Dwarf (Dungeons & Dragons)

• 1. Introduction

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  Dwarves in Dungeons & Dragons have been part of the game since its earliest days, but their roots stretch back much further than the 1970s. The idea for the D&D dwarf draws from Norse and Teutonic mythology, from Germanic legend, and most directly from J. R. R. Tolkien's dwarves in The Lord of the Rings. What questions does that ancestry raise? How does a creature from centuries-old folklore become a playable character at a table in someone's basement? And what does it mean that the dwarf, of all the fantastical beings a player could choose, has remained one of the most popular options across every edition of the game?

  When Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson built Dungeons & Dragons from its predecessor wargame Chainmail in the early 1970s, they brought the dwarf with them. The short, stout figure who swings an axe, resists poison, and sees in the dark was already present in Chainmail's miniature figures before D&D existed. That continuity from wargame to roleplaying game tells us something about how central the dwarf was to the fantasy tradition being assembled. The questions the rest of this documentary will answer: where exactly did the D&D dwarf come from, what does it look like and how has that changed, what subraces emerged across decades of publication, and why has this character endured long enough to inspire dwarves in an entirely different game, World of Warcraft.

• 2. Ancient Roots, New Rules

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  The Germanic story The Ring of the Nibelungen and the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin" have been called "ancestors" of D&D dwarves. These are not obscure references. They are among the most widely known stories in European tradition, and the fact that the D&D dwarf traces directly to them suggests just how deep the design team was willing to reach. The Norse concept of the dwarf, short and skilled at metalwork, traveled through centuries of storytelling before landing at a game table.

  Poul Anderson's 1961 novel Three Hearts and Three Lions is a more specific and perhaps surprising source. The original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons features a dwarf character race whose design is strongly influenced by Anderson's book. That novel includes a dwarf named Hugi with a Scottish accent, and most popular portrayals of dwarves in D&D have followed suit with that same regional lilt. Anderson's dwarf also contributed something mechanical: the dwarven ability to detect a sloping passage underground comes directly from his book. This transfer of a literary detail into a game rule shows how the designers treated fiction as raw material.

  The early rules placed firm limits on what a dwarf could do. In the 1974 edition, a dwarf could only play a fighter and could not progress beyond the sixth level. That changed in 1976 with the first supplement, Greyhawk, which allowed dwarves to play a thief with no level restriction. The 1981 revision of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set went further, treating demi-humans like dwarves as their own classes with a maximum level of 12, compared to the Halfling's 8, the Elves' 10, and the human classes' 36.

• 3. The Body and Its Politics

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  Dwarves average four feet in height, with stout, broad bodies, and male dwarves grow thick facial hair. The question of whether female dwarves could grow beards became one of the more contested design questions across editions. Female dwarves in Tolkien's novels could grow beards, and some D&D authors followed that lead. R. A. Salvatore is among those who adopted the convention. The game rules' official position was rarely concrete, varying by culture and campaign setting.

  The specifics of that variation are telling. In the World of Greyhawk setting, all dwarves including females grow and wear beards, though only some females shave. In the Forgotten Realms, female dwarves can grow full beards but usually shave. In the Eberron setting, they do not grow facial hair at all. The Complete Book of Dwarves specifies that women among the deep dwarves "wear their beards long, unlike other dwarf women (who are typically cleanshaven)."

  By the fourth edition preview book Wizards Presents: Races and Classes, the art direction had shifted. Artist William O'Connor was given specific direction by the design team to change how female dwarves were depicted. Rob Heinsoo, writing in the same book, stated that O'Connor's art "gifted us with a magnificent new look for dwarf women." He called them "strong, sensual, earthy and feminine, with an exotic beauty that no one would think to splash a beard on." Ilan Mitchell-Smith noted that dwarves, along with elves and halflings, are defined in terms of "subjectivity, and ultimately, humanity" rather than serving as a monstrous other. Philip J. Clements observed that dwarves "tend to embody an extreme vision of masculinity."

• 4. Abilities, Pantheon, and Alliances

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  Combat-oriented players have long favored dwarves for concrete mechanical reasons. Dwarves resist both poison and magic, and they can see in the dark, a skill called infravision in earlier editions and darkvision beginning with the third edition. Their ability to detect sloping tunnels, traps, and other mining-related features underground gives them a distinct niche in dungeon exploration.

  Dwarves usually worship Moradin, whom dwarven legend describes as their creator. According to those legends, Moradin fashioned the dwarves in his own likeness using gems and metal, then breathed life into them. The full dwarven pantheon in many campaign settings includes Abbathor, Berronar Truesilver, Clanggedin Silverbeard, Dugmaren Brightmantle, Dumathoin, Muamman Duathal, Vergadain, and Laduguer, the last being the god of the duergar. Several additional gods including Hanseath were introduced in Races of Stone, published in 2004.

