Designing a race of 7 foot tall dwarves

[Jay R]

Please name them on some sort of pun on oxymoron.

Oxyminers?
idk

Sorry. It's a fun idea, but I try to maintain a medieval fantasy flavor, and modern word games break the immersion.

-------------

Garimeth, I love the idea of terracing. I now assume that when they are done sluicing an area, they sculpt it into terraces, thus returning it into arable land - forming a beautiful background to the massive stone castle that is their village.

As isolated as they are, I'm not convinced yet that the lake is causing trouble foir anybody else, but it might attract outsiders now that the forest is passable again.

[Garimeth]

Sorry. It's a fun idea, but I try to maintain a medieval fantasy flavor, and modern word games break the immersion.

-------------

Garimeth, I love the idea of terracing. I now assume that when they are done sluicing an area, they sculpt it into terraces, thus returning it into arable land - forming a beautiful background to the massive stone castle that is their village.

As isolated as they are, I'm not convinced yet that the lake is causing trouble foir anybody else, but it might attract outsiders now that the forest is passable again.

The aesthetics of the aqueduct, terrace farms, and well mason built castles could look really cool. It also gives you a wide range of architectural styles to choose from: roman, medieval, gothic, incan or mayan, lots to play with there.

As for the lake, I'm less in the specifics because you know your setting better than me, but basically I think the idea of a displaced group of beings, and/or an opposing natural force is cool.

[Garimeth]

Jay R, I was curious what you ended up deciding about this. Its a cool idea, I'm interested in how you chose to implement it.

[Jay R]

I won't be running that game again for months. I'm trying to get ahead of things. Here are my current thoughts. Feel free to propose more.

The basic idea of the world is that there are waves of civilization, that open with an Age of Heroes, followed by long periods of stagnation and decay, as the wilderness pushes back. The wilderness has been pushing back a long time now, and the continent the PCs are on is mostly wilderness and ruins, with dots of small villages, and a few uninteresting areas of farmlands slightly more developed. The only life most people currently alive have known is toild for food, and always defending against monsters from the wilderness. The PCs grew up in an isolated village, which had been raided by goblins three times in their short lifetime.

But things may be changing, and the PCs might be the front wave of a new Age of Heroes.

Long before the PCs' arrival, there was a huge forest, haunted and impassible. The PCs recently ended that threat, and the forest is once more merely an extremely dangerous wilderness. The next several levels will be interacting with groups that were unreachable for many generations, and about which they know nothing.

[All of the above has already been established.]

One of those groups will be the big dwarves, deep in the mountains in the middle of the forest. They will be about the size of a village (100-300 of them). This will not be obvious, because they live in a huge castle. They are stone masons, and they've been isolated for a long time.

The first indication will be when the PCs discover a ruin with carved stone friezes, clearly dwarf-made, whose carvings show something unusual. Dwarves and humans, but the humans appear to be smaller than the dwarves. [I will play it fair, but I hope that they start looking for a diminutive race of humans, rather than large dwarfs.)

There will be an area that is mapped like the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northeast New Mexico. The dwarves have a huge pit mine near where Elizabethtown was. This mine had the Big Ditch, and is now mined out of gold. The dwarves still occupy the castle they built there centuries ago, but are now mining for gold at Baldy Town.

Besides the PCs, there are others moving through the forests now, and the dwarves will be under attack, or expecting an attack, from some small army - orcs, ogres, I don't know what yet. Maybe even humans. The dwarves will likely consider the PCs to be scouts for this army.

It might be an attack from the Underground below, from the bottom of the pit mine.

The dwarves are good fighters against the occasional wilderness encounters, but have never faced an army (at least for hundreds of years), and have no knowledge of unit tactics. [The PCs have, and do.]

The first wave won't be the only problem. It's clear that more pioneers will be coming through. The dwarves will have to find a way to live with others. They are a small group, although they live in a great castle.

Hopefully, somebody will realize that humans would like to settle by the excellent farmland around the lakel, which the dwarves don't care about, and the dwarves would be able to trade for food.

At the end, assuming that the PCs end up helping the big dwarves, those dwarves have a few magic items left over from hundreds of years ago - weapons too small for them to wield, items only useful when wandering, etc.

Feel free to suggest more possible adventures there. The big dwarf settlement is a cool enough idea to be more than a quick pass-through adventure.