How and why do Dwarves live underground?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


I'll say this up front. I like the idea. It's cool. However, it brings up a LOT of issues. We've got extreme heat, oxygen supply, toxic gases, water supply, food supply, waste removal, and construction/expansion of settlements, all major issues that will make life underground incredibly difficult and often fatal. How do the Dwarves solve these problems? In fact, why do they want to when they could live on the surface? I'm highly curious about this, and would love to find a logical explanation. Yes, I know we could just say fantasy and call it a day. However, I am eager to find a justification. It may not be necessary for a fantasy game, but it is fun to try and solve these issues.

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Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
I'll say this up front. I like the idea. It's cool. However, it brings up a LOT of issues. We've got extreme heat, oxygen supply, toxic gases, water supply, food supply, waste removal, and construction/expansion of settlements, all major issues that will make life underground incredibly difficult and often fatal. How do the Dwarves solve these problems? In fact, why do they want to when they could live on the surface? I'm highly curious about this, and would love to find a logical explanation. Yes, I know we could just say fantasy and call it a day. However, I am eager to find a justification. It may not be necessary for a fantasy game, but it is fun to try and solve these issues.

The underground world of our earth is quite different from the underground world of most D&D worlds. In D&D its more like the Carlsbad caverns (but more vast and beautiful, if that is even conceivable). There are not so many poisonous gasses, there are teaming ecosystems, there are massive veins of gold, silver, and *mithril*. In short, the underground world is such that one wonders why anyone would brave the dangers of the surface, where you have to deal with things like weather, aerial dragon attacks, etc..


Starfinder Superscriber

I'll start with this:

Well one thing I would start with (biologically) is they have a bonus to poison saves. There's another mammal that lives underground in fairly toxic environments that dwarves may have, the naked mole rat. They have something in their genes that both allows them to live in low oxygen/high CO2 environments as well as amonia fume rich air. There could be something like that which dwarves naturally have which is one reason they are able to live deep down with low O2 content.


Most of those problems are addressed by safe mining.

The best reason for it is safety. Consider living underground as you live in your house. You know the terrain. You have nice square walls and no one can easily sneak up on you. Living underground gives them a nice solid fortification that they can continue to expand without having to worry so much about crossing into other territories. Living underground also compliments their low height and solid build. Smaller tunnels are safer.

If I were to attempt to evolve a dwarf I would start with a heavily built society based off of mining and herding. For some threat based reason, they had to move into the mines due to the surface being unsafe. Between selective breeding and survival of the fittest in a few hundred thousand years if they haven't been wiped out you may very well have dwarfs. Add in the, supposed, increased background magic of the underground and you could shorten that time by a great deal.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

If this leads to changing the RAW to account for the geothermal gradient pr re-working maps to make them possible according to plate tectonics... <shakes fist>


Hmm... For a predominantly mining-culture living closer to their best/rarest/most valuable resources would likely mean living deeper underground. Living down there would likely make maintaining the defences of a mine easier, and would remove the trek down through a long tunnel each morning, and then back at the end of the day with carts full of resources.

They'd only have to wall off their civilization and their mine for the most party, rather than worry about a long path between the two, that would need to be guarded along its entire length, not just due to the threat of monsters, but also to ward off thieves going for carts of freshly-mined treasure like gems or valuable metal while it's being carted between the mine and civilization each at the end of each day. Having the mine directly inside the city means the long, dangerous trek is the job of the merchants rather than the miners, and in a dwarven society the merchants probably get the less respect of the two. If they want safe travels they can employ guards for all the city cares.

That's the first answer that comes to mind for me at any rate.


as i've mentioned before i'm writing a book at the moment, and i ran into this exact problem. though they may be a bit setting specific, here's how i've handled several of them:
1)air: the dwarven nation in my setting have a large set of steam-driven fans that pump fresh air down into their cities, with the lower quality air being pushed out into the surrounding tunnels and the smoke from their fires ect being channelled directly outside. naturally this limits the depth of the initial holdings, but lower down communities simply draw air from the city above them.
2)food: the dwarves in my setting have many tunnels devoted to growing fungi and mushrooms, which also helps to purify the air. they prize meat, which they can only get from hunting on the surface or rarely through other tunnel-dwelling creatures. they do not farm livestock due to the large amount of room and resources such creatures take up, and the relatively poor cost-benifit of such practices. some hidden surface communities are an exception to this rule. waste is removed by a surprisingly sophisticated sewerage system, and is recycled as fertiliser.
3) Expansion: the dwarven cities are composed of meandering collections of corridors and rooms, taking up a far greater area than an equivelent human city. this means that the structural intergeraty of each section is less likely to be compromised, and makes chain reaction collapses almost impossible.

as i haven't actually reached the dwarven civilisation yet (they'll be in book 2) i've only done preliminary basics so far. hope they're what you're looking for.


