Races Revisited: Dwarves

I've been itching to redesign the core races for a while now.  Part of the reason is 5th edition with its really appealing broad-strokes approach to game design, and part of the reason is that Pathfinder is almost 10 years old, based on a system over 15 years old, and it is starting to collapse under its own weight.  In terms of character creation, playable races are the bread on which you build your open-faced sandwich of a character.  The toppings are the class and feats and other customization choices, and you can be as simple or as complex as you want with those, but underneath it all you need that bread to be characterful and easy to understand.  Sorry, that metaphor broke down quickly.  

What I'm trying to say is that I want the playable races to be as simple and evocative as possible.  They need to get across the core idea of the race without getting in the way with too many extraneous skill bonuses or abilities that function in instances so specific that you forget about them when the time comes to use them.  I'll start things off today with an easy one: the dwarf.

Montalore Bearbriar, by Kent Hamilton

Dwarves are easy because they are the most iconic of the fantasy races.  Authors, game designers, and world builders have played around with elves a lot, probably because Tolkien's holier-than-thou elves can get really tiresome outside of Middle Earth, but everyone seems to agree that dwarves are pretty good as is.  They live underground, love mining and treasure and alcohol, fight with axes, and have great big beards.  The idea of dwarves is so solidified in fantasy that even in worlds where the authors have deliberately tried to shake things up, dwarves often remain fairly unchanged.  Pathfinder's dwarves are pretty good, and the changes I've made to them are relatively few, but I believe I have streamlined and refined the dwarven race into a simpler and more fundamentally dwarven form here.

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