Let's Try to Piece Together the Outside World!

Yeah, it would kind of figure that the elves wouldn't last long after the war. They might have won.... but the cost! Those dwarves were fearless, tenacious bastards. I can't imagine the elves had much left in them after that. Maybe the rest of them sailed off to their remote island heaven or perhaps were simply knocked off by the swiftly burgeoning human empire.

 

What about Dwarven Atom Smashers? Shouldn't the Dwarves be able to kill the Elves with it? Not only this, but one should assume that they have legendary wandcrafters, legendary tinkerers, and legendary weaponsmiths, allowing them to mass produce bombs, or at the least bolts of mass destruction.

 

Could they even craft the DAS here? I mean, considering that they lost because they ran out of resources, it's possible that DAS was never within realms of possibility for them.

 

Well they should have been able to have and use them in the first and maybe second war, so one would assume that they would have been able to keep them from the first two wars.

Speaking of the Dwarf-Elf Wars, how did they start, and why?

 

The wars had no specified reason. War never changes... It just happens when people of any race and nationality decide they want to kill others for any reason or even none at all. Usually by the time any war is done all sides have rewritten history to portray them as victims and everyone else as aggressors.

The most reliable data after a war is that no two sides see it the same way.

 

Maybe, just maybe, the dwarves invaded the elves because nobody likes elves?

 

They started as a dispute about drink preferences - elves wanted to ban production of alcohol that wasn't wine or champagne, while dwarves wanted to be able to produce their lager.

Which seems like just an absurd enough reason to fit.

 

Dredmor must've been a dwarf himself, or he had connections with the dwarfs. Why? His dungeon is full of dwarf cannons and plastic bolts, while there are close to no elven things to find.
His dungeon might've been a Dwarven bunker at some point in history. The kind of bunker that has cannons on every corner.

 

Maybe he was the king of dwarves, even. That, combined with the dwarves losing the war, would give him enough of an incentive to want to kill them all.

 

Or he locked them out of his fortress, and then realized he locked himself in.

 

And the player was sent by the elven king to finish the dwarven king, because for as long as Dredmor is still alive (or not fully dead, or whatever), the elves can't ban production of non-wine non-champagne alcohol.

 

But then the elfs seem to be mightier than the dwarfs. They can command humans. Maybe the outside world is one huge forest with great tree cities everywhere, and the only corrupted place is Dredmor's dungeon.

 

Maybe the dwarves themselves can't enter Dredmor's dwarven fortress because of some seal he did, and thus they could only send humans. And because humans couldn't be allowed to know that Dredmor wasn't an "evil lich" but instead just dwarven king who immortalised himself to protect his kin, they ended up sending single adventurers instead of the whole army.

Who knows... maybe...

 

I'm actually with the elves, because the wine is much more effective than the beer.

 

Which is why everyone denied the dwarves resources and they had to resort to using plastic?

 

It all makes sense now! Not only this but the Wizard Lords who controlled the wizardlands would've sided with the elves because of how effective the wine is!

 

Basic stuff: there is a King that reigns over the land outside the dungeon. As per the intro text.

 

Who says he isn't a figurehead?

 

Kings make GREAT figureheads.

The real power behind the throne is Dredmor himself, who through the careful use of dreadful magics and even more dreadful Machiavellian gambits, set himself up with the cushy position of chancellor. Every fifty years or so he retires from the position only to come back with a new name and face to keep the ruse fresh.

The whole sending 'heroes' to his dungeon thing started as just another facet of the deception but over centuries politics have grown a bit stale and Old Dred finds the occasional adventurer to be a welcome diversion. Especially since he has no real fear of death.

Dred has been 'defeated' by numerous adventurers who despite combing the whole *&#@ing dungeon still can't find his phylactery since it's sitting safely in the last place anyone would think to look: on the King's brow.

 

Well, he has enough authority to pick some random wannabe out of the crowd and assign them to delve into the dungeon. That implies that, whether politically impotent or not, he has some serious social cred.