, embattled paladins and clerics stand against all that is blasphemous and vile. The very threat that hangs over them throws their nobility into sharp relief.

Other nations do not. Lacking the fire of faith or reason or charity, these nations decide—consciously or not—that the only way to survive great evil is to become it. They stare into the face of their nemesis until they become its mirror.

The Bonemortar dwarves are a terrifying clan who make their homes on the slopes of the Kartacian Mountains. For centuries, the Bonemortar dwarves toiled under the pallid thumbs of a line of necromancers, who were themselves locked in a never-ending struggle against a triumvirate of lich-kings who claimed the Kartacians as their own.

Naturally, these necromancers relied on their dwarven serfs for the skill of their stonework. But the Bonemortar dwarves were powerful in magic as well. Like most dwarves, they were masters of the ancient art of runes. But they lacked their race’s usual prejudice against arcane casting, lacing their glyphs with abjurations to create fortifications of unearthly strength.

Even so, the lich armies hammered at the dwarves and their overseers. Skeletal hordes, bone wyverns, and siege engines of nightmarish proportions broke through their walls and tore down their gates. And so the Bonemortar dwarves tapped the might of their masters and learned the necromantic arts as well. To their rune-carved stones they added mortar made from the bones of countless creatures, including their own dead. In doing so, they earned a new name.

And the walls held.

The tide turned, and soon one of the lich-kings was crushed into powder by the combined might of the dwarves and the spell-slinging of their human liege, Velshard II. The dwarves then turned on the weakened wizard and reclaimed their freedom. Now they exercise dominion over all his lands and beyond, while still weathering the onslaughts of the remaining two undead armies.

Obsessed with protecting their borders, the Bonemortar dwarves are driven to find more bones with which to anchor their magicks. And so they enact a terrible tithe on all those who dwell in the windward side of the Kartacians. When the clattering of their iron-shod horses is heard on the cobbles, townsfolk know the dwarves have come to collect the old, the infirm, the weak, the lame, and the barren.

The dwarves ride into the lands of men and harvest them for their skeletons.

More to come in two days…