If you think of dwarven cities as things laboriously carved out of solid rock one chisel chunk at a time, it's hard to conceive of great dwarven cities. But if you think of dwarven cities as habitation utilizing the natural caverns of the world which have been cleaned up, straightened up and carved to match the natural cavern shapes, then it's not nearly as difficult to imagine.

And then there's magic spells which shape and or move stone.

Venting poisonous gases would be easy with a couple of well-researched spells. Replenishing oxygen would be just as easy (ever-spewing oxygen bottles anyone?)

In short, it's not earth. It's a magical realm filled with magical people who use magical means to solve their problems, some of which might be similar to our earth problems but there is no reason to believe that all of our earth problems map into their world.

In my own fantasy world where I run all my campaigns what I described above is basically how dwarves live. Not all of them live underground though, dwarven enclaves in the larger cities are usually built into local hills or cliffs, but as much of the city is built from new stone as dug into the earth. In fact the stone they dig out to make room underground is then stacked outside to make more room, so they double-dip with each block of stone they chip.


1. because someone has to live there, it might as well be dwarves (probably reasoning out of north mythology)
2. it's closer to raw gold, Mine=City, Mining=working, mining law=law this is the Terry Pratchett explanation, more or less.
3. it's easy to build in stone, if you don't have to drag it out of the mountain.
4. it was always this way.


Well in order from someone who doesn't have a background in mining . . .

> extreme heat,

No with the earth/stone as an insulator unless you mine VERY deep or have the badluck to hit a lava vein most underground structures are actually comfortably cool as the heat's absorbed by the land above you. Same reason in real life a lot of people have underground homes, albeit not so deep.

> oxygen supply, toxic gases,

Pretty much the same thing, leaving out the above posters genetic adaptation and magical items that supply crisp clean air you could probably rig something up with proper mining. Put in an air shaft at strategic points, have lots of wide open spaces, underground adapated plants like mushrooms to absorb CO2 and other poisonous gases, arrange things so you get a through breeze.

> water supply

Not a problem all you need is an underground river of which there are probably as many as above ground ones and you could easily solve the problem, sink your own channels if you want afterall it can't be that much more difficulty than carving out your own rooms to live in you just need to create a level lower down, break the dam or let it shatter naturally and there you go you've diverted part of the great Maranwa river to flow underground and then back up to form the pools and rivers of your city.

> food supply,

Mushrooms and other underground adapted organisms, mole stew anyone? Also since they'd have some opening to the surface world for access or air supply you could have the underground city with above ground animal or crop growing areas.

> waste removal,

Even less of a problem, on the one hand I view dwarves as rather like Japan excellent recycling and reuse programs. You don't toss your broke axe onto the tip you take it and get it melted down and the materials reused. Feces and other organic waste becomes compost. As for the rare items that are non-recyclable and don't decompose well I'm sure you could find some deep dark crevasse to dump it in. Or again there's magical disposal

> and construction/expansion of settlements,

Smaller strctures mean less risk of collapse and when you add in the fact these aren't humans working in an environment they aren't naturally suited too but beings who've lived in there for thousands of years. They'd have very advanced techniques for telling where and when its safe to dig as well as methods of doing so.

> In fact, why do they want to when they could live on the surface? I'm highly curious about this

Well first off there's defense. YOu don't have to worry about spreading your army across wide open spaces as there's only a few ways in and out which means you can concentrate your defense and have few men protecting your civilisation. A good thing when you consider that relatively lower birth rate of dwarves and the smaller pool they'd have to draw on for their armies.

It also applies to natural problems as long as your in a tectonically stable area bad weather, forest fires, floods are all going to be significantly reduced as well as the fact that if you do have a disaster e.g. your underground water supply flooding its a lot easier to block the flow. Instead of having to sandbag a massive river you just seal the doors to those rooms and the water takes the easier natural path away.

