I was thinking about what a Dwarven Druid might look like.
I don’t think a new racial power covers it – a dwarf’s nature is to harvest and refine. It stands in contrast to the Druid’s desire to live in protection of a natural cycle that, in part through them, is self sustaining. A world full of nothing but Dwarves would end up looking like the clockwork planes eventually.
Enter The Rock. The Rock protects the rich earth while simultaneously exploiting her. A Druid serves within nature, but The Rock ‘corrupts’ her into a form more pleasurable to those with sentience.
Small suggestion, instead of only having one choice for race, have backgrounds, like tinkerer, miner, etc
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll mull it over.
I don’t disapprove of alternatives to the race selection, but… when I saw Paladins could only be Human it said a lot to me about the class, about the nature of the society where it could exist – warlike, depraved, holy, narcissistic and altruistic. I think there’s a message in showing that it is limited to Dwarves that wouldn’t be as apparent if I limited it to Dwarves but gave background options.
In likelyhood I’ll keep it as one ‘option’ for my stack-of-classes and add a few alternate options as they come to me for an alternate take for other people and groups.
Sean Fager there are some documents floating in the g+ tavern with all the core races in the other classes. I think that with the classes like druids could welcome any race with the right fiction, a dwarf might be the protector to a druid until he/she moves on then the protector inherits the role or could be a wilder tribal family where the shaman/druid replaces the priest for these dwarves.
I’ll concede that a dwarf could be The Druid, formerly a protector of and trained slash indoctrinated by a magical hippie (aka druid, lower-case-d). Or using The Druid as a substitute for a Shaman class – Druids focused on the ability to inflict harm to cure others and speak with an area’s resident spirits fit the bill nicely.
It felt like the Dwarfs needed their own distinct class that embodies the feel of the Druid but without the desire for balance. A nature mage, a cultural outsider, the loner, clothed and fed by the land, enemy of those who would damage their sacred lands. I (semi-subconsciously) consider Druids as forest folk. Dwarves are mountain-folk (at least in most of my games) and their avatars-of-nature should reflect that. I want The Rock to carry that distinction further than can be done with the core-class Druid.
Choosing the race option of the playbook simply gives you the racial ‘power’. Want a dwarf druid (shapechanger), just say you’re a dwarf, you just don’t get the halfling / elf / human racial power. If you like you could take the approach from the Planarch codex and choose a heritage move instead.
That’s the way we play, and like with all things DW, the choices the players make shape your gaming group’s particular vision of DW.
That said, your vision of a dwarvish druid as a seperate class is kinda cool.