Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 wildboar Jun 01, 2015 4:45:03	I’m in the process of doing some world building and am currently working on the religion of the dwarves. In this homebrew setting, Mountain Dwarves are basically analogs of Vikings and Hill Dwarves are analogs of Celts. They share a common religion in that they revere their ancient ancestors (those mighty heroes held on common before the Hill Dwarves split from the Mountain Dwarves).   My question: Do you all know of any resources from which I can use to beg/borrow/steal? I’m basically looking for something with a Viking flavour that details hereoes I can use for the Dwarven Ancestors. Thanks!
#2 OoftaMeg Jun 01, 2015 7:37:28	Wikipedia is your friend for references to ancient religions if you want to actual myths.  If you want the D&D version you can go over to dndclassics.com and get a copy of Deities & Demigods.   What I did for my deities was to grab stuff from wikipedia and then just assigned domains based on what made sense to me.
#3 Marandahir Jun 01, 2015 7:37:34	Well, your main issue here is that the Celts and the Vikings have very different religious beliefs and sagas of stories, even if there are some analogues between them. Your best bet would be to look into the history of Viking invasions into Scotland. Scotland's DNA comes from Pictish (Brythonic Celtic) ancestry, mixed with Irish (Goidelic Celtic) invaders, Anglo-Saxon mercenaries hired by the Britons to fight said Picts, who later turned on the Britts and joined the Picts (so you have a bit of intermarrying there), and then the Viking invasions that added a last touch and brought their form of Christianity to the area (by then, we're looking at Christian Vikings, not Norse God-worshipping Vikings). There are probably a ton of heroes from Scottish Dark Age history (look into the 300 AD/CE – 1000 AD/CE period) that you can draw upon, just change up the names a little. You could have the Hill Dwarves emulate the Pictish side of things while the Mountain Dwarves tie into the Nordic side of things. After all, the Picts did come from the hills of Scotland (and were referred to as "hill people" by the Britons and later the English), and the Vikings did come from the mountains of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc. You might even say that all Dwarves share this mottled blood between the various ancestries, but various dwarves emphasize various backgrounds. Obviously, fantasize the whole backstory, changing cultures a little bit, you're not on Earth. But it's a good place to start. Xerox historical figures and rename. It's one of the DM's best toolboxes.
#4 Kazadvorn Jun 01, 2015 8:58:35	Norse... or really Teutonic... myth would be a better choice for building a Dwarven pantheon... at least if you want to maintain a traditional view of the Dwarf 'character'.   The Celts were, if I had to pick an alignment, Chaotic... some Good, some Neutral, some Evil... but all pretty Chaotic. There was a great deal of in-fighting between the various Celtic tribes... stealing livestock was pretty much the early Irish national sport.   The common view of Vikings also is sort of at odds with any popular fictional view of Dwarven culture. There's no evidence that I know of that would describe the Dwarves as either raiders or traders.   If I were you, I'd fall back on the vast trove of D&D 'Deities and Demigods' information available and start with Moradin and Berronar Truesilver and go from there.   See if you can get your hands on 'Faiths and Pantheons' (2002) and 'Races of Stone' (2004). I can't really think of any pre-Christian human pantheon that could be grafted easily onto the Dwarf culture and society - as generally presented. Most human mythological settings are just too random and chaotic to fit the highly structured society of the Dwarfs.
#5 FunkySpunk Jun 01, 2015 9:33:01	IIRC, the PHB has both the Norse and Celtic pantheons at the back of the book. I know it has the Norse one.    My advice would be to choose one of the pantheons, not both. Just have cultural differences between them.
#6 arnwolf666 Jun 01, 2015 10:26:47	What's wrong with Moradin and the dwarven pantheon already created?
(Reply to #6) Lord_Ventnor	arnwolf666 wrote:
#8 Miladoon Jun 02, 2015 7:40:19	Moradout?  Moraquiet?  Moracowbell?   I am trying to think of all the gods in the dwarven pantheon.
