By This Axe: The Cyclopedia of Dwarven Civilization reveals the secrets of the great and proud race of dwarves, compiled, codified, and curated for use in your favorite old-school fantasy role-playing game. With the Cyclopedia, you get:
- 270 pages of lore and rules bounded in a stitch-bound hardcover and PDF edition
- A full-color painted cover by Michael Syrigos
- A full-color interior layout with full- and half-page art
- Compatibility with Old School Renaissance RPGs such as ACKS, OSE, LL, and LOTFP
By This Axe is organized into ten chapters:
- Chapter 1, Introduction, details the audience, purpose, and approach for this book.
- Chapter 2, Dwarven Lore, provides an overview of the ethnicity, physiology, language, and customs of dwarves. It is narrated from the point of view of a sage in the world of the Auran Empire.
- Chapter 3, Dwarven Characters, explains how to roll up a dwarven character in any one of six racial classes, including the craftpriest, delver, earthforger, fury, machinist, and vaultguard.
- Chapter 4, Dwarven Templates, provides eight pre-generated templates for each character class in this book. Using these templates, you can easily make your vaultguard a highborn lord, your machinist an apothecary, or your craftpriest a reliquary guardian.
- Chapter 5, Dwarven Earthforging, details a new style of magic, wielded by the earthforger class, whose innate talents have allowed them to channel the power within materials to reshape their form.
- Chapter 6, Dwarven Automatons, presents rules for designing, building, and repairing clockwork and steampunk-type machines. The section includes over 20 example vehicles, objects, and other automatons to act as examples for the build process and/or to include in your game as items to encounter or use, or as blueprints in treasure hoards.
- Chapter 7, Dwarven Domains, explains how your dwarven characters can establish themselves as rulers of domains and realms, with rules for agriculture, urban settlements, vassals, garrisons, and more.
- Chapter 8, Dwarven Mining, expands the rules for domains to include mining for precious metals and quarrying for stone. Special rules for “delving too deep” allow your dwarves to greedily hunger for gold - risking potentially dire consequences.
- Chapter 9, Dwarven Mycoculture, details the secret methods of mushroom farming used by the dwarves to feed their vaults and brew their marvelous ales and beers.
- Chapter 10, Dwarven Relics, offers a catalog of over 35 rare and powerful dwarven relics, artifacts, and antiquities that might be guarded in sacred reliquaries, wielded by dwarf lords, or re-discovered in lost vaults and deep and hidden places.
By This Axe is designed for use with the Adventurer Conqueror King System™ (ACKS™) but is readily compatible with other fantasy role-playing games built on the same core rules.