Pathfinder Chronicles - Gazetteer - Asamnet

Pathfinder Chronicles
4
Dwarf Elf Human Half-Orc Half-Elf Gnome Halfling
The following races are found throughout the Inner Sea
region and make excellent choices for player characters.
Sidebars throughout describe the human ethnicities.
Dwarves
Dwarves divide their history into three epochs. The first
covers the original subterranean life of the race’s progenitors,
a dour time of toil and monotonous craft. The second era,
generally considered to be the height of dwarven culture and
inf luence, encompasses the dwarves’ epic struggles against
their orcish and goblinoid enemies, including the final war
and the resulting push to the surface world of Golarion, still
hidden from light in the grasp of the Age of Darkness. The
third era began near the end of the human Age of Anguish,
when the cloak of shadow and ill tidings from the fall of
the Starstone finally passed for good, and the glory of the
dwarves soon passed with it.
The mountain ranges and primeval forests of Avistan
bear witness to the glory of the ancient dwarves in the
form of crumbling abandoned citadels and moss-choked
eroded statuary. The dwarves today are too few in number
to populate all of their old holdings, and while they might
have reclaimed some of these places, other creatures have
moved in and show no signs of leaving without a struggle.
Characters
Dwarves today are most common in the northeastern
section of the Five Kings Mountains, with a Gathering
Council meeting at Highhelm roughly every 200 years to
discuss affairs of import to dwarfkind. Over the centuries,
these gatherings have become more contentious and
diverse, as dwarves have grown increasingly isolated from
one another. The rosy-cheeked warrior-skalds of Kalsgaard
in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings and the squat, hairless
contemplatives of Osirion’s Ouat caste might share blood,
but their cultures are strikingly different. In this era, what
it means to be a dwarf remains more f luid than ever before,
and the whitebeards of the oldest dwarven halls know this
disparity as a sign for what it is—the impending extinction
of dwarf society.
Dwarves stand about a foot shorter than humans, on average,
and are stockier even than a burly half -orc. Incredibly dense
creatures, most dwarves are about 100 pounds heavier than
they appear due to their strong skeletons and tightly packed
musculature. Most dwarves wear their hair long, with men
nearly always favoring long beards. Traditionalists festoon
their beards with elaborate braids, small battle trophies, or
beads commemorating important events in their lives, and
the shaving of a beard is considered a deliberate departure
from time-honored dwarf traditions.