Then you have mental makeup dwarves may have a low level racial agoraphobia. They'll go outside but they aren't comfortable with having that massive empty void above them instead of good solid stone. I remember one show I saw which had an underground race and due to various events the earth cracked open and it had them staring up and wondering what that weird blue thing was as they'd never seen a sky before.

Convenience instead of having to mine and haul your materials to your city you can simply mine and then not only do you have new materials but you also have new rooms and caverns for your city to use halving the work to do.

That's just off the top of my head.


I think Moon Glum hit the nail on the head.

the fantasy world is a much different environment than the real world.

In the fantasy world Giants and Flying dragons are a natural posibility. they are not magical they simply exist because they do. this same thing allows the underground world to behave differently and a vast number of intelligent beings to specialize in specific environments (elves forests, dwarves underground, etc etc.)

I dont say any of this to be glib or brush off the OP... I just think its a reasonable explanation for the way things are.

I think the only thing I would significantly change with regards to dwarves is to make them favor, weapons like spears over axes. simly because close quarters combat as you would expect in a caves favors the use of thrusting weapons over weapons that need the space to be swung about like an ax, mace or sword.


I do not remember completely if the problems you write of are addressed in the book, but I highly recommend Races of Stone. It deals with dwarven culture and living conditions in detail. It's a 3.5 book, so you can easily convert any rule material in it.

As an additional source, the 2e Forgotten Realms book Dwarves Deep may help as well.


What about Quintessential Dwarf? I have a used copy in the mail right now.


FuelDrop wrote:

1)air: the dwarven nation in my setting have a large set of steam-driven fans that pump fresh air down into their cities, with the lower quality air being pushed out into the surrounding tunnels and the smoke from their fires ect being channelled directly outside. naturally this limits the depth of the initial holdings, but lower down communities simply draw air from the city above them.

Quick comment:

Make an air vent at ground level, an air vent high in the mountains, and air will naturally be drawn through as the warm inside air rises to the cold mountain air. If the city is level, make an air vent on the eastern side and build a solar chimney on the western side, where it will get the most solar heat. The sun will heat the air in the chimney and draw air through the city.

Saves fuel for the forge. ;)


@Hudax: thanks! see, this is why i hang out here.


I thought the Dwarves came above ground when the Starstone hit and the only Dwarves that still live underground became the Duergar, or are there still dwarves underground?


Hit the nail on the head there. Dwarves actually live in the mountains more often than not, with the underground mostly being for mines.


Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
What about Quintessential Dwarf? I have a used copy in the mail right now.

Dunno. I only know the Quintessential class books. Judging from them, you will find a lot of info and material for playing dwarf characters, but not much else.


pipedreamsam wrote:
I thought the Dwarves came above ground when the Starstone hit and the only Dwarves that still live underground became the Duergar, or are there still dwarves underground?

That's Golarion. I'm talking in generalistic D&D terms, not Golarion terms.


Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
pipedreamsam wrote:
I thought the Dwarves came above ground when the Starstone hit and the only Dwarves that still live underground became the Duergar, or are there still dwarves underground?
That's Golarion. I'm talking in generalistic D&D terms, not Golarion terms.

oh ok.


Download Dwarf Fortress.
Play Dwarf Fortress.
Understand that the dwarves in dwarf fortress suffer through the bleakest most brutal and at times anally realistic world imaginable and that the dwarves of golarion live like kings in comparison.


FuelDrop wrote:
@Hudax: thanks! see, this is why i hang out here.

Hudax's explanation is only part of what would happen. The natural differences in air pressure between the calm air deep underground and the fast moving air across mountains would create a powerful air current without any temperature differential at all.


Adamantine Dragon wrote:
FuelDrop wrote:
@Hudax: thanks! see, this is why i hang out here.
Hudax's explanation is only part of what would happen. The natural differences in air pressure between the calm air deep underground and the fast moving air across mountains would create a powerful air current without any temperature differential at all.

What does this mean for the Dwarves?


It means the air will naturally cycle without having to run machinery

The Exchange

Underground rivers are not necessarily the free flowing rivers of the surface. It follows faults (fast speed) and a variety of porous layers at sometimes glacial speeds. The most recent and extensive discoveryHamza River.

Not all dwarves would mine metals, there are other very tradable resources underground.
As for vast and spacious rooms underground, I recommend looking up salt mines. Wieliczka Salt Mine, Detroit salt mines, or even Salzburg. yadda yadda yadda.

In the mines I have been in, the temps were stable and cool to ambient. A light jacket was all you needed and even then once you acclimated, it was more for protection.

