a bit of discussion that cropped up when the Rune of Forging was mentioned!
Rune of Forging
This rune ensures the war machine is free from imperfections and therefore deadly accurate. In order to inscribe it, an
Engineer must strike the machine with a hammer and a Runesmith must recite a special litany with each blow, making it a weeks-long ritual.
That makes me wonder if there are some potential runes out there that are very hard to discover because they require there being other people in the room while the runes are being made. Runes that require multiple runesmiths acting simultaneously, or runes that require that some other craftsman is practicing their craft as the rune is made, or even, more adventurously, runes that need a spellcaster to be casting a spell or creating an enchantment on the target object.
On a tangentially related note, I wonder if any Brana have inspired by runecrafting to try making their own magic items.
I'm eh, a little worried for the Dwarfs in the MoM in a few millennia, or whenever it was the ogre migration came. They'll be pretty entrenched by that point, but still....literally the entire ogre race rampaging through in a feeding frenzy is nothing to scoff, and even if Dawi are short and stout I doubt they'll be off the menu. Not to mention, even if we handled it well with the Brana, there's no guarantee that the eastern dwarfs will react well to a race of colossi inhabiting what they'll likely see as their mountains by the time they come across them.
In the shorter term the problem is likely to be that the original greenskin homeland is apparently in the east of what would become the Dark Lands. In canon they migrated west as a result of the same Slann induced vulcanism that caused the Time of Woe in general, which they were particularly hard hit by.
As a warning, below I'm positing a particularly revisionist take on Warhammer history, which I'm not asserting to be the gospel truth.
Now, the greenskins don't currently have metalworking, and probably aren't an existential threat to the dwarven colonists, but the reverse very much isn't true. This means that the first sustained contact between dwarves and greenskins will be very different. In canon, the relatively small number of chaos dwarves was able to go full imperialist on them, able to enslave entire tribes and transplant them to labour in their industries (which would presumably have included agriculture before they and the Slann destroyed the Dark Land's environment). This even continued after escaped slaves brought the secrets of working metal, including steel, back to their homelands.
The second chapter comes, of course, when the greenskins came west at the start of the Time of Woe, and immediately attacked the dwarves. (As a side note first contact between humans and the Karaz Ankor is recorded to have happened in the first decade of the Time of Woes as well). Now, think of the context here. The greenskins are usually presented as unreasoning savages, but it actually makes sense for them to immediately attack the dwaves. From their experience dwarves are the bogeymen, slave taking imperialists with an unending hunger for green flesh to throw into their furnaces, both literally and figuratively. Importantly, they won't know much about dwarven culture; as these are the free tribes who will only know what small numbers of escaping slaves told them - we're more than a thousand years before the black orc lead rebellion where vast numbers of slaves cast off their chains at once. In this situation it's very understandable for greenskin refugees fleeing climate change to attack what looks like their historic oppressors.
And so they did, and from that moment when they kicked the dwarves at their lowest moment the die was cast and relations between dwarves and greenskin were always going to be unrelentingly hostile, an attitude that the dwaves passed onto their later human clients, and the greenskins internalised.
Here though, none of that may happen. While the dwarves have experiences of negative contacts with other sapients in the form of the beastmen and Fimir, they also have positive contacts with the Brana and elves, and they also have experience from their own Hashut cultists that every race can have bad apples and that doesn't damn all their kin by association. The lesson it does seem to teach is that the problem is Chaos rather than otherness, as that's the common thread.
This means that I can see the dwarves, if they encounter the greenskins from a position of strength as they're likely to here, being willing to deal with them peacefully. Whether that will be reciprocated or not is another matter, but the greenskins won't have a epoc long history of being raided for slaves for slaves by dwarves. The fact that the chaos dwarves could use the greenskins not only as slaves, but as slave soldiers, and that much later on people manage to negotiate and trade with the Hobgoblin Khanates for passage, and the coexistence of gnobblars and ogres, indicate that it might not be completely impossible.
A big factor as to what happens could be related to how popular the hill dwarf lifestyle becomes. If the dwarf population keeps growing and the proportion of them happy to live in and on the surface of a hill keeps going up then the dwarves may want to settle the future dark lands themselves, rather than just the mountains around it. If the Brana keep expanding, their presence would make securing large amounts of the surface easier if the dwarves can build them towers to nest in*.
There's also the question of humans. We don't know when they moved up into the Dark Lands from what were apparently their original equatorial homelands. They may not have been present until Settra's conquests across the Crystal (later Bitter) Sea, descendants of armies or colonists left behind after Nehekhara fragmented upon his death. This was a period when the Plain of Bone was called the Plain of Plenty (presumably later soil erosion revealed the dragon skeletons?). If that's the case humans won't be showing up there for another couple of thousand years.
* thinking about dwarven colonisation efforts makes me mourn Dolgi's decision to maintain a monopoly on the Rune of Featherweight all the more. It had such transformative potential if it had been made available for widespread development and adoption that will now probably never occur because Dolgi wanted to ensure that his already extraordinarily wealthy family would be even richer.
