Dwarven Architecture

Evolutionary psychology has been drawing on the backs of napkins for a while now, and one of my favorite theories concerns the genetic basis for the appreciation of beauty.  Why is beauty?

The rationale is this: protohumans were preyed upon by big predators, and so they benefited from living in places where they can see a long distance without interruption by bushes or tall grass.  Open spaces, instead of deep forests.  And trees gave us fruit (one of our favorite foods) as well as a refuge and a good viewpoint.

And so protohumans that liked living in those locations prospered, while the ones that liked living in tangled forests got eaten by thylacodons.  And that evolutionary motivator that made us move into rolling grasslands with a few tall trees, that motivator was beauty, or at least a certain predisposition toward a certain kind of appreciation.

One one hand, it's poetic.  Beauty saved our lives.  Trees plucked us out of the mouths of tigers.

On the other hand, it's dehumanizing.  The only reason we enjoy parks is because of some ancient genetic imperative in the back of our brains that has long since outlived its usefulness.

But that's just speculative.  Let's talk about dwarves, which are totally factual.

Dwarves are not just short, hairy, drunk dudes.  Dwarves are alien.

This means that they have alien notions of honor, of family, and of beauty.  They will disagree with you about what a city is supposed to do, and how you are supposed to interact with it.  They do not go to parks to relax.

Some Facts About Dwarves

1. Dwarves love to work.  Or more accurately, they get very uncomfortable if they ever feel lazy.

2. Dwarves lack creativity in all its many-splendored forms.

I would like to add a third: Dwarves suffer from agoraphobia.  They dislike open spaces, and are happiest when they are touching a wall.  Or better yet, two walls.  Things that are far away are ugly.

Put these three things together, and it becomes pretty easy to imagine a Dwarven city.

I drew this!

There are no long, straight streets.  It's not full agoraphobia, because dwarves don't find long distances scary or even uncomfortable.  They just find them displeasing, the same way that we find caves ugly.

I mean, caves are super cool, but they're very different from lounging in the shade in my backyard.  I can appreciate the cave, but I'm comfortable in my backyard.  I wouldn't want to live in a cave.

Dwarves feel the same way about the surface world.

The streets of their cities are dense, knotted things.  It is displeasing to see a great distance, and other dwarves look unappealing from so far away.  Therefore, all the roads are long chains of right angles, thick and monotonous.  It's not that they want to lose themselves in their city, they just don't want to be confronted with it.

The halls are perfectly square in cross-section.  The duplex blocks are the same plus-sign shape, imitations of an older pattern they inherited from their parent city.

Some human: "Wouldn't you be able to get places faster with straight streets?"

Some dwarf: "I don't know, wouldn't you be able to stop wasting space if you stopped planting trees in the middle of your fucking sidewalks?"

Without exception, the rooms are nearly all 20' x 20' squares.  This is the ideal size for a dwarf.  It's enough for a bed, a work table that doubles as a dinner table, and their choice of a giant hamster wheel or bench press.

The room size is standardized, like a tatami mat.  Even their larger rooms tend to be multiples of this same unit.  It makes it easier to fit rugs.

Dwarves love rugs.  Each rug represents a terrific amount of work, presenting in a fashion where its easy to see.  Every knot and loop was woven by hand.  

They also like how they can wear the rugs out by running around on them.

And off on the right side of the map you can see the winding.  This is a long path that has been made longer by turning it into a zig-zag.  It takes about 4 hours to walk, and it exists so that dwarves can take a nice long walk after work.  (Dwarves do very good on hikes.)

Dwarven labyrinths serve the same purpose: to stave off dwarven restlessness through physical activity.

At the far end of the winding is a statue of a dwarven angel, worn down into a humanoid lump by generations of dwarves chiseling their prayers into the angel's surface.  It looks like a beatific potato with minuscule script covering every inch.  (Dwarves are very good at writing small.)  Anyone who leaves a suitable offering will get +2 to their saves.  This lasts until they rest or break something.

And their love of work extends to their walls, too.  The walls of an old dwarven city are covered with chiseled lines, each only only a few millimeters apart.  They are patterned after the natural lines in the rock, or they whirl around each other like a fingerprint, or else an endless grid of squares, or else they are just the same labyrinth, endlessly patterned throughout the whole city.

They like to brag that their tessellated streets are covered in the same tessellations that the streets themselves have.  So in a way, each section of each wall is a map of that tessellation pattern of that part of the city.

Dwarven cities are insanely loud places.  That's why they shout all the time.  (During Hammer Day, you can hear them on the surface.)

Dwarven City Names

 Ancestry is as important to dwarven cities as it is to dwarves.  There are two main schools of dwarven city nomenclature.

In the first, cities are named according to their ancestry, according to where that city's founders came from.  For example: 

Hive 9, Son of Hive 1, Son of Hive 1, Son of Hive 24, Son of the Invincible Walls of the Underlord

Or Hive 9-1-1-24, for short.

Alternatively, cities are named according to a system of angles and distances, according to the angle formed between magnetic north and their founding city.  For example:

Hive Tangent Nine-fourths, Of the Fifth Parallel and the Third Sectorant

This is why it is so common to see Dwarven surveying teams in the Underworld.  They're not uncommon on the surface either.  Much better lines of sight up there, unfortunately.