>Dwarven society is essentially quasi-communist>Living in mines encourages communal quartering, everyone sleeps in the same big hall>Lack of resources means that everything has to be rationed>Children are brought up and educated in the mine creche >"Our mine > our society > our selves">Organise themselves based on which area of the mine they work so you have three basic groups, Miners, Administrators and Security. Administration covers quite a lot of ground from cooks to healers to cleaners to traders>It can't be an anarchy and you can't trust people to know which is the best way to do things so society is very highly regimented, adherence to "mine rules" (the rules governing how the mine operates, safety and security) is expected to be total and instantaneous. Adherence to "social rules" is a little more lax.>Personal freedoms are low, personal property is low>Administrators are the most powerful group, since they control people's assignments>Religion is banned but flourishes underground>Anyone can join the mine, from any race but you can never leave>PCs are most likely to come from groups that leave the mine, prospecting groups, warriors, traders and the likeThoughts? Disclaimer and I can't believe i have to say this but this is Current Year /tg/ this is in no way and endorsement of communism, I'm just trying to think up ways to make my fantasy races different
>>92699137What about the mines that only produce steel?
>>92699116>clans>autistic flashing of wealth>arbitrarily hard to acquire social status>kings and queens and high nobility>Gigantic fortresses of unparalleled craft in order to achieve glory>etcI mean dwarves as they exist in the vast majority of things is basically antithetical to your situation. If you really want to make them interesting, don't make them communist, make it so there's just dwarven settlements and such with radically different ideologies still working together for a greater dwarven good.>fascist or highly authoritative dwarven holds with militaristic might as their major focus in areas of extremely high war>more relaxed but still productive enclaves of fairly greedy unregulated waukeem worshipers in major cities, cooperating with other highly effective craftsmen to achieve high levels of monetary wealth (basically mega capitalists)>anarcho agrarian communes of basically halfling tier dwarves farming in the hills and fields to make sure food deliveries to their brothers in the mineshafts and fortresses can never go without a bite to eat, and more importantly, a bite worth eating>beyond mega hippies who travel across the world and commune with nature in its many forms in order to atone for the exploration of the land their kind do, bringing balance to the injustices their kind do as a penance they willingly take upon themselves>some civilizations like your own, where interspecies cooperation is natural, if not exactly super effective at timesYou got a good angle to explore, but it'd be interesting to see Dwarves be fairly varied rather than the age old GRUDGE DRINK BITTER SLUDGE MINAN OOOORE AND BANGING MY WHOOOORE DIGGY DIGGY HOLE shit.
>>92699116>but you can never leave>PCs are most likely to come from groups that leaveSomething doesn't add up here
>>92699116>It can't be an anarchy and you can't trust people to know which is the best way to do things so society is very highly regimentedWouldn't magic solve that issue?Like have a core structure in society be the guild of divination.
>>92699144Setting aside the communist memes, it is a valid point. Metals are valuable, and if your dwarves are amazing miners they should be bringing in a lot of trade, which begs the question of where all those trade goods are going towards?Unless dwarves are somehow worse than human miners and live a shittier life than a lowly human miner despite not having a lord above them pocketing the bulk of their produced value. Which, y'know, is an angle if you want your Dwarves to be unique.
