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[Splint]

All hail the blooded axe........

[NW_Kohaku]

Or maybe they'd see the steel axes the dwarves carried, and the steel armor they wore, which respectively cut through their armor like it almost wasn't there and rendered them nigh invulnerable to their attacks, and start a cult around those.
Or an artifact-based cult...

Considering as Toady wants to make artifacts magical, then it would make perfect sense for people to worship a kitten bone floodgate that shoots lightning bolts as a symbol of the Thunder God.  In fact, if we get the religious figure mooding, it could even be true, although it would be for the dwarven thunder god, not the animalman one.

[Graknorke]

I've always liked the idea of dwarves being the more socially lax of the main races, in that they do not particularly discriminate against anyone for unreasonable reasons, so long as that person does nothing against them and will contribute to the prosperity of the fortress.

Animal people are a perfectly logical addition to dwarvern society, especially considering that they share the caverns with many of them. Animal-men should not really be largely distinguished from dwarves, with the exception that they might start up their own guilds and form relationships faster with each other than with dwarves.
Also because I kind of like the idea of tribes trekking across the caverns to see the fortress with its rumoured vast piles of food and a plentiful supply of dwarvern luxury goods.

If this tied in with tourists and visitors my personal wishlist for extra-fort interactions would be complete.

[Niyazov]

I also recall there being pacific islanders who mistook american, australian, and british military personel as thier dead ancestors during WWII and built cults around the machines they arrived in: Thier planes.

I would imagine a giant carved skull with a massive ropereed impersonation of beard in place of a bamboo and vine/palm leaf plane.

This is not true. "Primitive" are no more likely to mistake a living, breathing person for a dead ancestor than you are. Cargo cults arose as a result of confusion about cause and effect, which everyone is susceptible to, not just Pacific islanders. The insular islanders practiced indigenous religions that emphasized that correct behavior is rewarded with material success. This is not so different than the various material rewards offered in the five books of Moses; reward and punishment in classical monotheism were taken to refer to tangible rather than spiritual occurrences.

Their way of life had persisted for hundreds of generations when suddenly war brought hundreds of strange foreigners who operated strange machines, built inexplicable buildings and were unimaginably wealthy, sharing some of that wealth with the islands' inhabitants  in the form of food and tools . Having never encountered modern factories or farms, the island inhabitants perceived these items as miraculous and concluded that either the foreigners had figured out the correct behavior to get rewards from their own ancestors, or that the strangers had wrongfully intercepted divine rewards that the islanders' ancestors had intended to send to them. The first conclusion resulted in the formation of cargo cults; the second, in uprisings and returns to traditionalism (as with the John Frum movement).

[Splint]

Ok, so I was wrong. Pardon my lack of knowlege on something I hadn't looked up more than once (And I skimmed at that.)

[Niyazov]

Ok, so I was wrong. Pardon my lack of knowlege on something I hadn't looked up more than once (And I skimmed at that.)

There may be some cases where people genuinely confused other people for divinities, but it is usually associated with highly isolated people and extraordinary coincidences that made the conclusion unavoidable. James Cook's 1st voyage to Hawaii is cited as this; although it's difficult to say whether it is all true or not, there is some evidence that suggests that when Cook arrived at Hawaii, he was mistaken as a divine avatar because he arrived during the god's festival in a manner that matched sacred traditions. However he quickly dispelled this impression once he had made landfall and started acting like a jerk; when he returned a few weeks later they stabbed him to death on the beach.

There is of course a rich tradition of charlatans deliberately pretending to be gods or possessed of divine powers for any number of reasons.