Want more? Hard Rock Miner's Handbook.


Temperatures underground in most places are typically relatively cool and stable for hundreds of feet. When you get down about 1,000 feet or so, that's when it starts to get hot. Much further than that and it starts to get REAL hot.

The Exchange

I've done a lot of fun variations for "pure underground" dwarves. Seems like most of the dwarf-holds I've actually mapped out tend to take advantage of a river gorge, a desert mesa, or a sheltered ravine in the midst of arctic lands - there's always a bit of surface contact even if many of the important structures are fully underground. The only duergar city I've designed wasn't hacked out of bedrock but constructed inside a vast cavern (but then, I build my Underdark out of industrial-sized components.)


First off it's fantasy, you can't apply too much real science without breaking it. As with a lot of other unimportant details you are going to need to handwave some things and just say "it just works it doesn't matter how". Now with that said it's always fun to add some sense of verisimilitude to games :)The first thing you have to realize when you are talking about dwarves is that the core rule book got them wrong. Dwarves don't fear and distrust magic, they love magic! Seriously. It's not magic, it's (arcane) magic USERS that they fear and distrust. Bolin, the master smith who creates and sells magic weapons and armor out of his shop every day is a respected elder and pillar of the community, not an outcast. Pathfinder even gives us a great rule mechanic to explain this, the master craftsman feat:

Master Craftsman:

Your superior crafting skills allow you to create simple magic items.

Prerequisites: 5 ranks in any Craft or Profession skill.

Benefit: Choose one Craft or Profession skill in which you possess at least 5 ranks. You receive a +2 bonus on your chosen Craft or Profession skill. Ranks in your chosen skill count as your caster level for the purposes of qualifying for the Craft Magic Arms and Armor and Craft Wondrous Item feats. You can create magic items using these feats, substituting your ranks in the chosen skill for your total caster level. You must use the chosen skill for the check to create the item. The DC to create the item still increases for any necessary spell requirements (see the magic item creation rules in Magic Items). You cannot use this feat to create any spell-trigger or spell-activation item.

Normal: Only spellcasters can qualify for the Craft Magic Arms and Armor and Craft Wondrous Item feats.

Once you start thinking of dwarves as a race constantly surrounded by magic items a lot of things begin to make more sense. If there's a problem you fix it with some magic items and some ingenuity.

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
We've got extreme heat

This is really only an issue in areas of extreme geological activity, once you get past the first few feet the vast majority of underground is a very stable cool temp, around 50 degrees +/-. This is why people would keep root cellars and why many large food industries are now looking at underground construction for new warehouses.

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
oxygen supply, toxic gases

In addition to the purely mechanical solutions above there is the spell gust of wind. As a second level it would cost about 6k to produce a continuous magic item that moves a large amount air through a settlement.

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
water supply

A decanter of endless water costs about 4500gp to create and puts out 300 gallons of water a minute. That's 432,000 gallons a day. If you figure that a single dwarf uses 20 gallons a day that's enough for over 21k people.(The average US citizen uses about 50 gallons a day but we also have things like dishwashers, showers and laundry machines)

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
food supply

This one is interesting. Unlike the real world fantasy worlds are assuming that there's a whole underground ecology that's full of life. Like the poster above I would assume that there are caverns where dwarves grow edible fungi and moss. They could also fish in underground lakes and rivers. I would also pull over the idea of the rothe from the forgotten realms setting. Basically they were underground cows that live off of moss.

If I wanted to go a higher magic route I would have huge caverns that have continually active portals to let in sunlight (or positive energy from one of the planes). They would be crafted in to the ceiling and would act as a sun so plant life could grow underground. It also opens up some interesting adventuring ideas, some of these caverns could have been around for thousands of years near abandoned dwarven ruins and could be filled with a prehistoric jungle type of vegetation and weird variations on common creatures. (Think journey to the center of the earth)

I think that if I was creating an adventure based off of dwarf culture I would probably make this an issue that the dwarves haven't really been able to solve. I would say that they use the methods above but that it doesn't produce enough food for the entire population, therefore the dwarves need to supplement their food stores with trade. This helps explain why dwarves are normally considered a merchant race. Dwarves don't need to trade for tools or weapons as they already make the best. They don't need to trade for most luxury items either since they are able to create fine jewelry and have better access to materials (gems and metals) than any other race. So the only thing left for them to trade for is food. If I want to purchase a fine dwarven made magic sword I don't bring a chest full of gold coins, the master craftsman Bolin gets all the gold he needs from his cousin Hargrin who works in the mines. But if I show up with a caravan of wheat and barley for making ale suddenly I'm serious customer.

