Thorgaz

The greatest of the holds, and not the only one¶

Thorgaz is the largest dwarven power in Valdrin, which in dwarven terms means it is the confederation that the most holds have agreed to be counted in, and no more than that.

Independent holds are common. Some are single mountains with three hundred dwarves in them and a grievance about a lease from four centuries ago; some are wealthy, ancient and perfectly content to trade with Thorgaz while refusing every offer to join it. The dwarves see no contradiction here. A hold is a thing that keeps itself. Thorgaz is a large number of holds that have found it convenient to keep each other, and Durrenhold is where the arguing gets done.

Outsiders who speak of the dwarves and mean Thorgaz get corrected the way you correct a child about somebody else's family.

The hold that was a mine¶

Thorgaz colonies do not have a founding date. They have a moment when everyone stopped calling it a mining enclave.

Beneath mountain crowns of iron and frost, dwarves carve wonders in halls that have never seen the sun, and the veins of the world pay for it. The shaft goes deeper, the miners stop walking home, the quarters become houses and the store-rooms become halls, and one day there is a road wide enough for two carts and it has been the main road ever since.

Where dwarves dig, fortresses rise. Given a century, the rock itself becomes loyal to them, and taking a Thorgaz hold has historically required either treachery or geology.

What is cut is kept. What is kept is defended. What is defended is ours by the third generation.

Thorgaz charter clause, standard in all holds

Stone as a political theory¶

The Church of the Anvil teaches that flesh is clay and only iron and fire temper the soul. A Thorgaz hold is that doctrine expressed in architecture: everything permanent, everything heavy, everything built by people who expect to be criticised by their grandchildren.

Nothing is plastered over. Old walls are patched and built into the new work rather than torn out, and the oldest of them are covered edge to edge in cut inscriptions: births, deaths, marriages, sieges, the completion of a good bridge. A hold is a city and it is also a record, and Thorgaz does not really distinguish between the two.

What the archive is for¶

Thorgaz stands thirty points below neutral with the Laeroth and twenty below with the Eldrin, and only one of those grievances is properly understood by the people carrying it.

Dwarven and orcish claims to the same mountains have been settled by violence for so long that many holds keep the casualty rolls as a formal archive. In more than one of them the original quarrel is a matter of record and no living dwarf can say who was in the right. The archive is maintained regardless. The names are still read. A hold that stopped reading them would be conceding that the dwarves who died were spent on nothing, and no council has ever been willing to sign that.

Governing under this flag¶

Slow to start and nearly impossible to dislodge. Your material standard will be the best in the region and your early expansion the slowest on the map, and neither fact can be traded against the other.

The historic grievance with orcs arrives with your settlers and will find a spokesman if orcs join your streets. Plan the wage roll for a workforce that will not be hurried and cannot be replaced quickly, and build the first wall properly, because you will not be permitted to build it twice.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter.