The hairless dwarf

[Rhyden]

Man, back when I was a wee noob, I'd look at a dwarf in the tavern and automatically think they had a long, rich beard of sloppy, messy hair. When I made that emote about that dwarf's beard, was I embarassed when the now suspectible OOC message came up: Dwarves don't have hair! Although I've learned to accept this and become used to it, the whole idea with dwarves and no beards still troubles me.

:arrow: First, and foremost, how exactly do dwarves -not- have any hair? Some sort of magick from what I've read, but still, it doesn't make too much sense, to me at least.

:arrow: When I think of a dwarf, for so many past experiences and reasons, I automatically think of a long beard, like in so many books, games, and movies we've all read, played and seen. Such great phrases as "By my beard" or "May your beard last a hundred years" can't be existent. Without this, the whole idea of dwarves is lost to me.

:arrow: I'm still trying to picture the idea of an ArmDwarf in my mind but it keeps on coming out as a really muscular and ugly baby.  :?:  I'm sorry, but even if ArmDwarves are hairless, I keep them hirsute in my mind.

- I'm a huge dwarf fan and I love the creativity put into the new versions of dwarves in Armageddon, but it still just doesn't work for me, anybody else feel the same?

[Rhyden]

Woops, post got screwed up, just say 'yes' for beards and 'no' against. Sorry! My bad.

[Geekfreak]

I agree. I hate the idea of dwarves without hair. It bothers me  :shock:

-GF

[moab]

Well, crap, I voted yes because I like dwarves without beards!
:-D

It took me awhile as a newb to get into it as well.  Same thing with the elves.  "They ain't sexy" as they say.

However, after spending a long time (like six-eight months - long time for me) as a dwarf, I got used to it.  

It's hot, dwavern hair would be PIA.  Instead of thinking of them as bald babies, think of them as mini-muls.  :-D

[Xamminy]

Read the Prism Pentad series of books for Dark Sun, where a lot of the inspiration for Arm originally came from.

[Marauder Moe]

I agree, I still have trouble picturing hairless dwarves.  The image/concept of the Armageddon elf came more easily to me, though, because I've always disliked elves in any setting.

[Quo]

:arrow: First, and foremost, how exactly do dwarves -not- have any hair? Some sort of magick from what I've read, but still, it doesn't make too much sense, to me at least.

How exactly do (most) humans not have any hair in their face or torso? It's just one line of evolution, and I don't see why there shouldn't be one without any hair at all.
There's dogs where you can't tell head from tail for the mass of fur, and there's dogs that are entirely naked. I don't find it difficult to imagine hairless dwarves.

To me it's a twist that actually helped me not to fall into the "Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, Hi Ho, on to the way we go..." stereotype.

--Quo

[Anonymous]

Hairless dwarves have just never set with me.  It's the way it is and I don't try to get around it, but it seems like the Dark Sun dudes went too far in trying to differentiate their title from Forgotten Realms or whatever.  I'd prefer that Zalanthan dwarves have hair just not in large quantities.

Still, not everyone playing a bushy-bearded dwarf that calls everyond 'Lad' is a nice thing, so whatever it takes.

[Agent_137]

It's different. I like it.

If I wanted to play a high-fantasty RPI mud i'd go play shadows of isildor.

But I don't want to play high-fantasy. It's overdone, like that new song on the radio that gets played by 18 stations twice every hour.

[jmordetsky]

Agree with Agent. If you want that 'tolkien' style of things go elsewhere...

Though, I've always thought that calling the races on zalanthas by their Darksun/Middle Earth names was inviting troubles.

Dwarves on Zalanthas are not the Dwarves from middle earth, and should maybe have different names....perhaps their mirrikum names? Same for elves...

[Hicksville Hoochie]

It's just one of those things that probably fits better with the World.

Dwarves are made to be endurable. If a dwarf was covered in burly hair and massive beards, they'd more than likely burn up in the Zalanthas climate. They don't inhabit mountains in frozen areas of the world like in other settings, where that burliness would help them out.

The same with elves, when I first started Armageddon, I was like 'seven foot tall elves?! What the hell?!' but then after realizing the ideas of their running, it occured to me that a 4'6" elf would not have much luck hopping along the sands with a graceful stride.