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
waste removal

Bags of Devouring or a Sphere of Annihilation would be an expensive way of getting rid of waste. The much cheaper and easier way would be to have all the waste drain in to large sewer caverns filled with oozes or gelatinous cubes. Since gelatinous cubes don't digest metal objects these sewers would fill up with precious items over time as people accidentally flush valuables away. Of course since the oozes are so well fed and numerous there would be many would be scavengers that never make it back from the sewers. (ironically leaving their gear, which further tempts adventurers to risk their lives) You could create an entire adventure that starts with "oops, I dropped my magic ring down the drain"

Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:
construction/expansion of settlements

Dwarves are a long lived race which generally would imply a low birth rate. On top of that they are a race that lives in a dangerous environment and is almost constantly at war with orcs and giants. Expansion would generally be the least of their worries as population growth is very slow (if it's even growing). You can see this in dwarven battle tatics, the idea is to fight defensively while wearing the strongest armor you can find to minimize losses. Even if you only lose 1 dwarf for every 20 orcs you end up losing ground over the centuries. Secondly Dwarves build out of stone. This means that the house my great, great, grandfather built is still standing in more or less the same condition when I'm old enough to inherit.

Even with those factors there would still be some need for building, going back to the idea of a master craftsman making magic items you could build a Lyre of Building to do the work of 100 men working 3 days. At 6500gp it's not extremely cheap but when you figure every use basically saves you 3 gp (100 labors * 1 sp per day * 3 days)it takes about 42 years for you to recoup your investment if you use it once a week. 42 years is a long time for a human but not for a dwarf who lives hundreds of years and will pass along the item to his children. It's a great investment. You could also create magic items that use move earth or expeditious evacuation or that summon earth elementals for building.


Because everyone know that trees are the enemy of Thor! And they live above ground.


Ok I am going to go for purely mundane solutions - the magical ones are easy enough to integrate as and when you wish.

Airflow - inflow passages remain open, outflow have fires and or lava in them to create a pressure differential - airflow achieved. Of course you can also have waterwheels running fans to circulate air.

Water - Much like surface cities - underground ones set up shop near subterranean rivers and/or lakes.

Food - subterranean fish, reptiles and insects. Fungi, algae, moulds. These can all be cultured and farmed intensively making them space-efficient.

Light - Impractical without magic but possible with a closed system (which doesn't use up all the oxygen!) - metal pipes and crystal sided lamps fed by oil. Not beyond the ken of engineers as good as Dwarves.

Waste - For non-biological wastes a mining culture creates it's own dumping space. Lava can be used (with good ventillation) and for biological wastes, the bio-waste can be composted for use by the fungi being farmed.


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Hudax wrote:
If the city is level, make an air vent on the eastern side and build a solar chimney on the western side, where it will get the most solar heat.

...put Balin's tomb under eastern shaft so it can be atmospherically lit when the fellowships finds it in the morning...


You might find some answers in the construction of real world underground cities like Kaymakl Underground City, Derinkuyu Underground City, and Özkonak Underground City.


Somewhat unrelated (as many of my comments are), I found it jarring in Sword of Shanarra that the dwarves (who fit the bill physically) were healers and lived in above ground/tree villages.

Love the book, but the non-standard fantasy presentation was very, very different.


Kelsey MacAilbert wrote:

I'll say this up front. I like the idea. It's cool. However, it brings up a LOT of issues. We've got extreme heat,"

Depends on how far down you go. A few hundred feet under ground its actually rather chilly.

Quote:
oxygen supply, toxic gases,

Air shafts. (obligatory for adventurers to sneak through)

Quote:
water supply waste removal

The problem underground is more often not where do you get water, but where do you get RID of it. If you dig a hole underground, like many mines, you wind up filling it up with water. I would imagine that dwarves , before establishinig a city/town, dig tunnels to draw off some of the excess water so their cities don't get flooded and make sure to divert some near the city. Water goes in, waste goes out like a roman constant flow toilet.

Quote:
food supply

This is where you need to toss in some fantasy mushrooms. Also explains the high alchohol intake, as you can ferment almost anything and you probably don't want to eat a lot of things that grow in the dark strait..

