Funny running into this again in Suledin Keep days after kvetching about that post where the OP said the devs should have made it so that your choice in leadership in Orzammar should have affected the dwarf quests in Kal-Sharok.
To be clear, I think it would have made zero sense for a decision made 20 years prior by another character to have any bearing on Rook. This inability to understand that your main characters are not all linked and don't have all the information you do is hamstringing this fandom.
But even if you hadn't played the prior games (or simply hadn't paid attention), the fraught relationship between Kal-Sharok and Orzammar is described in the dialogue you can listen in on simply by walking slowly around the outpost during Lace's quests.
Dwarves are almost completely magically inert. While there are few exceptions (esp wrt multiracial ppl), they largely evolved in a planetary magical dead zone. No full blooded dwarf is born with natural magic ability.
(Above example farthest right in front is half elemental and has power over fire.)
HOWEVER, this doesn't mean they can't use ANY magic.
Dwarves can use enchanted items and even harness natural energies of the world with their technology. A dwarven mage is very different from an elven mage, as they really a lot more on science, physics, and engineering for just about everything in their societies.
Through all history, dwarves were at the forefront of engineering and trade, learning to use the resources of their lands and strength of their hands to create large scale trade empires, exchanging their labor and expertise for enchantments and other foreign goods.
They aren't at all insular peoples and make up a very large portion of all big time world traders and business leaders.
Trade Common, the most universally used language in-world, relies heavily on Dwarvish Trade, with some human and elvish trade language mixed in.
Dwarvish technology is the most advanced non-magical tech known across the entire planet. While magictech is abundant on Treias, dwarven tech is regarded as very high end and impressive due to its LACK of magic use. Dwarves have made great strides in providing for those who are magically inert, and enjoy pushing the envelope as far as possible to match or exceed the possibilities of magictech.
They're very open to information and hardware trade, though some traditionalists get overly proud and stubborn if one tries to "improve" their work with magic.
They originate from mountainous and ore rich lands and are known as the people of the stone, or stone speakers. Gems, ores, metals, minerals of most any kind are ever present in their history, society, and iconography through all of recorded history. Dwarves are typically great at discovering resource heavy mining areas all over the world and are heavily relied on for gathering and shipping construction materials in just about every society.
They are typically short and extremely hardy, normally growing lots of facial and body hair no matter their gender. Treatment of said hair and what it says about a dwarf differs among different societies, but typically a great beard is well appreciated.
Common belief about dwarvish people is that they aren't very fashionable and stick much more to practical clothing over anything else, which is wildly untrue. Dwarven fashion is taken very seriously and typically tries to merge durability and practicality with a sort of art deco beauty. Maybe a hint of brutalism. And when access to pure unrefined minerals of all kind, there's no shortage of sparkly stones for expertly crafted jewelry. Like the people themselves, everything they produce is sturdy and long lasting.
Spiritually, not many dwarves pray to gods. Maternal ancestry is the strongest bond in most dwarven cultures. The mothers, grandmothers, eldest sisters, etc. of dwarven families are often seen as the matriarchs, strong and unyielding, kind and caring. Passing traits and lessons through one's maternal line is very important to dwarves. It's more lax in modern times with the understanding that not everyone has a mother or other matronly family in their life.
Dwarves, on average, live to around 500-600 years. They can have rather large families with siblings born MANY years apart, and most planned families do space their children some 10, 20, even 40 years or more apart. They're in no rush. They also have no legally established marriage system, and just one family can have several mothers that guide them.
Notes:
Initially inspired by the dwarves of Dragon Age, I wanted at least one society or lineage that could thrive without magic. I love highly magical worlds but having peoples that are non reliant on that magic is also extremely interesting to me! However, I also wanted my version of dwarves to also be much more sociable and important to the world at large instead of being confined to caves and mines and not knowing much about the world outside.
okay I SWEAR I'm going to bed but a couple real quick thoughts about orzammar, since we were talking on stream how they're dressed so warm -
the lava flows are really far away and would cool on the surface from contact with the cool air (esp in such a large cave system - would be expected around 50F) my quick searching suggests it could be emitting around 290F/200C from surface when a significant part of the surface has cooled and hardened, trapping heat inside the flow
the deep roads are not built like orzammar - perhaps when the titans were around, there was different heat processing or something.
