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Should they give the option to have a beard with a Female Dwarf?
thevampinator
Member Posts: 307 Arc User
Its in the lore, Female Dwarves can and do grow beards. Maybe not as impressive as a mans but still a beard. I say they give beard options for female dwarves. What do you guys think? Personally I think they should add to female dwarves beards. Would be good for those that want to roleplay a female dwarf with one and it kinda bothers me that they don't have the option.
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In the 2e game I run, one of my favorite NPCs is a bearded female Dwarf named Thanra Rockforge. She's a Thief/Cleric of Vergadain, a shop owner in a mostly human town, and she runs it like a Thief/Cleric of Vergadain running a shop in a human town would run it! Her brother, and partner-in-crime, is a *little* bit more of a stand up fella and is a minor voice of reason sometimes, but she's the brains and the will of the operation. At a distance, some humans have a hard time telling them apart.
She shaved the beard once because everyone kept bugging her about it, but when she did, everyone agreed she looked better WITH the beard!
where he quotes Tolkien as writing, "no Man nor Elf has ever seen a beardless Dwarf - unless he were shaven in mockery, and would then be more like to die of shame... For the Naugrim have beards from the beginning of their lives, male and female alike..."
I don't know much about the history of D&D's lore, but often it seems like it intentionally veers from Tolkien. So it would actually surprise me if their dwarfs did fit his mold.
somewhat forward in their behavior towards females not so adorned." I'm not sure where else it may be mentioned. I'm not sure if it carried over into 2E either. I play it like dwarven women generally shave when in the outside world or when expecting company, but when at home, some shave and some don't.
As Exhibit B, I give you the cover of "A1 - Slave Pits of the Undercity":
That lady on the right, swinging the warhammer, is actually a bearded she-dwarf! I've seen that picture off and on for the last 30 years and never realized that until it was pointed out to me recently. I thought that was just her hair, but if you look closely, it is actually a beard! She's a pre-gen named Elwita in the back of the adventure.
... Umm, I think it should be said that I really don't care about this as much as it may look. I prefer my ladies clean-shaven, just saying something that's a thing is a thing.
While Tolkein can be singled out as a major influence on the early game, they have been moving away from him for a long time.
And he was far from the only influence.
The magic system was famously taken from Jack Vance (to the extent that it was called a "Vancian" magic system), and classic mythology had it's place as well, though with Tolkein also borrowing from classic myth, it led to some credit being given to Tolkein when it wasn't deserved.
Getting people into the game if you are talking about Sidhe or Tuatha De Dannon is a harder sell, never mind getting into specific roleplay with obscure mythological history working in the background or some completely original setting with who knows what races.
The audience was generally familiar with Tolkein, so using a more generic Tolkeinesque elf and dwarf that borrowed more from Norse myth meant that more people that would be inclined to play will know what they are dealing with. That's a level of comfort that would help people get over the hump of the people that would try to bully them for their choice of hobbies, and it meant that there were enough people out there that when the Satanic panic hit there was enough support, enough reasonable people, to stand against it.
As time went on they have added more races and monsters and come up with ways to let players tap into more options, but at the core you have what was always there, and that is a familiar selection that people are comfortable with.
They want to add Dragonborn and maybe eventually Genasi, Assimar (horrible name. Horrible), Warforged and whatever else down the road?
Great.
Using those four and Tieflings as the starting races and then maybe adding Humans, Elves, Half-Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and Half-Orcs down the line?
That, to me, is completely backwards.
In my own world, Aasimar and Tieflings are both the same race (Nephilim), but manifest in different ways and it rarely shows in obvious physical ways. They are closer to Greek demigods, but not as powerful.
Regarding the demonic panic thing, it's hard to blame people. There's a big difference between a concept inspired by folklore or myth and a concept that's made up of stolen essentials and names from an actual, living body of belief that have been given a little twist. It was a stupid move to take something that 57% of the world's population takes seriously and treat it like a school yard joke. It caused problems - still causes problems, and ensured an enormous number of potential players would never even pick the game up.
