SOMEONE FINALLY ASKED!
Im in the middle of fluffying the backbone of lore I made to make runelore workable as a mechanic, and that includes runesmith culture and traditions.
As of right now though, just know that for the purposes of this quest, contemporary runesmith culture in the time after the War of Vengeance and Time of Woes is a distortion/different from the runesmith culture of the Golden Age.
Losing a massive amount of your runesmiths and being disconnected from each other does that.
If someone can accurately guess one difference I'll add +5 to a background roll.
Easier, and more fun, for me to parse the entire surface level culture and then dig into that.
As it stood in the fading age after the War of Vengeance and other catastrophes the Guild of Runesmiths is a priesthood of a mystery cult, a religion restricted to initiates and whose secrets are only available to those initiates. They are isolated mountaintop masters who are frantically practicing their craft with three general priorities it seems like: repair what they can of the Karak runeworks, build powerful masterworks that can turn the tide of endless enemies, and recover lost runework. The Masters have to be The Very Best They Can Be, and shoulder the load of many.
Thus the Rule of Pride dovetails neatly from those restrictions. A Master runesmith can't, they *cannot* spend time churming out endless numbers of lesser works when they are the only dwarfs who can maintain the most important and ancient runeworks, build the most powerful masterworks that can turn entire battles, and who might remember where some ancient scrap of lore might potentially be.
They have also suffered crippling, absolutely horrendous loss of life, to the point where many many masters and their knowledge is just gone. Completely. And so you have Holds where there might once have been entire families of runesmiths but now there's one. Maybe two. Maybe
none. And so they are dealing with a utter dearth of potential apprentices because the blood is far less prevalent than before, and they have to find worthy apprentices to pass on their knowledge. But many can't, further cementing the issue that each Master has to be The Very Best.
What does this
say? They are desperate, while the runesmiths of Snorri's time are not. In the fading age you don't hear about master runelords making toys. Or pretty clothing. They do not make idle work. Snorri, clearly does. That's one huge difference. There are enough of Snorri's contemporaries and things are calm enough that they can perform idle work. The runesmiths like Snorri have time. The runesmiths of the fading age have no time, not even enough to maintain the integrity of the Karaks
and make masterworks
and recover lost knowledge.
But right now runesmiths can have those one weird drunken ideas that runesmiths of the fading age might discard because they have no time, and fiddle with them till something interesting falls into their lap. Or make several thousand toys. Or weave pretty dresses.
And their pool of apprentice candidates is larger. The golden age runesmiths can afford multiple apprentices, they have a confidence that they can find someone to pass their knowledge to. The runesmiths of the fading age, don't.
On lighter topics, how long is Snorri's beard in dwarf body lengths? This is very important
