Okay I know we always go on about Marvel’s uncanny casting ability.
But if you thought they were the only ones, let me draw your attention to this man:
Viggo Mortensen, aka Aragorn son of Arathorn, aka Sexiest Ranger in Middle Earth
would hike, often for more than a day, to remote filming locations, in costume, for the sake of authenticity
was the best swordsman Bob Anderson (swordsmaster/instructor for LotR, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc) says he has ever trained
occasionally writes poetry (more book!canon than film!canon but um hello)
does all his own stunts
lived all over and speaks about 23940209384 languages
you know that scene at the end of Fellowship when he’s fighting the Uruk-hai? And one throws a dagger at him and he hits it away with his sword? Yeah, the guy who threw it was supposed to miss, but accidentally threw it directly at Viggo. Who just casually Aragorned and hit it away.
They actually cast Aragorn to play Aragorn
Can I just add a few things?
Would randomly give chocolates to the hobbits
According to John Rhys-Davis (aka Gimli), whenever you have a large cast, one or two actors will naturally become the leaders. Guess who ended up in that role.
Single-handedly convinced cast and crew to camp out to shoot a scene in the sunrise
Once hit a wild rabbit with his car by accident. Promptly stopped his car and went to see if the rabbit was dead, needed a vet or if the only merciful thing to do was to finish killing him. The rabbit was dead. Viggo realized he was hungry. So he took the rabbit, made a fire by the roadside and ate it.
According to cast and crew, sometimes you’d just see him disappear in the middle of the night and suddenly he’d come back with fish he’d caught
Had his sword with him at all times. Slept with once.
The best horse rider of the cast, hands down. Rides better than lots of pros, according to a horse trainer. Couldn’t bear to part with his horse at the end of the shooting, so he bough him. The next movie of his also involved horses, and he bought his horse in that one, too.
Knows how to survive in the wild. I’m not kidding.
Hand-stitched a few things in his costume for an authentic “I live away from civilization” Ranger feel. Also told the weapons department to make him a small bow because “Aragorn lives in the wild, he needs a hunting bow, or he’ll starve to death” – literally nobody else had thought about that. Also requested a small stone to sharpen his sword. Suggested that Aragorn would take Boromir’s arm guards after his death.
Speaking of hand-stitching, once he was touring Japan with a reporter for an article. Walked into a store, took a tshirt, bought it, cut off the print and hand-stitched it into the hat he was wearing. The reporter was going “?????????” the entire time.
Peter Jackson literally sometimes called him Aragorn by accident
If anyone wants to see typical first egg laying behavior this is it!
She’s throwing the shavings behind her in an attempt to make a good nest. She also does some scratching with her feet create a shallow bowl to lay in and make it comfy
@why-animals-do-the-thing an example of trainability in fish! Harder in long-tailed male bettas because they can’t really clear the water, but bettas can be taught to swim through a hoop, and this is the next step up. They’re smart fish who are easily motivated by food.
And that thing in the background is a betta hammock. Bettas like to lounge near the surface of the water so they can easily wiggle up to the surface for a breath, and some will even lounge in areas so shallow they’re barely covered by water. Their favorites are places where they only have to lean their head up for a breath.
A long-term friend of mine had been lamenting that while there seems to be a lot of push to diversify elves and ‘get them out of the forest’ but everybody seems content to leave the dwarves in their mountains. In my campaign world I do have dwarves still in the mountains, but I have a particular reason.
Dwarves, as a fantasy or rpg race typically have the following traits:
Short, stocky or round with a low center of gravity
Facial hair and plenty of it, sometimes on females as well
The Axe. If there’s no axe, there will be a hammer
Smiths, craftsmen and great builders
Beer, mead, ale… it’s all good as long as it’s not wine
Underground. Not just a little hole, but deep underground.
That’s a phenotype you can pick up and move anywhere, provided you can grow something you can then ferment and make into booze. So let’s see how they might fit in different environments.
Desert. If you’re going to live in the desert you have to worry about water and maintaining your body temperature, as it can get both unreasonably hot and cold in the desert, often switching from one extreme to another from day to night. Lots of animals have figured out that the temperature is much more stable underground and burrow, and the trees that survive find the water table. There are two very good reasons to build your home underground, and from there you expand your home into a city with networks etc. You can ferment the cacti. Darkvision would be handy as you’re not going to come up in the day if you can avoid it. I imagine they’d build large ventilation columns, a bit like termite mounds, reaching above the dunes, the only evidence of the city below.
Sea edge. I’m thinking cliffs, harsh and windswept towering above the churning waters. The windchill can be lethal, and the saltwater of the ocean is all but undrinkable without specialized processing. (Maybe they have that technology, maybe salt is a major export. Everybody needs salt before refrigeration.) Not much lives on sea cliffs aside from some agile birds that nest there, far out of reach of predators. Building your fortress into the side of the sea cliffs is a very defensible position, and there’s a huge amount of energy to be potentially harnessed in the wind and waves. Branching out into ships is difficult from cliffs, it may be easier to use underwater channels, if such a clever dwarf could devise a vessel to travel entirely beneath the waves. The lower tunnels of an sea cliff fortress are prone to flooding, so these dwarves are likely to be better at balancing and swimming than their inland brethren.
Ice. Where do you expect to find a phenotype that has a reduced body surface area to volume ratio (approaching spherical), comfortable insulating body fat and extra hair? Somewhere very cold. You can dig down into solid ice, which will be relatively more comfortable out of the wind chill, but if you build up with the excavated ice it will likely end up with snow accumulating on at least one side, eventually looking like a hill. Fireballs obviously strongly discouraged, and layered furs prefered over open flame for heat to preserve structural integrity.
Old forest. Nobody ever said anything about getting the dwarves out of the forest. I don’t mean your standard, idyllic, meadow filled forest. I mean the dark, overgrown, ancient, creaking forest with trees so old, massive and twisted that you can’t be certain they don’t have faces. The sort of forest where you can barely see the sky, and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck for no clear reason, but you can’t help but trust your instinct that something, somewhere is patiently waiting to eat you. Here it’s probably much safer underground, where you can at least establish a defensible position. I imagine large halls, edged with the passive roots of the still living trees, and probably a significant mushroom proportion in the diet. Elves above may not even know they’re there.
Really they can make themselves at home anywhere you need a defensible position. Break some stereotypes, throw some dwarves around.
(But you cannot toss them)
I already have Sand Dwarves as a subrace for my campaign, so this helps
Sea Edge dwarves… not bad… but stick with me here for a moment… Beach Dwarves.
PLEASE CONSIDER: oceanside dwarves working synergistically with seals. raising their chunky little kids in the same warm coves. harnessing seals to pull them out to sea and then using nets to catch lots of fish for sharing. dwarves with sealtooth spears and sealskin coats. seals with protective runes dyed into their fur and hung around their necks. some elf is sailing to the west all mopey and sad and pass a big rock and there’s six big fat brown whiskery lumps and they all roll over and jeer at once
why be sad when there’s sun to lie in and rocks to lie on and fish to digest
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