Overview
Steel Dwarves are an innovative, driven race. Though they possess typical dwarven traits of stoicism and resoluteness, the Steel Dwarves have experienced less trauma and hardship than their very distant cousins, the Snowfell Dwarves. As a result, their society prizes peacetime pursuits more highly; namely, artistry, architecture, and creating a lasting legacy.
Steel Dwarves were once boulders who awoke when a magical comet streamed by overhead. They immediately began digging, and never stopped. The Steel Empire spans beneath entire continents. It is a highly advanced civilization full of master artificers, blacksmiths, and engineers.
In many respects, the Steel Dwarves are far ahead of the other races and civilizations of their time. They are unfortunately not well known for their skill and revolutionary developments in technology, engineering, crafting methods, metalwork, stonework, architecture, city-planning, science, mathematics, magic, and the academic arts owing to no general desire to interact with the outside world whatsoever.
Personality
Steel Dwarves are hardy, curious, bright, and playful. They enjoy theorizing and talk often of philosophy. Most children are well-educated, resulting in an intellectual society and a natural desire to question things. They are a resolute and pragmatic people.
Steel Dwarves are interested most in what they can see, touch, and define with logic and reason. They can be viewed as greedy, but only because because they are never content with a simple life. Steel Dwarves are always striving to learn more, perfect a craft, find something, do something new. They are restless and driven to mine deeper to find more mysteries to unravel. Children start digging holes before they can speak. It's in their nature.
Appearance
Though they stand under 5 feet tall, Steel Dwarves are very heavy (300+ pounds) due to their bones being reinforced by minerals that make them strong and unbreakable. They are broad, compact, and often muscular as physical fitness and prowess is praised in their society. Their lifespan is approximately 200 years.
Steel Dwarves have greyish and blue tones in their pale skin, owing to their origins as boulders. Their hair is typically muted tones of black, grey, white, or brown. There are two clans in the Steel Empire who have a rivalry with each other; the Blackbeards and the Bearfist; the Bearfist shaves their beard and keeps it close-cropped, while the Blackbeards grow theirs to exorbitant lengths and adorn them with special ornaments. Beard styles and choices throughout the empire mimic these two clans’ choices.
Combat and Professions
Steel Dwarves make excellent warriors, smiths, engineers, inventors, and masons. They have a knack for visualizing spaces and a great understanding of physics owing to their race’s fantastic feats of tunneling. The Steel Empire’s halls are magnificent in their engineering and their city planning is excellent and efficient.
Society
The Steel Empire’s cities are vast and expansive. They combine living spaces with areas for scientific, academic, engineering, and arcane study. Vast animunculories (areas for the production of automatons), workshops, refineries, and marketplaces dominate the underground. Mining shafts are fitted with massive Great Lifts that serve as elevators down deep into Ilisara’s core.
Many dwarves work in the Steel Empire’s mines, or inside of its scientific and war quarters. The Steel Empire’s focus is on useful, practical technology that aids them underground. The underground is, of course, riddled with monsters and other creatures from the Dark Below — so their wartime technology is quite formidable. Steel Dwarven artificers create and manufacture mechanical apparatuses of varying complexity to fight, mine, and perform mundane tasks in the Empire.
Ingenuity and creativity are prized in Steel Dwarven culture. Their knowledge of metallurgy and process for creating armor creates long-lasting, durable pieces that are nigh indestructible. Artistry is so well-respected that anyone without a talent or knack for it is viewed with less respect.
The Steel Empire has a very complicated system of governance, wherein an Emperor oversees various councils of Science, Magic, Engineering, Economy, and Mining. The councils are comprised of individuals from clans, who possess varying amounts of land and territory within the Empire. The Emperor’s role is to serve as a tiebreaker for the councils when decisions cannot be reached. He has little personal power beyond his clan, although his clan is often the strongest and most powerful in the Empire.
Religion
The Steel Dwarves are atheists. They don’t believe in gods. To them, gods are merely individuals who acquired divine power. They call them "empowered individuals" rather than gods. A true god, in the Steel Dwarves' minds, would be a single omnipotent force that had no checks and balances in the universe. Steel Dwarves have a complex scientific explanation for all kinds of magic, how it works, what it does, and how it is acquired. There is no mysticism to them. Thus, the Steel Dwarves do not worship anyone. They are cynical and skeptical about religion.
History
The Steel Empire is at war with demonkind and all other Inferni who live in the Dark Below. In the process of fervently mining towards the planet’s core, they dove into a paradisiacal “second Ilisara” complete with gigantic power-crystals, prehistoric flora and fauna, and resources found nowhere else on the planet.
The Steel Empire’s mines reach very, very deep beneath Ilisara into dangerous territories where only their automatons can reach. They extract foreign minerals like aetherium from the core and use it to power their cities with renewable energy.
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