: I've heard theories that the Smiths of Muirthemne were
: dwarves but then why would Connacht want to destroy
: them and why were the commiting horrible attrocities?
: Also, what do dwarves have to do with spiders? I'm
: probably waaaaay out of date and this whole topic has
: been debated to death but will you ressurect it just
: for a while to tell me why, why, WHY?!?!
Well, most of it has already been gone over - why the Smiths are Dwarves, etc. But basically, the deal is that the Spiders have lived in the caves around Dwarven lands for a long time, so the Dwarves know about them and somehow a sect came to worship them (we don't know how exactly). The atrocities would be human sacrafices to the Spider-gods at the shrines inside the Tain. Connacht assailed the Smiths but didn't find them or their shrines - I suspect they fled into the Tain, and then engineered it's theft by barbarians from the south, and later emerged out of the Tain when they were a safe distance from Muirthemne (perhaps in Forest Heart, from which they could easily trek to Dwarven lands). Also, GURPS tells us that Dwarves are just as magical as humans, but tend more toward mixing science and magic. Castles, for example, are built by stacking a bunch of rocks and then magically making them a solid wall. See also World Knots, and the Tain - both mechanical devices which can be broken or fixed, but which hold a magic charge to power their functionality.
