The Ds have it.
Well done, you picked the most difficult option to find! Well, besides "love", but there was no chance anybody was choosing that. If you were looking for money or power you could've just had Nedru go find you some jarl's age-appropriate second child, but now you're just going to have to go talk to people.
Luckily, you can go do that at the birthday party Abystok's merchant class are throwing in your honour. First, though, a quick refresher on the elk birds and the cave bees.
As every dwarven bairn knows, ancient legends relate that the dwarven race first arose when the cold north wind impregnated the first mountain, or alternatively that the first dwarves were the offspring of a pair of creatures created from the thighbones of the great icy giant from whose body the world was made. What the legends agree upon, in any case, is that dwarves only now resemble small stout humans because the gods chose to make them that way, but are actually an entirely separate class of being — though the learned argue that dwarves and humans were once closely related before the former diverged through millions of years of magic use.
The key biological difference for your purposes here is that dwarves separate themselves into two sexes only for reasons of personal taste and convenient interaction with other races; this being the source of the human misconceptions that there are no dwarven women or that dwarven women all have beards and are indistinguishable from the men. (Obvious nonsense; the two can readily be distinguished by simple examination of the pelvic structure, and female dwarves may or may not cultivate beards at their pleasure.) Medical professionals do sometimes warn that the female skeletal alignment offers a better chance of successful childbirth — one of the lines of evidence used to promote the belief that dwarves were once more like humans and have modified themselves, in fact — but hardly anyone really pays attention to that sort of thing. Meaning, ultimately, that you will not be restricted by matters of petty biology in the producing of heirs regardless of your choice of mate. I'm sure this is very liberating for you, now let's move on.
We skip ahead; your party is now ongoing. You are pleased to find that there are almost as many churls and thegns present as jarls, and they aren't even obligated to come by the demands of social class. Of course you know that it's easy to be the most beloved king Abystok knows when the bar was set so low, but it's still heartening. The décor is lavish, yet understated, as appropriate to a party hosted by the merchant caste. A variety of caged beasts are on exhibit, loaned from several private collections, and someone has even convinced the runesmiths to dig up the old spark-throwing wands of celebration which you haven't seen used since you were much smaller. The most important part of all, the feast, is as extravagant as the region's foremost food exporter (ie, Abystok) can provide; all the bounties of the Great Sea are available, as well as subterranean livestock and the strange (even to most dwarves; these things are hard to grow and hardly found in settlements with surface farms) crops raised in the depths. You have just finished up a satisfying course of squid and sunfish stuffed with wilted sows-ear mudcabbage and you are beginning to feel sufficiently limbered by copious drink to undertake a round of meet-&-greet.
Where will you begin?
A) A knot of jarls and thegns (hey, isn't that the guy who tells you how the mines are doing?) talking animatedly to the far left.
B) The small group of runesmiths whispering to one another in the corner. Man, what is with those runesmiths?!
C) Gostell and some of his soldiers are chatting with some farmers you assume he knew in his past occupation over on the right.
D) Behind them, the merchants who paid for this party are joined by some more jarls, probably making sales even now.
E) Hey, those humans sent a delegation to your party! How nice. They look so adorably out of their depth.
Poll
8 (88.9%)
Author
Topic: SpamDwarves: Low King Golian Duskbrow of Abystok! (Read 25360 times)