It fits in the climate and setting, which is why it's that way. Were this a Middle Earth mud, or DnD(non Dark-sun) based, I would be very opposed to it as well.

[Delirium]

Oddly enough, the image of Tolkien-style elves and dwarves has been ruined for me. In fact, I automatically think 'tall sneaky bastard' when I hear the word 'elf' and 'short hairless dude' when I hear the word 'dwarf'.

Go figure.

[Maybe42or54]

Isn't a problem for me.
Personally. I have always pictured dwarves as short little bald things and elves as thieves. But then I never liked Tolkien.

[JollyGreenGiant]

I like my dwarves without hair, my elves without scruples, my halflings feral, and my tieflings clawed.

[Dracul]

Agree with Agent. If you want that 'tolkien' style of things go elsewhere...

Though, I've always thought that calling the races on zalanthas by their Darksun/Middle Earth names was inviting troubles.

Dwarves on Zalanthas are not the Dwarves from middle earth, and should maybe have different names....perhaps their mirrikum names? Same for elves...

No no no dude...you've got it all wrong.

The dwarves on middle earth are not from zalanthas....

duude...
completely backwards.

ahem  /derail.


...to me...its a pretty null issue. It makes sense, its not much of a big deal...and Ive come greatly to terms with elves as the sneaky lilttle necks they are.

[Angela Christine]

Warning: completely unoffical, wild speculation ahead.  Proceed at your own risk.


I like to think that dwarves used to be hairy.  Thousands of years ago Zalanthas was just like the forgotten realms, maybe it _was_ the Forgotten Realms.  :twisted:  Zalanthas is a post-apocolyptic world, that means it went through an apocolypse, or perhaps a series of cataclysms.  


One of the early cataclysms happened so long ago that it isn't even mentioned in the history page: something happened that twisted the very fabric of magick, and magick became much harder to harness.  The Gods died, or at least abandoned the prime material plane.  Probably the fault of some feckless "hero" adventurers, messing with things mortals were never meant to mess with.  However, this did not destroy the world, it just made traditional magick-users rarer, and traditional clerics extinct.  No longer was there plenty of ambiant magick around that anyone who memorized a spell book could harness, instead you could only get the power for magick by drawing it from another plane where magick still existed (elementalists) though magick drawn from the elemental planes has a "will" or "flavor" that only makes it appropriate for certain kinds of spells,  or by drawing it from your own life force (preservers).  Very few people have the innate ability to draw on an elemental plane, even fewer are crazy enough to keep hurting themselves to do the paltry magickal effects available to a neonate student of magick.  So magick became very rare, almost mythical.


Defiling was introduced later, by our friend the Dragon.  Why did he do it, where did he come from?  We just don't know.  Ask him some time, if you happen to run into him.  He was the author of much of the apocolyptic or cataclysmic events that created the known world we know and love.  He litterally sucked the life out of the world to fuel his own magick.  Practically everything died, even the bacteria and other tiny life forms that make it possible for soil to support plantlife.  What was left is barely enough to support a fragile desert ecosystem, and even that is dying.

* * *

Now back to dwarves.  Something twisted them, too.  Something created a strain of hairless dwarves.  And then something destroyed all the non-hairless dwarves.  They were a slave race, not the first people the powerful would try to save.  A very small group survived, possibly only one pair or one male dwarf existed at some point durring the troubles.  All modern dwarves are descended from this very small group, so they were all terribly inbred and lost genetic diversity.  There is some evidence for this: adult dwarves are all 50-58 inches tall, so the tallest dwarf is only 8 inches taller than the shortest dwarf.  All dwarves are 8-10 tenstone in weight, so the beefiest dwarf is only 20 tenstone (about 44 pounds) heavier than the scrawniest dwarf.  They are practically clones!  (You see a similar lack of diversity in humans, though it is not quite as pronounced they still have a much narrower range of heights and weights than humans on Earth).  So all modern dwarves have the mutation that causes hairlessness, or the succeptiblity to some illness that causes hairlessness.


* * *

So what could it be?  What is it that makes dwarves hairless?  


