Dwarves Don't Use Axes

[Formless]

Problem, madd0ct0r-- it was already note by Alyrium when this whole bit came up that his underground cities are of a completely different construction than mines (better ventilation, bigger passageways and tunnels, more centrally organized, etc.). It obviously is possible to make mines with Renaissance tech, that's how Europe got all its steel. But that does not necessarily flow into his kind of grand subterranean cities, which I maintain are unrealistic in their ambition.

Here is more or less the kind of society I was envisioning when I originally wrote my objections to tunnel fighting. Barring exotic pre-existing subterranean underworlds like the Underdark of Forgotten Realms or Exile from the Avernum games (because, dammit, it will always be Exile to me!), most dwarves would probably settle for living above ground, even if they are miners (consider that mining is the kind of hard labor that is more frequently done by those of low economic status, not elites). Smiths would almost certainly prefer above ground living since it would give easy access to water, especially flowing water in streams and rivers that could be harnessed via water wheels to power labor saving machinery. Buildings carved directly into or under the mountain are expensive projects that would be seen mainly wherever elites are able to pay for the construction of a palace, a religious institution decides to do a major project (since religious institutions have been known to do crazy expensive projects like that) or a fortification was needed, usually protecting valuable assets such as the mouths of a mine or strategic locations around the mountain. So think more like Machu Picchu with Scandinavian style mountain halls owned by the kings and nobles, and (of course) mines nearby securing the wealth.

Naturally, tunnel fighting in such a scenario wouldn't happen very often, because most targets are above ground and those that aren't are going to have well known and protected entryways assuming the builder or owner is relatively competent.

[The Yosemite Bear]

also in D&D purple worms and certain insects can be domesticated to build Moria sections

[jollyreaper]

Formless, I'm the last person to throw reason to the wind. And I prefer my fantasy to have a plausible feel. It's all a question of what you suspend your disbelief from.

In Lord of the Rings you can accept the idea of hobbits, dark lords, magic rings and the like and question why they didn't just fly the thing to the mountain with eagles. "because you wouldn't have a story otherwise" doesn't cut it. I accept the idea that the fell beasts would have knocked the eagles from the sky and that it was dumb luck that the hobbits were sneaking in at the same time Strider assaults the gates and even all of that would have been in vain if Gollum hadn't been so bitey.

I do agree with questioning dwarf tropes and that subterranean living would be pretty hard to make work right. Even if the dwarves lack human psychological needs, it's still difficult work. And the idea of surface farms in mountain valleys make a lot of sense.

You ultimately either accept the tropes and try to find a way to justify them or you subvert them and find a way to make them work better. Maybe the dwarves live in fortifications carved into the side of mountains that are a mix of crazy Buddhist monastery and castle. The ignorant traveler thought dwarves lived underground and his hosts explain that they work underground and have their strongest fortifications there but prefer clear air and sun just like all other mortals.

The traveler could ask about the endless underworld and his hosts explain that is one example a continent over. The now extinct advanced race mined deply using god magic and cleared out thousands of miles of shafts and tunnels. The dwarves moved in later and are growing rich just off of what the advanced ones left behind. Because the tunnels have never been fully mapped, there are many ways to the surface and all manner of foul beasties have made their way in over time. But because that dwarf fortress is so famous, people tend to assume all dwarven delvings have a similar scope and threats.

Hell, even basic dungeon crawls don't make a lot of sense. Dungeons are very small. You would no more get lost in one than you would get lost in a basement! So you either reject the concept and point that our in your story or embrace it and make people believe. That's assuming you have the chops to pull it off.

Here's another example for you, dragon riders. Is that awesome? Fuck yeah! Practical? Not really. A knight on horseback is necessary and fearsome. The horse won't fight on its own and doesn't have fire breath and claws. Lance, bow, the knight has reach. On a dragon? He's a bit redundant. And a drsgonlance just shouldn't be necessary. If you assume dragons are immune to their own flame, one dragon could still toast another's rider. And their claws would be excellent weapons in the air much like a raptor's.

All that being said, if you want dragon riders, go for it. But you'll have to do something special to make them seem plausible. In a standard fantasy world they would be more like the fell beasts. Prestige mounts, useful for commanders who need to get from here to there in a hurry, but the rider is not a knight and doesn't assist the combat prowess of his mount in any way.

