D20x5 Dwarven Mountain Halls

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D20	This mountain hall
1	is carved into natural pilasters of salt, towers glittering in the lamplight.
2	appears to be a single castle alone on a plain, but this is just the mound of a great and teeming anthill.
3	is carved out in a negative-space sculpture of a dwarven body, a great library in the stony folds of its brain, causeways and canals along its arteries, slag-dumps leaking from visceral forges, and so on.
4	is built upwards as quickly as it’s dug downwards, a spire and a shaft in one.
5	is built across and down a crevasse in a spiderweb-suspension of steel cables.
6	piles down the mountainside it’s built into, with terraced fields and cyclopean ziggurats.
7	is an inchoate marvel of ferrofluidic construction, architecture shifting between solid and liquid forms in an urban dance.
8	has been dug into a volcano, and pumps its magma throughout for light and heating.
9	resembles a brutalist arcology built inside an enormous, unnatural hollow within the earth.
10	is an underground pastoral idyll where eyeless sheep graze pale grass beneath its cavern’s crystalline sun.
11	is carved into the hexagonal basalt pillars of an ocean causeway.
12	is built in the guts of a titanic mining machine inching its way through the stone over centuries. The dwarves have forgotten how to operate it, repair it, and even if they made it in the first place.
13	is carved into the mineral carapace of an ancient, gigantic crustacean.
14	was once a human city, now conquered and dismantled into a mountain of rubble.
15	is built into a seamount, bronze submersibles raised and lowered on chains to move between the hall and the ocean’s surface.
16	was once much, much larger, but only a small fraction is now inhabited. The rest has been sealed off by disaster or deliberate containment.
17	is built into the stump of a giant petrified tree.
18	is built into the sides of an open-air mine, under the comfortable darkness of a massive sunshade.
19	uses a carefully engineered and directed glacier to do the bulk of its digging.
20	is surrounded by a cloud forest on top of a mesa. Scaffolding stretches throughout the canopy.

D20	The dwarves of this mountain hall
1	refuse to sully their tongues with speech, preferring instead to write down anything they need to communicate. Tone is conveyed by the writing medium: blood on stone for momentous passions and awful curses, or honey-based ink on gold leaf for the respect necessary to address a king, for instance.
2	are born partially unformed, and must attach prosthetics to make up for their missing parts.
3	prefer to drink many varieties of tea over alcohol. Societies are formed and feud over the superiority of psychedelic, stimulant, deliriant, and suchlike teas.
4	treasure wigs of ludicrous shape, make, and colour, for their scalps, beards, armpits, and elsewhere. Merkins made from a lion’s mane are reserved for kings, on pain of death by smelting.
5	practice a martial art specialized for fighting in tight spaces.
6	are intensely agoraphobic, and must wear blinders like a horse’s on the surface.
7	believe deeply in a form of geomancy based on revealing rock strata and examining the innards of geodes.
8	believe that people on the surface fuck birds and eat tree bark.
9	treat their tools as people, with names, personalities, and funerals when they break.
10	are immune to the toxic effects of metals, and consume mercury as a medicine.
11	forbid the creation of graven images except for golems and cenotaphs.
12	believe themselves to be the rightful owners of all the world’s goods and resources, with everyone else being thieves, renters, or the recipients of gifts.
13	fossilize the bodies of their dead to be posed in grave-gardens.
14	find snails adorable, breeding them for show and races.
15	have skin the colours and textures of types of stone.
16	find humans to be both overly squeamish and sentimental about sex.
17	worship the cube, believing it to be the mathematical and physical basis of reality on which all else rests.
18	are fond of body modification implants. Each social group has their preferred motifs of horns, bumps, and ridges.
19	hold the work crew to be the basic unit of society rather than the individual or family.
20	can communicate in a reverberating code transmitted by tapping steel-toed boots against cave walls.

