By This Axe - The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization



The Kickstarter for By This Axe - The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization is now live. It is a 200+ page hardcover book of dwarf-specific lore and rules, written for three groups of gamers:
  • GMs creating and running fantasy campaigns using any OSR systems who would like to add more depth, variety, and verisimilitude to their dwarves. If you’ve thought to yourself, “if only I better understood the per-capita productivity of dwarven mushroom farms, I could more easily simulate the siege of Dragon’s Tor,” this book is for you.
  • Players participating in an OSR campaign who would like to test out some new character classes and gameplay experiences. If you find yourself saying, “I wish my dwarf could build a steam-powered tank to delve through a mine while high on berserker-rage-inducing mushrooms,” then this book is for you, too.
  • Gamers who just really love dwarves. If your ringtone intones “Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-męnu!” when anyone calls, if you cultivate a chest-length beard with battle-braids, if you prefer to drink your bread in mugs, if you’ve been forging a battle axe over your stove during lunch hour, then this book is for you above all.
The book has ten chapters:
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  • Chapter 1, Introduction, details the audience, purpose, and approach for this book.
  • Chapter 2, Dwarven Lore, provides an overview of the ethnicity, physiology, language, and customs of dwarves. It is narrated from the point of view of a sage in the world of the Auran Empire.
  • Chapter 3, Dwarven Characters, explains how to roll up a dwarven character in any one of six racial classes, including the craftpriest, delver, earthforger, fury, machinist, and vaultguard.
  • Chapter 4, Dwarven Templates, provides eight pre-generated templates for each character class in this book. Using these templates, you can easily make your vaultguard a highborn lord, your machinist an apothecary, or your craftpriest a reliquary guardian.
  • Chapter 5, Dwarven Earthforging, details a new style of magic, wielded by the earthforger class, whose innate talents have allowed them to channel the power within materials to reshape their form.
  • Chapter 6, Dwarven Automatons, presents rules for designing, building, and repairing clockwork and steampunk-type machines. The section includes over 20 example vehicles, objects, and other automatons to act as examples for the build process and/or to include in your game as items to encounter or use, or as blueprints in treasure hoards.
  • Chapter 7, Dwarven Domains, explains how your dwarven characters can establish themselves as rulers of domains and realms, with rules for agriculture, urban settlements, vassals, garrisons, and more.
  • Chapter 8, Dwarven Mining, expands the rules for domains to include mining for precious metals and quarrying for stone. Special rules for “delving too deep” allow your dwarves to greedily hunger for gold - risking potentially dire consequences.
  • Chapter 9, Dwarven Mycoculture, details the secret methods of mushroom farming used by the dwarves to feed their vaults and brew their marvelous ales and beers.
  • Chapter 10, Dwarven Relics, offers a catalog of over 35 rare and powerful dwarven relics, artifacts, and antiquities that might be guarded in sacred reliquaries, wielded by dwarf lords, or re-discovered in lost vaults and deep and hidden places.

I'm posting this as an excited backer who has loved the work this author has produced so far, and is hoping to see the campaign hit what I think are some very cool stretch goals to expand the book further. (Really excited for what looks like a very high-quality dwarf-specific OSR book, the Dwarven Defender was my first PC back in the 3.5 days and I've been hooked since.)

By This Axe - The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization