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View Full Version : Too Bee Dwaarfy [my players stay out]



shadow_archmagi
2009-12-10, 09:42 AM
So, I'm working on my own homebrew setting. I have this cool soviet-rome thing going on for the elves. Humans have some cool little settings of their own, too. Gnomes are a plot arc.

Dwarves.. I havn't thought of anything for.

Then a thought occured to me.



The structure and design of a beehive allows it to store information; compare the pattern of honey-filled and not-filled hexes with the pattern of a punchcard. This allows a hive to retain its knowledge and history despite the fact that individual bees tend to die and not be able to communicate all that well.


Regardless as to whether my science is correct, I had this idea for dwarves-as-hive-creatures.

That is, at first glance, they look like sterotypical dwarves and act like them and think they are, but subconsciously the entire colony is acting as a single entity. The mountain acts as a semi-sentience (similar to The Force in starwars; a source of guidance and wisdom rather than an outright order-giver) and its memories are stored in the architecture and design of the fortress. Every cavern hall, every statue and wall-carving all contribute to the overall history. (Not in an obvious "And this carving is a picture of Urist Rungaxe and Gurib Menacedwelt the goblin. Urist is striking down Menacedwelt. It relates to the battle fought during the Third Goblin War" sense, but more of a "secret meaning to our feng shui" sense)

Sound nifty?

Cyrion
2009-12-10, 09:56 AM
Sounds like a cool idea, but will it affect dwarvish interactions with outsiders enough that it adds to the flavor when the PCs aren't threatening to rearrange the furniture in the hive?

Ianuagonde
2009-12-10, 09:56 AM
Sounds like a very fun idea. It also gives a very good reason for a race to go live underground: a lot more stone to carve. You could even use the ceiling. It also explains why dwarves are so fierce in defending their home turf: a destroyed city means lost information and guidance, which may never be recovered...

My first thought was of the Discworld's computer, Hex. The memory is made of an antheap, and information is, you guessed it, coded into the storage system: size of the cell, shape of the cell, location of the cell, what's stored in it, what's next to it...Terry Pratchett is awesome.

Chromat
2009-12-10, 09:59 AM
Hmm, that sounds kinda like Magic the gathering hobbits from edition or two ago. They had something called touhgtweft or something like that, they are called kithkin, check it out it might give you some ideas.

Anyway idea is awesome , and lends itself to a great fluff.I would like to play :)


In any case i might copy it.

Very nifty!

erikun
2009-12-10, 10:02 AM
This sounds a bit like the China Brain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain) thought experiment - individual dwarves, doing what they are "told" to do by historical president, are allowing the whole community to act as a collecting "ancestral mind".

It would also be a good reason to cast out any non-conforming dwarves.

Zom B
2009-12-10, 10:03 AM
Thought I'd inject this in here, but nature retro-mimics computers all the time. Look at DNA. You have Cytosine, which only pairs with Guanine (forming a C-G pair) and Adenine, which only pairs with Thymine (forming an A-T pair). If you assign values 0 to A-T pairs and 1 to C-G pairs,

CAGGACTACTTCGATTAC
GTCCTGATGAAGCTAATG

becomes

10110100100110001.

Interesting, neh? Maybe in the future computers will build, read, and deconstruct DNA sequences for their memory.

subject42
2009-12-10, 10:04 AM
Sounds like a cool idea, but will it affect dwarvish interactions with outsiders enough that it adds to the flavor when the PCs aren't threatening to rearrange the furniture in the hive?

I would imagine that it would have a pretty profound effect on Dwarves that left their mountain home. Not having untold generations of memory at your fingertips would be like having a limb removed.

shadow_archmagi
2009-12-10, 10:05 AM
This sounds a bit like the China Brain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain) thought experiment - individual dwarves, doing what they are "told" to do by historical president, are allowing the whole community to act as a collecting "ancestral mind".

Hey, that's a pretty cool link there. Thanks!

Grumman
2009-12-10, 10:05 AM
The sort of mechanical computing people build in Dwarf Fortress might be useful inspiration. Perhaps the dwarves' understanding of the things they create is innate rather than learned. The dwarves expand the computer and increase its memory, inputs and outputs, while the computer protects the dwarves by operating traps and managing their supplies.

dsmiles
2009-12-10, 10:06 AM
mmmm...hivemind dwarves...racial telepathy, maybe? Can instantly communicate with any dwarves within "X" miles?