but it's fair to expect orzammar to be comfortably cool & their many many layers (Rica wears 3 skirts - one of which is quilted!) make more sense
full honesty before i look things up, when i said "the maker made the stone and then she made dwarves" i was at least partially thinking about how aulë made dwarves in lord of the rings
but there is a codex about dwarven faith in origins ("Codex entry: Dwarven Faith") and it does offer some interesting insight, since it changes depending on whether the warden is a dwarf or not. i'd quote the parts about the stone in both versions but they would make the ask extremely long; a top highlight though is brother genitivi, in the non-dwarven codex, saying dwarves don't have gods at all in the most, uh, disdainfully andrastian way, even if the dwarven side of the codex does say they don't "vie for the favor of absent gods"
also according to the wiki's page on The Stone, dwarves do indeed believe themselves to be literally born of the stone aka the earth itself, and that they venerate her but they don't worship her as a god, and that she's believed to be a "living and shifting entity with a will that surrounds and guides the dwarves" as well as "supports them, shelters them, and offers them the most priceless gifts of the earth" (including lyrium). it also brings up underground dwarves' stone sense and how, according to origins' codex entry on lyrium, dwarves "[find] veins in the Stone quite literally by ear" (<- note capitalization). apparently once they go to the surface they lose their abilities too so. yeah
re: theology finally i think, in-universe, "what is the stone" and "who made the dwarves" and all of this is probably a matter of pure unadultered "pogostick satan"-tier academic theological debate within the chantry's scholars, flipped table and all, and again what i'll say is based on my baseless silly speculation/guess, but: if andrastians do actually believe that "the maker made the stone and then she made dwarves [and so they aren't children of the maker]", my takeaway on how it works is that if a human gives birth to another human, their entire people was still created by the maker, so the baby is still a child of the maker because it was like, conceptualized i guess by the maker. he decided what babies would look like and such.
meanwhile dwarves as a people would be believed to be created by the stone, and so theoretically they weren't conceptualized by the maker, or at the very least he didnt have a direct hand in realizing the concept (idk if andrastianism subscribes to the idea that "the maker planned for everything that has ever happened and ever will"? but if it does i figure the explanation is that when the maker made the stone, he knew that it would design and create dwarves as a concept, but he didnt design and create dwarves /himself/ and instead let the stone do that, and so they're a step removed rather than being a direct creation. i figure)
all that theology does hinge on my interpretation that "they could say the maker made the stone and then she made dwarves" though, which could easily be complete and total heresy. in fact that might be why josie is nervous about inquisitorial stone veneration, because the inquisitor venerating the stone yet being favored by andraste can be interpreted as divine confirmation of a heresy from 200 years ago and that might make the chantry triple hate you
apologies for the long ask, dwarves are just interesting lol
if i write a full response to this the post will be essay length but this is all super interesting and i am eating it thank u
dwarves, magic resistant, not children of the maker! nobody cares!
mages, connected to the Fade, first realm Maker created, are obviously to be feared, as they would turn away from the Maker at the first inconvenience.
dwarves, who literally cannot dream, are away from His light too
I do not know what I am trying to say with this it is just interesting.
RIGHT??
in an ideal world there would be dwarven andrastian sects who consider themselves further from demons and pure of the corruption of the black city, not to mention elite branches of templars purely composed of dwarves, which should really go without saying. and also the tevinter chantry would preach that mages are closer to the maker via their connection to the fade. come on bioware it’s not rocket science
abt elves and dwarves being "further from the maker", iirc mother giselle says that in inquisition, so that might be it. also w/ "who does the chantry believe made the dwarves if not the maker" they mightve taken literally the dwarves saying theyre the children of the stone? idk if dwarves themselves believe the stone actually physically made them but it feels feasible for andrastians to justify it like that, unless that contradicts the maker making everything (though ig they could say the maker made the stone and then she made dwarves)
yeah that is my first thought too but if so why does josephine say the chantry is unsettled by the idea of the inquisitor believing in the stone and that if they do they should keep it under wraps? i could see that maybe they take no issue with the dwarves being from the stone, only their worship of it and of their own ancestors rather than the maker, but it still begs the question of wtf is the stone and how did it create people that supposedly aren’t from the maker. maybe like you say, the maker creates the stone and it creates the dwarves. but that’s, i mean... if the maker creates the first humans and they bear children are those children not still of the maker? can i get some theology can i please get some theology
hi sorry that im about to b insane in ur inbox op and feel free to like ignore this but the idea that dwarves wouldn’t care about “not being made by the maker” because they dont believe in him is. Baffling to me??? Because the horrifying part of that isn’t inherently the “oh the maker doesnt care about us” thing (though that does suck. That does suck very bad if you think about it for more than five seconds) its the “oh these people do not see us As People the same why they see others as people”. Like if a pastor says a group of people isnt “made in god’s image” so therefore they dont have the same “blessings” that they do. You might not believe in it but the implications are Very Clear. Anyway thats all sorry for being like. Insane
you’re not being insane!!! yeah i think that’s it. it’s less about what they’re actually saying (although what they’re actually saying isn’t great) and more about how that kind of religious worldview would actually affect how you view a group of people
To those who wonder why the Rings of Power turned the nine kings of men into the Ringwraiths but nothing happened to the elves or the dwarves, the Rings did actually affect the other races. It’s just that the elves caught on and were able to counter Sauron’s power. As for the dwarves, the power of the Rings worked a little too well and Sauron was unable to control the greedy, little shits he’d unleashed on the world.
Because back in the dawn of time, when the smith god Aulë created the dwarves, he made them more resilient to the darkness because he feared what Morgoth, essentially the root of all evil, would do to them.
