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.
Showing posts with label Dwarves. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dwarves. Show all posts
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
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…
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…
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Plague Dwarves
The plague dwarves carry loss of the Everdelve in their very bones. The Ironbond, Steelguard, and Kazzar clans were among the last to forsake their ancient holdings, and whole family lines were lost to mind flayer experimentation. As the Brain Nations fell in turn to fiends from the Lower Planes, the descendants of these abused lines escaped. Haggard, thin, and tottery, with pale skin and patchy, jet-black beards, these dwarves are sallow remnants of a fallen age. Cursed with a mysterious wasting disease, they are feared and rejected by all who come in contact with them.
The Healed are plague dwarves who have overcome their families’ dark affliction. They are as stout and bold as other dwarves, but they love the depths of the earth less. Most refuse to handle a hammer or pick, instead preferring axes or even short swords. They keep their hair cropped close to the skull and some even shave their beards. When asked why, they answer only, “To remember.” When pressed further, their hands go to the hilts of their weapons.
The Healed are plague dwarves who have overcome their families’ dark affliction. They are as stout and bold as other dwarves, but they love the depths of the earth less. Most refuse to handle a hammer or pick, instead preferring axes or even short swords. They keep their hair cropped close to the skull and some even shave their beards. When asked why, they answer only, “To remember.” When pressed further, their hands go to the hilts of their weapons.
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