D20	This mountain hall is known for producing
1	the cutting edge of technology in its region.
2	masterful jewelry for the fabulously wealthy.
3	limitless mass-produced trinkets.
4	beverages so coveted that being corked in a bottle of pure gold would not substantially increase their price.
5	enormous statues and cannons both, a credit to their casting technique.
6	clocks, self-driving wagons, calculation engines, and other wondrous automata.
7	beard oil and moustache wax.
8	hyphaic textiles of astounding tint and patterns.
9	musical instruments of pitch and timbre to be the match of any maestro.
10	gunpowder and firearms of exceeding refinement.
11	military tacticians and siege engineers.
12	alchemists, poisoners, and other workers of substance.
13	treatises both philosophical and political, arguments with unarguable proofs.
14	armour, shields, and fortifications which are proof against any assault.
15	artisans of the highest caliber.
16	vessels and vehicles to traverse any terrain in any weather.
17	impregnable walls and unconquered castles for unthinkable fees.
18	the weapons which were wielded by the heroes of a hundred legends.
19	enthralling sagas and the catchiest drinking songs.
20	monster slayers whose grudges and outsized kills are legend.

D20	This mountain hall is defended by
1	ingenious contraptions: spinning blades, whirring gears, spurting acid.
2	berserkers with foam dripping from their beards, drunk and raging from mushroom wine.
3	enigmatic beings of celestial light, trapped in refractive crystal prism-prisons.
4	eyeless beasts of the earth’s darkest depths, barely tamed by whip and chain.
5	warriors clad head to toe in the finest steel, fighting with precision and unity to match any golems.
6	titanic war machines modelled after heraldic beasts: iron wyverns that exude toxic fumes, brass gryphons whose pinions screech with the effort of holding them aloft, and so on.
7	mercenaries from every corner of the world, blinding in the hues and sheens of their livery, bought with spoils hacked from stone.
8	elemental entities of stone and soil, enslaved by spell-tablets engraved by generations of lawyer-priests.
9	the ghosts of their ancestral heroes, bound to statue-likenesses until bloodily needed.
10	neighbouring human principalities, dependent on their continued exports.
11	the geography itself turned against invaders: rockslides, cave-ins, reservoirs set to flood, and so on.
12	networks of sapper-tunnels, trenches, and minefields.
13	cannons, ballistas, trebuchets, and even stranger siege engines.
14	tanks and gyrocopters straight out of Da Vinci’s imagination.
15	the unquiet dead stolen from other peoples’ barrows and catacombs, unleashed and abjured in the enemy’s direction.
16	vicious exile-clans, promised an honourable return to the hall if they die in defense of it.
17	the exhumed skeletons of antediluvian behemoths.
18	slave-armies captured from the teeming hordes of subterrene troglodytes.
19	darkling devils ensnared by contracts of such devious completeness that they behave like simple programs.
20	a feast of ogres fattened on the glut of the hall’s agricultural excess.

D20	The doom which awaits this mountain hall is
1	the price of digging too deep: molten demons unleashed from the earth’s burning heart.
2	jealous greed, brother turning against brother for a fistful of gold.
3	invasion, to be pried open and plundered by envious hands.
4	explosive hubris, the pinnacle of their invention failing at the moment of activation.
5	madness, the call of an unkind god heard by each dwarf in turn.
6	subsumption, the loss of will and imagination to the directionless pounding of pick on rock, hammer on anvil.
7	collapse, imprudent supports crumbling into the abyss.
8	the inexorable grinding of the continental plates it lies betwixt.
9	plague and the quarantine which must follow, sealing the place into withering decline.
10	endless cycles of arbitrary tyrants deposed by bloody revolutions that calcify into yet more despotism.
11	Malthusian chaos, population expanding faster than the means to feed it.
12	a failed ascension from flesh to machine.
13	a repressive culture imploding in an orgy of violence and actual orgies.
14	paranoia reverberating through close quarters, witch hunts, purges, and millenarian fervour.
15	the practice of unwise magics getting the place swallowed by a hostile living demiplane.
16	a deep ennui that spreads like a sickness, a slow starvation as even eating loses any satisfaction.
17	treachery, once-comrades opening its gates to its enemies.
18	one of pure misfortune, to be crushed by a falling meteor, the dust of its diaspora scattered on the winds.
19	a malignant curse which grows ever more suffocating over the generations.
20	a megalomaniacal ruler squandering its wealth and working its people to death building grand egoistic monuments.