theme for a fantasy campaign

[Agemegos]

I'm thinking about eusocial dwarves, the scale of dwarvish colonies, and the number of children that a woman might have in her lifetime. And I don't like the results I'm getting. Did you see whole dwarvish towns and cities as single colonies with a single queen? Or dwarves not forming big settlements? Or dwarvish settlements as colonies of colonies? The last looks like the only way to get dwarvish cities without huge bloated dwarvish queens giving birth to hundreds of tiny undeveloped spawn. I don't like the monsterqueens, but the eusocial families turn out with very low inter-group co-operation to go with their high intra-group co-operation.

If dwarvish families are producing sterile workers it's because they can't hire labourers. The human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange is sinking into the sand of instinctive co-operation, and I'm getting alien-ness.