Review: The Quintessential Dwarf

Review: The Quintessential Dwarf

Many times before, I said that I love GURPS because any RPG book is a GURPS book. Back in the D&D 3.0 days, when the OGL was reigning supreme, and many third-party publishers were churning out tons of books of dubious quality, I haven’t really found any use for these books in my D&D games. Sure, some of the stuff there looked nice, but it was awful from the game balance perspective. Today, I’d like to talk about The Quintessential Dwarf, part of the Quintessential series by Mongoose Publishing. Mongoose Publishing is no small player in the RPG scene, and they produced tons of D&D content. The Quintessential series is quite large, with each book detailing a particular class or race, with some classes or races even getting two books.

I’ve always loved dwarves in D&D. There’s something of a running gag in my group that whenever someone decides to roll a random character, it always happens to be a dwarf. The most popular dwarven character concept is something every one of you have seen – a warrior with an axe and a shield, rude, grumpy, bearded, stubborn, and fond of drink. You may roll your eyes and say that it’s boring, but I think otherwise – while such character doesn’t break any new ground, it’s fun and easy to play. I’ve played such dwarves, I’ve had my players make such dwarves, and I’ve even had parties with multiple such characters. I’ve had a player make more non-standard dwarf characters too, such as a dwarf ninja with an axe that actually made sense in-universe, or a desert dwarf merchant.

 

The first chapter of every Quintessential book is devoted to character concepts specifically for those people who are looking for new ideas. What’s good for us is that concepts and ideas are something universal and system-agnostic, so they would work in GURPS as well. Each concept has a description that also includes a paragraph on why would such character become an adventurer and some roleplaying advice, which is nice. Here, for example, you can find the blighted dwarf from a clan that was cut off from other dwarves. Such dwarf is socially inept and born with deformities, a true outcast among his kind. You can make a dwarven exile who was banished from his community for some transgression. Or, perhaps, your family didn’t contribute to the community, and had their children, including your character, become guild serfs? There is definitely some stuff to inspire you here. The Prestige Dwarf chapter basically continues the same topic – dwarven prestige classes that can serve as character concepts outside of D&D too. You get stuff ranging from a cannoneer to a forge mage to a deep druid. Honestly, nothing that we haven’t seen before in the official D&D books, aside from, perhaps, the cannoneer.

 

Next up, we have Tricks of the Race. In D&D terms, this chapter mostly talks about the applications of skills in very dwarven ways, but also introduces some new concepts. For example, it talks about brewing herbal dwarven ales, and even provides recipes. Aside from being intoxicating, these ales have additional minor beneficial effects. I don’t remember seeing this in D&D books, but I do remember magical ales in Pathfinder. This chapter also describes tunnel fighting that probably could be adapted as a martial style in GURPS. All the maneuvers described in this book are combat options in GURPS that are available to everyone. For example, the book tells you that when fighting an opponent with a long weapon in a narrow tunnel, you can pin the weapon to the wall. That would work like a weapon bind from Fantastic Dungeon Grappling.

                While this chapter does not introduce any new skills, it introduces new uses for old skills. For example, refining metal with the Alchemy skill. What’s funny is that it can be ported to GURPS almost as-is, without any changes. If you have suitable equipment and time, you may use Alchemy to increase a metal’s DR, HP, or make it somewhat flexible, which provides DR but decreases damage. Nice. There’s also an interesting use of Intimidation – when you lose a certain number of Hit Points, you may roll a free Intimidation check, showing off how you ignore pain. That’d be a great perk in GURPS, something akin to the perk that gives you a free Intimidation attempt after you kill an enemy.

 

The next chapter is titled Tools of the Dwarves. It’s all about the equipment, obviously. And I have to say, it has some interesting stuff. While armor blades is nothing new, you have such things as the axe-bladed crossbow that can be used in melee, or the bolt driver – a spring-loaded weapon that propels a very heavy bolt over a very short distance. There’s also the springspear that can be triggered to punch out at a longer range. It can do so only once before if must be reset. I think these are some neat ideas, and I will port them to GURPS one day. The chapter also introduces the runecannons – dwarven firearms. Despite their name, they are nonmagical in nature. What makes them different from normal firearms is that they can be adjusted by the user to increase accuracy, damage, or range at the cost of something else. Yet again, this sounds cool, and I’ll probably adapt it for my games.

