Diesel Dwarves

DIESEL DWARVES

They produce it. They drink it. They sweat it. They breathe it.

Diesel is not merely a fuel to the dwarves of the Thundering Heights.

It is their lifeblood.

The Thundering Heights

The ancestors of the Diesel Dwarves were a human-descended mountain people who settled deep within the Thundering Heights. They built their homes into the stone and spent generations digging farther beneath the mountains in search of ores, metals, gemstones, and anything else the earth would surrender.

At first, mining was simply how they survived.

Then came Dieselbeard.

A dwarven scientist whose name would become impossible to separate from the history of his people, Dieselbeard discovered a process that could refine the minerals of the Thundering Heights into a thick, volatile fuel unlike anything An'kor had seen before.

He called it Diesel.

Everything changed.

The Age of Diesel

The first diesel-powered machines were built to make mining easier.

They did.

Then the new machines allowed the dwarves to mine faster, which gave them more material to refine into Diesel, which powered larger machines, which allowed them to dig deeper, which produced still more Diesel.

The cycle never stopped.

Entire settlements were rebuilt around engines, pumps, furnaces, drills, lifts, crushers, and refineries. Tunnels that once took generations to carve could be opened in years. Mountains were hollowed out from within. Chimneys and exhaust shafts pierced peaks that had stood untouched since before recorded history.

For the Diesel Dwarves, this was progress.

For everyone living downstream, downwind, or above the next promising mineral deposit, it was often something else.

Diesel-Blooded

Generations of constant exposure changed the dwarves themselves.

They inhaled Diesel fumes in the mines, handled it with bare hands in the refineries, ate food cooked above diesel flame, and eventually began consuming small amounts directly.

Their bodies adapted.

Modern Diesel Dwarves can tolerate concentrations of fumes and toxins that would make most other peoples violently ill. Their lungs, skin, blood, and digestive systems have changed enough that Diesel is no longer merely something they can survive.

They crave it.

A Diesel Dwarf deprived of it for long periods may become weak, irritable, exhausted, or physically ill. Strong doses produce heat, energy, aggression, and a sensation many dwarves describe with approximately the same reverence other peoples reserve for alcohol, narcotics, religious ecstasy, or particularly good breakfast.

Beer survived for a while.

Eventually it was largely replaced because, according to dwarven consensus, it simply did not kick hard enough anymore.

Diesel can be smelled on them. It clings to their hair and beards. It stains their clothes. Their breath often carries its sharp chemical bite. Heavy labor or battle can leave a faint oily sheen on the skin.

They produce it.

They drink it.

They sweat it.

They breathe it.

Dwarven Temperament

Diesel Dwarves have a reputation for being simple-minded.

This is not entirely accurate.

They are capable engineers, miners, mechanics, builders, and logisticians. Their machines would not exist otherwise. What outsiders often mistake for stupidity is an aggressively practical worldview and an almost pathological dislike of unnecessary complexity.

A problem is something to be solved.

A wall is something to be broken.

A mountain is something to be mined.

An ore deposit is something waiting to become Diesel.

This directness can make Diesel Dwarves remarkably effective and unbelievably frustrating. They have little patience for philosophical arguments about whether a resource should be extracted when the resource is visibly sitting there doing nothing.

To a Diesel Dwarf, unused potential is waste.

Industry Without End

The greatest weakness of Diesel Dwarf civilization is also the thing that made it powerful.

It is hungry.

Their machines require Diesel. Producing Diesel requires raw materials. Extracting those materials requires machines. Larger operations demand more fuel, more tunnels, more workers, more refineries, and more territory.

The Thundering Heights were not enough forever.

Dwarven prospectors spread across An'kor searching for new deposits. Mines became outposts. Outposts became settlements. Settlements required roads and engines. Engines required Diesel.

Other nations frequently accused them of stripping the world bare.

The dwarves rarely understood the complaint.

From their perspective, leaving valuable ore buried underground is roughly equivalent to starving beside a locked pantry.

Their oldest national ambition is brutally straightforward: mine wherever useful resources can be found, extract as much as possible, and turn as much of it as possible into Diesel.

The fact that An'kor is finite has never made this philosophy particularly sustainable.

Xanaras made that hunger an existential problem.

As the Core's shield collapsed inward and more of An'kor was lost, the amount of land still safe enough to inhabit shrank with it. So did the amount of earth the dwarves could mine. Deposits that once fed entire industrial regions now lie beyond the shield, buried beneath territory controlled by Xanaras and the Feeders.

For a people whose bodies, machines, and civilization all depend on Diesel, this is more than an economic shortage. Every exhausted mine inside the shield is one fewer source of the substance keeping their society alive.

The Diesel Dwarves now face a problem their ancestors never had to solve: there may be plenty left to mine, but most of it is on the wrong side of the shield.

War

On a battlefield, Diesel Dwarves are difficult to mistake for anyone else.

Their armor is heavy, practical, scorched, and usually built to survive both enemy weapons and their own machinery. Their weapons favor brutal mechanical force: powered axes, drills, hammers, saws, reinforced firearms, and engines built with far more torque than good judgment would normally recommend.

The most feared are the Diesel Dwarf Berserkers.

Before battle, a Berserker consumes enough concentrated Diesel to push the body far beyond ordinary limits. The result is a short period of terrifying strength, aggression, pain tolerance, and stamina.

A Berserker swinging a diesel-powered axe is one of the fiercest opponents a soldier can meet in close combat.

The process is not healthy.

This has never stopped them.

The Core

When the Demians warned An'kor of Xanaras, the Diesel Dwarves were among the peoples asked to turn centuries of expertise toward something other than conquest and extraction.

Corian needed space beneath it.

A great deal of space.

The Diesel Dwarves dug.

Deep beneath the new city, their machines tore through stone to create the chambers, shafts, tunnels, and foundations required for the defense mechanism that would eventually become the Core.

It may have been the first project in their history where digging deeper was done to preserve the world rather than consume more of it.

Even now, Diesel Dwarf engineers remain closely tied to the enormous underground infrastructure beneath Corian. The Core may depend on magic, nature, technology, science, and the soldiers who guard it, but all of that power still sits inside a hole that somebody had to dig.

The dwarves are very proud of this.

Possibly more proud of the hole than the Core.