Northern dwarven culture

Dwarves hold a very strong sense of community within their clan. Its significantly more important than family to a dwarf.

A clan will always have 1 core hold, the home of the clan. These holds will tipically be mostly underground, buried into a mountain where the dwarves live.

Larger clans will also have more smaller holds close by, also still part of the clan. These seperate holds are nearly never more than half a days travel from eachother and always have a very traveled tunnel or path to make travel between them easy.

A clan is often a super isolated society, with most members living, working and dying while barely meeting anybody from outside the clan. Only small groups of dwarves handling things like trade and diplomacy with the outside.

The ruler of a dwarven clan is determined by ancectry. Only those who can claim lineage to some dwarven hero of old may try to become the head of the clan. When a new clan head has to be determined all dwarves that want to participate will stake their claim based on what ancector they are related to and their own accomplishments secondarily. Other dwarves will then all pick 1 claimant to support, culturally its expected they pick based on what ancector they find most important. Tipically clans will have a law on how many claimants there can be, with only those with the highest number of supporters being a claimant.

Next a clan will tipically have a series of challenges both physical and mental written into their laws. Those who stand at the top at the end become the clans leader.

This proccess however often doesn't fully go by law. A succession crisis its the most common cause for a clan to split into new clans. When a victor is determined either by law or not, they become the new head of the clan with mostly absolute power, on paper only limited by a few permanent laws set by the ancectors

In practice the head of the clan near never has absolute power as various different jobs within a clan often have a leader of their own which holds a lot of influence over that job, think things like the head miner, craftsman or rune-mage. The head of the clan often tried to appoint these but in practice they often can't. These positions tend to be given to the dwarf that the rest within the job see as most fit for it, with all the squabbling you can expect of that.

Though a clan can have much internal strife, all that falls by the wayside when a clan is attacked. When an attack from the outside puts the clan in danger, any internal politicking stops mattering.

When a clan loses all their holds, you get whats called a lost clan. The members of a lost clan will tipically still hold a deep tie to their old clan and often these dwarves will build a new home. Or otherwise they are taken in by another clan, allowed to live in the clan but for a very long time treated as outsiders and 2nd class citizens, it often takes many generations for dwarves to consider the children of a lost clan member to be truly part of their new clan.

Some dwarves of lost clans instead assimilate into other society's like those of humans or halflings, or find new ways of living.

If a hold is still reclaimable, if it was taken by some hostile force, then this is something most dwarves of a lost clan will spend their life trying to attain. Even many generations after the ones that lost the hold will still likely be trying to regain it.

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