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The Dwarves were always a bit of a mystery to me, and frankly, they still are a bit. I did know from the very start that were going to be the ‘first’ race (the fairies were always meant as more of a joke thing than anything else… except when they’re not, of course) and that they were going to be long gone by the time of the story. Anything else about them was completely up in the air, and I was always too pre-occupied with detailing elements of the world that were actually important to the story.
The earliest conceptions of them were, obviously, heavily influenced by the Dwemer from the Elder Scrolls series, and they also picked up a bit of an ancient Egyptian styling along the way. Of course, those concepts quickly became a pain to refine. Trying to reconcile a scientifically advanced race of agnostics with the heavily secular Egyptian design sense was a giant mess. And I’m still not sure there’s a good way to do that combination that doesn’t make them look like giant, vain shitheads that like to make statues of themselves for no reasons besides ego like Stargate’s Goa’uld or Warcraft’s Titans.
A break-through came when I made a sudden shift in the Dwarves’ back story, just months before our heroes were suppose to go to the dwarven city. All of sudden, I actually had story reasons for why the place would look like a wrecked, looted mess, devoid of any real sign of advanced technology. And while the change probably did hurt those scenes a bit, it did mean the Dwarves were given a pretty major plot upgrade from the role of minor macguffins The Dwarves will have much more of a part in the Errant Story universe, even if it’ll take them a while to get around to it.
(Yeah, I don’t know why these are turning more into design documents, instead of background dumps either…)