As a side note, do they have a Scottish accent?

shadow_archmagi
2009-12-10, 10:10 AM
I would imagine that it would have a pretty profound effect on Dwarves that left their mountain home. Not having untold generations of memory at your fingertips would be like having a limb removed.

That's about the appropriate analogy. Inconvenient, rather unpleasant and odd-feeling, but ultimately bearable. If you wanted to visit Russia, but found out you had to leave your left arm at home (and get it back when you got back) that wouldn't exactly cancel your whole trip, just make it a bit less fun.

Dwarves far from the mountainholm lose out on the calming, solid-ness effect that it has, and so tend to be more irritable and extra stuck-in-their ways (overcompensating for their newfound feelings of insecurity)

Cyrion
2009-12-10, 10:13 AM
I would imagine that it would have a pretty profound effect on Dwarves that left their mountain home. Not having untold generations of memory at your fingertips would be like having a limb removed.

Agreed, but what do you want to have as the practical impact? You'd want to be careful that your logical conclusion isn't a race of anti-social, agoraphobic, paranoids (well, moreso than the stereotypical dwarf already is). Because this is a popular PC race, I'd want to find something that translates in a positive way to the game world. I really like the idea (and I've been looking for some cool cultural things to do with races for my new world), but I don't see the end product yet.

dsmiles
2009-12-10, 10:18 AM
I would imagine that it would have a pretty profound effect on Dwarves that left their mountain home. Not having untold generations of memory at your fingertips would be like having a limb removed.

This is actually covered in Lords of Madness. When Illithids leave the Elder Brain's area of influence, there is a magic item that provides that comfort. I don't remember if it had a practical application, but you should check this out.

bosssmiley
2009-12-10, 10:18 AM
Heh, hivemind (http://vaultsofnagoh.blogspot.com/2009/07/all-dwarves-aint-same.html). :smallamused:

kamikasei
2009-12-10, 10:24 AM
OP: do you want a hive mind where the dwarven city as a whole is some kind of individual capable of thought and action, or something more like a shared memory where the dwarves can transmit information to one another through the structure of their home?

The latter sounds more interesting to me (if only in that the former makes playing a dwarf pretty bloody hard). You might check out the book Snow Crash, which had some interesting speculation of this sort as part of its plot:
It riffs off Sumerian mythology and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind to propose the idea that, in the past, humans weren't fully conscious, but rather our brains were effectively hosts for programs, and cities acted as storage places for these programs where workers could gather and be programmed by priests with the knowledge of how to perform their tasks for the day (the priests themselves being no less programmed).

As an idea: dwarves are individually much like any other race, but a lot of what they know how to do they know instinctively rather than consciously, with the complication that their instincts can be switched to active or dormant by certain stimuli. They're heavily influenced by external cues, and the setting in which they find themselves, the role they're kitted out for, and the tokens and bearing of the people they're dealing with, have powerful subconscious influences on them (e.g. a dwarf will reflexively give enormous respect and deference to a person with the proper mantle of authority marking him as the Allocator of Duty for the day; if you kill the Head Dwarf and steal his Dwarfy Hat, the guards trying to arrest you will have to fight the urge to bow to you while they do so...).

Perhaps you could even have dwarves switching skill sets entirely by going through certain rituals in the right places. A dwarf needs to succeed to the position of Chief Smith, so he goes to the Halls of Memory and walks the appropriate labyrinth, chanting and hammering a drum in a particular set rhythm... the sounds echo and filter through the tunnels and openings and return to his ears as an acoustic signal that unlocks or installs the appropriate knowledge, and he becomes the new Chief Smith.


If you assign values 0 to A-T pairs and 1 to C-G pairs,

...then you miss the T-A and G-C pairs. DNA is quaternary, not binary.

Cyclocone
2009-12-10, 10:29 AM
So, what happens if a dwarf gets drunk? Does he get temporarily cut off from the empathic link?

If so, what if he starts to like it that way? Does he get ostracised, maybe even kicked out of the colony?