 

Next up, we have a chapter with new dwarven subraces. We have cliff dwarves that live near the surface and build their settlements into the cliff faces. Devil dwarves are basically dwarven tieflings. Rage dwarves are an extremely aggressive offshoot of the dwarven race. Sacred dwarves are half-dwarves half-earth elementals. Silverbore dwarves belong to a dwarven clan that managed to dig into the Ethereal Plane and carve out their own demiplane. Aside from the silverbore dwarves, there’s nothing particularly interesting here that we haven’t seen before. Cliff and rage dwarves could simply be cultural variations and not subraces.

 

The Dwarven Magic chapter talks about, well, dwarven magic. It introduces rune magic that acts as temporary or permanent item enchantment or single-use scrolls. This is nothing new, even in D&D, but we have to take into account the fact that this is a D&D 3.0 book, and in that edition, rune magic was pretty barebones. If you’d like to see my take on rune magic in GURPS, you can check the appropriate video. Alternatively, read the Symbol Magic chapter of GURPS Thaumatology.

                Aside from that, there’s a subchapter on deconstructing magical items. Basically, dwarven enchanters may learn to disenchant a magical item and use that energy to power another enchantment. This sort of enchantment recycling is pretty nice, and would be easy to replicate in GURPS.

                Speaking of magical items, the book also introduces two new item types. The first one is arcanomech prosthetics. While the concept is cool, it makes you think – why would anyone bother to craft such an item instead of paying a priest to regrow your lost limb? The book says that there are some crippling injuries you cannot recover from with magic, but I actually do not remember anything like that in terms of mechanics. I guess to justify the existence of arcanomech prosthetics, you could introduce a clan that renounced the dwarven pantheon and has no priests, or something like that. The second item type is the ancestral artefact. Basically, a soul of a dwarf preserved in an item. Something like a variant of an intelligent item. You can already do that in GURPS.

 

The next chapter talks about dwarven religion. Obviously, the canonical D&D dwarven pantheon is not open content, so the author here had to come up with something new. He reworked the pantheon into a triumvirate of gods – the Miner, the Smith, and the Hidden Mother. So, if you’d like to change things up a little bit and retire Moradin, Clangeddin, and their kin, this is one way to do it. I won’t. I like Moradin.

 

The next chapter is titled Mines, Smelters, and Forges. And now, we have something interesting that I haven’t seen in D&D. First, it talks in great detail about mining – how you survey the site, determine what ores or gemstones are present, stake a claim, guard the mine, and, of course, actually dig the shafts and tunnels. There is even a bunch of random event tables related to tunnel digging. In GURPS, I believe you only have two pages on mining and excavation in GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3, but the rules from the Quintessential Dwarf could easily be adapted to expand the existing rules.

                GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3 has less than a page about smelting. To be completely honest, the rules from the Quintessential Dwarf say pretty much the same thing, but using more words. However, there is some info that isn’t found in GURPS there, so it still may be useful. Also, for those who like exotic fantasy materials, it provides a bunch of new ones.

               

Next up, we have a short chapter with new monsters. They aren’t monsters that your dwarf would fight, but monsters that your dwarf would use. There are three dwarven mounts – deep crawler, mule serpent, and boulder beetle; and three companion animals that also have other uses in the dwarven societies – oilbird, dire tuatara, and cave caecilian. I found it interesting that dwarves boil young oilbirds to produce cooking oil. That’s kind of morbid, but fitting.

               

The final chapter talks about the dwarven holds – where they are built, why they are built, and how they are built. The most interesting and useful part to me is the list of various structures with dimensions and even costs, and the list of required occupations and salaries for professionals required to run a dwarven hold. This is good character inspiration material.

 

The Designer’s Notes are very nice, as they always are in these books – this is something consistent in this series. Overall, this book is a mixed bag. There’s quite a lot of stuff that is already described in the official D&D books, and even some of the new stuff isn’t very novel. However, there also are some interesting parts that may give you character, adventure, or worldbuilding ideas. As always, I grade them not as D&D books, but as GURPS or system-agnostic books. In that regard, I would rate it 6/10 – it’s not bad, but it’s not spectacular either. For example, the dwarven society is not described at all – for that, I suggest reading Races of Stone instead.