It’s Midgard Monday! Each week, we visit a corner of the wide world of Midgard. Look for standalone content you can drop into your campaign—whether it’s in Midgard or your own homebrew. Find new inspiration each Midgard Monday!
Midgard is vast and filled with different peoples. Wildly different cultures can exist just a few miles apart, each one a potential heritage for your character. Consider this your invitation to raise a tankard, call out praise to Ninkash, and embrace your inner dwarven adventurer!
A stout drink and a bold heart help you claim this achievement: a full set of Ironcrag heritages, drawn from the thirteen major cantons of the Crossroads region of the Midlands. Drink deep, leave a comment, and maybe, just maybe we’ll crush some foes along the way.
The shining treasures of dwarven life in the region, Templeforge and Zobeck offer two different perspectives.
Templeforge
Templeforge stands as a monument to artistic craftwork and to the devotion all nearby dwarves feel towards their people’s origin tale as Volund’s handiwork. members of this heritage distinctly value an artisan’s efforts, and strive to create spaces which support them.
Templeforge Canton Heritage
Called Favgia Baselgia in the days of the elvish Valerian Empire, this is the most holy of places in the Ironcrag dwarven culture. It houses the Hammer of Volund, said to have been used to forge the dwarven people in the times following the death of Ymir. It is a pilgrimage site (see Take a Walk to the Shrines of Volund), a canton community, and the birthplace of Liftgas ore airships.
This is a friendly, devout, and industrious locale which has endured longer than nearly any settlement (except for maybe Gunnacks). A moderately populated canton housing around 7,000 souls, its leaders carefully control and plan its expansion to protect the site from threats above and below. Considered a wondrous commune by its residents, most find it feels somewhere between an academic town and a carefully defended, sleepy backwater.
Common backgrounds for this Heritage include adherent, homesteader, maker, rustic, and soldier.
Religious Alchemy. You are proficient with the Religion skill. You can also use your Religion skill for alchemy-based checks.
Nature’s Eye. You are proficient with the Nature skill, and when you use it to predict the weather you have advantage. You can also use your Nature skill instead of Survival when making checks to navigate overland, and for checks to forage for food and water.
Languages. You know Common, Dwarven and one additional language of your choice. Typical Templeforge heritage characters choose Northern Tongue.
Zobeck Canton
Zobeck is not strictly a canton for Ironcrags dwarves, but it is a distinct culture that a few dwarves and similarly-minded folk have carved out for themselves in the Clockwork City. Zobeck canton heritage offers a vision of a peaceable, sophisticated, surface life integrating trade, commerce, artifice, design, and invention. They do this amid a city experimenting with representative rule amid a field of literally bloodthirsty autocrats, god-binding theocrats, secretive oligarchs, and one political cousin of the Canton of Melana, still half obsessed with the idea of monarchy.
Zobecker Canton Heritage
The “lowland canton of Zobeck,” as it is sometimes called, is home to a relatively small enclave of 1,000 very urban dwarves who infrequently visit their cousins in the Ironcrags and tend to venerate Rava over Volund, Ninkash, or Wotan.
Those clans primarily occupy the Gear District of the Jewel of the Argent, but many have houses throughout the city. They almost never muster free companies to march during the season of war, preferring to focus on smithing, geargrinding, and steamcraft. This less martial bent earns Zobecker dwarves the occasional disdainful glare from their mountain relatives. That look usually softens when they benefit from a clockwork innovation in a difficult situation.
Common backgrounds for this Heritage include adherent, alchemist, envoy, homesteader, and maker.
Steamwork Understanding. You have proficiency with tinker tools.
Kobold Frenemy. You have regular interaction with kobolds from quarters of Zobeck and Lillefor. You can add your PB to saves vs kobold-made traps, to WIS (Survival) checks made to track kobolds, and to CHA (Persuasion) checks made when engaging socially with kobolds.
Languages. You know Common and Dwarven language and one additional language of your choice. Typical Zobecker canton heritage members choose Draconic, Elvish, or more rarely, Nurian.
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Want a more focused start? Try the Zobeck Clockwork City Collector’s Edition! This detailed sourcebook
gives players plenty of room to run, and includes adventures within the Clockwork City itself!