"As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves."
Dwarves are one of my favorite fantasy races. There's just something utterly fascinating about miniature warriors that think they are just as big and strong as anyone else. Their hubris and often sour attitudes only makes them even more charming from an outside point of view. The biggest trouble with dwarves is that despite the rapidly expanding face of fantasy dwarves have stayed pretty much homogeneous as little angry, bearded Scotsmen wielding axes who are unified against everyone else in the world. The duergar offer a variation on this but still pretty much fit under that umbrella. What I think the dwarven world needs is something to break up the unity that makes them all kind of seem the same.
The path that I'm taking on this is to separate the dwarves religiously. The older, more conservative dwarven tradition will be one focused upon ancestor worship while younger, less traditional dwarves will begin to take up the common gods of the world.
The path that I'm taking on this is to separate the dwarves religiously. The older, more conservative dwarven tradition will be one focused upon ancestor worship while younger, less traditional dwarves will begin to take up the common gods of the world.