>>92699144>>92699292Yeah, it really is nonsensical to have a resource-extraction-focused social structure be described as being that way because they don’t have resources.If you want to push that angle, I’d actually suggest combining it with the “religion is officially banned but de facto prevalent” angle: dwarves are naturally spiritual and think of what they extract as belonging to the spirit of the land, so they hoard it in what is effectively a shrine. They rationalize this by saying that, because the entire mine works together to extract it, it shouldn’t belong to any one dwarf, but to the mine as a whole, to be used only as needed by the community. This gets you the irony of incredibly wealthy dwarves living incredibly Spartan lives, establishes why they’d be especially unhappy about paying non-dwarves from their hoards, and introduces possible hooks like>a dwarf adventurer, stumbling across treasure clearly stolen from a dwarven mine, feels a deep-seated compulsion to find out WHICH mine it was stolen from so that it can be returned. He then has to explain to everyone that this definitely isn’t because of religion or anything, the fact that it sits wrong with him on a spiritual level is absolutely just that he’d hate to see his own mine robbed in such a fashion>turns out it’s from an incredibly prosperous mine that would, under most accounting principles, just write off the loss as immaterial>still deeply bothered by any chance that he should keep it personally because it belongs in a dwarfseum
I was going to click off the thread, until I saw >>92699144.>why did I even try and make a good thread on /tg/ in 2024You could have tried harder to make a good thread, instead of going with such a milquetoast take that smacks so much of "!Markarth, Skyrim but with dwarves instead" that it almost hurts to read.I don't fucking care about the politics, it's just the generic>muh dwarfs>muh dwarfs mine>muh shitty living conditions>muh "nobody escapes !Cidhna Mine"bullshit that makes me figuratively cringe.Nobody cares about your generic dwarves in your "totally original" !Skyrim fanfic.Ignore the faggots spouting about communism, and redraft your idea. Trying to move past the generic mold even just a little more could make a huge difference, Anon.To end this longpost on a silver lining, you have the potential to create a detailed world and consider numerous ecological and political structures simultaneously, which is a good skill to have, which is why I gave you this criticism instead of just ignoring the entire thing and being on my way.Take pride in your craft.
>>92699116Counterpoint: even in mythology dwarves were known for the quality of their work.
>>92699116I did play communist dwarves in a space game. Yeah they fit the commie vibe quite well.I played both Stalinist dwarves and soviet-wavev retrofuturist dwarves.The beards make it work. They all look like tiny Karl Marx.
>>92699137hard to mine food and wood, which means you have to trade for it and the people selling you it know you need it hence its gonna cost you
>>92699516I like it. Good post.
>>92699116Wouldn't communalism or something similar be a better term? I think Communism and socialism should only be applied to industrialized societies, unless we accept that all depiction of dwarves are industrial societies already.
>>92699116You don't need to ban religion. There are version of socialism that incorporate religious systems be it Christian, Buddhist, or Islamist: "Love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Timothy 6:10), virtues of charity, mutual forgiveness, the communal nature of some of their figures etc.
>>92701674To be honest I don't understand the small differences between the various types of socialism, communism, marxism, trotskyism etc. etc. so I tend to just call them all communism for ease of use.
>>92699116>Dwarven society is essentially quasi-communistThey can survive by eating rocks, so it makes sense.
>>92702900Fuck8ng kek
There are more deleted coments than ones up, the fuck happened there.
>>92703233OP mentioned Communism.
>>92699116>dwarves worship demonsI've always wanted to try this.
>>92699116axe and pick instead of hammer and sickle
>>92699116why did you post skinny bearded elves to talk about dwarves
>>92705541Better?
>>92699116You're describing Dwarf Fortress, and religion isn't usually banned in a dwarf fortress (at least, not as common as dwarves having a certain complexion is banned) and even outside of that all of the above is usually the foundations of a dwarvish faith based on ancestor veneration in most other settings, often none dissimilar to the Chinese system save the adage that the first dwarves are sometimes elevated to pantheonic levels of divinity so they don't look short compared to all the other mortal races' gods.
>>92699116Unlikely, you don't usually hear about Dwarves starving millions of their own people to death or allowing themselves to be ruled by foreigners who hate them.
>>92699116So right off the bat if the setting has not developed capitalism it cannot develop communism. Just like a setting that hasn't developed feudalism can't develop capitalism as this requires the refugees of towns and cities populated by burghers. If you have a standard medieval fantasy setting OP, your inspiration for communal societies should be more focused on the Levellers or the Diggers, but miners.
>>92699116When I play Dwarf Fortress, I'd like to give dwarves personal property, but its difficult to get them to take it!DF also has religion now. I don't prioritize it highly but I try to accommodate temples.
>>92699116What? Only as much as old germanic tribalisim is communist. You might as well call the Vikings commies. >>92703233Just a normal communist purge, comrade.
