Ancestral Origin: Ancient surface dwarves
Primary Environment: Underdark
Game Rules: Use standard Duergar ancestry rules
The Duergar are a dwarven people descended from populations that migrated from the surface into the Underdark in antiquity. Their separation was not the result of one universally remembered event. Different ancestral communities may have gone below in search of mineral wealth, refuge, defensible territory, new settlements, or escape from conflicts that have long since passed out of reliable history.
After centuries and millennia below the Spatial Break, these populations became distinct from their surface dwarven relatives. The traits represented by standard Duergar game rules are understood in Kor Sirok as part of that long adaptation to the deep world and its unusual magical and geological conditions rather than as the consequence of a single divine curse or common ancestral catastrophe.
Communities
Duergar settlements participate in the same fragmented geography that shapes other Underdark peoples. Cities, strongholds, mines, clan territories, and smaller communities can remain separated from one another for generations by dangerous routes, producing substantial differences in government, religion, law, language, and relations with outsiders.
The risks of subterranean travel encourage more isolationist attitudes in many Duergar settlements. Reliable tunnels, controlled entrances, defensible chambers, water sources, and known routes can be matters of survival, while opening a new passage can expose a settlement to predators or hostile neighbors as easily as it creates an opportunity for trade.
Mining, stonework, engineering, and control of deep resources are especially important in many isolated Duergar strongholds. Duergar populations in ports, mercenary companies, scholarly communities, surface cities, and mixed settlements have developed around very different occupations and institutions.
Relations with Surface Dwarves
Duergar and surface dwarves generally recognize that they are related peoples. Long isolation has nevertheless produced distinct historical memories, institutions, political loyalties, and expectations, and communities on either side of the Spatial Break may know surprisingly little about one another.
Relations range from trade and kinship to suspicion, rivalry, and open conflict. Surface dwarves may value access to deep mines and routes, while Duergar settlements can depend upon surface timber, food, livestock, medicines, or manufactured goods difficult to obtain below. In other regions, generations may pass without meaningful contact.
One of the better-documented modern encounters occurred beneath Krynhold, where the Brass Blades discovered a group of Duergar enslaved by a beholder. The episode demonstrates both how far Duergar populations can exist from familiar surface routes and how dangerous the Underdark remains even for peoples adapted to living there.
Religion and Identity
Duergar worship the gods of Kor Sirok according to local history and personal devotion. Religious practice in an isolated stronghold may differ greatly from that of Duergar living among surface dwarves or in a mixed Underdark city.