Barak Varr is the Sea Gate, the strangest and most outward-looking of all the holds, carved into towering cliffs above the Black Gulf where the mountains at last come down to the ocean. Alone among the dwarf realms it possesses a harbour, and through that harbour flows the trade by which the landlocked Karaz Ankor touches the wider world: the wine and cloth of men, the strange wares of Araby and the elf-realms, and outbound, the peerless craft-work of the mountains. Where other holds face inward to the deep dark, Barak Varr faces the open horizon, and it has grown worldly in the facing.
Its merchant clans are reckoned broad-minded to the point of danger by their mountain kin, for they haggle with humans, entertain foreign captains, and hold opinions about tides and trade-winds that no proper deep-hold dwarf should ever need. Yet Barak Varr is dwarfen to the core. Its great steam-driven ironclads rule the Gulf with iron hulls and heavy guns, its docks bristle with defences against corsairs and worse, and its clans keep their grudges and guard their gold every bit as jealously as any hold beneath the peaks. It is only that here, uniquely in all the Karaz Ankor, a reckoning is as likely to be settled by a cannon's broadside as by the axe.
Order of battle
The Barak Varr field the units of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds, a detachment from the roster:
Other Dwarfen Mountain Holds formations
Karak KadrinThe Slayer Keep, iron sentinel of Peak Pass and home to the great Shrine of Grimnir, where doomed dwarfs come to swear the Slayer Oath. Ruled by the Slayer King Ungrim Ironfist, it turns no oath-bound pilgrim from its gates, and so Karak Kadrin marches to war with an army that intends to die well.
Karaz-a-KarakEverpeak, eldest and mightiest of the holds and capital of the Karaz Ankor, where the High King keeps the Great Book of Grudges beneath the tallest mountain in the world. It has never fallen to any foe, and its halls hold the accumulated treasure, law, and memory of the entire dwarf race.
ZhufbarThe great engineering hold, built into the walls of a chasm where falling meltwater turns ten thousand wheels day and night. Zhufbar's workshops arm the Karaz Ankor with cannon, handguns, and gyrocopters, and the Engineers Guild counts its forges the finest in the world. Its soot-stained clans are the closest thing dwarfkind has to radicals, which is to say, more conservative than any other race's priests.
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