The matter of religion and faith is not really a conversation to have here, but I think that the concept of there being devils and demons in the game is not a bad one in and of itself.
They are there as enemies. They are things that the player characters should be fighting.
Now maybe some people would say that it trivializes things, but if those same people can argue that "pretending to be an evil character" is leading kids to evil then wouldn't they have to concede that "pretending to fight demons and devils" is a good thing?
If there were flaws I would say that they were:
1) Inserting Devil and Demon lords, using the names that they did. Using "close but not quite" names like Modeus, Orkas, Demogorg, etc, or just coming up with original names for those beings could have helped bypass a lot of attention and issues.
2) Supporting evil player characters in the rules. Just take that out. Play groups that were so inclined would have been able to play as they wished anyway, but no one could claim that the game was "pushing" players to play as evil characters.
Not that I think that the game was anyway, but the assassin class wasn't a good look.
Anyway, this is diverging from the topic at hand, so....
Anyway, it was a slow growth of hybrids throughout D&D history. Neverwinter simply picked the core races plus the most popular hybrids to start with, but then, yeah, they kinda forgot to add any more races. Put me in for a Gnome and a Lizard Man!!
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Re: Satanic Panic,
Yeah, they could have played it a little more vague, it would have been "smart", but I'm glad they didn't. The rest of the game is built on real world myths like elves and dragons and wizards, and back then the real world mythologies of the Norse, Greeks, Egyptians, etc. were used too, it would have been odd to just declare Judeo-Christian mythology off limits.
Beyond that, they threw in an occasional pentagram, inverted cross, or "real world" magic symbol, which for some was disturbing, but for others awesome as HAMSTER! For a little context though, back in the 70's, the occult was all the rage. They simply threw in what was going on at the time. And it worked. When the media got ahold of it in the early 80's, D&D sales skyrocketed. It caused a lot of people to get dirty looks and have sit down and have "the talk" with their parents about how they weren't actually devil worshippers, but for most, that made it even cooler.
Keep in mind that when this stuff was being put in place, these were just regular people working out of their kitchen on a typewriter making all this stuff up, they didn't have focus groups and a "cultural compliance" department. Also, many of them, Gary Gygax included, were quite religious and they never saw it as a problem.
I probably shouldn't be continuing to derail like this, but I'm glad things were the way they were in the game. When everyone spends their time filing the rough edges off, everything becomes dull.
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Anyway, back to what really matters...
The mutton chop beard for example would be perfect for a female dwarf. Wished the photo would show up bigger but its big enough to show that beard at least. Anyways had trouble linking it to the forums.
I think the artists who take the bolder approach achieve better results, and their designs look really amazing.
One obvious example is the use of female pronouns in the rulebooks; "She would roll...", "Her character will...", etc.
Another was that the female Dwarves would be "pretty", so as to make them a more appealing choice for the ladies, and I am 99.9% certain that this is spelled out in one of the books that they released in advance of 4E that showed some of the artwork and that talked about the ideas behind the new system.
Bearded ladies are a sideshow thing. If a girl wants to play a dwarf she doesn't need a bunch of grief from the boys about her beard.
So female dwarves were still stocky, but unlike the males who generally have a squarish shape, they also had curves and no beards*.
Another separation from Tolkein, which to me is a good thing.
The default setting for D&D used to be Greyhawk, for 4E became Forgotten Realms (a decision which I didn't like, but not a conversation to be had here), and is whatever it is for 5E, but whatever it is is most certainly not Middle-earth.
If some DM somewhere wants to play in Middle Earth then they can use their knowledge of that world to design their campaign around, buy the "Adventures in Middle-earth" books, or even track down the old MERP books.
They should not look to the core rules of D&D expecting them to be a perfect match, and that includes things like race descriptions and whether Dwarven women have beards or not, just as someone that goes over to play LotRO should not expect Dragonborn to be a playable race.