Quote:
In fact, why do they want to when they could live on the surface?

Roaving monsters, Flying Dragons raining fiery death from above, armies of fast reproducing humans.... and down below is where all the ore is.


They live underground because that is the myth the Norse/Germanic peoples gave us. So with that...

The Dwarves are an underground race in Tolkien who gave us the widely known version of the Norse myth- they were made of earth and stone by the god of smithing. He loved working with metals, earth, stone and jewels.
So he made little folk who would love the same. He did it in secret as the other gods made the Elves and Ents and didn't make anybody else. The Dwarves mined and were happy.

Nobody mentioned how they ate etc. It was a fantasy story. People pretended to do a job on how uderpeople ate by using Roths (Subterranean Cattle that looked like miniature buffalo) and fungus, but we all know that fungus is not really food. But its fantasy so underground fungus is food here. But, there are underground bugs near the surface, lichen, moss- near the surface in places, and cave fish, and fish from rivers that make it into underground rivers. Probably underground fish in underground oceans.

Idaho has a huge underground warm water ocean for example which is heated by the volcanic activity that makes Mt. St. Hellens erupt and old faithful go off. It also spills off into the snake river canyon in hot springs all along the north face of the cliffs. (I have been there.)

Now if you go to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Finland, Switzerland... they have little farming villages in the mountains, with cattle, sheep, goats, and small alpine cottages. They keep chickens, gather eggs, make cheese, butter, milk, yogurt (yogen), liquers, Beer,Wine, raise pigs, ducks, geese, etc. They also have grain farms. And they have miners. Now, so too would the Dwarves. I would see Dwarven villages and cottages like the 7 Dwarves all over the mountain kingdoms of the Dwarves. If not on the surface, than just under with light shafts inside so the livestock would flourish. On the mountainside they would raise grains. If not, they would have an elaborate scheme of mirrors to reflect sunlight to grow crops underground, using topsoil from the surface and their own waste and the animals waste for furtilizer. They are also meticulously clean. Bathing and combing their hair. So they would have lots of running water in their caves through cut stone piping and they would have either volcanicly heated water or use fire elementals trapped in the stone to heat the water. Umber Hulks, Otoyus, Neo-Otoyus and Slimes to eat their Garbage in the pits.

The Exchange

You can make sunless cities of any race a bit more plausible as long as you think through its design and location. The city needs water sources: some of the more exotic cities could actually be islands, or giant columns, in the middle of underground lakes. Trash disposal needs to be considered, but previous posters have gone over that pretty well. I generally exploit the existence of ceilings: most cavern-towns will have access shafts in the ceiling of the cavern to improve ventilation, provide a little light (provided they run all the way to the surface), pour in or pump out streams of water, or allow the use of pulley-and-chain elevators. A sunless city also needs a food supply - at least enough to keep it going when trading or raiding can't provide enough food. The occupants might flood unused caverns to convert them into fish farms. Wastes and trash can be dumped into pits or caves where the stuff can feed detrivores such as fungus and edible vermin. Thermal vents, when present, tend to be a bit of an 'oasis' of various fungus, slimes, scum and creatures that eat such things: plenty of options for harvesting. On the subject of fungus, I usually justify all kinds of useful ones on the basis that they've been cultivated for use just like plants are up on the surface: there are edible ones, medicinal ones, toxic ones, stringy ones that can be woven into cloth, giant long-stemmed ones that can be cured to serve as timber, luminous ones that act like candles, and so forth.


Dwarven Merchant
"Would you like some Rat with your gender changing fungus, it'll make it go down a treat?"

Adventurer puts down the mushroom and backs away slowly.

Seriously when discussing fungus as food you need to remember that dwarve's aren't humans and are very resistant to poisons so things that they can survive aren't necessarily the same thing humans can.

I remember in one book I read vampires where incredibly powerful magicians and usually insane because they'd evolved in a low magic world so when they got to a "normal" magic one the sheer amount of magic was intoxicating and they were used to doing the same thigns with much, much less.

I can easily see Dwarve's on the surface being apalled by human waste and amazed by the sheer amount of edible foods.

EDIT
I also remember a system where brocoli was a deadly poison to orcs so not only might Dwarves be able to survive on things other races can't but they might have different reactions to what others consider food.

Yeah Dwarven light be packs a punch to other races but you want the hard suff you get the naturally squeezed juices of these little yellow and green fruit humans call lemons and limes. Only the toughest dwarve's can manage more than half a glass before passing out drunk.


