Dwarves and minor magics
I haven't updated the blog in a while, so I think I'll ramble a bit about why Moon Shadows dwarves are so different from other "old school" dwarves. I began my D&D adventures with AD&D 2nd Edition (mixed with some older 1st edition books). I really enjoyed it overall, but there were many things that annoyed me before I realized it's all made up so I can just change the parts I don't like. One thing that bothered me is the way it was claimed to be a generic game system for fantasy adventures in your own setting while simultaneously prescribing setting details. For example, "dwarves are inherently unmagical and can't be wizards". Dwarves are master craftsmen and created many magical objects in myths and fairy tales, but in D&D you needed a human or an elf to make a magic item for you.
I wasn't even a big fan of dwarves, but that restriction irritated me. In B/X D&D, it was even worse. Dwarves were just short fighters who could tell if a stone floor was uneven. They couldn't even be clerics. I was always more of an elf fan, so I did my best to ignore that restriction until 3rd edition came out and removed it.
I had read The Lord of the Rings when I was a kid, but somehow never encountered The Hobbit, which I had only vaguely heard of. Gimli was my mental model for dwarves for many years and then the Warhammer Fantasy dwarves mostly reinforced that image. When my son was about 6, I bought a copy of The Hobbit to read to him. Reading about the dwarves in The Hobbit reignited my passionate hatred for AD&D's race/class restrictions.
The dwarves (and hobbits, too) in The Hobbit had many supernatural abilities that were presented as matter-of-fact skills in the same manner as their being excellent miners, smiths, and jewelers. After they find the troll's treasure hoard (from which Thorin and Gandalf got their swords and Bilbo got his "sword", Sting), they bury the loot to recover later and protect it from discovery by saying spells over it! Let me check my copy that happens to be close at hand... Huh. It seems I bookmarked that page because that is where I left off during my most recent reread of it:
"Then they brought up their ponies, and carried away the pots of gold, and buried them very secretly not far from the track by the river, putting a great many spells over them, just in case they ever had the chance to come back and recover them."
That particular ability entered my Moon Shadows setting in the form of the sun dwarf's "Cache Warding" protection rune that gives a hiding place a chance of being overlooked by searchers until the dwarf comes back to it. It isn't a big flashy fireball or lightning bolt, but it put the idea in my head that minor magics like cantrips shouldn't be limited to wizards only.
The dwarves were capable of many feats that would be a spell in D&D if Gandalf had done it. They made ink that wrote runes that were only visible by the light of a moon in the same season and phase as when they were written. They made a keyhole that was only visible one day a year. They made a door that was only visible by moonlight. Balin understood the speech of ravens.
The dwarves weren't the only ones to have these minor magical abilities. Hobbits could be nearly silent and invisible. This isn't presented as them being really good at hiding because they're small, but more like supernatural ninja stealth. This was originally a bedtime story for children and hobbits are fairy tale creatures. "If fairies live in the woods," a child might ask, "like the story says, why don't we ever see them when we walk in the woods? Why don't we see them dancing around that ring of mushrooms in the lawn?" "Well, you can't see a fairy who doesn't want to be seen, because of their fairy magic!" Also, it seems like Aragorn treating Frodo's wound was more than just "Make a Nature check to find medicinal herbs and a Healing check to apply them."
If the "non-magical" dwarves could have so many supernatural (if not super powerful) abilities, why shouldn't these cool little magic tricks be available to anyone? In the Moon Shadows setting, casting a fireball spell is a rare ability for magical specialists, but being able to light a candle with a snap of one's fingers is more commonplace. Just like in the real world, being a Formula 1 race car driver is a rare skill but it's not unusual to know how to drive a manual transmission. I'll describe these minor magics in more detail after I write up the cosmology and alignment system, because they're tied together, but here's a hint: fire-aligned characters don't typically have "flint & steel" in their inventory.