(Reply to #6) Dougan_Axehammer	arnwolf666 wrote:
#10 Marandahir Jun 02, 2015 9:58:46	Actually, the language Professor Tolkien created for the Dwarves, Khudzul, only superficially resembles Nordic languages – the runic writing mainly. The Dwarf names we see are actually translations into Nordic from the language of the Dalish/Lake-men, who spoke a language related to that of the Rohirrim in the same way that Old Norse is related to Anglo-Saxon (both are Germanic Languages).   Khudzul is actually closely based upon Hebrew and other Semitic languages in terms of structure, sound, and cultural elements. This was intentional: Tolkien wanted to discuss the issues related to the Jewish diasporal into Europe and their small merchant enclaves within larger Germanic, Celtic, Latin, and Slavic-origined communities. The diaspora of the Dwarves from Erebor after the coming of the Dragon, the "taking jobs wherever they could", them being looked down upon or mistrusted by their human and elf and hobbit neighbours, and their strong desire to take back their ancestral homes are all elements where Tolkien was trying to directly discuss the history of the Jews in Europe – a people that he only had the most high of respect for, as you may read in a letter he wrote to German publishers when they inquired into his ancestry before agreeing to translate and publish The Hobbit. This is before even getting into the superficial appearance-type similarities between Tolkien's Dwarves and the malignant streotypes of Jews – portraying them as short, hairy, greedy, selfish, etc. Of course, remember that this is what Elves and others say of the Dwarves, and as we've seen in some adaptations, such as the Jackson trilogies, Dwarves actually can have quite a range of appearances. And of course, while Dwarven culture places certain customes as higher value than others, Bilbo speaks quite admirably of the dwarves after getting to know them, as any introverted home-body might after first feeling uncomfortable with having to get to know a culture so alien from his own sensibilities. Of course, Tolkien also begrudged allegory, and his Dwarves have a vast history quite unrelated to the history of the Hebrews and the Jews in Diaspora. Applicability is the right term: the Dwarven story lets him raise certain universal questions about cultural relations that other authors might use the history of the Jews in Europe to speak to. But as for the language, Khudzul, it is one of the most fully formed, non-Elvish tongues Tolkien has ever written, and as I said, it is most closely related to Hebrew, not to Norse. Remember that runic-like scripts have appeared as far away removed as the Orkhon Valley of the steppes of Central Asia, where Turkic peoples used a script written on stones quite similar to the way the Norse did. It's not called Runes, but it's essentially the same way of writing. Certain Celtic groups did something similar as well in the British Isles and across Continental Europe, even into Anatolia (where they found a mercenary kingdom that fought for Greek, Persian, and Roman wars). And stories of little people (or at least, shorter people) of the hills or mines are pretty common throughout the world. The Ainu legend of the Koroppokkur in northern Japan carry a very similar concept to that of Dwarves (and also to Gnomes), and they've been called a Dwarven subrace in past editions of D&D through the Oriental Adventures label – the Korobokuru. D&D Dwarven culture even carries a bit of a samurai quality to it, so there are some really cool things you could do with that. The Quinkan of the Aboriginal Australian Dreaming-Time are stone spirits, and one of the types is short and fat. One could decide to play with that culture for them. The point is, Dwarves are what you make of them. The OP wants to do a Celtic/Nordic mix for the race, and that's great. Both the Clets and Norse had legends of Dwarves who lived beneath the earth. It doesn't have to be Moradin and standard D&D fare. That's what makes homebrew games so rich and interesting.
(Reply to #9) The_White_Sorcerer	Dougan_Axehammer wrote:
(Reply to #11) arnwolf666	The_White_Sorcerer wrote:
#13 demon_idol Jun 02, 2015 16:55:56	I have found that one of the first things to do is decide if gods are literally real or if they are believed to be real, but there is no objective cosmological/cosmogenical reality. If they are all real, then its best to create a cosmology and cosmogeny first. This will include the history of how the dwarves came to be, how the hill and mountain dwarves came to be seperate peoples, and then some of the struggles of those two peoples and the heros that emerged from those conflicts.   Going with the idea of using the gods of Norse and Celtic mythology as inspiration for dwarven god-heros, it may be that the mountain dwarves fought giants, and dragons, while the hill dwarves wandered and discovered new lands. So the hill dwarves developed god-heros related to sea fareing, lore, and the crafts, including the craft of war, more than the moutain dwarves whose god-heros were more based on storms, strength in battle, rage, and raw nature.   It could also work that the god-heros of the mountain dwarves just happened to include dwarves that were a lot like Odin, Thor, Freya, Heimdal, etc, while the hill dwarven god-heros were more like Math, Branwen, Pwyll, Gwydion, et. al.   If you are interested in Welsh mythology, I would heartily recommend the Mabinogion tetralogoy by Evangiline Walton. Its great fantasy fiction, and a fun way to familiarize oneself with the Welsh branch of Celtic Mythology.
#14 The_White_Sorcerer Jun 03, 2015 0:23:38	My personal approach when creating the various deities for my homebrew world is to borrow, steal, and plunder. The dwarven pantheon, for example, includes the whole pantheon from Monster Mythology, the new dwarf gods from Races of Stone, and Dennari from the 3e Deities and Demigods. If there are some FR-specific dwarf gods not included in the "core" pantheon I might just throw those in too. So far my dwarven pantheon has a fairly hefty 16 deities.
#15 Mecheon Jun 03, 2015 1:36:02	arnwolf666 wrote:
#16 Marandahir Jun 03, 2015 5:52:06	Ugh. I literaly just spent an hour writing out the Welsh Myths for you and lost it all as Firefox crashed. In any case, I suggest visiting https://web.archive.org/web/20150315011657/http://www.celtnet.org.uk/celtic/ (the website went defunct in May) for Welsh mythological wisdom. It's the best repository of it.