Hammer of the Dwarven Lords

[Messageboard Golem]

Dwarves are the masters of the forge, displaying skill with the axe and the hammer. We long for glorious battles where we may test our mettle. The mysteries of the dwarves are more substantial than that of the elves and their glitter of fairy dust.

Chapters
1-The Clachduin (The Painted Dwarves)
2-The Hallvring (The Reaving Dwarves)
3-The Khura (The Steppe Dwarves)
4-Dwarven Gods
5-Dwarven Equipment
6-Magics of the Dwarves
7-Dwarven Wrestling
8-NPC and Prestige Classes

Features:
3 Cultures
11 Gods
New Weapons, Armor, Alchemical Items and other equipment
New Domains: Sea and Stone
Almost 50 new spells
8 Classes

 

[Crothian]

Hammer Dwarven Lords

In the days of D&D dwarves have always been a rather well depicted and well defined race. Racial books in d20 were one of the first areas covered. Green Ronin had a very good on in Hammer and Helm, Bad Axe Games had their highly respected Heroes of High Favor: Dwarves, and Mongoose had the under appreciated Quintessential Dwarf. Yet, even with three solid books to reference there is always room for more especially one of quality. Hammer Dwarven Lords is another good book on Dwarves that will serve well as a stand alone or in conjunction with the other books.

Hammer Dwarven Lords is a new PDF by Dark Quest Games. They have put out some very good books like Dweomercraft: Familiars, Moon Elves, Death: Guardian at the Gate, and In the Saddle. They have a good handle on PDF publishers and are one of the unsung companies that constantly do good work. Hammer Dwarven Lords is eighty-six pages long. It is well laid out with excellent art. The book has good production values and is fully book marked.

The one thing that Hammer Dwarven Lords really excels at is the details. It has a few really well defined dwarven cultures, dwarven gods, and dwarven society. It describes the life of the dwarf from birth to death. The level of detail really makes this book stand out.

The first three chapters covers three different dwarven clans. Each is fully detailed as to what the dwarves do from birth on. The culture, art, fashion, government, religion, and foods are all discussed. These dwarves seem alive with the detail giving some great ideas for both players and game masters. This is a very strong set of chapters and really covers a lot of information.

There is a small chapter on gods making them easy to use, but not taking up too much space for people that are wanting to use their own deities. There are a few new domains and almost fifty new spells. There is plenty of new equipment but the highlight is the wide assortment of new alcoholic beverages. The details are again great in these sections.

The book finishes with feats for dwarven wrestling and some new classes. The classes are thought out and well balanced. I like how they are in the back of the book as the clear emphasis is on the details of the clans and their people.

The Hammer Dwarven Lords is a very well written book that covers lots of areas. It has a good amount of rules and detailed text, but the writing and the details are clearly the emphasis of the book. Once again Dark Quest Games has done a very good job of detailing a race and subject matter in great way.

 

[DragonTurtle]

Hammer of the Dwarven Lords is an 87 page bookmarked pdf in portrait style with a color cover and black and white illustrations. The interior art is good and matches the contents of the book.

I have the impression, and it may be wrong that in many campaigns dwarves are heavily inspired by Scottish and Norse cultures. This book does a lot of the homework for those that feel that their dwarves should come from a similar background. The book then breaks the mold by modeling a 3rd race on the Mongol horde. You won’t find any hill dwarves or mountain dwarves in this book, instead three new clans are described. The book doesn’t include any stats for theses dwarves, and the ones from the PHB should do well, except you may feel like tweaking a few things, such as giving the nomadic dwarves a bonus to ride and handle animals instead of crafting for example.

Chapter 1: The Painted Dwarves- very Pict like dwarves that tattoo themselves in clan colors. It feels like a mix of Scottish highlanders and Picts for the culture. The dwarves live in clans that each have their own color that they display in clothing and flags.

Chapter 2: The Hallvring, the Reaving Dwarves- These dwarves are seafaring Viking like dwarves. They even believe in a Valhalla like afterworld.

Chapter 3: The Khura, the Steppe Dwarves- These are the mongol like dwarves. They usually attack anyone that comes into their lands and so they can play the antagonist in a campaign if so desired.

