Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
Are dwarves susceptible to stationary banditry? Can a dwarven warrior of skill and charisma gain the ability to raid other dwarves and extract their wealth, and over time, be transformed into a king. Or do dwarves have enough ability to defend their own mines so that a stationary bandit won't survive, or won't make enough to stay in operation?
|
Historically, most victims of roving banditry have been farmers, who live on flat lands and wealth in the form of cows, sheep and grain/flour, and town-dwellers.
Farms have essentially no defensive structures, while towns can have walls, which provide some protection.
But it seems to me that if Dwarves live underground, in fairly narrow tunnels, or even tunnels that are wide most of the way but which calculatedly narrow down to tactical "choke points" every few kilometers, might be a lot less vulnerable to roving bandits, and so have less need for kings, at least in the sense of a tax-extracting protector.
Maybe the problem for Dwarves is that the dig too far, too deep, too quickly? In some worlds, digging the wrong way might uncover supernatural threats such as Balrogs, while in more-or-less mundane worlds you're likely to hit an aquifier (if that is the right term?) or a lava vein, and get your tunnels flooded, with lots of death and destruction.
If so, then what Dwarves need aren't warrior-kings to protect them from military threats, but rather lords with a certain careful and restrained attitude, to counter the normal impulse to dig, and dig, and dig some more. Not to prevent digging, but to increase the likelihood that digging is safe, and is done in directions that are reasonably assumed to be safe to dig in.