1. It could be an auto-immune disorder that affects 1.7% of humans (on earth) but affects 100% of dwarves, and they always get the worst form of it.  An auto-immune disorder is attractive, because an over-active immune system could explain why they never seem to get sick.    

"Apolecia areata, pronounced (al-oh-Pee-shah-ar-ee-Ah-tha) affects millions of people in Canada and 1.7 per cent of the world's population. It is an unpredictable, autoimmune skin disease, which results in hair loss, not only of the scalp, but also elsewhere on the body. The disease can cause a profound impact on the sufferer's life. Imagine waking up one morning and finding large clumps of hair on your pillow and bald spots on your scalp. What if you looked in the mirror and realized that your eyebrows were gone?

   Apolecia Areata is caused when a person's white blood cells attack the hair follicles. The cells see the follicles as aforeign body and something that should be destroyed. This results in lack of hair growth for months or even years.  Although the scalp is most often affected, any hair-bearing site is vulnerable."

2. It could be a protien problem.  They are unable to form or process the protien (keritin?) that hair is made of.  The problem here is that fingernails are made of the same protien, so if protien was the cause you'd expect them to not have fingernails either, unless their fingernails have mutated somehow and are now made of a different protien.  Maybe all the protien that would normally go into hair production is converted to super-dwarven-testosterone that makes them absurdly muscular for their height.

3. Their skin has changed.  Humans have hair folicles on very nearly every inch of our skin.  Some kind of hair, however thin, grows everywhere but the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, the lips, and parts of the skin around the genitals.  You can tell at a glance that the skin on your lips is different than the rest of your skin, and you don't have to look too closely to notice that the grippy skin on your palms and soles is different from most skin too.  It is unlikely that dwarves are covered in lip skin, because they'd always be chapped everywhere, and that would be nasty.  Skin like that on the palms, fingertips and soles of the feet is a possibility though: it doesn't produce hair, but it does still have pores for sweat and oils, and it preforms more or less like regular skin.  Of course this would mean that dwarves have grooves like finger prints _everywhere_ including on their butts, something to be investigated ICly.  :twisted:

4.  They are particularily susceptable to a disease, parasite or symbiote that attacks their hair folicles.  Much like a tapeworm lives in your digestive system and steals your food, these little suckers live in the hair folicle and eat the live hair cells before they ever leave the skin.  For some reason the hair cells of other humanoids don't entice these tiny parasites.


5.  They don't have regular humanoid skin at all.  Zalanthan wildlife is warped: we have rodents with feathers, snakes with feathers, land animals with tenticles, insects the size of elephants, extreemly un-areodynamic creatures that can fly, and even stranger things.  I like to think this is because of "fallout" residues from defiling magic.  The same thing happened to dwarves, giving them skin that is not normal  humanoid skin, perhaps not mamalian skin at all.  (Something similar happened to the ancestors of the gith, replacing much of their normal skin with lizard skin).  It looks a lot like the skin of other humanoids, but it doesn't function the same way at all (perhaps it helps them be more hardy, resist poisons, and makes their skin tough enough that some blows bounce off their thick hides even without armor).  




As I said, this is just wild speculation, and is probably wrong.  But you never know.


Angela Christine

[Angela Christine]

D'oh, I forgot something.

The main problem I have is that something is definately very different in, under or around their skin, and that should have side-effects.  Specifically, they should either be much more prone to acne than humans, or completely immune to acne, because acne forms in the hair folicles.

This is non-trivial.  How is anyone supposed to correctly describe a and roleplay a dwarven adolecent without this critical bit of information?  


AC

[Maybe42or54]

Wow. I like.

[FiveDisgruntledMonkeysWit]

AC, you have a fascinating mind.

[Rhyden]

I'm gonna stick with AC's idea, yet the idea just won't work in my mind, sadly.

[John]

:arrow: First, and foremost, how exactly do dwarves -not- have any hair? Some sort of magick from what I've read, but still, it doesn't make too much sense, to me at least.

