Thursday 12 February 2015
For the love of Dwarves.
Dwarves are made to make, not love.
Male Dwarves are bound up in their creations and their works, which expand in their minds like a maze so that they rarely feel desire. They must be seduced. The only way they can be distracted from their deep selves is with art. A truly amazing work of art will enthral and enrapture a male Dwarf and allow them to feel the stirrings of physical love.
Therefore every female Dwarf that wants to get laid is usually off on the road learning to become a supreme artist. The journey of the artist involves essentially understanding everything. You never know what knowledge or experience will inform your art. And so female Dwarves can be found in almost any place, doing or learning almost anything. Always with keen intentness and a with the relentless drive common to the Dwarves, yet also with an uncommon awareness and sensitivity to their environment rarely seen in Dwarven men. And always in the middle of mastering some subtle craft, whether a particular style of painting, poetry, sculpture, music or anything that could be used to produce a work of art. Truly mastering a style or form can take at least fifty years, and they have no idea ahead of time which form will be most suitable to produce their masterwork.
And killing things. Lots and lots of things. Ugly terrible things. Which is 'sculpting the world' literally, by cutting bits of it off, and 'painting the world' - usually red.
The art of the Art-Berserk is the wound they create and the scene of the wound, its a kind of performance art, like theatre, but real, whereas the art of the world-sculptor is the absence of the ugly thing they just destroyed.
So the high point of an Art-Berserk career might be a raid on, for instance, a Drow city where every member of the ruling class is chopped to bits in the space of an evening, the drow blood painting the walls.
Whereas the final work of a great sculptor might be the void left behind in hell when a major deamon lord is removed from existence. With an axe.
Its possible the performance on its own might be enough to do the job. If not, they will have to try to put it into words, or into a tune, or shape it in stone or paint.
Then, maybe, finally, they could possibly get laid.
Dwarven Women generally don't have beards. They do have a lot of facial body modifications.
They make masks, half-masks and eye-guards from varieties of precious metal. They create a wide range of tattoos. They use piercings and subdermal implants of multiple kinds. its common for a female Dwarf to combine these in various very beautiful, very radical ways
Since Dwarves see work and artifice before they apprehend anything else, to alter yourself is to become more like yourself. Your skill is more real than what you look like, so replacing your appearance with the products of your skill is becoming 'more real'. And in a sense, more beautiful, though they are not exactly the same thing.
For a Dwarf having a low level of skill is their equivalent to being ugly. Not exactly your fault and something we should try to look past, but not good. Unfortunate.
There are quite a few Dwarven women who, for various reasons, have no more sexual interest in Male Dwarves than Male Dwarves generally have in them. Which is lucky because it makes life a lot easier. And there are various people of different kinds who, for whatever reason, might be sexually interested in Male Dwarves and for them the path is the same. Produce a great work of art or its not going to happen.
Falling in love with a Male Dwarf is a rough gig.
EMPLOYMENT
Some roles you might find a female dwarf in:
Combat-Geologist
Earth-Skald : Learning and relating the songs of the earth. (Not the songs *about* the earth, the songs *of* the earth.) these can be very long indeed and you may have to travel to different points on or under the earths surface to learn them.
Historian : mainly correcting the dwarf-related historical inaccuracies of other races. By killing them if necessary.
Thief-Historian : to get back treasures held in the wrong hands ie most treasures, which have probably belonged to dwarves at some point. Even down to a single coin from a hoard.
Historian Of Crimes : Dwarves basically don't forgive anything ever.
Art-Berserk : These can meditate then create wild, action paintings from blood splatters.
Axe-Samurai : To others, quite similar to the Art-Berserk, but don't call them that, they both consider themselves utterly different forms.
Bookbinder : Dwarves write books 'so as not to shame the binding'. The construction of the book comes first, then the contents must be of a quality high enough to match the object, right down to the strike of the ink, and then the ideas communicated, which come last.
To write a book, first build the shelf. Work the gems, make the paper, bind the book, perfect your calligraphy, then turn your mind to a subject in order to add the proper finish to the thing (learning a subject takes about 100 years and may demand specialist knowledge ie an adventure.)
Miner : to get the right gems. To a dwarf, mining is like and adventure or an exploration, its like being in a forest for us, something new and strange each day. In a sense, all Dwarves are Miners. The same way all humans are hunter-gatherers. We might be doing something else right now but that’s our baseline. Its what we return to when things go wrong, its the skillset that informs us. We are generally hunting for something or gathering something.
CLOTHES AND ARMOUR
Dwarves tend to make their own clothes and their own armour, the only difference with female dwarves is that its hard to tell these two apart.
You can herringbone the patterns on ultrafine mail so that it falls like cloth yet, when struck, the patterns mesh and the force is distributed. You can interlace very fine chains through padded silk, you can hinge and layer plate so precisely that it looks like water falling, you can carve and emboss bronze so that, from a distance, it really does look like cloth, you can make the solid seem light, the fluid seem hard, soft things sharp and the sharp things hard to see. Put some fucking feathers on it, why not? In fact, why not titanium feathers so perfect they look like the real thing? why not a dress of them?
Armour and fashion are both considered a kind of liquid sculpture amongst Dwarves, essentially about form, and there is no reason for them not to get calmly and relentlessly good at them the same way they do with everything else. If you are running around beaning things with an Axe for complex sexual reasons then there is no reason not to look good doing it.
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you're not really not-quite talking about INDEXING which is right up there with AXING DUDES as dwarves go.
ReplyDeletei learned the ancient art of INDEXING from reading the AUSTRALIAN GOVERNNMENT PUBLISHING SERVICE STYLE GUIDE CIRCA 1978 which i purchased at ARCHIVES THE BOOKSTORE next to THE PANCAKE CHURCH in brisbane. good shop.
Deletei wrote my bestiary before this and my player's handbook after, and it shows. the players handbook is utterly incomprehensible, the bestiary only dense
Deleteanyone who ever named anything in this country (australia) was a dwarf. good solid names. no nonsense
DeleteNice
ReplyDelete