What's wrong with fungus as food?

Doesn't anyone here eat mushrooms?

The Exchange

thejeff wrote:

What's wrong with fungus as food?

Doesn't anyone here eat mushrooms?

Well, certain kinds, sure.


Fungus is just too far down the food chain to be a primary food source. The closer you food source is to photosynthesis the more efficient it is. Plants are best, followed by herbivores. Small is more efficient than large so guinea pigs are better than cattle and Tuna is more efficient than baleen whales even though it's higher on the food chain. Fish also has the advantage of a really big pool of algae you don't need to tend the way you need to tend pastures for livestock.

My take on Dwarves is that they should either live near the surface and grow normal crops in inaccessible valleys or live near the surface with the bottom of their city opening into a sea cave and live mostly off of fish.

Dark Archive

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Options;

1) The real world has ecosystems that function in absence of light, such as deep sea tube vents, and the crazy critters that spring up around them, using chemosynthesis to thrive. Assuming that, in a fantasy world, such things might exist as well, perhaps in the 'underdark oceans,' in particular, the lakes and seas and rivers of the darklands might have thriving ecosystems, with tiny chemosynthetic flora feeding brine feeding larger blind cave eels, etc. forming a chain of life that functions without light-dependent plankton.

A diet of eels, or tiny shrimp, or similar life from the deep lakes and cisterns and rivers of the darklands, would make for plenty of protein for the dwarves, supplemented by 'seaweed' or fish eggs or bats or whatever. Insects would likely be just as tasty and acceptable as sources of food as lobsters and shrimp are to us, and a steady diet of centipedes, considered by the dwarves to 'taste like chicken,' could explain dwarven children having a better than average resistance to toxins.

2) Magical or otherwise not-natural-to-earth sources of energy could also exist, like the 'mysterious underdark radiations' of Greyhawk and the Realms, which could sustain all sorts of plant-like life, that is then fed upon by herbivorous or omnivorous life, which is in turn fed upon by carnivores. If these radiations exist in certain types of ore, and are not dangerous to animal life, the dwarves could mine up chunks of them, pulverize them to cause them to 'radiate' faster, and spread them on underground crops of fungal or plant life, which they then harvest to make beer, bread, etc. A slower and more sustainable form of agriculture could involve dragging the rocks into position and just leaving them in the 'fields,' glowing their pale glow, and sustaining the crops (at the cost of slower growth and harvests). The 'smash and burn' agriculture that smashed up the rocks might have led to dwarves constantly moving around to find new mineral, or plants that had adapted to thrive on less potent mineral (as they exhausted 'the good stuff'), and eventually fueled the Quest for Sky, as the dwarves were finding it harder and harder to sustain their populations with the ever dwindling supplies of 'grow-rock' to smash up and maintain their crop-rotations, leading them to the divination-led quest for crops that could thrive without the mineral (fueled by the sun, instead).

Perhaps the radiation of these rocks *is* slighty harmful to animal life, and acts like a magical toxin to those who spend too much time in proximity to it, explaining the dwarves developing over millenia a resistance to magic and poison, and a higher than average Constitution score.

3) There's gotta be a hollow earth. Hollow earth's just rock. Somewhere, in a deep vault, a fake sun hangs in the sky over a jungle teeming with dinosaurs. Perhaps dwarves originated in such a place, and the 'ancient builders' who left ruins in these places were, in fact, the dwarven version of the Azlanti, an ancient race that modern dwarves stubbornly insist doesn't exist, since they don't accept the notion that they were once the lowly worker caste of a more advanced and developed 'high dwarf' culture that either left for other planes (perhaps to become the Azer?) or was overthrown by their flunkies, who proved incapable of maintaining their subterranean paradise (or holding off their serpentfolk rivals for control of the deeps) and were driven into a 'Quest for Sky' *to escape their own destruction.*

Vast rice paddies lie overgrown and now inhabited by mega-crocodiles, outside the vast temple-palaces the 'high dwarves' once occupied, while their brutish 'low dwarf' workers labored outside under the red crystal 'sun.'

If the dwarves of the surface world were returned to these vaults, they would pretend not to recognize the architecture of their more evolved forebears, and the similarities between themselves and the long abandoned demon-worshipping sub-dwarven degenerates that now haunt those ruins.


To be consistent with many a mythical depiction of Dorvz.

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