[balzacq]

The last time I ran a (french) vanilla (with sprinkles) fantasy campaign, I started with the question, "Why do humans inhabit the fertile valleys, while elves, dwarves and orcs inhabit the deep forest, high mountains, and waste places respectively?"

Since this was a world without strong proof of creator or interventionist gods, I figured that all the demi-human races were in fact other species of genus Homo, or other genera of family Hominidae, that were better at competing against sapiens than IRL hominids were (and thus surviving until historical times) but still got pushed out to the lands Homo sapiens didn't want.

The Dwarves were, therefore, a cave-dwelling impoverished mountain tribe until relatively recently in campaign history -- in the last 800 years or so they absorbed and/or invented enough technology to get really good at hard rock mining and discovered that they were sitting on top of an enormous mother lode of metals (an asteroid strike, pushed up by plate tectonics to the top of a mountainous plateau).

That's when the ancient Dwarven Kingdom took over the entire plateau for a few centuries, and when the stereotype of the gold-hoarding dwarf was first set. The entire economy of the plateau changed as high-quality metals (ore at first and then processed goods) flooded out and crafts, technology and luxury goods poured in. After a while, humans started migrating up into the mountains to try to get at some of the riches themselves, and at the same time one of the great orcish overpopulation surges happened and orcs in great numbers rampaged through the plateau and forced the Dwarven Kingdom back onto its heartland and the dwarves themselves into a more defensive underground existence.

Therefore: (1) there's no reason to assume that dwarves prefer to live entirely underground, and certainly not in working mines; (2) they must have had a means of subsistence before they learned to dig deep; and (3) their subsistence had to be something they could grow at high altitude and in the cold. Meat was from guinea pigs, marmots, or other furry rodents, specially bred to large size and higher meat content.

I see dwarven cave complexes dug into high inaccessible mountainsides surrounded by terraced fields of turnips, carrots, or other roots (I wasn't sure whether potatoes existed on this continent or not), supplemented by berries and oats and barley where they would grow. High valleys would be heavily fortified at their mouths by means of walls, hanging reservoirs set to flood, deliberate avalanche setups, etc.

I figured that each major mountain/valley complex would be the home of a major dwarven clan. Orthogonal to the clans would be a guild system of occupations; clan exogamy would be accomplished by joining a guild according to interest and aptitude and marrying within it.

That part of dwarven society that had moved permanently underground would also have fungus chambers, rodent warrens, and blind-fish lakes. I joked that dwarven traveling rations were "pressed fungus and rat jerky."