REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "A Special Section: Dwarves"

For issue #58 (February 1982) of Dragon, I'm going to cheat a little – well, a lot – by focusing on not just one but four different articles. I think it's justified, though, because the articles cover closely related topics and three of them were written by a single author, the inestimable Roger E. Moore, in those days when he was not yet the editor-in-chief of Dragon. "A Special Section: Dwarves" is also an important collection of articles, one that, in my opinion, marks a turning point in the history of D&D. Indeed, it's a collection that makes me wonder if perhaps the Silver Age didn't begin sooner than I have suggested in the past, for these articles were extremely influential and ushered in not just explicit follow-ups by Moore himself, but also a growing codification of not just D&D's non-human races but many other aspects of its fictional milieu.

The first of the four articles is "The Dwarven Point of View," which presented a psychology of the dwarves, explaining aspects of their thoughts process and, by extension, the society and culture that arose from them. "Bazaar of the Bizarre" featured two new (and forgettable) dwarven magic items, while "Sage Advice" answers a battery of increasingly nitpicky questions about dwarves. "The Gods of the Dwarves" is probably the most well-known of the four dwarf articles in issue #58, if only because it was officially canonized by Gary Gygax, who included it in his 1985 Unearthed Arcana expansion to AD&D. I'll also never forget "The Gods of the Dwarves" because it included an illustration depicting Berronar, the dwarven goddess of safety, truth, and home, with a beard:

I've long had a fondness for this piece of artwork, both because I relentlessly used it in my youth to bludgeon those who denied that female dwarves had beards (in contradiction of both Tolkien and Gygax – so you know it had to be true!) and to emphasize that dwarves aren't just short, stocky humans. They are, effectively, an alien race and to expect them to conform to human ways is absurd, not to mention demonstrating a severe lack of imagination.

When this quartet of articles was released, I adored them and made every effort to incorporate as much of them into my ongoing campaign as I could. Nowadays, I have much more mixed feelings about them, chiefly because they, almost certainly unintentionally, became the fount from which subsequent discussion of dwarves flowed. That is, later writers – and even TSR itself – treated Moore's ideas as normative, the result being that, as the '80s wore on, the portrayal of dwarves in AD&D became less diverse. At the time, I didn't care; indeed, I was very happy with "official" information on dwarves and all the demihuman races, because I wanted my campaign to conform to the conceptions of my betters in the hobby. In retrospect, though, I feel less happy with these articles and wish their influence had been more limited.

(The original version of this article and its comments can be found here.)