And does he then go adventuring, earning his race a reputation for being drunken and anti-social?


Oh, and do your dwarves have women, or do they have Elder Brains that spawn tadpoles, which must then be inserted into the skulls of gnomes or halflings to grow into full dwarves?
And are those real beards, or are they just hairy tentacles?


Nahh.. j/k, j/k:smallbiggrin:

Zom B
2009-12-10, 10:31 AM
...then you miss the T-A and G-C pairs. DNA is quaternary, not binary.

I should have said A-T and T-A pairs and G-C and C-G pairs instead. I just thought people might know what I meant.


And are those real beards, or are they just hairy tentacles?

They're antennae.

deuxhero
2009-12-10, 10:43 AM
Neat idea, but would it be possible to execute without the dwarfs (and use some custom race in place of it)?

shadow_archmagi
2009-12-10, 10:43 AM
do you want a hive mind where the dwarven city as a whole is some kind of individual capable of thought and action

a shared memory where the dwarves can transmit information to one another through the structure of their home?

The first. The mountain is a separate entity. Going so far as to call it an "individual" would be a bit much; it shouldn't be something you can have a conversation with.

In film, whales are huge, strangely gentle creatures who communicate via an otherworldly and haunting tune.

The mountain would be sort of like that (minus the actually making noise part, most of the time. I guess if the rock were to creak and shudder a bit, the dwarves would interpret it as a sign that things were going horribly wrong).

You couldn't say "QUICK! TIMMIE IS TRAPPED IN A WELL! JOSH, COME QUICK!" but the mountain might notice and suddenly Josh would decide he's rather thirsty (or perhaps just feel uneasy and decide he ought to walk towards the well, that sort of thing)

Likewise, if you were dealing with someone untrustworthy, a dwarf wouldn't suddenly realize "In the year 263, Trader Mcdibbler sold us seventeen tons of fool's gold and we never caught him for it" but the dwarf would begin to distrust him, and maybe report him to someone who would actually have access to the dwarven records (the architecture thing is mostly for the mountain's benefit; they'd have "real" records as well) and recognize him as a scammer.


Neat idea, but would it be possible to execute without the dwarfs (and use some custom race in place of it)?

Sure. You could use elves who do the same thing with trees, or kobold mountainholms, or hobbits and their shire (Hobbit-holes acting like the punches in the punchcard) or really anything with anything. The concept boils down to

META-CONSCIOUSNESS MADE OF PHYSICAL OBJECT(S); SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP WITH SAPIENT CREATURES

shadow_archmagi
2009-12-10, 05:07 PM
Would a +2 to wisdom and charisma while within a certain distance appropriately represent their enhancements? Maybe a few subtle SLAs or something?

erikun
2009-12-10, 05:26 PM
Well, I would think that the dwarves in the mountain would be able to "feel" what the mountain feels, get a sense of uneasy when the mountain is uneasy, etc. It really wouldn't be telepathy - more like a "group empathy" for all the dwarves in the mountain. Becoming friendly with one dwarf makes the other dwarves friendly, annoying a single dwarf annoys the whole community. If one dwarf is on alert, then all dwarves are on alert (not necessarily knowing what the problem is, but still ready for a fight).

Can the dwarves communicate with the "mountain", say though divination spells? It's not something that players would likely talk to, but if the dwarven priests can talk to their "mountain protector", then their unusual customs and society would make more sense. Or at least they would know which ones make the mountain "feel better".

I'm a bit more interested in what the dwarves would actually do to maintain the mountain-mind. It wouldn't simply involve standing around, unless they're all inheritly psychic and using their mental abilities to generate the hivemind. Must all dwarves walk a specific path down various roads, depending on what other dwarves they see? Must all dwarves report to a central "comb" to preform daily "religious rites" which act as programming and maintaining the memory of the mountain?

Visitors sound get the impression that the dwarves are odd, after all, without assuming the entire colony has been zombified.

shadow_archmagi
2009-12-10, 05:35 PM
Can the dwarves communicate with the "mountain", say though divination spells? It's not something that players would likely talk to, but if the dwarven priests can talk to their "mountain protector", then their unusual customs and society would make more sense. Or at least they would know which ones make the mountain "feel better".