[LaCroix]

All that being said, if you want dragon riders, go for it. But you'll have to do something special to make them seem plausible. In a standard fantasy world they would be more like the fell beasts. Prestige mounts, useful for commanders who need to get from here to there in a hurry, but the rider is not a knight and doesn't assist the combat prowess of his mount in any way.

Apart from pointing the pointy and bite-y and fiery parts of the dragon at the correct targets, you mean?

I personally would call everyone who's profession is to handle a multi-ton, armoured, claws the size of your arm, flying, flame-throwing raptor creature that could kill him by just accidentally burping in his direction not only a knight, but a HERO!

Full plate mail (might even be asbestos lined) would be a necessary precaution, if just to survive if your 'pet' wants to CUDDLE a bit!

[jollyreaper]

If dragon are no smarter than horses then the rider would be like a pilot and keep the beast doing what is useful, yes. If dragons are sentient and can take orders, no rider would be necessary. The rider would essentially be a passenger.

So perhaps you could say no thinking dragon would submit to being a war mount or fighting in a human conflict. Ridden dragons are the dumb ones. Or maybe they don't become intelligent for a good numer of years.

Still, none of this justifies dragonlances though I still love the idea. It's like combat mecha. Awesome yet unlikely.

[Sea Skimmer]

A dragon could easily be smart enough to take orders, but not really able to grasp the intricacies of combat and need directions. After all humans normally have a chain of command in the first place for combat even at a very low level because people focused on killing will quickly loose track of the bigger picture. A rider would also act as an observer, very handy if you had to worry about aerial opposition while attacking ground targets.

[Terralthra]

If I recall correctly, dragon-riders were a response by the Good forces to the depredations of the evil dragon air forces on infantry. In order to combat them with an advantage, the metallic dragons fought them in the air, but to give them an advantage, they took riders with weapons enchanted to be especially deadly to dragons. It was a response to a threat, and not really a bad response.

Problem: dragons are raining fire, acid, poison gas, etc., down on our armies.
Response: well, we need a weapon specifically deadly to dragons (who are resistant to most magic, can fly out of range of infantry ranged weaponry while still doing damage to the ground below, etc.). So, said weapon can't be pure spells, must be able to possess equal range and mobility as the dragons it targets.

Another dragon meets those requirements, along the same logic as "the best anti-fighter defense is another fighter." However, assuming equal amounts and bare combat efficiency, that's an attrition strategy which only combats the threat, rather than ending it.

So, you add something to your dragons to make them more combat effective, like, say a big-ass lance enchanted to slay dragons. Putting that in one of your dragons' claws wouldn't be very effective (throws flight badly off-balance, etc.), so you need to put it centrally mounted somewhere...like on the dragon's back. But it can't aim that itself very well, so you put a dude with a saddle there, because you already have a bunch of knights who know how to aim a very similar weapon from a mounted position.

[Formless]

You ultimately either accept the tropes and try to find a way to justify them or you subvert them and find a way to make them work better.

*offers required reading*

Look, jollyreaper, if you spend enough time thinking about this stuff away from internet influence you learn a few things. Its never about "tropes". Ever. The more you think in tropes, the more your intellectual capacity, in terms of both creativity and analytic skill, dies. Because you don't "subvert" tropes. You build a world. And if you have worked hard enough at it, idiots on that website and elsewhere online will misinterpret what you are doing as a "subversion" of some platonic form known as the "trope". Its a meaningless idea that rots the brain.

There is a "trope" for dwarves that appears valid because it appears so often in the High Fantasy genre post-Tolkien and the theft of all his ideas by other authors, notably the creators of D&D. There is also a fairy tale dwarf with completely different characteristics more like that of... well, a fairy, obviously. And there is the Nordic mythology and its dwarves. And then there is the more general concept of the Little People, which you can see in literature such as The Wizard of Oz. Completely different still. So what am I supposed to subvert? Nordic myth? Tokien's stylization of Nordic myth? The dwarves of folk stories and fairy tales? The Munchkins of Oz?

None of the above, unless to write intentional parody. If I call them dwarves, it is because I am paying homage to a literary/genre tradition... but the onus is still on me to develop the archetype regardless of whether I am consciously trying to subvert someone's use of it. In the same way, even if I am consciously invoking the archetype of the Epic Hero, I can't call him Luke Skywalker and say he is from Tattooine. I still have to make him my own character.

As such, I see no need to steal Tarn Adams' concepts and have dwarves literally living in underground fortresses all the time.

