No one has ever seen a female, or child, dwarf, even when they are allowed to set foot within the great halls of the dwarven clans. The reason for this is simple, there are none. Each and every dwarf alive today was created and reborn from secret birthing chambers overseen by the dwarven priests and protected by the fanatical Heartguards. When a dwarf dies, his clan spares no expense to retrieve his body so that the priests can perform the rites due a dwarven warrior. He is set upon a throne in the halls of the dead, his armor and weapons enshrined with him. Next his heartstone is removed, causing his body to return to stone, and set within a budding stone deep within the birthing chambers. This budding stone will release a full-grown dwarf into the world roughly a century later, his memories slightly faded but easily restored. The priests quickly filling this new dwarf with stories of his past deeds, allies, and enemies. The dwarf will most generally take his old name once again and march against his enemies in a cycle of reborn and renewed aggression.
Each dwarf sees the priest that oversaw his re-education as his father and will generally defer to that particular priest's wisdom, as long as it does not endanger the clan as a whole. While each clan follows that particular clan's Great Thane, and the Thanes under him, it is the priests that advise and sway their judgment.
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? Responses (11)
This is highly incomplete, but if I never posted it until it was complete then it would never get posted in this lifetime :P
This certainly piques my interest! I encourage you to finish it. I'll try to add thoughts as they come to me.
This is complete enough and an interesting core idea.
Seems like I've read something similar to this before? I agree w/ MM ,its def enuf to stand on its own as a 3.5/5.
I looked through every RPG, fantasy book I own or had access to, at the moment I can not find a reference to this. Does that mean it is not out there? Nope, if you do find some thing like this then definitely let me know with a link. I would prefer to change this enough that it stands on its own than to steal someone else's idea
Don't sweat this, I wasn't implying anything anyway, lots of peeps 'rediscover' the same concept. My memory is terrible so Im mot sure if Im even right.
Nice!
A diamond in the rough. Had you spent like a few more hours on this, polishing it and refining it, I think you could easily have gotten a 4.5
If you don't have females then you don't have males either, or do your dwarfs have penises and testicles? If so, why? Not much incentive to have something that no longer have any practical use and only serve as a physical weak spot.
So you either have a race of ken-doll golems, or a bunch of dudes who at some point for whatever reason decided to do away with women and keep cloning themselves.
Basicly, were they ever flesh or did someone invent this method, can't likely have been themselves unless the method has changed.
I think the Warcraft Lore also has the dwarfs were once made of stone thing, but as an idea, there's a lot of logical leaps.
No need to cloud fantasy with the practicalities of reproduction. There are many legends of creatures, gods, beings with clear genders being spawned from rocks, foreheads, and various other weird sources. Perhaps these dwarves did it the old fashioned way and got cursed/blessed into being tubers at a later point.
I like this idea, and as previously been said, I think if it was worked on for a little bit more it could have been so much more. Commenting on Goss, nowhere in the sub does it state that they require sex of any kind so I don't see where and why its necessary to have organs of such. It is fantasy after all, hell even Sci-Fi could argue races with homogeneous origins are evident all the time in books and movies. I see little issue with it and it definitely doesn't detract from sub, I honestly didn't even think about it.
Valadaar's right, from our modern perspective we may see male and female as biological realities but in fantasy (or even in historical views of the natural world) the origins of the masculine and feminine do not correspond to a need for reproduction. Historical views of reproduction might explain this by saying that dwarven males just found another place to deposit their homunculuses...homunculi, homunculopodes...
Nice idea, could have been done in a 100 words. There was story in Beneath ceasless skies in which dwarves reproduced by turning themselves into roots and budding off that way. Xenophobic humans dug them all up though...