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dengarbountyhunter 10-16-07, 03:18 PM

You see, I have much trouble picturing dwarven architecture. Not that there is one only answer to that question (I guess it depends on how the DM wants it in their campaing), but I'd like to know at least how most people see it. First of all, do most of them live in cities carved in the mountains? I ASSUME they do... Second, assuming their city are underground, are there any gigantic (city-sized) open room with buildings at the bottom, like a human city placed at the bottom of a very large cave, or are their city just endless tunnels with stone doors leading to each building carved into the stone, and almost no open spaces? If it's the latter case, that would explain why we never SEE a picture of a dwarf city, even in the Art Gallery of Races of Stone (because you can't really take a global picture of something that boils down to rooms connected by tunnels). But what if they don't live IN the mountains but merely in the mountainside? After all, regular dwarves don't have light sensitivity; we can safely assume that they DO interact with light as powerful as the sun's at least occasionnaly. A whole city carved in a steep mountainside, with paths winding along the cliff (like the road to Machu Picchu (http://www.yannarthusbertrand.com/yann2/affichage.php?reference=366J-03-27&pais=Perou)), and maybe stairways protruding from it for a quicker acess to levels of different heights, and buildings carved no further than a few meters in the mountain for regular houses? I know that carving stone is long and nobody's gonna do it more than necessary, but dwarves are Lawful. They might just take decades to carve a city because that's how their ancestors did it, so both types of cities would be "realistic" for dwarves to live in. I don't know why it matters so much to me, but I just don't know how to make a dwarf city...