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A GLANCE OR TWO AT DWARVES IN THE REALMS

Dwarves are a LOT more than gruff accents (and hopefully NOT bad parodies of Scottish accents!). So here are some brief things to help bring dwarves of the Forgotten Realms to life at your gaming table!

We all know the Stout Folk, those bearded, short beings who mine for metals and gems, forge tools and weapons, fight a lot, and go around being gruff all over the place.

There’s a lot more to the dwarves of the Realms than that, so let’s take a look—or rather, a couple of swift glances.

Dwarvish is beyond my scope, this time around. And in the Realms of 1200 DR through to 1500 DR, many dwarves daily use the Common Tongue studded with words of Dwarvish.

There’s no commonly accepted reckoning of years among dwarves; they either use Dalereckoning like many surface humans do, or date things within a clan by the reigns of clan chieftans (“X befell in the sixth year of Buruin’s leadership”). Dwarven kingdoms and stand-alone communities do the same thing: reckon events by “the sixth of Mirtul, in the second year Delvran held the throne” (or mayor’s scepter, or council head seat).

When a dwarf wants to swear a solemn oath (vow something, not curse someone), they may use one of these popular oaths:

By the beards of my ancestors

On the grave of my grandsire/grandmare/father/mother

By the gods who blessed my birth

By the honor of the [[my clan]]

Dwarves have surnames if they’re of a wealthy or important family, but far more often use a nickname or byname (“The Fierce” or “Heavyhammer”) as a second name, or use their clan name as a surname. Sometimes, dwarves choose names and in doing so start a new clan. For example, King Harbromm of Citadel Adbar was clanless (outcast); he spurned his clan, and they in turn spurned him. He was born an Ironhar dwarf. He and his sons now style themselves “Ardbarhar” dwarves, so they are a new (albeit tiny) clan.

M any (or even most) dwarven clans began in this way. Clan Meiritarn (pronounced “MEER-ih-tarn”) shattered entirely, long ago, in “clanstrife” fighting, becoming sixteen new (small) clans.

Dwarf Hair

All dwarves of the Realms are more hirsute than the average human.

Some female dwarves have beards, some wear false beards when going to war (as so many foes know they’re fewer than males, so wipe them out and over time, the dwarves dwindle), and some shave clean.

MOST female dwarves, if they do nothing at all to their hair, naturally have sideburns, some curving into chin-edge fringes.

Unknown among dwarves of the Realms without deliberate styling: curly hair.

A few dwarves may have slightly wavy hair, but dwarven hair has stiff shafts like horsehair, so doesn’t form tight curls (ringlets). Unless treated (heat, curlers, etc.) 

Dwarf Cuisine

Dwarven cuisine in the Realms varies widely with what’s locally available, but there are some common staples: leek bread (dwarves make them in handloaves, which are “rolls” to us); potato and leek soup; rock crab; rothé back (bison steak would be close); fried browncap mushrooms (portabello is close); barleycakes (oatcakes); fried lamb kidneys; mutton chops; silverfin (trout); smallfowl sausage (made with minced pheasant, grouse, goose, duck); roast boar fritters (apples, diced dates, flour, salt, thin-sliced roast boar); tarnsar (sliced fried potatoes, onions, and boar thinslice).

And then there’s cheese. Many dwarves will eat almost any sort of cheese with (copious) ale or stronger drink, but they have favorites. In particular, Elturian Grey (also known as “dwarfcheese” and “stonework”) originated in Elturel but these days is made in many places between Amn and Scornubel. It requires a particular mold that grows on grass and clover, takes months to mature but also keeps in open air for almost a year, and looks like real-world blue cheese or Stilton, but has marbling of black, not green or blue. The stonework nickname comes from its looks, and it’s sometimes called “dwarfcheese” because almost all dwarves love it, hoard it, and rhapsodize over its taste. Elturian Grey has a very strongc taste and smell, the latter almost like vinegar and the former like ham and pineapple fried together with hot sauce.

And when it comes to disposing of wastes after they’ve eaten, Underdark dwarf settlements “farm” oozes (mobile lichens) that feed on dwarf poo, though they rarely work fast enough to quell all the smells.

Dwarf Forging

Almost all subterranean dwarven (and gnome) forges use “open” lava flows or the heat of nearby magma flows for their heat; dwarves are both efficient and see this as working with nature/the will of the gods.

Dwarves also prize rare enchanted items known as “forgestones:” very hard, durable (not brittle) stones, such as rock crystal, bearing permanent magics so they heat up and cool down on command, without themselves being harmed (so they can “power” a forge without need for fuel).

With dwarven plumbing to carry/pump heated water and so transfer heat over distances, the magma that’s everywhere down deep enough can be brought upwards to the shallower Upperdark in select places. Dwarf communities develop around the rarer natural upvents.

Dwarves can and do enchant items they forge, but dwarven culture until the Thunder Blessing tended to be secretive rather than sharing about magic.

Adamantine

Most famous among the metals dwarves produce are mithral and adamantine (a supple alloy derived in part from adamant; raw adamant ore is known as “adamantite.”

Dwarves Deep tells us that adamantine is mithral with adamantite while Volo’s Guide to All Things Magical claims adamantine is  . Don’t be confused by any apparent contradictions; there are in fact five different adamantine alloys.

“Just” mithral with adamant (= smelted, purified adamantite ore) is more brittle than the mixes that add silver or electrum (which is itself an alloy, though found naturally occurring). The less mithral, the less harsh the reflective gleam.

