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The Desertification of the Dwarven Homeworld - a result of their sun getting hotter?

It is an interesting sequence of events. I did not follow all of the thread from the beginning, but I tried to keep up, especially with the last post. Some concepts to consider is what these events would do to the dwarven culture. Did they lose massive amounts of lives, cultures, and diversity during the divine war? did they have any hand in the destruction or take sides or did they fight against both sides, and what lessons were learned from that effort or lack thereof? With such great upheaval and dramatic change from apocalyptic-like historic events, I would imagine the culture of those who survived would have kept very strict, authoritarian-type governance, at least at first. Major attempts to preserve culture (a question to ask is whether the dwarven culture was diverse before the divine war and if it continued to be after), traditions and strong aversion to change - or the opposite of wandering survivalists who have lost all records of their past and only know oral traditions that emphasize flexibility and survival. After the many years of living underground, have they learned to flourish, or do they still struggle living underground. Are they united in their struggles or do they have infights and diversity struggles with different ideologies? As an example of a potentially conflict in ideology, did the divine war lead the dwarven culture to fear and revere the dwarven gods more, or did it push the dwarves to hate and revile the gods? Another question I have would be, after so many years underground, do the dwarves still desire to live above ground, if given the chance, or even if the ground recovers from desertification, would they still prefer living underground?

It is intruiging for you could take it so many ways. Perhaps it was one single family (or small group) who 'discovered" the way underground and all "modern-day" dwarves descend from that family/group, or you could have whole cities escape and different cultural hubs revolve around the survivors of those different cities - like dwarven clans, each with their own particular culture, style, and ideology.

Oh, and as far as cause - if you have gods fighting, perhaps as you said, you could use supernatural events. Some ideas I have are firestorms, asteroids, acid rain, poison fog.... another idea is that perhaps the world desertificated because plant life died off. In example, ancient warfare, they used to sow salt into the ground after they razed it and burned everything down - and the large quantity of salt in the soil will cause the land to remain barren for a very long time - - - perhaps something akin to salting the land occurred globally in the divine wars. Akin to that idea, perhaps the atmosphere became thicker, perhaps due to the increased dust in the air that along with dust storms and higher temperatures, the air flow of the planet dwindled down or stagnated, which led to rain not traveling much further than where it originated. These are just a few ideas shot in the wind, however, I do not know how solid the science would be behind that - especially since it's on a global scale.

There's a lot of great stuff in here, actually. Your suggestions about modern Dwarves being descended from a single family reminded me of Noah's Ark, which made me realize that there might be some fun ways to have the story of the Dwarven planet feature some parallels to the story of the Flood. It could be that the Dwarven Deities warned the Dwarves to get underground before a certain point but only a small number of them actually listened as a majority had turned their backs on the Dwarven Deities. As a result, when the catastrophe hit the planet, only a small number of Dwarves actually survived because they'd actually moved underground.

As for the cultural impact of these events, I had been planning on Dwarven cultures being, at present, republics of the Greco-Roman varieties, though with the added element of powerful Guilds which acted as large voting blocs. I could see this being something that got started in the aftermath of the Divine War, with the Guilds originally being founded to ensure that people got all the necessary training they needed to perform various trades that were essential to the survival of Dwarven societies. So, you'd have the Mining Guild for carving out new spaces for underground cities to expand, the Blacksmith Guild for metal workers, the Farming Guild for the underground farms (which will be a magical form of hydroponics in some cases,) and so forth. Over time, however, the Guilds began to use their influence to decide who did and did not get to work in certain trades and abuse their power in other ways. Think of it like a combination of corrupt labor unions and criminal syndicates. The Guilds hold a ton of sway over who gets to be in charge of Dwarven societies. Thus, rulers tend to spend the first part of their administration paying off all the people they bribed into getting a particular Guild to vote them into office.

I do know that once access to the Transitory Planes became available, some of the Dwarves abandoned the Dwarven Homeworld, hoping to find a better life above ground on another world. Ironically, most of them would make the Plane of Earth their home, though I hasten to add that the Plane of Earth has Shell Worlds in it. These are planet-sized chambers that are like Dyson Shells, complete with Sun Portals providing illumination, a day/night cycle, and weather patterns. Thus, one can live "above ground" while still being "under ground" on the Plane of Earth, which is mostly solid rock.

That's all I have time for, now, but thanks for the feedback! It's given me plenty of food for thought!
 
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