Dwarves

"Ah, you're done with your break?"
"I never stopped, my friend."

Dwarves have a storied, shared history deeper than their oldest mines and longest mountain passes, built on a mutual struggle that has tied them closely together for generations. Other races know them as hard workers, skilled craftsmen, and builders of some of the most impressive communal works that civilization has ever seen.
Held together by a strong work ethic and an almost ubiquitous reverence for The Bearer of the Burden, dwarven culture is sturdier than the rock it is built upon. As a natural result, most dwarves met away from their ancestral homes are exceptions as a rule, but the commonalities between them are well known.

Racial Modifiers

• Characteristics: Dwarves gain a +1 bonus to CON and DEX, but suffer a -1 to AGI.
• Size: Dwarves subtract 2 from their Size characteristic, and may not choose to increase it using the Uncommon Size Advantage.
• Implacable: Dwarves are slow but extremely firm when their feet are planted, and hard to slow down further. They gain a +3 to STR rolls against any Impact or attempt to use Trap or Take Down maneuvers on them. They may also ignore the first 2 points of Movement Restriction and the first 20 points of Natural Penalty to Initiative of any armor they wear. Finally, they gain a +20 bonus to any Acrobatics checks made to keep balance when on the ground, no matter how precarious or slippery.
• Night Vision: Dwarves ignore any penalties caused by natural darkness, and reduce penalties from magically induced or absolute darkness by half.
• Unbroken: The weight of Dwarven history manifests itself as a +30 to any Resistance Check related to possession or domination. Dwarves may not take the Easily Possessed or Vulnerable to Pain Disadvantages. In addition, they gain a +20 bonus to Withstand Pain, and any Dwarven character that chooses a class that would normally pay 3 DP per point to develop Composure or Withstand Pain instead pays 2 DP per point for these secondary abilities.
• Stonewhisper: Dwarves have acute senses when it comes to stone, metal, and earth. This not only confers them a +20 bonus to Notice and +40 to Search related to stone and metalwork, as well as +20 to any Forging or Trap Lore checks made in regards to these materials. Finally, they may ignore 40 points of Damage Barrier or 5 points of Fortitude from any item or being made of these materials provided they can clearly see it and have heard sound coming from it at least once. When striking an unattended object, this increases to 60 points of Damage Barrier.

Basic Information

Anatomy

As their name implies, dwarves are short and stocky people. While not as small as Goblins and significantly wider in build, their stature sticks out the most among their physical characteristics, as they are otherwise similar to Humans in general make.

Dietary Needs and Habits

While any omnivorous species can theoretically eat them, fungi are a frequent staple of the dwarven diet. Able to be cultivated with little to no sunlight when given warm conditions and moisture, these prove an ideal food source in their mountain homes. They know how to prepare a multitude of mushrooms and molds for safe consumption, and many famous dwarven ales are actually based more in fungal life than grain.
This is not to say they shy away from meat, vegetables, or fruit; in fact, many fruit and meat products are so difficult to safely bring to Argenduum that they are considered rare delicacies among dwarves.

Civilization and Culture

Major Organizations

It is impossible to speak of dwarves as a people without mentioning Argenduum, and the Dwarven Peaks that house it. A powerful and nearly impregnable set of towns, water channels, and roads built into and within the mountains, Argenduum is held as an architectural marvel the world over.

Culture and Cultural Heritage

Dwarves revere The Bearer through action, and the value they place in hard work is far from an outside perception. Even with their freedom secured, dwarves work long and hard with little complaint for the good of their kind. One only needs to gesture to the grand halls they have created to explain why they are willing to go to such lengths - they look upon the fruits of their labor every day.
This often reaches extremes most races would consider abhorrent. Dwarven societies are very regimented and hierarchical, with comparatively little time spent with family and work groups instead being expected to fill the gap. It is very common for dwarves to garner close friendships with those they work beside, spending even time outside of work cultivating these relationships. This helps to contribute to their famed work ethic.
This frequently seems like something of a trap, where dwarves are stuck with those they work with because of the stigma of leaving their companions, but dwarves also highly value individual freedom. Many of their cultural traditions exist to address this gap. At the same time, this value they place upon freedom extends to other races, and Argenduum has been known to cut trading ties with even the most lucrative of partners if they find proof that they have been engaging in slavery of any sentient race.