You can’t get “adamantine” without adamant (the smelted, purified, very hard but brittle metal = smelted, purified adamantite) as an ingredient. You can add steel and still get adamantine, but you can’t leave out adamant.

An alloy of “just” steel and mithral yields a steel that’s better than stainless steel in terms of its rust resistance. Survives a lot of rust monster attacks, for instance. (However, dwarves and gnomes consider making it a waste of mithral.)

Dwarf Coins

Among themselves, dwarves chiefly trade by barter (direct goods exchanges), and whenever they buy and sell in large amounts, they use trade bars (shaped, clan-mark-stamped ingots of smelted metal, usually copper or gold or an electrum alloy that won’t rust; the much rarer iron and silver trade-bars are always everbright-enchanted to prevent oxidation).

However, dwarves mint all sorts of coins for others (today, they are the chief source of counterfeit coins of long-fallen human kingdoms, trusted among merchants as better-than-genuine because dwarves make them as pure metal as practical, and maintain consistent weights, with knurled-edge [or other dressed edges] to prevent shaving or excessive wear. Dwarves use these currencies for their inherent metal values among themselves.

When making their own coins, modern dwarves usually use the denominations and forms established by the gold dwarves of the Great Rift. The gold coins (equivalent to gold pieces) are “axes” (thick, flat coins that take the shape of double-bladed/back-to-back axeblades, that are often valued at 5 gp each because of their weight and volume in purer-than-most-coins gold). For other metals (blueshine- and everbright-treated silver and copper, or more often the alloys collectively known as electrum), “coins” usually take the form of thin, flat rectangular plaques (rather like the smallest “gold bars” of the real world today: a rounded-corners, thin sheet rather like a really thick, undersized playing card) known among dwarves as “tuth” (plural) or “tath” (singular). They are worth less than axes (so, amounts represented among humans by copper and silver pieces).

Dwarf Burials

See my sourcebook FR11 Dwarves Deep (pages 11 and 29) for some details. When a body can’t be recovered, a weapon or tool used by the fallen is interred, with a runestone marker briefly telling their tale (e.g. “Faelra, daughter of Jundra and Ilbromm, fair of hair and kind speech, slayer of orcs, staunch shieldmaiden, fell protecting her kin [date]. A good [clan] dwarf.”) A body goes into a stone sarcophagus with the same sort of inscribed runestone set into a recess in the top (just resting there, it can be freely lifted out and put back).

The funeral service Itself varies with family wishes, the clan customs, and the officiating clergy (which deity), but always includes a mourners’ chant as the body processes to its burial, and a presiding priest standing over the body telling of the death and of the importance of the dwarf in life, ere the body is put into the sarcophagus (by family members, if any are available and willing; they arrange the body with any funeral goods such as favourite weapons or tools or art objects the fallen made, e.g. paintings or statuettes). After the interment, clergy sing a dirge, then everyone goes to where the clan (or family, only if no clan is involved) has prepared a feast, which usually turns into a wake.

Dwarves Of The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar

The “builders” (that’s the human term; dwarves would say “delvers”) of the Haunted Halls were the Smoothstone Hands, a traveling crew of dwarf masons led by Hardaggh Horn (who was, yes, of the Horn clan). Many of them were from the Arnskull and Jundeth clans, but the Soothstones weren’t clanless/outcast, just “vurtan” (the dwarf word for “apart from clan for work or quest purposes”), and over time the roster of the Hands included dwarves of almost all of the northern clans. The majority were usually middle-aged, and just over two-thirds male.

Hardaggh’s “second” (in command) was Mralah Gallowgar, a long-blonde-haired dwarf who could chisel a smooth, flat surface in any stone with astonishing speed (faster than mule-team-powered mechanical dwarf cutters). She later married a Worldthrone dwarf and over (much) time became a respected matriarch of that clan.

After delving the Halls, the Hands enjoyed almost a century of swift, very profitable work constructing crypts, wine cellars, and storage cellars for wealthy Sembian clients all across that Realm. Their work can be identified by the “Hand mark” carved low down on doorframe-adjacent wall blocks: a serpentine line tracing the outline of what results if you take your hands and interweave your fingers left forefinger horizontal on top, right forefinger pressed against it running horizontally and in turn pressed against your horizontal left middle finger. This mark can be found in the Haunted Halls, too, but only on undersides of the stone privy-seat slabs.

The dwarves who constructed the Haunted Halls began by ascending from the Underdark to certain natural rifts (see #26 on the original Halls map for one of them) and from these delving out horizontally-level passages and rooms. Once they had a large enough chamber emptied, they constructed a magical gate to shift tools and materials in, and rubble out (the rubble being piled at an outside location, in this case one of the ravines in the Stonelands, for use in later “hardflow” [ that is, concrete] work elsewhere). Then a second such gate was established, as work proceeded.

Such gates are customarily used to cut down on the otherwise time-consuming and backbreaking labour of transporting “mined out” bedrock out of the workings, which to dwarves who lack the means of making gates sometimes results in such laborious and time-consuming sidework as breeding, feeding, and training giant slugs to act as moving rubble-wagons.

After the work is done, these gates are dismantled.

New gates are created only where a client wants them (and is willing to pay for them) and are customarily far smaller than the larger-than-heaped-wagon-size construction gates. They are crafted to fit within frames and spaces constructed for them. The gates currently found in the Haunted Halls are of this second sort.

Realms engineers of all races (including dwarves) focus on strengths of materials, stresses and strains, buttresses and support props, not what some long-ago dwarf termed “the imaginary language of mathematics.”

So there you have it: a glance or two at dwarves of the Realms.