I have to put a qualifier on my vote. Yes, they have steam engines.
However for the most part they are not very effective or efficient
steam engines. There may be a few almost sentient relics from
earlier times, but most modern engines hiss and leak and would be
more pain than they are worth except that:
- they are holy, when the world is whole, the steam engines will work
better.
- the dwarves don't use flesh animals, and can't make stone animals
anymore, and there are certain jobs that will require more compact
strength than dwarf-power can provide.
- there are certain things that you can do with a steam engine that
you can't do otherwise outside of weird magical engineering with
bound essences and what not, and steam engines just seem more
dwarvish.
In other words, there are reasonable excuses to give dwarves steam engines, however those engines can be sufficiently tempermental, fragile, and inefficient that it doesn't make the dwarves too powerful a force, and makes for great game opportunities (i.e. the dwarves bring out a paddlwheel ship, but that boiler just needs one reckless hero to whack at it with a sword and it will blow.....)
All just IMO
--Bryan
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