Dwarf Society

[FlintlockJazz]

An impressive act of Necromancy has been observed: gkathellar answering 3 year old questions.

 

Oh, well, the thread seems to be progressing nicely after that, but it was a bit surprising to see.

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die

[gkathellar]

An impressive act of Necromancy has been observed: gkathellar answering 3 year old questions.

 

Oh, well, the thread seems to be progressing nicely after that, but it was a bit surprising to see.

 

Oh, hey, this is old.

 

That said, you can put this one squarely on Messier-31. Necromancy is one of my banned schools.

[Alexander1]

 

Dwarves are often misunderstood by writers as they've evolved in fiction

The thing is, dwarves aren't real. There's nothing to be "misunderstood." Just because Tolkein did them one way doesn't make that the right way, only his way. His ideas have been borrowed, sure; every writer borrows ideas and makes those ideas their own.

 

 

 

I was actually referring to the concept of a fantasy world where elves, dwarves, and humans co-exist, which was Tolkien's concept first.  Writers borrowed Tolkien's ideas for Dungeons and Dragons  and Pillars of Eternity borrows from Baldur's Gate, which is itself a game set in a D&D setting.

 

The difference between Tolkien's borrowing and other fantasy writers is that Tolkien borrowed from mythologies like the Prose Edda or folklore -- D&D was ripped from a single author's work of fiction, to the point where the original version was disputed for copyright infringement.

 

That aside, I wasn't calling them "misunderstood" because they fail to follow Tolkien's archetypes; I was calling them "misunderstood" because they're the "misunderstood race" -- i.e. the race that writers don't often develop as much as elves, humans, or the other races they've added to a setting.  People "get" elves -- they're immortal and have greater wisdom than mortal men -- but dwarves have other qualities that even BG2 didn't really develop or portray. 

 

I wasn't insisting that games follow Tolkien's rules or have to be more like his own, though I still find his lore more in-depth than any fantastical representation since.  My chief concern is that most fantasy games that go for the "elves and dwarves" fantasy setting is that they deeply develop elves, but shoe-horn dwarves in without really giving them their own culture. 

 

Ironically, the term "dwarves" is actually something Tolkien invented.  Other fantasy stories that don't borrow from Tolkien use the term "dwarfs" as a plural for dwarf (like Warhammer does) and the mythology Tolkien was inspired by uses the term "dwarrows" as a plural for dwarf.  Any fantasy story that uses the plural dwarves is borrowing from Tolkien's fiction, not mythology or folklore.

Edited September 24, 2015 by Alexander1