Chapter 4: Dwarven Gods- This chapter discusses possible archetypes that the dwarven gods might follow, names such as the Hearth Lord and the Judge, seem to be only place holders for the DM to change to specific gods in his campaign. This is a nice touch which allows the DM to really customize the information and pick and choose roles that he wants.

Chapter 5: Equipment- Starts off with Arms and Armor, which is probably a requirement in each racial book. The weapons and armor are not your stereotypical dwarven arms as they really are put here to expand on the racial types described in the earlier chapters. This means you will get stats for the Clachduin Knife which every painted dwarf gets upon reaching adulthood and other weapons that match the various tribes.
You also get some alchemical items, and a number of alcoholic beverages. The drinks all have an in game effect which can be ignored or used as per DMs preference. I like the fact that each type of brew has a number of brand names. This will really help DMs whose players spend a lot of time in taverns, Dwarven spirits just got a lot less generic.

The last section of this chapter deals with magical items, quite a few interesting items, including a bow that allows you to effect your allies with the rage spell as long as your willing to shoot them with an arrow.

Chapter 6: Magics of the Dwarves- Starts with magical tattoos known as Pellidgeis and some feats allowing crafters to create them. You also get 2 new domains, Stone and Sea which seem balanced. The chapter ends with almost 50 new spells.

Chapter 7: Dwarven Wrestling- Introduces a number of grapple feats for those wanting to master dwarven style wrestling, an interesting chapter that adds a lot of flavor to dwarven pastimes and competitions.

Chapter 8: NPC and Prestige Classes. First is the Slonelecta who is a midwife and healer for the painted dwarves, a nice variation of the adept class. Seyders appear to be more powerful bards, using a fighter’s BAB and d8 hitdice, while still getting full progression in Bardic Music and Bardic Spells. The only balancing issue I see is the reduction of skill points to 4 a level. I feel that this class is unbalanced especially since it is mentioned as a NPC class. The new PrCs are listed below, the requirements almost all include a required base save, I am not a big fan of this requirement as muticlassing can allow a +6 base save at 3rd level. I would suggest tweaking skills to ensure that the character must be at least 5th level to take the class.
Alpine Ascetic- A dwarven monk, howeve nothing in its requirements require it to have any levels in monk. I would replace the Will save requirement with something such as the still mind class feature. This class also has some spell casting ability.
Hearthbreaker- An assassin that specializes in killing other dwarves. An interesting class that doesn’t have to be evil.
Mountainheart-A spellcaster who gains powers from the mountains themselves, full spellcasting abilities and higher BAB and Hitdice for most arcane casters, so a look at balance is suggested. For Druids the class is probably ok as they would stop progressing in wildshape and would actually decrease in hitdice.
Pyroclastic Celebrant- Pretty much the same argument that I used above, class abilities every level, plus full spellcasting and higher BAB and Hitdice. For a class designed for arcane casters it is not well balanced.
Soulsick Slayer- A fallen priest or paladin that continues to gain some divine power.
Vault Cracker-A dwarf specializing in bypassing traps.
Overview: I like the alternate takes on dwarven culture, and if you are looking for a way to separate your dwarves form those in the PHB, this is a good resource. While I agree that new dwarven subraces don’t need new mechanics, I do feel that tweaking should be done if racial abilities no longer make sense. The Viking dwarves for example don’t need stone cunning and may benefit from another advantage instead, however the book never points this out and I think even a sidebar giving possible changes would be nice. I also feel that the PRCs could have been designed for some of the individual dwarven races described in this book. While the options here are interesting they really apply to standard dwarves and not the races presented here. In conclusion this is an interesting book on dwarves and is a great starting ground for DMs to use when creating their dwarven races. I give this book a 4, only to those looking for non PHB like dwarves.

 

[Pinotage]

Hammer of the Dwarven Lords is a d20 pdf product from Dark Quest Games. The pdf presents three new dwarven subraces in incredulous detail, as well as a host of new rules for wrestling, drinking, and others; and new prestige classes, magical items, spells and more. This pdf has a page count of 87 pages, of which 83 pages present a very detailed and interesting look at dwarves. Hammer of the Dwarven Lords normally retails for $6.95. This review was done as part of Crothian's Review Project.