>>92699116>wordlbuilding too detailed to fit 90% of scenarios>too incoherent not to ruin the remaining 10%Many such cases.Look, OP, the only interesting part about your whole post is the first line as it evokes amusing images of a dwarven USSR, and then you squandered it by poorly describing a fairly standard communal society with low surplus (which shouldn't be spending a lot of precious work on mining, or really anything except food production).Try again, and this time think of a good reason as to why your dwarves might be mining valuable stones and metals yet still lack the wealth trade or manufacturing would bring them.
The defining facet of dwarfen society should be a lack of social mobility. Your daddy was a miner, his daddy was a miner, your whole family line has been miners since they were first molded from the earth. Your only options are to raise the standing of your clan in the guild which is a rigged game, join the army and obtain acclaim but every male dwarf is already required to serve X amount of years so you're one of thousands trying to get noticed, or leave the hold entirely and try to stake a claim by yourself which means losing every bit of protection and leaving yourself vulnerable to fey moods and various issues, even before monsters, in hopes that effort will actually be rewarded.It won't, high effort is expected because you're a dwarf, stuff your grumbling because the older generations had to do it all uphill, both ways, in the snow. The idea of other societies that you can just go somewhere else and remake yourself entirely without anybody knowing is absent to them.The closest to communism you could get them on is by pretending that bronze age egypt was also communists because it hired the out of work farmers to build and maintain public works in the off season.
>>92699116This is not Communism, just basic communal arrangements common in any pre-industrialized society. Communism specifically is about the organization of society around the collective ownership of capital inputs (in the early 20th century where it flowers, the capital inputs are machines and factories). It's a meaningless term to apply here, you could replace most of your greentext with "Hunter-gathers are essentially quasi-communist" and be equally nonsensical. If you just want to paint your dwarves with a Soviet-style bureaucratic aesthetic, just go for it.
>>92715147'everyone has to strictly share the magic terraforming/smithing/'whatever dwarf stuff' fire-gems because shit got nasty last time we gave people a chance to hoard them' would make a better (if still crude) analogy for communism desu>>92715029not a historian but egypt actually seems an unusually good example of a semi-centralised economy that worked
>>92715159Egypt wasn't low surplus IIRC, didn't they export an assload of food?
>>92715191All supervised by a vast bureaucracy and state companies.
https://youtu.be/DiG0LomEptE?si=p_hveS-Ndwfk9px9
>>92706849No.
>>92715215Yes, but that wasn't my objection to OP.>communal>low surplusThis makes sense.>communal>heavily focused on miningThis is also fine.>communal>low surplus>heavily focused on miningThis needs a very convincing explaination.
>>92715253Just threw off the shackles of the Tyranny and is involved in a war in Vend... I mean Undertee?
>>92716344OP could use the typical hate that Dwarf and Elves have between them for some fairly reason ages ago. The problem was solved but some retard saw opportunity of rising if the conflict kept going.Fast forward today the asshole Dwarf is dead but a bunch of his goons are on places of power. Those Dwarf leaders that Know the truth use the Grudge Propaganda against the elves and make it seem like there's some constant battle against them in EVERYTHING going on, while the Elves are rightfully pissed with the retard Dwarf that can't piece things together and see how they're tricked.Now you have the Dwarf commie leaders taking 90% of the wealth for themselves even if they don't know in what the hell they can spend it (Maybe giving it to Dragons, in case the Elves decide to get into a war with them and have them as allies, and this could be a major scandal because Dragons are a common enemy in the setting, for example), and the 10% goes to try and keep the mines running and keeping the Dwarf in their fortress alive and healthy enough to work.
>>92702877Communalism = the Commune, everyone knows everyone.Communism = the State, orders come down from on high and movement is determined by the admin class no matter how far away they are.It's mostly a distinction of scale in practical terms but the philosophies are pretty different by virtue of having to tackle the different challenges caused by said scale.
>>92699116>>Children are brought up and educated in the mine creche >>"Our mine > our society > our selves">>Organise themselves based on which area of the mine they work so you have three basic groups, Miners, Administrators and Security. Administration covers quite a lot of ground from cooks to healers to cleaners to traders>>It can't be an anarchy and you can't trust people to know which is the best way to do things so society is very highly regimented, adherence to "mine rules" (the rules governing how the mine operates, safety and security) is expected to be total and instantaneous. Adherence to "social rules" is a little more lax.>>Personal freedoms are low, personal property is low>>Administrators are the most powerful group, since they control people's assignments>>Religion is banned but flourishes underground>>Anyone can join the mine, from any race but you can never leaveWhat the hell setting are you talking about, this doesn't match any dwarves I've seen.
