(This article SHOULD have been published on 11th of October last year. But here it is now! Yay!)
I really like dwarves. It’s mostly nostalgia to be honest, I used to play dwarves in Warhammer Fantasy Battle back in the day. But they generally inhabit a very limited genre-space nowadays, composing the “drunken hairy short guy with an axe, a shield and an excuse for a bad Scottish accent” -segment of an adventuring group. So here’s something completely different!
I mostly figured to write up a spell-slinging dwarf because I’ve been struggling with attribute outliers in DCC’s “race-as-class” world. Great, your dwarf with 18 Intelligence survived the funnel. Too bad his race is just too stupid to put that brainpower to good use, you’re stuck swinging that axe with your 7 Strength… We’ve poked at the issue before, with the dwarven runepriest (available here) and the elven knight (available here), and will likely return to it again in later posts or publications.
This one has actually been brewing up for a long time, since I had trouble finding good fictional references for it (let alone time to read them!), and because the obvious and easy solution in DCC is just to let the smart dwarf be a wizard, using the rules for a basic wizard – if nothing else, he can always go on a quest for his wizardly power. But now he doesn’t have to, since the rules are here.
As a side note, I’d absolutely love to have a good mini for a dwarven wizard, just for my collection. I remember seeing one in the old (Citadel?) catalogues a while back, but hunting one down seems like a mighty challenge – tips for this would be appreciated!
As always, stay safe, stay healthy!
Cheers,
AMP