Why This Axe?

A Bit about "By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization"

May 30, 2022

Last week, I buried the lede. Hidden half-way through my philosophical musings, I announced an upcoming project called By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization. If you missed the announcement, By This Axe is a sourcebook that’s all about dwarves. It’s launching on Kickstarter on June 21st.

Now, at least since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, fantasy worlds have had races. In Middle Earth, the races were “man,” “elf,” “dwarf,” “hobbit,” “ent,” “orc,” and “troll.” Tolkien’s races were translated virtually one-to-one into Dungeons & Dragons during the 1970s and from there metastasized into every other role-playing game and most videogames. Along the way, some races got re-named (hello “halflings”), some races got split into sub-races (“dark elves” and “mountain dwarves”), and lots of new races got introduced, including some that become so popular as to dominate a lot of contemporary play (cough, “tieflings”). For a while, virtually every RPG, CRPG, and MMORPG on the planet had you select a “race,” alongside a “class,” as the formative choice you made when creating a character.

Despite this abiding popularity, however, “race” has begun to go out of favor within some contemporary circles of the role-playing game community. In several systems, the word has been phased out in favor of “ancestry.” Sometimes the word is still used, as a legacy inherited from prior editions, but all of the mechanics or traits associated with race have been removed, leaving it purely cosmetic.

Given this evolving trend, it raises the question of why anyone would decide to publish a sourcebook devoted to the dwarven race (or any “race”, for that matter). It seems like jumping on a bandwagon that everyone else is jumping off!

Do I just have a Wisdom score of 3? Certainly n—well, maybe. I’ll let you be the judge.

But let’s get first things first: The book is not intended as a reaction to anybody else’s game design choices. I’m not trying to win away disaffected 5E or Pathfinder players by “giving them back races.” (The book is not even designed to be 5E compatible.) Nor is the book going to make some sort of statement that race mechanics are better than ancestry mechanics. I begrudge no one their choice in fantasy entertainment, even if they begrudge me mine. I think that having a variety of game systems that take different approaches that appeal to different players is unquestionably a good thing. The tabletop role-playing game hobby is a far better hobby for having more games with more options for players to choose from.

So where did By This Axe come from? As dull as it might seem, By This Axe is actually an outgrowth of my personal obsession with verisimilitude in worldbuilding. Since my early work in Adventurer Conqueror King System’s core rules, I’ve elaborated a richly detailed system for modeling the economies, militaries, trading patterns, and settlements of fantasy realms. A lot of people in my ACKS community love dwarves, and via our Patreon and Discord, they asked me for rules for dwarven realms. At their behest, I created rules for dwarven magic, dwarven mining, dwarven mushroom farming, and dwarven machinery construction, along with various classes to exploit those game mechanics. When all was said and done, I had over 75,000 words related to all sorts of “dwarf stuff.” Those mechanics became the basis for By This Axe.

But having all the “dwarf stuff” begged the question of why everyone thought of it as “dwarf stuff” in the first place. Why didn’t I write halfling mining rules? Why didn’t I write about elven mushroom farming? Why does everyone believe that dwarves are miners or farm mushrooms or use axes? In ACKS I summarized dwarves as follows:

Dwarves are stout, short, bearded demi-humans who average a height of approximately 4’ and weigh about 150lb. Dwarves have a reputation for having surly attitudes, and are particularly gruff with elves. They value precious metals and stones, and live in deep underground vaults, where they endure constant raids from the orcs, trolls, and even worse denizens of the darkness below.

Where did that come from? The truthful answer is “in the course of crafting his world, Tolkien established the first tropes about dwarves from the raw material of Norse myth; afterwards his epigones built their worlds from the raw material of Tolkien’s tropes; and their epigones built their worlds from the raw material of their predecessor’s tropes; and on and on, until eventually the bundle of tropes we call ‘dwarves’ were codified in everything from Dragonlance to Dwarf Fortress.”

But while that’s true, it’s also useless. It doesn’t help a worldbuilder, gamemaster, or writer who wants to create dwarven civilizations that make sense. Knowing the source of the tropes doesn’t justify the tropes in-world. It doesn’t offer any verisimilitude. It lets us deconstruct dwarves, but it doesn’t let us construct an explanation of dwarven civilization. It’s certainly no basis for a cyclopedia.

I could have gone back to Norse myth and started from scratch, of course. The problem with that approach is that if you start from scratch, the end result won’t recognizably be dwarves as the term is used in today’s role-playing games. The particular tropes of dwarves as they appear in pop culture today aren’t an inevitable outcome of thinking clearly about Norse dwarves. But they’re the tropes we have and want to write about. And as the saying goes, you go to war with the tropes you have.

Abducting Dwarves

I decided to solve the problem by abduction. No, not like alien abduction. I didn’t kidnap Gimli and probe him to discover his bone density. I mean abduction as in abductive reasoning. Abduction is defined by Wikipedia as "the process of arriving at an explanatory hypothesis of a surprising circumstance." (I’ve written about abductive reasoning in my book Arbiter of Worlds, and you should read it if you haven’t.) The foremost philosopher of abduction, Charles Sanders Peirce, summarized abduction as follows:

The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course;
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Many people casually use abductive reasoning all the time without realizing it. For instance, assume the surprising circumstance that your car won't start this morning. “If my car battery were dead, then the fact that my car won't start would be a matter of course. So there is reason to suspect (abduce) that my car battery is dead.” And so you check the battery, and voila! You need a jump. Abductive reasoning is also used all the time by professionals in the course of their work. Doctors use abductive reasoning when they diagnose an illness based on symptoms, and detectives use abductive reasoning when they suspect a perpetrator based on evidence.