Yes, they can communicate to a very limited degree. Dwarf priests and their king spend time meditating and "In contemplation of the rock" to fully maximize their connection to the mountain. It still isn't an actual linguistic thing, but they may get visions or flashes of insight, or at the very least a strong sense of how things are going in the fort.



It wouldn't simply involve standing around, unless they're all inheritly psychic and using their mental abilities to generate the hivemind.


I'm thinking that to a very limited degree, this might be true. Sort of like the 40k Ork's Waaaaugh. Certainly not a large component of the mountain, but present.



Must all dwarves walk a specific path down various roads, depending on what other dwarves they see? Must all dwarves report to a central "comb" to preform daily "religious rites" which act as programming and maintaining the memory of the mountain?


The programming and memory maintenance would consist of (In reverse order of importance)

1. Moving furniture about
2. Carving on the walls
3. Designating new areas to be mined out or walled off

An average dwarf might spend some time in contemplation of the rock, but it would be more for his own personal mental health rather than to benefit the whole.


EDIT: My other concept for the dwarves was that for whatever reason, they take it upon themselves to be the guys with all the Sealed Evil In A Can. Psionic-proof stone vaults full of mindflayers, triple-locked treasure chests with ancient artifacts of power, that sort of thing. Possibly even "We the dwarves control the only working access to The Underdark"

Not sure how that could fit in at this point, but I"ve never been one to not use an idea just because I had a better one.

Perhaps the mountain-entities were created to be guardians, and then when dwarves noticed they felt calmer and more cooperative at certain spots, settled there, and the symbiotic relationship sprang from that.

The Demented One
2009-12-10, 05:39 PM
Trust me. Make this literal.

Dwarves that keep massive hives of bees, using them as defense mechanisms, food sources, work forces. Give them giant bee cavalry, clockwork bee-launching guns, alchemical honeybombs. It will be glorious.

shadow_archmagi
2009-12-10, 07:16 PM
Trust me. Make this literal.

Dwarves that keep massive hives of bees, using them as defense mechanisms, food sources, work forces. Give them giant bee cavalry, clockwork bee-launching guns, alchemical honeybombs. It will be glorious.

...

I'll file in the ideas drawer for next time

Fishy
2009-12-10, 08:34 PM
The obvious problem is that the Mountainmind is going to be agonizingly slow.

Ulrist McDwarf meets McDibbler, and the two of them arrange a sale. On his way to the store-room, Ulrist notices that one of the tables feels 'slightly out of place', and adjusts it accordingly. This sets off a chain reaction of furniture-moving throughout the fortress, but in the amount of time it takes for the Mountainmind to even recognize that it knows McDibbler, he's bought his stuff and run off.

Now, when stuff around you is changing faster than your ability to store it, you start to have a problem. The Mountainmind probably can't even see McDibbler. Anything that happens on that scale has to be handled by the Dwarves themselves, while the Mountain thinks about large things that change slowly.

It would probably be more interested in geological and ecological processes than we are, and it might be able to follow politics and economies in a broad, statistical sense. Elves might live long enough to be interesting. Liches, Dragons and Outsiders certainly will- and anyone who tries to put together a millennium-long scheme in a gambit to rule the universe.

Or, because it's D&D, the Mountainmind might be an epic wizard in the process of researching a staggeringly powerful spell.

shadow_archmagi
2009-12-10, 09:30 PM
The obvious problem is that the Mountainmind is going to be agonizingly slow.

While a more literal interpretation would be, I'm going to say that only long-term memory is stored in the physical world while the collective subconcious is used for short term thinking.

Fortuna
2009-12-10, 10:15 PM
I almost think that it might be more fun to have two levels of the Mountainmind, almost independant. One of them will be on the physical level, and will be able to observe on the scale of decades or centuries and communicate on the scale of years. The other will observe on the scale of a normal dwarf, and communicate on a scale of minutes. That would seem to marry the concepts nicely.

Zom B
2009-12-10, 11:22 PM
Trust me. Make this literal.

Dwarves that keep massive hives of bees, using them as defense mechanisms, food sources, work forces. Give them giant bee cavalry, clockwork bee-launching guns, alchemical honeybombs. It will be glorious.

"Oh, what, are you going to unleash the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths so that when they bark they shoot bees at you?"