Dwarves....live
in the mountains and underground. A culture of rational self-interest. There is a concern with personal achievement; hence the need for pre-existing
self-evident ties; clans & clannishness can prevail in outside dealings.
There is a belief in multiple spirits connected to a certain rock, rocks, place, places
&c. To craft a rock/metal/&c. poorly is to insult its spirit and hence to
bring demerit on one’s self. One might compare this to Shinto; an ancient set of beliefs that predate codification still practiced by a civilisation even after centuries of growth. This polytheism informs the human Manifest Rite.
One element of Dwarven society is herdsmen. Rearing cattle underground is difficult; but Dwarves nonetheless enjoy big joints of meat. This could be traded for, but some Dwarves operate their own herds in high mountain pastures (they have to be brought in from the hills come winter - much like Alpine herdsmen in those mountains must, and this is accompanied with some ceremony). This is a rewarding enterprise; beef prices in Dwarven communities are somewhat higher than Human prices for similar quantities. However, the cultural prestige of this occupation is lessened compared to that of miners, smiths, sculptors, &c.
The Dwarven desire for personal accomplishment hasn't reached what might be referred to as dystopian levels - merely levels sufficient to make non-Dwarven visitors uncomfortable.
Elves...live (for a long time!) in
the forests and isles. Traditionally they are vegetarian aside from when a beast must be culled- they
can (or say they can) innately sense when this is supposed to occur. This ties into their religious-philosophical beliefs -which are overwhelmingly pantheistic. This pantheism informs the human Unified Rite.
Unlike the Dwarves, they attempt to set up a form of society dedicated to group happiness; developing a form of innate understanding and empathy with those around them (this sort of thing dovetails nicely with Charisma being 'the Elven character stat'). Those who have lived solely among other elves for long enough would be confused and distressed that a human does not want to join in
the games. Naturally, those Elves dwelling in Elven communities within human cities possess a different point of view and are somewhat more flexible.
Like Dwarven society, these traits are can be off-putting to those not used to them; again, these traits haven't yet served to turn Elven society into Huxley's Brave New World.
Yes, this is all somewhat reminiscent of another double-dozen High Fantasy settings. But the split between the two Elder Race societies informed the rest of Terrae Vertebrae (see the Introductions page).
Decided to take a look at your blog, happened across the idea of the two elder races being locked in philosophical dispute over individuality vs collectivism, decided this was brilliant, saw you had the dwarves as the individuals and the elves as the collectivists, decided this was exactly the opposite of how it should be. Underground is resource-poor and subject to cave-ins, working alone is madness! Now aboveground, that's where there's spare resources and people can afford to pretend they're rugged individualists who did all this on their own. Also, more practically, there's enough room to go BE a rugged individualist.
ReplyDeleteThat said, your way leads to dwarven cowboys talking through gritted teeth about men shooting their pa and this havin to be entered in that there book of grudges. Or complaining about no-good rustlin elves, runnin off the cattle just cuz they claim it's time for a cull.
And that does seem fundamentally right somehow. Did you go with that vibe or not so much?
As I recall (and this was written a few years before I even started the blog!) the reasoning for the Dwarfs as Individualists was rooted in the sense that they were creating or significantly adapting their own environments. This is set against a broad notion of post-Tolkien harmony-with-nature Elves (Tolkien's own Elves are great craftsmen themselves, working extensively and sensitively with nature - but they were never Dryads, somehow living within the trees).
DeleteI wouldn't strictly call it an inspiration, but I was thinking to some degree of the various Libertarian strands in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Luna also being resource-poor (I forget if Heinlein called them 'Oxygen taxes' or not, but something of the sort was there). In any case, my notion of Vertebraen Dwarves was to have them in fairly constant contact and commerce with the surface - I had no particular notion of a Vertebraen Underdark.
There's a bit in Discworld where Pratchett says (as I recall) 'If a Dwarf had a forge he could make simple tools and if he could make simple tools he could make complex tools, and if he could make complex tools, he could make anything.'
As referenced later*, some of the notion was drawing on the idea of 'Dwarves as hard workers and peerless craftsmen': if anyone could pull of the Stakhanonvite feat of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, it would be them. In that sense, they're more meant to be Horatio Alger than Zane Grey.
There's a little more of the Western in the human Duchy of Kapelleron, though this was deliberately fairly muted.
I suppose there's a touch of the stereotyped Japanese craftsman in them as well, spending twenty years obsessively studying their craft. Somewhere in my notes I have the phrase 'Samurai bat Dwarf' - bats as hunting hawks.
Sad to say, in the few Terrae Vertebrae games I ran, no-one got round to playing a Dwarf. So this never got anyone else's spin to develop the culture of the Dwarf Hold of X or the Settlement of Y.
The most recent iteration of Vertebraean Dwarves have been the Hydraulic Dwarves bordering Punth - who lean more towards amoral capitalism, franchising and the control of water, though I've not done a thorough write-up on them yet.
Dwarven cowboys aren't out of the question! Thinking on it, I quite like the notion of tanned, weathered practical Dwarves from the surface pastures as cowboys contrasted with the pasty, over-ornamented magnates from the Holds as railroad barons and industrialists from Back East. 'The Gilded Age' is inadequate to describe what a Dwarf can do with ornamentation!
*https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2018/05/opposites-detract-and-ante-eden.html