I.
Dwarven battle philosophy in Sam’s era looks something like this:
- We live in caves.
- You don’t.
Although it could also be expressed as:
- We live in caves that we have mined ourselves. It’s very difficult to get an attacking army OUT, even though we’ve mined and tunneled and designed these caves ourselves and have made it as easy as possible in case we want to do that.
- It’s really, really hard to get an invading army IN, especially since we’ve mined and tunneled and designed these caves ourselves and have made it as difficult as possible in case someone would want to do that.
II.
That being said, when the Dark Lord’s absolutely unbelievably vast and implacable army was about three days out, Supreme Commander Sam finally finished hiking and waving a very, very, very large white flag.
As the Dark Lord had very sensible scouts, it did not take long before Sam was standing in front of an assemblage of the Dark Lord’s generals, one of whom (Sam would learn her name later, and promptly forget it) was reading the document Sam had brought:
“This is just a genealogy of the Dwarves who wrote it,” she said.
“Yes, that’s the first two pages,” Sam agreed. “We didn’t want you to think that we lacked the authority to treat with you.”
“Where’s yours? You’re the one I’m meeting.”
“Oh, I’m nobody important,” Sam said offhandedly. “That’s why I’m Ambassadoring. Someone has to.”
The General did not blink. Much.
Sam gently walked over, took the huge sheaf of parchment from her, and started going through it. “Try around….” He moved his finger gently over the lines. “…here.”
The General (her name was Ash; she didn’t go by “General Ash” if she could help it) read out loud:
“Be it hereby noted:
“We, the Nior, acknowledge only the supreme rulership of P’tah, God of Creation and/or Miniatures.
“However, as He hasn’t been too specific with what He wants, as long as we can keep making things and generally living our lives, we will also make them on behalf of Whoever is currently running this city/country/continent/planet.
“If that’s acceptable, we’re in.”
Ash raised a very hairy eyebrow. “If that’s acceptable?” she said. A tone of voice is absolutely not capable of penetrating a tent wall in a way which is helpful to the visual spectrum, but she somehow managed to indicate the thousands and thousands and thousands of Orcs at her command without actually pointing to them.
Sam nodded. “First, while being a Ruler is better than being an Ambassador, it’s not great. You seldom get a chance to make anything really interesting, and usually if you try, other Dwarves are too busy to listen all that carefully.
“So if you have a specialist who wants to do the work, and it won’t mess with our lives too much, that sounds good to us.
“Also, militarily, we don’t really care how many Orcs die, no offense, and we’re quite fond of Dwarves. Not individually; individually, most of us can take us or leave us. But as a whole, we don’t want the chance of being wiped out.”
An entirely different General, who was not from a species that believed in names, said, “Don’t you mean ‘certainty of being wiped out?’”
So Sam spoke for a bit.
First, he reiterated the surrender of the Dwarves. No reason to let that get overlooked just because you had something interesting to talk about.
Then he began to talk about the Dwarfish part of the Underdark, and its assorted protections.
He used the words ‘cave in’, ‘mine shaft’, and ‘trapped forever in a stony darkness which has never known and will never know the Sun’ with at least relative constraint, under the circumstances.
The assembled Generals listened with increasing unease.
“So an extremely large army could take you, probably, but only by suffering massive losses and destroying large parts of what would be valuable about conquering you by force?”
“Oh, yes,” Sam said brightly.
“But you wish to surrender?”
Sam shrugged, “As a people, if you want to do all the boring work of ruling, go right ahead. If you could probably kill us a lot, that’s even more incentive.”
Then he gave a very small Sam smile.
“Also, all of our traps are generations old. We know they work. It’s not exactly interesting or skilled labor. But Ambassadoring?”
He outright grinned. “Nobody wants to do it, but at least we haven’t tried it before. If nothing else, it should be interesting.”
III.
That would be a good place for this piece of Sam’s story to end.
Interesting, yes. Well-crafted, likely not. (We judge not our own words; just the workmanship of Sam’s tale.)
There’s a great deal of honor in creating a new art form, although one’s motives aren’t generally honor (fame, perhaps. Insanity. Honor? New art forms are best made by breaking through convention in one great driven burst or set of bursts. Honor, like the House of Orange—maintains.)
It’s normal for this to be extremely honorable, once the new art form is recognized. This usually involves people going from being shocked to excited. This usually happens no more than a decade or two, or sometimes a century or three, after the innovator’s death.
Thus it goes.
Sam’s plan is to do the Ambassador job well. But there isn’t much chance he can do it artfully, or craftily. There is little chance he can do something meaningful with it, unless, say, it’s a meaningful job. But it’s politics; how meaningful can it be?
Sam is determined to do a good job, but it’s hopeless. Aside from the fact that the Dark Lord is evil, which ought to be at least impractical, there’s just the fat that nobody has really invented a great longterm system for politicking with any real success.
(For example, the less said of Dwarven experiments with both Democracy and Autocracy, the better. As for their experiment with Demonocracy, there is a reason why there are essentially no Dwarven magicians, sorcerers, or summoners.
Not anymore, anyway.)
IV.
This is what Dwarves have figured out about Government:
- Most Governmental systems are bad.
- Kings are exceptionally good or exceptionally bad and somewhat even out, and…
- …if you have Kings and Royalty, you can likely bribe them into making their families take the jobs when they retire, die, or decide to do something actually fun.
- So that’s what Dwarves do.
- It is not true that they breed their rulers to be useless.
- They simply recognize that most rulers are ALREADY useless, and breed for an inability to be too bored and a certain sense of shame if you don’t show up for work once in a while.
- This system works badly, which is to say, better than most other systems of government in use anywhere at all.
V.
A Dwarven philosophy of warfare:
Don’t. It cuts into your mining time.
A Dwarven philosophy of governance:
It is entirely possible for Government to craft something well, and not even necessarily by accident.
It is also possible for all of the atoms of a door to translocate simultaneously such that you can walk through it without opening it.
Many things are possible.
Few things are likely.
___
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