Short and powerful, dwarves stand between 4½ and 5 feet tall. Their frames are nevertheless extremely massive, and an average dwarf weighs in the vicinity of 200 pounds. Life in the Athasian wastes make them rugged, tanned, and callused.
Dwarves seek out meaningful work to occupy their time. A dwarf is never happier than when he has a cause to work or fight for. A stoic race, dwarves love to approach tasks with a single-minded intensity. They devote their very beings to these tasks, laboring for weeks, years, even decades to the exclusion of other endeavors. Once a dwarf is committed to a particular task, it takes a great deal of coercion to make him set it aside for even a limited amount of time. A dwarf strives for the personal fulfillment he achieves upon completing a lengthy, difficult task.
A dwarf's present task is called his focus. No simple job can become a focus. A focus must be a feat that requires at least one week to complete. While performing actions that are directly related to his focus, a dwarf receives a +1 bonus to all saving throws and a +2 bonus to all proficiency checks (or +10 to any percentile rolls). The concept of the focus is integral to a dwarf's makeup and is even tied to his physiology-so much so that those dwarves who die before completing their foci become undead banshees who wander the wastes haunting their unfinished works.
A dwarf character reacts to other characters based upon his current focus. If another character is actively committed to the dwarf's focus, the dwarf considers that character to be a sensible and dependable companion. If, however, a character vehemently opposes a dwarf's focus, the two are irrevocably at odds until one or the other is dead. There's very little room for compromise in a dwarf's mind.
Dwarves are nonmagical by nature. They can't use wizard magic of any sort, though they can employ priestly magic. Their nonmagical nature gives them a resistance to wizard spells that translates into saving throw bonuses for attacks from magical wands, rods, staves, and spells of a wizardly nature, as shown below on TABLE IX. Likewise, dwarves also have exceptional resistance to toxic substances. They receive bonuses to saving throws versus poison using the same table.
| Constitution Score |
Saving Throw Bonus |
|---|---|
| 4-6 | +1 |
| 7-10 | +2 |
| 11-14 | +3 |
| 15-18 | +4 |
| 19-21 | +5 |
| 22-24 | +6 |
Unlike in other AD&D campaigns, Athasian dwarves don't receive combat bonuses against larger opponents, and they don't have any natural abilities to detect sloping passages or other underground discrepancies. They do have infravision (the ability to see varying degrees of heat in darkness) to 60 feet, and on Athas their base movement rate is 6. The maximum age a dwarf can hope to live to is 260.
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