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[shadow_archmagi]

So, awhile back, I remember reading that bees used the structure of their hive as a form of data-storage. (IE: The pattern of which hexes are filled with honey and which ones aren't and other stuff). Sort of like those punch-cards that old-timey computers use.

Sort of like those binary computers that people make using levers and floodgates and pressure plates.

So, I'm sitting here, trying to think of something to give dwarves for my homebrew D&D setting. Elves already have their own little culture I set up, gnomes have a nifty history, etc. Dwarves got nothing.

So I had this thought: "What if Dwarf mountains were like hives? Every dining room and hall of ancestors having special meaning. The whole community acting as smaller parts of the larger meta-conciousness of the MountainHolm. Each dwarf thinking of himself as an individual, acting as an individual, but working for the hive. Maybe he doesn't KNOW that by putting statues in the lower south caves he's recording the war against the goblins, maybe he just considers it a flight of artistic fancy.

As you go higher up the chain of command, they do get more aware of the arrangement (Not that they consider it anything but benevolent... channeling the mountain is like channeling the force. Something that guides and supports.) with the Mountain King himself spending most of his time trying to commune with the MountainHolm. (After all, what better way to run a country than to ask the country itself how things are)

Sound nifty? Thoughts?

[Captain Alchatron]

Personally I've always seen dwarves as unspiritual beings who only care for the gods in a quid pro quo sort of way, much like the Romans - but then that's me, and if you're looking to make your own universe and lore it's really up to you. 

I really like your idea of hive-like fortresses but personally I'd have them do that deliberately, as a way of recording information, rather than simply unwittingly acting to some divine plan.

Out of interest are you going to be making fortresses like this and attempting some sort of computing, or are you just writing it into their backstory? A labyrinthine hive fortress would be awesome.

[shadow_archmagi]

divine plan.

I'd hardly call it Divine. I'd like it to be something rather subtle so that it can be gradually revealed over the course of the story.