DRAFT

The Duergar are basically an underground species. They dig tunnels, they are great miners and great blacksmiths. In a real sense, they are truly people of the earth. I got to thinking that a culture prone to be underground would have evolved a diet quite different than humans or any other above-ground species. Sure, they would have vegetables and protien sources. They’d have fat and oil sources as well. However, they would not necessarily have had grains or dairy. Considering that two major food groups were unavailble to them, I thought the Duergar that first contacted humans (or any other sentient species) would be fascinated by simple things like bread and cheese.

For some reason, that seemed like a great disadvantage, so I thought about them having some sort of weird grain that grew underground. In exploring that idea, however, I couldn’t find a satisfactory grain plant. Then it occured to me that potatoes and cassava would be natural starches that they could grow. That would mean that they’d have their own version of bread and all sorts of things (potato bread), but it left out dairy. Dairy is almost entirely derived from animal milk and I wasn’t sure what could be done. So what I decided to do was make the duergar skilled cheesemakers, but that the cheese they make is quite rare and difficult to make. Think about how much milk a burrowing animal produces (as opposed to a cow or goat) and you can see where I’m going with this.

In order to prevent any species from suffering from a marked stereotype, this is an uncommon talent, but one that would provide some diversity to the duergar. I figured that ‘a duergar cheese’ would be a common phrase to mean something that was very good and very rare.