Worldbuilding Beverages Follow-Up: Example Dwarvish Drinks

Back in April, I released a guide on building your own drinks to enhance your worldbuilding on DriveThruRPG. You can pick up that guide for only one dollar! Followers of the blog will also know that I've been running a campaign using the system World Wide Wrestling, but set in my homebrew world's dwarven kingdom. (I wrote a full review of the system as well).

Part of getting my campaign up and running meant a lot of time thinking about dwarves and dwarven culture... even if a lot of that is going to be background and not actually relevant to the campaign. This is a shorter post, but I hope that it is interesting as a glimpse into my worldbuilding and my beverages product. So, without further ado, here are some of the drinks in my world's dwarven kingdom, using the templates from my product. If you want to build your own, be sure to pick up Worldbuilding Beverages on DriveThruRPG.

Guildbrew

The main dwarven kingdom in my world is dominated by a nationalized guild system. (I wrote about the history of guilds a few months ago--and yes, in that article, I explicitly talk about guilds being local institutions, but I'm making a conscious decision for my dwarves to have national guilds). That means the Brewer's Guild dominates dwarven beer-making, or at least beer-making in the predominantly dwarven kingdom.

Much of the dwarven kingdom is mountainous, with settlements in the valleys between the mountains. Still, this means a pretty high altitude for the kingdom as a whole, which, according to some basic research into beers historically brewed in the alps, limits the efficacy of using hops. As a result, Guildbrew would have a low hop flavor.

Due to the fact that the guilds are national, this beer plays a defining role in uniting the people of the realm from a culinary perspective. It is available in every town and city. The guild as a training process means that brewers will learn to brew ales in the same way. While different local conditions in water, yeast, and barley will lead to slight variation, for the most part, this drink can act as a truly unifying force for the kingdom. It is available to poor, consumed in groups at the pub, and available wherever you are so that you can make friends with locals in any town.

Lastly, I'd considered the kingdom's main meals to be heavy on sausage and potatoes. Potatoes grow well in colder environments, so the alpine climate of the kingdom fits a potato-based cuisine. And the mountainous terrain lends itself to a sort of alpine transhumance, semi-nomadic way of life for a lot of people, which I detailed more about in my article about cows. This beer is a good fit for that, as darker, malty beers tend to be seen as good pairings with cured meat and potatoes. That one was entirely incidental, but a convenient historical coincidence.

Leyanaug

Contrasting with this national beer is a highly local beer. This beer is mostly defunct, but it came about as a new resource for a town that I was building out using Ex Novo by Sharkbomb Studios (review of the game here). When building out the history of a Spa/resort town, the story developed a resource of a local brewery. The founder of the brand was a religious dissenter in a time of rising tension, and with the still nascent Brewer's Guild being allies of the main state religion, control of the town's local beer culture becomes a proxy for the impending religious explosion. While this beer will be less relevant to the campaign, both because it is in a different town than where the campaign is centered and because the beer is now long-defunct.

Leyanaug beer is brewed with using the natural water of the hot springs that provide the spas in town. The water is alkaline, and so the malted barley used is intentionally acidic to balance it out. The beer is dark and malted, even darker than the Guildbrew (which had not fully developed as a style when Leyanaug beer existed). To preserve it without the use of hops, local herbs and spices are used. All this together means that there is an earthy, metallic flavor.

The result is a beer that requires some getting used to, but which becomes a highly local institution for those who want to defy the authority of the central government and the national guild system. Eventually, the rogue brewer is executed for his religious dissent after outright civil war has broken out, but this only turns him into a sort of martyr. His beer is still drunk in halls of resistance.

Utilization

While my wrestling game wasn't exactly political, having these two specific beverages helped hone my own thinking about the world and the town my players were in. My players have been fighting in the arena, and so we're not delving into what political choice their preferred beer implies as part of the campaign--I'm not above it, but it is not the theme of this campaign.

But it did help me think about power and resistance in my dwarven kingdom. My players were operating outside of the normal guild-ruled entertainment venues, but they were a small enough group that the powers that be were fine to look the other way. Still, small acts of resistance--drinking Leyanaug beer, visiting this wrestling match--became things permitted in the world... while also being things that are obvious and socially ostracizing.

I wrote that beer is a communal beverage in the original series on worldbuilding using drinks. It defines communities. In the Leyanaug section, I described how that beer is a bit of a "shibboleth" for a particular revolutionary group--the Zaiiaists. In the small town of the wrestling campaign, where there is not a particular rebel movement (it is generations after the revolution was crushed), memories are still long. It means that the audience for my wrestling group is limited unless they get the blessing of the guild: there are people who live and die by loyalty to the guild as their community. The people who would attend their matches are outsiders in some way or another.

In short, investing this beer with a rebellious character, while emphasizing the community-establishing role that your preferred beer has in dwarven lands, let me see the ways in which other small rebellions against the system inform community identity in this particular region of my world. If drinking the wrong ale is a community-defining characteristic, then surely visiting the wrong wrestling venue is equally as community-defining.

So, then, I looked around at my outsiders. Who would sponsor my players? Who was their "creative" or "booker", helping pick who wins and who loses? An outsider. Who is willing to help fund them as a sponsor? An outsider. The NPCs my party interacted with were outsiders in some way or another.

And none of them drink Guildbrew.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse at a more practical example of how I use my worldbuilding beverages system to think about themes and NPCs in my own world. If you want to build your own, be sure to pick up Worldbuilding Beverages on DriveThruRPG for $1!