Disclaimer: The reviewer is a d20 freelance writer/editor but is not affiliated with the publisher of this product. Every effort has been made by the reviewer to ensure that this is an impartial review.

Note: This is an older review reposted since the server crash.

Initial Impressions:

Hammer of the Dwarven Lords comes as a single, fully bookmarked pdf file. It contains no borders so, barring the cover and those pages containing interior art, this should be easy to print. The cover art is by Kallen, and features a good image of a dwarven warrior with an axe. The interior art was very good, and artists Gillian Pearce and Sabrina Hart can take credit for some impressive and well done images, although they may not cater to everybody's impression of a dwarf. The pdf is well edited and the layout professional, and I was pleased to not pick up any obvious errors while reading the pdf.

One of my few complaints about this pdf is the lack of any introductory material. Like Moon Elves, the elven counterpart to this pdf, the pdf just jumps right in by detailing the first dwarven subrace, with no material explaining the nature or content of the pdf. Unlike Moon Elves, the title of the pdf does give an actual indication of the content of the pdf, but I felt an introduction would've been helpful. Overall, through, this is a solid pdf on the presentation front, easy to read, error-free, and with some good content, the latter which I'll move on to next.

The Details:

Hammer of the Dwarven Lords is divided into eight chapters. The first three detail the three new subraces, and the remaining five detail additional material related to dwarves, such as prestige classes, equipment, wrestling rules, dwarven beverages and the like. The pdf contains a good mixture of fluff and crunch, although some of the fluff was a bit 'word' heavy. By that I mean that the authors have created numerous dwarven words to support the text and use them liberally. I found that I had to page back and forth continually to find the meaning of a word just to be able to follow the flow and meaning of the text. While I'm not against creating flavorful words, perhaps a table containing the words and their meaning would've been more appropriate rather than having the back read through several pages to find the meaning of the word you were looking for. Granted, the first use of every word was in bold text, but still I found that this was at times very frustrating and took some of the pleasure out of reading the pdf. If all the words were in a table, I could've printed that out and simply referenced it when reading the pdf.

The Dwarven Subraces (Chapters 1 - 3): Three new dwarves subraces are presented in the first three chapters: the painted dwarves or Clachduin (a race of tattooed dwarves that are at home both in the forests and in the mountains), the reaving dwarves or Hallvring (sea-faring raiders and strong warriors) and the steppe dwarves or Khura (nomadic dwarves in war-like chariots). Each subrace is detailed in splendid detail, although mechanically they are no different from standard dwarves. The pdf is right to call these descriptions cultures, and you truly get a feel for each new race of dwarves. While dwarves in general have been done in pdfs and published work quite often, there's still a lot to take away from this pdf and its splendid detail.

Each subrace contains details on a wide variety of topics, including life cycle and growing up, festivals, religion, myths on creation, society, government, laws, arts, food and drink and a whole lot more. If you're looking to flesh out your dwarven culture or even create your own, there's a lot here that is interesting and useful in this regard. Given that these chapters take up almost 40% of the pdf, there's a lot of detail here for both players and DMs, and a lot to inspire new ideas on dwarven habits, nature, culture and society. I would've liked to see more mechanical detail on some of the aspects of these races, such as the ships of the reaving dwarves or the chariots of the steppe dwarves.

Dwarven Gods (Chapter 4): The dwarven gods are presented in a unique and interesting way that I haven't encountered before. Rather than assigning different dwarven deities to the dwarves or to each subrace individually, the dwarven pantheon is presented in the form of several generalised pillars that can be used to construct dwarven deities based on the typical characteristics of each pillar. So, for example, there's Deep One pillar, associated with mystery and ancient power. Based on the numerous qualities of this pillar, dwarven deities can created from it, and several incarnations of each pillar are presented with enough detail to create something interesting. Other pillars include the hearthlord, the high one, the warrior and the weaver. In addition, several 'pillars' are presented for lesser dwarven deities, and include the wise one, the trader and the judge. This is a good chapter particularly for those that don't want to constrain their dwarves within a certain deity, but would rather use the versatility of a pillar to create something unique to a character or setting.

