Which style of dwarf settlement do you prefer?
Option A: Dwarf Halls. A main gate leads into a large underground avenue carved straight into the mountain. While there may be some natural caves interspersed, the overall structure is planned and artificial. The dwarf hall is all one super building. Homes, facilities, and stores are essentially rooms and are all connected via the dwarf hall(s). Examples: Erebor, Moria
Option B: Inside naturally occurring caverns. A wide open space underground where a settlement might develop similarly to a real world city. Unlike option A, there is something akin to an “outside space” with distinct buildings and streets. Phenomena like stalagmites, grottoes, and mushroom forests might surround the city which is cool, but might also make the city more vulnerable to scary things that live in the dark.
Examples: Blackreach from Skyrim
There's too many problems with large underground settlements I don't like to just handwave with "wizards" so mostly neither. Clean air alone is a logistical nightmare when dealing with non-natural cave systems and even that doesn't work once you go in as deep and extensive as the Underdark or as cramped as a city. Then there's the gas pockets, cave-ins, earthquakes, flooding, food concerns, etc. which you'd have to address individually or do something weird and drastic. I hate "don't think about it" as a solution; it feels really counter to why I'm worldbuilding in the first place.
You sound like you're also a hard sci-fi gay. No offense.
Combination of A and B. Also some surface settlements, mostly used tor interacting with outsiders, herding, and military defense purposes.
I'm not smart enough for hard sci-fi. Definitely INTP though.
This isn't such a boring perspective, actually. What replaces underground settlements that still feels dwarvish? It can't merely be big stone constructions. What about it being below ground level, though not beneath the earth? Like, in natural canions, or narrow valleys between steep mountains, for example. If all the dwarves come from a specific geographic location that's like that, it might not be so strange, and it might give off the same vibe without causing those logistical issues.
I kinda have a city like that, but it's up high and full of goat people that I suppose I could have coded as being dwarf-like.
Aboveground dwelling, structures made of timbers/stone meant to receive and disperse the load of topsoil/fill that will be deposited on top and planted. Farming can be done in the outlying regions or literally on top of the mound.
You get to draw on the archetype of the fairy mound and the little folk who live under it, you get subterranean craftsmanship, you get something more approaching real world feasibility (even if, I'm sure, there are problems executing this IRL)
Like this, but on a scale to the point where it becomes a feature of the landscape.
Son of a b***h. Like THIS.
Going on what says, what about food sources and other resources like wood or oil for fires? Do dwarves live underground and farm the land above in your setting, how does that work?
That's part of what makes Dwarves more than just short humans IMO; the fact they're more advanced in underground works than we are even today, knowing methods to circumvent things like gas pockets or cave-ins, where to build so Earthquakes aren't such a big issue, how to balance their food needs...
But why aren't they smart enough to realize the easiest and most elegant solution to those problems, which is to just live on the surface?
Has nothing to do with intelligence, rather stubbornness. They dislike humans and distrust Elves in many settings. That’s an easy way to explain it.
There was nowhere on the entire continent with no elves or humans? Because that's a hell of an ecological clusterfrick you're describing there, anon.
Why not both? Also why are there only 2 options?
well can you think of a third option?
Vietcong-style tunnels, similar to what Duergar have built for themselves in Underdark. Combination of natural passages and narrow artificially created ones that try to look natural. Primarily intended for inconspicious relocation and hiding from or misleading any potential pursuers. Ocassional bigger communal rooms deeper inside.
That would be fricking nice, I'm keeping the idea.
I like both. Option A is much more common in my Dwarf Fortress runs though. How often do you find expansive caverns big enough to host a city's worth of Dwarves irl?
One that isn't a fake binary choice created by some shitposter trying to assassinate /tg/ by literally drowning it with shit.
I like to play up the difference between hill dwarves and mountain dwarves. Hill dwarves are descended from commoners who did the undesirable task of farming the surface. They love in houses and invented cheese. Mountain dwarves are descended from the wealthier classes who got to do the more traditionally dwarfy things in carved-out mining colonies.
I like dorfs