Weirdo Beardos
One of the advantages of playing a miniature heavy version of B/X is that it gives you complete control over character selection. Taking a general WYSIWG approach to things makes it easier to explain to modern players why their super-unique character with the long blah-de-blah backstory – at 0 XP! – falls under the large category of #NotAtMyTable.
Take female dwarves. Seriously. Take them. While you’re at it, take any dwarf that has a separate class modifier. They don’t need those, they have a class already. It’s dwarf.
Using B/X as the starting point means race as class. Which isn’t to say players have no choice in the matter. They can play a sword dwarf or an axe dwarf or even a hammer dwarf. See? Lots of choices. And I’ve got miniatures for all of them. What I don’t have is miniatures for thief-dwarves or cleric-dwarves or, god forbid, sorcerer-dwarves. If you play a dwarf yo get enough boosts that you don’t need any more of them from having a separate class. Take your doubled chances to find traps and shifting walls and be happy with them.
Using B/X as the starting point also means that dwarves have dark brown skin and three hair colors: brown, black, and gray. You’ll see this reflected in my painted miniatures.
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| Pictured: Every 15mm female dwarf figure I could find. Feel free to prove me wrong. |
Using B/X as the starting point also also means that all dwarves have beards. That tells me that all dwarven adventurers are males. That’s probably true in large part because dwarves are practical (again, canon written in the sacred text as recorded by the prophet Moldvay). They wouldn’t dare squander the lives of their precious womenfolk on such silly things as looting tombs, crawling through deep holes, and plundering long lost ruins.
As I re-read the works of Appendix N, I’m even leaning towards a much more mythic folklore interpretation of dwarves as literal people of the earth, maggots that infest the earth until invested with the gift of reason by way of contact with holy relics or some such excuse that fits better with a semi-Christian background.
Either way, dwarven players have ten choices for representation, because ten dwarves is how many you get in a pack of Ral Partha Europe’s Blighthaven range. Heck, even if I wanted a female dwarf figure, I can’t find any on the market in 15mm. So don’t blame me – blame capitalism.
Battle Valor games dot Com has a character pack in 15mm range that have a wizard thief and female dwarfs I hope this helps in your quest.
Copplestone has 15mm Dwarfs. No Females though.
And their models are very nicely made. I bought the dwarven character pack because the models were so impressive.
There's a female dwarf in the Asgard/TTG range from Alternative Armies (formerly 15mm.co.uk): it's the beardless one with the pigtails. Asgard also made her in 28mm.