Hell, even basic dungeon crawls don't make a lot of sense. Dungeons are very small. You would no more get lost in one than you would get lost in a basement! So you either reject the concept and point that our in your story or embrace it and make people believe. That's assuming you have the chops to pull it off.

You just lost me. First, because "dungeons" in fiction and gaming are usually not dungeons at all, they actually represent a vast array of architecture with many purposes. The name is just a convenient description of its role in the game or story. Second, who honestly gets lost in a dungeon crawl? Most dungeons in games are fairly straightforward to explore, and most dungeoneers in fiction (Eg. Indiana Jones) are professional enough that they are more concerned with the obstacles in their way than with getting lost. In fact, the only one I can think of where getting lost was a serious concern was the Labyrinth of the Minotaur of Greek legend, and that was an intentional part of its design.

All that being said, if you want dragon riders, go for it. But you'll have to do something special to make them seem plausible. In a standard fantasy world they would be more like the fell beasts. Prestige mounts, useful for commanders who need to get from here to there in a hurry, but the rider is not a knight and doesn't assist the combat prowess of his mount in any way.

You are over thinking this. As long as the story surrounding the dragon riders has a good narrative drive and focus, you don't have to do a whole lot more than that that and people will suspend their disbelief. Moreover, trying too hard can be counterproductive because if you give too many details those details can make it fall apart. Just look at any Star Trek script where they tried to explain tangential technobabble with a straight face. At least three out of four times it weakens the script rather than improving it.

To take an example of conservation of detail used properly, look no farther than the inventor of the dragonlance... Dragonlance. In there, we are told that the titular weapons are magic. It works, because there is narrative drive behind the heros' quest. No farther explanation or justification for why there are dragonlances are necessary (although they can be made as others here have done). The story is in the adventure, not the details of military logic and tactics.

If you do decide realism adds something to the story like atmosphere, you need to do so carefully to avoid those problems. That is where threads like this one come from.

[jollyreaper]

The thing I really like about tvtropes is it helps to determine which ideas are new and which have been done countless times before. It's difficult to keep up with all the material out there and it serves as a reality check. "Hai, wouldn't it be awesome if...?!" Oh, wait, I can answer it for myself. It's been done a thousand times before.

[Formless]

See, that's one of the ways in which it destroys your creativity. I don't even want to know, because for one thing I don't actually know how representative of a given trend a Tropes page is, even after reading the examples list. The page could just draw out people with such an interest that they bring in as many examples as they can without regard for how notable they are. Hell, just look at the ratio of anime to everything else (especially written media). The site has a well known bias on that point.

Second, if you read those examples lists with an eye for works you are actually familiar with, you quickly learn that many examples in a given list are half assed bullshit. There is the subversion (also, inversion, aversion, and deconstruction) fallacy I described above-- their expectations are equated to the author's intent. That's shitty analysis in so many ways. Sometimes you find examples on a list that taken together with others quickly reveal the "trope" to be so shallow as to be not worth giving two fucks about (such as any character archetype that ignores motive and personality). And there are some examples that are simple bias on the part of contributors, especially whenever its a "subjective" trope. Even if you don't read with an eye for things you are familiar with, you find far too many instances of examples that were shy about the details. Assuming any details are given, and not "Character X is this. Sooooooo much this."

Thirdly, there is an old adage which I can only paraphrase "there are no new ideas, only fresh execution." Among writers, its well known that you may only ever have a totally unique idea once in your life if ever. Most relevant themes have been done by someone. There has for a long time been recognized a few (seven, I think) basic plots that most works follow. Similarly, there are about twenty? fifty? or so (depending on who you ask) traditional "dramatic situations" (aka. conflicts) that almost every story follows, because we are human and because of tradition. Even as far back as the Greeks, they were categorizing plays by their intended emotions, and folk stories by their intended morals and philosophies, etc.. It doesn't matter, though, because a skilled writer can make an old idea seem new to someone, and hold the attention of even those who are familiar with previous ways this has been done before. Recognizing this is why Tolkien is a beloved author in fantasy and literary circles alike, and you aren't.

[madd0ct0r]

I started a separate thread for the mining sidetrack.

Interestingly, I've also just realised in the Hobbit the dwarves use a whole variety of weapons, not just axes.

Bows, Arrows, Swords and sheilds and mattocks. Can anyone remember what weapon Thorin chose in his last battle?