>>92702877You're not wrong to do so and the anon you're replying to is a a pedant who doesn't even really know what he's talking about.
>>92723469>Gommunism and Social Democrats are the same!No dude, just no.
>>92699116>quasi-communistDo you know what communism means at least?
>>92706849>That gaston gigachad elf
>>92699116Retard.
>>92703233/tg/ mods are the worst mods on the site and not enough people are using the feedback option and telling anyone that matters about itmoderation has been dogshit for a while, but it's taken a complete fucking dive over the last months, and they are completely ignoring entire low-effort/off-topic, while liberally abusing the off-topic and racism rules to remove all opinions they don't like, and frequently render entire discussions/threads illegible and nonsensical, especially since they often only remove one side of a conversation, even though both sides would have to be off-topic for a topic to be, well, off-topic to begin with
>>92715215Which was true for any feudal society too. What, medieval Britain was communist, now, too?
>>92729366I pretty much exclusively phonepost on 4chan these days because I never know when my random reply to an innocuous post is going to earn me a ban for "off-topic" with no indication of which post broke a rule.
>>92702877It's easy. Think of it as a question of when you think the Bolsheviks lost the plot.Social Democrats think the bolsheviks lost the plot in 1918 by refusing to cooperate with a capitalist state, Trotskyists think the Bolsheviks when Stalin took power, Maoists think the Bolsheviks lost the plot when Khuschchev said Stalin was bad, Marxist Leninists simultaneously think Stalin was the only good bolshevik and also the soviets were good until 1991.
>>92703233Janny had a wittle melty
>>92699116>Living in mines encourages communal quartering, everyone sleeps in the same big hallAlso, they're very comfortable with nudity due to communal hot spring baths.
>>92699116>>Dwarven society is essentially quasi-communistlol
>>92699292>>92699516One of the reasons the USSR fell into industrial and economic decline was that it was illegal to not be employed. As such, anything that improved efficiency or output to the point of reducing the need for labor wasn't implemented or not implemented to its full extent. Basically you'd have industry that would either stick with antiquated or obsolete machinery for the sake of requiring a labor floor to meet quota or you'd have a factory full of the newest bells and whistles that had a chunk of its labor force basically doing busy work all day. Translating this to dwarves, the mines are tapped out, their veins producing a trickle ore compared to decades ago, but still they mine and burrow into the stone because that's what dwarves do and anything else is decadent bourgeois elf talk. Carving an entire mountain to look like First Miner Comrade Grimnar Ironcarbon, building a fuck huge meeting hall 500 feet below sea level, all the stuff is labor sinks to keep people occupied and prevent them from spending too much time in the ale ration line whispering seditiously.
>>92702877They're irrelevant, largely. This is due to the fact that under Marx-derived systems, they define themselves by praxis, the process by which one realizes or enacts, rather than theory.
How about science worshippers?>can't do science>rely on others like humans and elves to do the thinking>kidnap members of smart races like humans and elves>war against other technological societies like gnomes>are known for highly technological society>aren't known for reliable technology, e.g. grenades spontaneously explodeYou can have both mythological and /tg/ dwarves at once.
>>92731037Imagine the stench
- everyone sleeps in their own room- abundant resources, nothing is rationed- children are raised by their immediate families- myself, my family, my tools, my weapons- do whatever jobs they're best at, specialization ensuring a strong market economy- you can't trust people to know the best way to do things, so you use traditions from your elders, who have the benefit of experience- personal freedom is high, personal property is high- merchants, smiths, soldiers, chefs and brewers are powerful and respected- freedom of religion for everyone- anyone can join or leave at any time- players are free to make their characters however they see fit
>>92699116Except Dwarves are always portrayed as mercantile and very entrepreneurial/capitalistic.
>>92699116You're out of your containment thread
>>92749885yeah, sloppers refuse to stop slopping.
>>92699116what the fuck is going on with the red headed dude's leg?
