Commentary on Dwarves & Gnomes

Happy New Year!

In Tuesday's post, I promised to provide some commentary about Dwarves, Gnomes, Kobolds, and other related topics, since I didn't want that post to be any lengthier than it already was — and it would have been, as I have a fair bit to say about these topics. That's because Dwarves were among the first things I decided I wanted to present differently in Dwimmermount from the way they'd previously been presented in Dungeons & Dragons and its many descendant fantasy roleplaying games. Ironically, though, it was D&D itself (or a couple of early editions of it, to be exact) that was responsible for pointing me in the direction I eventually went.

Chainmail and OD&D

Almost anyone reading this will, of course, know that the major impetus behind the early days of the Old School Renaissance was the rediscovery of both OD&D and its predecessor miniatures wargame, Chainmail. By "rediscovery," what I mean is something closer to "reassessment." Lots of people were looking back on both Chainmail and the original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons with new eyes, seeing in it all sorts of paths not taken, at least some of which were worthy of further examination.

That's probably why so many early OSR ideas were deliberately and indeed self-consciously "out there," which is to say, different in their approach to so many now-familiar aspects of fantasy RPGs. On blogs, forums, and in the pages of fanzines like Fight On!, everyone was sharing their own takes on non-human races, like elves, whose early multiclass mechanics were not well explained.

I was not immune to this fervor and very quickly had my own take on elves (which I'll discuss in a future post), but it was with dwarves that, in my opinion, I really came up with something genuinely unusual. However, my ideas took a while to coalesce into their final form. The first stage of the process occurred after reading Chainmail and then Greyhawk, both of which linked dwarves and gnomes in a way that implied that the latter were a sub-species of the former. That intrigued me.

Arthur Rackham and J. Eric Holmes

I have long been a fan of the English illustrator, Arthur Rackham. Among his greatest pieces are those he did for a edition of The Ring of the Nibelungs, published in the early 20th century. His depictions of dwarves are wonderful and weird. There's a deranged, almost feral quality to some of them that stuck with me, even years later. Though I initially wasn't conscious of it, I had Rackham's artwork lurking in the back of my brain.

Rackham also reminded me of Norse mythology more generally and its take on dwarves. In particular, Norse dwarves are entirely male; there are no women among their kind. That's why they're sometimes portrayed as trying to kidnap goddesses to become their brides. That, in turn, made me think of Snow White and how the dwarves in that fairytale behaved. Beyond that, I wanted to straight up avoid the eternal debate about whether female dwarves had beards.

Then there was the D&D Basic rulebook edited by J. Eric Holmes. This was my first D&D book and it had a profound influence on me. Though it's, broadly speaking, a just a revision and reorganization of 1974 OD&D, it has a number of its own peculiarities. One of these is its description of kobolds as "evil dwarf-like creatures" in contrast AD&D or even Tom Moldvay's 1981 version of Basic, which presents them as scaly little dog-men. Holmes also describes gnomes as "similar to dwarves, whom they resemble."

An Imaginative Player

When I started up my original Dwimmermount campaign, one of the players wanted to be a dwarf. I was happy to allow it, but I still hadn't fully come up with a picture of what dwarves were like and how all these various elements would mesh. That didn't deter the player, who was happy to tinker with them all, hoping to come up with something I liked. Ultimately, that proved to be the needed key to it all. He came up with the idea that his character was saving up enough gold and gems in order to "make a son" for himself by carving him from stone and decorating it.

I was so taken with the idea that I ran with it. Everything started to flow from that one little bit of characterization – dwarves as a male-only race, dwindling in numbers; their obsession with gold and gems; the fact that gnomes and even kobolds were the result of something going awry in the process of making a son, etc. Over the weeks and months that followed, I fleshed out lots more about dwarves, their history, and society. Soon, they were a vital part of the Telluria campaign setting and cornerstones of Dwimmermount.

It's fascinating to remember this all now, more than fifteen years later.