  The social relationships between dwarves and other races follow a consistent pattern across settings. Dwarves get along well with gnomes, who are regarded as close cousins. They accept humans, half-elves, and halflings, though their longer lifespans mean they tend to bond with a human's family rather than any single individual. They distrust half-orcs and do not appreciate elves, allying with them only when fighting shared enemies: orcs, goblins, evil giants, and trolls. Bruenor Battlehammer, a Shield Dwarf in the Forgotten Realms setting, serves as one of the most prominent individual dwarf characters in the game's fiction, reclaiming his homeland Mithril Hall and killing the shadow dragon Shimmergloom single-handedly.

• 5. The Dethek Script

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  The first edition Cyclopedia of the Realms, released with the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set in 1987, describes a dwarven writing system called Dethek, a name that translates directly into "Common." Dwarves using this script prefer to write on materials that will not perish. They inscribe on metal or stone, and books can be constructed from bound metal sheets.

  The physical form of dwarven writing has precise characteristics. Stone tablets are called runestones in Common, described as diamond-shaped, about an inch thick, and made of very hard rock. Inscriptions spiral around the edge of the tablet, read from the outer edge inward toward the center. Words are separated by spaces, sentences by crossed lines, and capital letters are marked with a line drawn above them.

  Color carries meaning in Dethek inscriptions. When glyphs are painted, the names of beings and places are picked out in red, while the rest of the text is colored black or left as unadorned grooves. A numbering system also exists, essentially a variation of pentadic numerals. Ideographs represent clans, tribes, and races. Some tablets bear reliefs and can function as stamps for various purposes. This writing system is one of the more fully realized cultural artifacts attached to any D&D race, rooting the dwarves in a material culture that goes well beyond combat statistics.

• 6. Subraces Across Settings

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  More than a dozen dwarven subraces have been described across D&D's publishing history. Hill dwarves are the standard. Mountain dwarves live deeper underground and have fairer skin. Deep dwarves dwell underground with an enhanced ability to see in the dark but are sensitive to light, and they resist magic and poison more strongly than standard dwarves. The duergar, or gray dwarves, are an "evil and avaricious" subrace living in the Underdark, their name drawn from Norse mythology. Bleeding Cool editor Gavin Sheehan praised the expanded background given to duergar in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, calling their lore "fascinating and intriguing" and describing them as "a force to be dealt with."

  The Dark Sun campaign setting on the planet Athas gives dwarves a distinctive treatment. Athasian dwarves stand less than five feet tall, weigh nearly 200 pounds, and have no hair at all. Each one pursues a singular obsession called a focus, requiring at least a week to complete. They can interbreed with humans to produce muls, sterile offspring combining dwarven strength and resilience with human size.

  In the Dragonlance setting, dwarves divide into three main groups. Gully dwarves, or Aghar, meaning the Anguished, are thought to be the offspring of gnomes and dwarves. The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman calls them a "miserable lot." The highest an average gully dwarf can count is 2, though some have reached 3. Blogger Graeme Barber criticized their portrayal as "unintelligent sub-humanoids" who are "profoundly mentally disabled to the point of not really even having a language" as stereotypical. Meanwhile, the Spelljammer setting gives dwarves an entirely different environment: they operate in huge spacefaring asteroids honeycombed with tunnels.

• 7. Legacy Beyond the Table

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  Next to Tolkien's own work, being a core player character race in Dungeons & Dragons has contributed significantly to how contemporary culture understands what a dwarf is. The character type that Norse mythology and Brothers Grimm shaped, that Tolkien refined, and that Anderson's fiction detailed, was then reproduced across decades of game editions reaching players who may never have read any of those sources.

  The depiction of dwarves in Dungeons & Dragons has been cited as the direct inspiration for dwarves in World of Warcraft, a game with tens of millions of players worldwide. The specific combination of traits that D&D codified, the combat hardiness, the underground expertise, the metalworking culture, the stubborn loyalty, traveled from the game table into one of the most widely played digital games ever made. Environmental humanities scholar Matthew Chrulew noted that the division of dwarves into subraces offered players the option "to customize a campaign, based on relationship to place." That framing points to something the full publishing history confirms: every new campaign setting that added its own dwarven subrace was building a distinct sense of place, whether that place was the icy Forgotten Realms north, the post-apocalyptic wastes of Athas, or the void between stars in Spelljammer. The 2014 fifth edition Player's Handbook marked the dwarf's fortieth year as a playable race, a span that few fictional archetypes have managed to sustain in an actively updated ruleset.