This thread is becoming amazing. I'm now imagining a living dwarf head functioning like a whole creature thanks to its beard.
Dwarves that can survive decapitation? Why the hell not?
How would you work that though? Have two beards, one attached to the upper body as a backup? Take off the [UPPERBODY] and [LOWERBODY] tokens(tags?) so that the head can separate from them or they can be separated from one another without causing death?
From what I recall of the wiki on the subject, the upper body being separated from the lower body is supposed to be invariably fatal, and the same with a single head and the upper body.
I'd even settle just for that, for the dwarfs to have metal-strand hair and have different metals for different hair colours.
Words cannot describe the sheer insane awesomeness of that concept. (Also I would kill to have a beard made of iron, or better yet cotton candy. I mean, what dwarf wouldn't? The only kind of beard more awesome I can think of would be a beard made of magma, but I have a hunch that wouldn't end well.)
That would be pretty sweet, yeah, but also pretty much imminently fatal unless we made the dwarves out of stone, or at least gave them some kind of medium-durability stone for skin, probably some kind of custom fossilized fat(Think the Fifth Elephant/Discworld with its rock treacle and the like) for fat, something like magma or mercury for blood, and I'm not sure what sort of material would do for their muscles, maybe steel or pig iron?
It does make me wonder if you could have a magma-beard become an obsidian beard. Which then just makes me want to have a caste with obsidian beards that are like living razor-wire.
Well I'm pretty sure it'd just be caste-based. Just call them all dwarfs, equal chance of birth, and have the only difference be beard material and colour. Double it up for the female caste as well if you want bearded females and you're golden.
(I think you would still need to double it up, just so you don't have like 9 men, each with a different beard colour, for every one woman? That sounds like a weird work-around, there's probably a way to balance a single caste to pop out 50% of the time, regardless of how many other castes there are)
Can you not have a Caste which is itself split up between males and females or that both sexes can be assigned to, then?
Hmm. So what would the hierarchy be, anyway? Copper Beards at the bottom as the base peasantry and then Bronze Beards next up as the craftsdwarves, Silver Beards for the traders(or maybe switch them with the Bronze Beards) maybe Obsidian Beards as a sort of special priestly caste(?), Steel Beards as the warrior-caste(natch), and maybe Rose-Gold Beards for the nobility?
Extra points if you could make the monarch the sole Adamantine Beard.
...Heh. I just had the worst idea for making dwarves drop "dwarf beard" helms upon death in a similar way Bronze Colossi drop bronze statues, so that in adventurer mode, one could kill dwarves and wear their beards as trophy-armor.