The Drasnian are a people of the dwarf, not a separate lineage, an eldest diaspora heritage rather than a divergence event. Drasnian dwarves are the eldest and by far most populous of the dwarven heritages, dating back to before the Uline dwarves went underground. Drasnians are generally a stout, serious bunch, with softer features than their other dwarven cousins, and live almost exclusively above ground or in homes built into hillsides. They have a long history of both prosperity and destitution, and through economic trade, fleeing war and persecution, and enslavement, have made it all over Alaria. Drasnians can be found in vast numbers at nearly any cultural hub, as well as in several countries where Drasnians have settled down in large numbers, including Drasnia itself, the believed birthplace of the Drasnians.
As a whole, they value education, money, and preserving their cultural and religious legacy. Drasnian culture is rich with customs dictating worship, relationships, and one's day-to-day life.
In bondage
The single largest body of enslaved Drasnians anywhere on Alaria sits in the Shacklands, the southern foot of Rimihuica, where the military republic of Gorath has held them as its chief commodity for three hundred years. They have never accepted it. Resistance among the Shackland Drasnians runs from the small and daily, work slowed and tools mislaid, up to the Moon Road, the network that smuggles runaways out through the Moon Wilds on Gorath's western edge. Their Trømgar kin across the sea have never accepted it either, and they watch the empire for the first crack. The Drasnian habit noted wherever the people are found, the long patience and the keeping of reckonings, is the same habit that has kept a captive population a people through three centuries built to grind that out of them.
The forge and the hammer
Drasnians keep the worship of Krondeum, the dwarven forge-daemon, whose rite was never really about fire so much as about craft: the finished thing carried to the clan-hall, the next hand to hold it named aloud, the naming counting as the prayer. In the Shacklands that faith has become the ground of a bitter irony. Gorath's war-church, the Iron of the Eternal March, took the same hammer-daemon and made him a patron of conquest, reading the hammer-stroke as the blow that breaks rather than the blow that shapes. So master and slave kneel to the same daemon and mean opposite things by him. The enslaved smith-priests hold to the older reading, the forge as craft and incorporation, and some have refused to surrender Krondeum to the empire's use even from inside their chains. A few have gone further and joined the war-church's own dissidents, rather than let the hammer be allowed to stand only for the lash. To them it is not heresy. It is the daemon being remembered correctly, by the people who were always closest to him.
Aspects
- Good with money and numbers
- I will do my duty