Common Customs, Traditions and Rituals

Commissions

Dwarves rarely work the same job forever, and mobility is important to their lives. While they specialize in specific professions, they take their actual jobs in the form of commissions, in which a group can work for three years to a decade on a specific task. When the task is complete (which can often come first) or the time is up, the workers move on to another job, and if more work needs to be done, the organizer will have to start a new commission.
These work organizers can take various forms, from governmental organizations within Argenduum to privately contracted work from in or out of the Dwarven Peaks. When external groups hire out dwarven labor, there is almost universally a dwarven middleman to ensure that operations run smoothly, as how hands-on any given company is can vary heavily. From mining to smithing to architectural or even mercenary work, commissions are a common and expected practice, and even the lowliest of dwarves know to be wary if they are not followed.
Groups of dwarves often stay together after commissions if they work together well, but this serves to provide them an opportunity to go their separate ways if they do not, and for people to switch professions or otherwise avoid being trapped in toil when it truly becomes unbearable. For dwarves, after all, hard work is voluntary and a matter of pride, not a matter of squeezing workers dry. It is not a perfect system, of course - commissions occasionally break down well before the three year mark on one end, and some organizers try to pressure good work groups to return for immediate follow-up commissions on the other.

Drinking Parties

One thing that almost everyone who has met a dwarf knows is that they can drink any other race under the table. Apart from drinking recreationally in general, they have certain traditions around this as well. As a method of relieving themselves of stress (which, contrary to outside belief, their stamina for is not truly limitless) and forming stronger bonds with their work groups, dwarves frequently hold after-work drinking parties.
During these parties, it is considered customary for the dwarves who arrange the party, as well as their work organizer, to give a brief speech, followed by the drinking proper. Participants pour drinks for each other and distance themselves from the sternness they show in their work environments. While the specific customs are myriad, standards of etiquette are generally relaxed, and one of the few taboos regarding these parties is to spread gossip about the antics that occur during them after the fact.

History

To tell the story of the dwarves is to tell the story of a time when organic life was in its infancy, when beings of magic and the elements still walked The Eye. In the face of the new world, many left for the planes or died out, leaving only ruins behind, but the empire of the late race who came to be known only as the Icemen did not. And thanks to this empire, the tale of dwarvenkind is one of slavery and struggle.
Vulnerable to magic but sturdy in body, the early dwarves were ideal laborers for an empire adapting to a changing world, easy to keep in check and able to handle environments where the Icemen would melt or shatter. The system was not flawless - some escaped, forming the first free dwarven presence in The Eye, but most dwarven ancestry dates back to those who were slaves until the end.
That is to say, the end of the empire, not the dwarves. Dwarves learned a powerful stubbornness under the heel of the Icemen, and even when they were worked to the bone, they also conspired to achieve their freedom. Their work was ultimately rewarded, as The Bearer, impressed with their resolve, gave them its favor, ensuring their victory against their masters.

Interspecies Relations and Assumptions

Humans

Many dwarves tend to consider humans to be lazy until proven otherwise. More so than other races, in fact, as humans have a well-known tendency of finding ways to make tasks easier, without adequate concern for quality and diligence. At the same time, they hold an appreciation for human agriculture and the food that comes from it, but some who know more about feudal practices are less enthusiastic about this as well.
Still, dwarves do admire the focus on practicality in problem-solving that humans have, and consider them the most 'civilized' of their fellow mortal races. As the two races are the most prone to permanently settling down, it is not hard to see why.

Elves

Dwarves admire elven dedication and patience, though they often consider the slender beings to be whiny. With elves being relatively upfront about their emotions and complaints and dwarves enduring silently, the cultural clash is almost inevitable. Naturally, dwarves refrain from mentioning this openly, leaving many elves ignorant to the issue.
Contrasting with humans, dwarves often find elves to be whimsical and impractical in their ideas, amassing art that serves no purpose or contemplating philosophy for philosophy's sake. However, dwarves do appreciate their elven friends, and it helps that it is rarely hard for them to find good gifts that they can be assured the dwarves will wear out in due time.

Orcs

According to the dwarves, if orcs, as a whole, could settle down and dedicate themselves to some real work, they would be the strongest race in The Eye. They make excellent drinking partners, are tough as nails, and they would sooner chop off their own hands than renege on their duties.
At the same time, orcs are uncivilized, unstructured, and often violent. Their greatest vices in the eyes of dwarves is their wrath and impatience, which keeps them from truly dedicating themselves to toil and strains relationships with them. In this regard, their heavy cultural focus on combat does them few favors.

Goblins

If you take an orc and remove everything good about them, you get a goblin, or so say the dwarves. Less patient, less honorable, less diligent, less durable, and far more prone to destruction than works of craftsmanship and creation, they seem to oppose everything dwarves value. Their stature is one of the few things that they remotely have in common.
This matter is not helped by the fact that dwarves and goblins both live comfortably within caves, a second commonality that does not work in their favor. Because of it, most contact between the two takes the form of conflicts that break out when dwarves dig too close to a goblin hideaway or goblins wander into dwarven caves. In these times, dwarves treat goblins as they would any other deep-dwelling monster.

Lifespan

300 years