Kduur

Stretching from the edges of the Rurial Forest in southern Falen to the northern edge of the Khala mountains, Kduur is the homeland of the Dwarves, and even today hosts the worlds largest population of them. Kduur is a monarchy built upon an efficient engine of bureaucracy oiled by multifaceted and intricate rules of etiquette.
While the nation has a large percentage of dwarves, most other races can be found in significant numbers and many have adapted to Kduur thinking and culture. It is said the Kduurian culture is as sturdy--and unyielding--as the black stone edifices in which so much of their history is carved. Dwarven society is the oldest known organized society on Aramanth (gnomes perhaps existed longer, but no one claims their societies have ever been "organized"), and shades of its influence can be seen in the sprawling beuracracy and stringent record-keeping present in the Commonwealth, to which Kduur existed as a part of for several millennia. 
Much of Kduurian society revolves around the Birthing Temples, tek structures whose plans exist in the oldest carved records of dwarven society. It is in those sacred places that new dwarves are born, for they are unable to breed by normal means. While for most non-dwarves outside of Kduur these temples hold little meaning or regard for them, all those raised in the Kduurian culture, Dwarven or not, holds a deep reverence for these places.

Structure

Kduur is a constitutional monarchy with a well-organized parliament and a highly efficient bureaucracy. The members of parliament are selected from the Kduurian noble families, a process that involves intense and long-running negotiation that continues until consensus is formed, or the elective sessions comes to an end. In the latter case, the families cast votes, otherwise, the city forfeits its right of representation in parliament.
Kduurian politics operates at an incredibly slow pace, but this is most often due to thoroughness instead of bloat. Many compare the bureaucracy of The Eternal Commonwealth to Kduurs when their frustration outgrows their patience, but despite Kduur's problems, it has not yet fallen into the labyrinthine bureaucracy or thrice redundant procedures that can all too redily be found in the oldest Commonwealth cities.

Culture

Just like the other aspect of Kduur, their culture is one of norms, etiquette, and negotiation. The very dialect of Dwarven developed over centuries in Kduur has taken on multilayered communication parlayed along with the subtlest of actions. Everything from the arrangement of a meal to the color of ones evening ware can shift the meaning of a conversation. Much of this stems from the unique Dwarven lifecycle, which relies on the birthing temples for the production of new dwarven children.
Such is the difficulty for outsiders to catch the nuances of their language that in recent years a second, Low Dwarven was developed for conducting trade and negotiating with envoys. On more than one occasion have delegates from The Karnos Republic instigated fist-fights during trade negotiations out of sheer frustration and/or boredom.

Public Agenda

Outside of securing their own communities from the dangers of the wildes, Kduur's primary goals are two-fold. The first is to ensure that their foreign-born populace of dwarves have available to them the ability to procreate via safe and secure the sacred vats held within the birthing temples. This more often than not involves negotiations with foreign nations to allow Dwarven temples to be built in their communities and for Kduurian priests and soldiers to be allowed to guard them.
Second, they seek to ensure the safe passage home for the Silent Ones, the animated bodies of deceased dwarves who are drawn back to their homeland to protect the sites where more dwarves are produced, though as more of these locations are built outside of Kduur, Silent Ones in farther reaches of the world are finding themselves drawn wider and wider afield from the homeland that understands that they are not malevolent undead.

History

Kduurian communities date back far beyond memory. In the deepest ruins inside ancient hill-homes in which the first dwarves lived in, there are the ancients carvings that serve as the first evidence of Dwarven history. Those first carvings were, unsurprisingly, the detailing of the rituals required to maintain and operate the life vats in which dwarves has always spawned from. It is unknown when the first dwarves arose, or who created them, but it is assumed that for centuries, even millennia, the dwarves passed down the precarious processes for the continuation of their species via an oral tradition.
Dwarven Society solidified around these vats, which eventually became housed in temples, and would be codified into their culture. Records are likewise spotty on when the trait arose in dwarves to rise shortly after death as semi-sentient beings to protect their homeland and their temples, but scholars believe this was something introduced, not something that arose naturally.
The majority of Kduur's existence as a formal society was spent as a province of the Eternal Commonwealth. The ancient carvings are still studied of the time in 4100 CE that the Commonwealth's Autarch at the time, a charismatic woman named Palaevius, arrived not with an army of soldiers, but with a diplomatic delegation. For five years the Commonwealth's ruler resided in the future Kduurian capital of Kas-Var, negotiating terms of annexation with the various dwarven rulers across the region. Through calm negotiation and persuasions, the Autarch worked out pacts with each of the communities that benefitted them enough that they were able to put aside their own rivalries and tensions and bend the collective knee to the human ruler. From that point on dwarven ad human or scholarship, governance, and research would influence each other greatly.
It would be in the wake of the Voidgate War that this would finally change. With entire swaths of dwarven Legionnaires dead, their bodies obliterated by elven weaponry and magic and forever lost to their Second Rising, and in 114 FE a resentful governing council made the decision to secede from the Commonwealth. At this point, the Commonwealth had withdrawn much of their military forces from the region to fight already raging fires of revolution in other lands, and could not spare the forces to send across the Still Sea to quell the nation. In the end, Kduur left the Commonwealth just as it had entered, with a calm and measured exchange of words from one group of leaders to another. In the following years Kduur would formulate its own constitutional monarchy, built from the lessons learned in the long years steeped in Commonwealth beuracracy. 
Kduur was formed millennia ago when the Dwarves of Falen found themselves increasingly threatened by the encroaching forces of the Eternal Commonwealth, who at the time was constantly in a state of expansion, often through violent means. Fearing what would happen to their faith and their ability to birth children should they be conquered, the most powerful dwarven families agreed to unite under a parliamentary system and agree to mutual protection of their communities.
It would be another thousand years before a monarch was affixed to the top of this bureaucracy, operating more as a tie-breaker and a means of pushing along inefficient political stalemates, which were growing to become a serious hindrance to Kduurian life and progress.
During the Voidgate War the Kduurians found their nation invaded form the Rurial forests to the south. The conflict was one of the shortest and most violent of the war, with Kduur bringing to bear all their most powerful tek in a single, short battle. The resulting cataclysm destroyed the Rurial forest, and the entire elven continengent along with it. Only the Voidgate survive, but the land around it was left in such a poisoned state that no elves could exit from it and survive.
The event is one of both great Kduurian pride and shame, for while they managed to defend their nation with minimal losses to their people, they also committed the kind of act they had always pledged to protect the world of Aramanth from, the wholesale decimation and poisoning of its land.

Religion

The Dwarves of Kduur venerate their elders in a form of ancestor worship that is as deep and intricate as any other part of Kduurian society. Each family has a near pantheon of ancestors they venerate and worship, with the most honored being the still intact Silent Ones who remain in physical form despite having left the mortal coil. In their faith Kduurians strengthen their bonds with both their forebears and their nation and leads them to redouble their work to ensure the temples housing the Dwarvne Birthing Vats are properly maintained and serviced.

Etched in Stone, our Legacy Endures

Founding Date

Approximately -5720 CE

Type

Geopolitical, Kingdom

Capital

Kas-Vaar

Alternative Names

Kduurian Guardianship, The Dwarflands

Demonym

Kduurian

Leader

King Daelan Grandir

Government System

Monarchy, Constitutional

Power Structure

Unitary state

Economic System

Mixed economy

Currency

The Kduurian Gnot