EditDwarves of the Mountain of Ice- Tone: A small dwarven enclave descended from those that escaped the destruction of Karadakana
- Timeframe: -~600 to Present
- Artifice: Low
- Region: Norizia
- Capital: Undaraka (~7,250)
- Notable Settlements: Undarza (~1,250)
- Government: Council of Elders
- Ruler: Ancient Gimnir
- Races: Karadakan Dwarves (~8,500)
- Languages: Karadak
- Religions: Yifarna, the queen of ice
- Coinage: Not minting. Ancient Karadakan coins are still in circulation, used to supplement bartering. Food is the primary resource of value, followed by furs; all else is regarded as a luxury.
EditSynopsisAs daemons raged through ancient Karadakana, the doughty Dwarves valiantly fought back, but many settlements that refused to adapt were wiped out. Many enclaves sealed off their holdfasts and fought defensively rather than press a hopeless assault and thus survived. Others fled their ancestral homes and sought safer lands. The predecessors of Undarak were of the latter type.
As the legend goes, after years of attrition against the daemons the surviving warriors and Runemasters of the ancient holdfast of Darazak in what is now Civizia sacrificed their lives to fight a hopeless holding action. They bravely battled to give the young, elderly and infirm time to escape into the lands above before they collapsed Darazak into a ruin of rubble sealing themselves in with the merciless daemons that beleaguered their people.
In the aftermath, the surviving elders of Darazak led the children north from their abandoned homeland. Knowing better than to venture back beneath the earth, understanding that more daemons might lurk in the ancient tunnelways, they instead settled into the hills of lower Norizia where they founded several small settlements and took up sheep herding and light mining. So they survived for time, but eventually aggressive tribes of humans pushed them from these lands and thus they fled further north. They found safe passage but no shelter in the ancestral lands of the Kraag and journeyed ever northward until they came at last to lands too hostile for humans to claim.
In this land of giant mammoths, caribou, snow leopards, and bears the Dwarves might have accepted their doom and given up their forlorn hopes for survival. However always industrious and stubborn to a fault they instead moved into the glacier fields and used their sculpting and carving lore to delve into the unforgiving frozen water as they once had into stone. Adapting to their new environment, they carved out a beautiful new holdfast made entirely of ice.
Using the furs of mammoths, caribou, and bears for warmth and to cover the harsh bare ice, the Dwarves live in surprising comfort in their frozen hold. They have become masters of using heat and water as construction tools, and have constructed a clever series of chutes and slides to facilitate movement around their spread-out domiciles. Their warriors became capable hunters of mammoths and bears, and their elders cast large nets between ice floes to catch delicious silver-skinned fish.
Though the Dwarves have no love of open water, the Undarakans by necessity have learned to make serviceable small watercraft with laboriously cured furs stretched over rigid bone frames, propelled by the use of paddles carved from mammoth bones, which with a little effort can be collapsed into a bulky roll and pulled or carried. They use these caraftas to move from one glacier or floe to the next and to go to and from the mainland.
Though Dwarven eyes need little to no light, the Undarakans also make simple tallow-burning lanterns lit by the use of flints. Though they shed a relatively weak and wavering light, its better than nothing and the small heat they generate can be a welcome comfort. Larger versions are used to generate heat when necessary.
The Dwarves hardwork and stubbornness has paid off, and they have flourished in their new home. So much so that the original glacier-hold had begun to grow crowded in recent years leading a few larger families to start a new settlement called Undarza in a nearby glacier a quarter day's journey away.
EditMagicThe Undarak abandoned the worship of Kadrin, believing they were forsaken by their patron due to their many travails. They turned instead to the worship of Yifarna, a greater elemental lord that makes her home in the deeps of the northern wastes. The story goes that she came to the Dwarves in their darkest hour when they were at their lowest and near to giving up and expiring from the cold and lack of food, and offered them her blessings in return for servitude. Her devoted Eizsworn claim it was she who lead the Dwarves to the glacier that would become their home and bade them cut into the ice to make their dwellings.
The Undarak have lost most of the Runecrafting arts that Dwarves generally excel at, holding only the the skills of tatooing. They use an unusual dark red ink made largely from the blood of mammoths and bears rather than more traditional tinctures, granting their Runic tattoos a certain boldness.
EditDetails Undarak does not have access to the materials to support the level of artifice Dwarves traditionally enjoy. They have almost entirely lost the art of metal crafting. However, they have adapted to their situation and use the materials they have efficiently and industriously.
Undarak hunter-warriors fight with short stubby bone and / or ivory harpoons and twin axes that usually are flint-headed but sometimes employ tusks or bones. They wear heavy furs that offer some protection from harm and wear helmets carved from the large joints of mammoths. Some stronger Undarakians wield two-handed bone clubs made from bear or mammoth limbs.
The Eizsworn of Yifarna can create incredibly sharp weapons from the ice of the glacier, kept from melting by the power of their magic. Some have also been able to call and control the fearsome eizenwyrms (ice worms).
Dwarves
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