Dwarves

The Dwarves are one of the most easily recognizable races of Artograch. Short but muscular statue, mild xenophobia, fondness for beer and women, you will almost instantly recognize the dwarf. Having been a closed people for millennia, dwarves are not very trusting with foreigners (other than the gnomes whom they don’t really consider  foreigners at all), but they are generous with the ones who earn their trust. They are also known for their talent at blacksmithing, mining and melee weapons. Dwarven steel is universally considered the best material for making both weapons and armour, and no one can deny the beauty of dwarven-made ornaments that decorate armour and weapons that would be already considered nicely-made even without them. Dwarves’ skin colour can vary from yellowish brown to pale white. A dwarf's hair colour can be blond, red, brown or black. The average dwarf's life expectancy is around 200 years, but depending on overall health and physical strength it may vary from 150 to 300 years. Male dwarves are very fond of their beard. In Dwarven society, if a male does not have a beard, he isn't considered male.

Traditionally, the dwarves lived in clans that constantly bickered amongst each other, but historical events six centuries ago changed all of that.

Attributes (FRPG)
Enabled aligment: any

Secret Origins
Biologically speaking, the Dwarves do not originate from Planet Artograch. Their ancestors colonized the planet roughly 30 000 years before present: as a race of spacefaring people with advanced technology, the Dwarves established a settlement on Artograch for the sake of having ann outpost from which it would be easy and convenient to communicate with mining stations on nearby uninhabitable planets. They also accounted for the fact that Artograch was already inhabited, but they left thge native life-forms largerly alone.

This advanced settlement however proved to be short-lived: in a war with another spacefaring empire, the various mining stations in the galaxy were destroyed, and the Artograch colony only manage to get spared of this fate by camoflaging themselves, creating artificial nebula in the star system and temporarily disabling communications with other planets and space ships, masquerading as a primitive species that lacks means of space travel. After the war was over and the clouds have cleared in the galaxy, the inhabitants of Artograch failed to re-establish contact with their Empire. In an effort to sustain themselves without trade with the rest of their missing mother-empire, they began harnessing the natural resources of Northern Artograch - even spaceships had to be disassembled to create power plants that powered the civilian needs of the population.

This civilization however proved to be short-lived. As the need for power grew, Dwarves began to experiment with combining magic with their modern technology, especially in their nuclear power plants. The end result was a disaster that caused several millenia of nuclear winter on all of the planet. The surviving Dwarves went into the various emergency shelters where they hybernated themselves and prepared for the release, alongside gasses that neutralize radiation. An unintended consequence was however, that the mixture of the freezing liquids and the deradiating gasses wiped off the memories of the surviving dwarves: the ones that would "awaken" around 25 000 years later would have absolutely no memories of the technology their ancestors had, effectively regressing to chalcolithic levels of technology.