In By This Axe, I applied abductive reasoning systematically to make an in-depth look at dwarves. For each trope I could think of, I substituted “common trope” for “surprising fact” and then used abductive reasoning to develop an explanation or each. For instance:

It’s a common trope that dwarven women are rarely seen.
If it were true that dwarven mothers give birth to female infants relative to male infants at a ratio of 1:2, then the rarity of dwarven women would be a matter of course because there’d only be 1 dwarven women for every 2 dwarven men
Therefore, let’s say that dwarven mothers give birth to female infants relative to male infants at a ratio of 1:2.

What became apparent to me, as I worked through the tropes, is that dwarves were only superficially similar to humans. For the dwarven tropes to be coherent, they had to be much more than just squat humans with a different ancestry and culture. For the dwarven race to make sense, “race” had to mean “species,” not “ancestry” or “ethnicity.” And so, in this cyclopedia, dwarves are treated one species, humans as a second species, elves a third species, and so on.

To use a quadrupedal example, this book thinks of humans as horses, elves as zebras, and dwarves as donkeys. Horses, zebras, and donkeys are different types of animals, that have evolved to live in different environments, with different traits and temperaments, and you cannot begin to understand a horse by thinking about it as a stripeless zebra. “But what about half-elves and half-dwarves?” you ask. No problem: It’s a misconception that species cannot interbreed. Often they can and do. Horses and donkeys produce mules and horses and zebras produce zorses or hebras. Tigers and lions can interbreed, as can wolves and coyotes, and so on.

When we say “dwarves are a different species,” we mean it. Dwarves are not just the “fantasy equivalent” of Scottish clansmen, or Vikings, or any other nation or ethnicity in our world. The difference between dwarves and humans is like the difference between horses and zebras, not like the difference between English and Scottish. The dwarves in By This Axe have their own physiology, which differs from that of our own Homo sapiens physiology. They have their own gestation time, reproduction rate, age of maturity, age of senescence, lifespan, immune system, which differs from ours.

With a different physiology, it follows that they have a different psychology than that of Homo sapiens, too. And from that different psychology, a number of different cultures follow, that make sense for dwarves in ways that wouldn’t necessarily make as much sense for humans. (If you don’t understand what I mean, consider that a jaguar, being an ambush predator, is a solitary animal; a lion, being a pursuit predator, is a social animal. It wouldn’t make sense for jaguars to organize into prides because a big group would just prevent them from ambushing prey.)

Dwarves in this book are a race like wookies are a race. They’re not humans, they’re aliens. And so, I guess, in a sense, I did engage in alien abduction after all.

Presenting Dwarrology

Although I’ve referenced some contemporary biological findings above, By This Axe isn’t written from the perspective of a 21st century biologist. That would destroy any verisimilitude we’d hope to create! Moreover, although I wrote it by abducting from dwarven tropes, it isn’t presented as a deconstruction and reconstruction of tropes. I’ll leave that to TVTropes.org.

Instead, the material in By This Axe is presented by a point of view character, a sage from the Tower of Knowledge of the Auran Empire named Sürcaneus. Sürcaneus is the self-proclaimed inventor of Dwarrology, the study of dwarves. All of Chapter 2 is presented in character, and any backstory or setting material in the later chapters is from his point of view, too. Using Sürcaneus as our point of view narrator offered several benefits:

Since Sürcaneus is a human writing about dwarves for a human audience, adopting his viewpoint allows us to focus on what makes dwarves different and gloss over all those areas where dwarves are just like humans.
As Sürcaneus is a sage in the world, rather than an omniscient worldbuilder outside of it, his knowledge is incomplete. This allows us to leave some facets of the dwarves open for interpretation or customization. It also means he can be wrong. The possibility of error allows Judges to simply ignore anything they disagree with.
Given that Sürcaneus’s writing exists in the world, it makes it possible for his writings to be discovered in the campaign, or given to players as in-character background information.
With Sürcaneus being a cross between a Greek natural philosopher and a Victorian anthropologist, it allows us to bring some humor to the writing. As a sage, he’s very smart but also very parochial; he tries to be magnanimous, but often comes off as smug. And the dwarves are, in many cases, messing with him.

He was fun to write, and I hope you’ll enjoy his point of view, warts and all. Head on over to Kickstarter to sign up for a launch notification. If you love dwarves, you will love By This Axe.

Postscript by the Sage

Mr. Macris claims to be the so-called “author” of the Cyclopedia but he is in fact a mere translator, re-working my elegant Classical Auran writing into the vulgar tongue you uncouth barbarians use to communicate. Since he has said his piece, let me say mine! The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization is a work of groundbreaking academic and scholarly importance. At no point in human history has so careful a study of the ways of dwarves even been undertaken, and as such it should command your attention and respect. Please do not allow yourselves to be misguided by my translator’s misperception of how the book was written. Every word of the Cyclopedia is an authentic recounting of my experiences living among the dwarves.

Your humble sage,
Sürcaneus

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