Dwarven Equipment (Chapter 5): This chapter takes look at new equipment, including a number of new items mentioned in the early chapters and the racial weapons of the new dwarven subraces. Each item is well presented and detail, and in some cases art is provided for a specific new weapon or armor. A large number of new alchemical items are provided, such as larstip extract that grant low-light vision, and stink bombs. A large portion of the chapter is devoted to dwarven beverages, and contains a detailed ruleset on drinking and consuming these. Some of the dwarven drinks are entirely unsuitable to non-dwarves, and the mechanics handles the drinking well. Flavor-wise different brands and quality drinks of each type are listed. Examples of the dwarven drinks include Dwarven Bark Mead (if you fancy being blinded by the potency of this drink then Emerald Crown Special makes the best quality variety) and Micomead (Hollow Honey will hopefully not leave you as drunk as the significantly better Rock Guild Dark Amber.

The chapter concludes with a number of new magical items, and these were both fresh and interesting. Examples include hotrocks that can be fired from slings (pardon the pun!), resuscitating breastplate (keeps you alive that little bit longer, and the stalward defender (a shield that acts like a immovable rod). There's a lot of useful material in here, and everything is mechanically solid and well balanced.

Magic of the Dwarves (Chapter 6): This chapter deals with all things magical and starts out by looking at the tattoos of the painted dwarves. New uses of the craft skill are introduced to create these masterful tattoos and item creation feats are presented to create magical version of the same drawings. Two new domains are presented (sea and stone) before the pdf details a large variety of new spells, most of them good, well written and balanced. Examples of new spells include blade shield (creates a damaging shield of blades that creates cover and can be used to protect and attack), frozen ground (causes the ground the freeze with damaging results over time), Lorgath's many-armed attack (allowing the caster to attack more times than normal), mutating gaze (the name says it all), seal tome (protect that spellbook) and strangling vestments (if you ever wanted to see a dwarf strangled by his own beard). Overall a very good selection, probably my favourite mechanical chapter of the pdf, and there are spells for most classes and of most levels. It's difficult not to find use for most these spells.

Wrestling (Chapter 7): This chapter deals with wrestling, a favourite pastime of the steppe dwarves. A variety of new feats are presented, the majority of them called grapple feats. The rules and mechanics, however, require that the concept of facing is established, and hence won't necessarily be useful within a normal combat environment. It would've been nice to see additional grapple feats that could be used in combat, but these could probably be adapted as such. From a sporting points of view I can see myself using these rules for fun, although even then there are some weakness to the system such as the facing and no clear indication on how to change formation or achieve various formations in wrestling that are required to use most of the grapple feats. A whole host of dwarven wrestling terminology is presented, so if you've ever wanted to know what 'tosser' and 'goof' mean in wrestling, this will tell you.

Classes and Prestige Classes (Chapter 8): The last chapter of this very detailed pdf takes a look at a number of new NPC classes and prestige classes. These include stonelecta (NPC Clachduin healer, midwife and counsellor), Seyder (NPC warrior-bards of the Clachduin), alpine ascetic (an enlightened dwarven monk of the high peaks and deep underground), hearthbreaker (an eradicator of darkness amongst dwarven people), mountainheart (a dwarf of the mountains), pyroclastic celebrant (a dwarf familiar with the destructive power of the earth), soulsick slayer (despairing dwarves that have turned from the divine and rely only on themselves), and the vault cracker (a trapmaker and master at disarming traps). All the prestige classes were presented with good flavor, although at times it was difficult to get a good impression of what the idea behind the class was. Most are solid and balanced, perhaps on the stronger side, but I think these are useful if you can get around the somewhat vague flavor text.

Conclusions:

Hammer of the Dwarven Lords is a pdf detailed dwarves. While dwarves have been discussed in numerous products over the years, this does provide some useful and interesting material on dwarves, and the flavor text is very detailed (to the point of being difficult to read with all the dwarven language words thrown in). There's almost nothing to fault on the presentation, and the entire pdf is well done, presented with some generally solid material that's mechanically strong. It was an enjoyable read, with lots of material that can easily be inserted into any campaign, and most of what's here can be used by players and DMs alike. The spells to me were the strongest part of the pdf, while the wrestling and prestige classes were slightly weaker. Overall I enjoyed this - based on content of detailed fluff, excellent mechanics and presentation, some difficult reading text in place, somewhat vague prestige classes, very good spells and volume of useful material, I'd grade this pdf with four stars.