I believe dwarves were bred into existance as a slave race a long long time ago. Now their original attempts wouldn't have created a perfect race. A side effect was most likely they couldn't breed a new race with hair. Over a couple of generations they probably perfected the technology and/or magick to create a race of dwarves that can have hair. But people were most likely so use to the idea of hairless dwarves that there was no desire for hairy dwarves so they discontinued the model

That's just one possible explanation. The real explanation is that Dark Sun dwarves don't have hair

:arrow: I'm still trying to picture the idea of an ArmDwarf in my mind but it keeps on coming out as a really muscular and ugly baby.  :?:  I'm sorry, but even if ArmDwarves are hairless, I keep them hirsute in my mind.

Oh that's easy. If you ever saw an episode of Deep Space Nine you probably didn't notice that the Commander of the space station (Sisko) is completely hairless on his head. He has no eyebrows (and in the later seasons) no hair on his head. If you also watched The Next Generation then you may have noticed that Guinan also has no eyebrows. And if you've seen Lord of the Rings you may not have noticed but Gandalf has no eyelashes (and I know, I was looking for them in all of the second or third movie). You may have noticed that I have a thing about people missing hair from their body. I notice it fairly quickly and find it very distracting. But that's how I picture dwarves. I grab a bald person, put in Guinan's lack of eyebrows and add in Gandalf's lack of eyelashes and put it on a stocky body. I come up with a hideous creature, but it's a dwarf

It's also possible Egyptian dwarves were hairless as well. I believe I remember reading at least some of Egyptian society (I think it may have been the higher castes) shaved their bodies completely of hair. Now if all castes did it then Egyptian dwarves would also have done it. I know it's not politically correct to refer to them that way, but Egyptian society (from what I learnt) actually had a special role for dwarves. They were glass blowers and gold smiths. Now if the possibility of hairless "dwarves" exists in Earth's past through artificial means, it's not that much of a stretch to believe it happened on Zalanthas

[Rhyden]

Sorry John, I'm not a Trekkee, STAR WARS RULZ! But I'll take the more meaningful part of your post into consideration as well, thanks!

[Bestatte]

Guinan has no eyebrows because Whoopie Goldberg has no eyebrows. I just thought I'd toss that in for fun.

Anyway - I was perusing the world of Teh Google...and found a website about Dark Sun. It was many days ago and I don't remember the link, sorry.

The word is, that dwarves aren't born hairless. They're born with hair. But mom and dad put wax on baby's eyes, mouth, and in their ears, and put a tube through their nose so they can breathe, then dip their entire heads into lye, thus burning the hair completely off the head.

This means that dwarves -could- possibly have hair in their ears and nostrils, and maybe even have pubic hair and hair on their armpits and legs like most humanoids do.

Or - through careful breeding (or careless inbreeding) they could have mutated into a hairless race.

The only question I have, is how do these bald characters show up with PALE skin, and not get sunburned on their unprotected scalps? And yeah - I've seen a few of them without a hat, riding across the tundra, mile after mile, with their zircon-encrusted tweezers gleaming in the moonlighty-light.. and nary a scorchmark on their chrome-dome.

Honestly, that's the only "huh?" I have about bald dwarves. I can totally envision them with no effort at all.

[Rhyden]

So, Bestatte, if I'm getting you correctly, dwaves -do- start out with hair...if this trully is the case, then I'll put a hirsute dwarf on my long list of possible characters, if the imms allow it. Of course there'd have to be a logical explanation (parents killed immidiately after birth then baby sent to live with stupid human family :twisted: ). The dwarf would be a freak of course, but it would evoke great plotlines and role-playing of course. And who knows, possibly others could catch on?

-If I'm totally wrong or anything about this, just ignore this post  :wink:

[FiveDisgruntledMonkeysWit]

So, Bestatte, if I'm getting you correctly, dwaves -do- start out with hair...

No, they don't. Bestatte was discussing Dark Sun. This is Armageddon. Though Armageddon is heavily based in Dark Sun, it is still Armageddon. And not Dark Sun. There is nothing in the docs that insinuates that some dwarves might possibly have hair, and definetly nothing that says they are born with hair that gets shaved off.
I'm not staff, not by a long shot, but I'll make an educated guess, and say that a hirsute dwarf would probably not get approved because it would be very jarring to the game enviroment.