I would like to play as a female dwarf, preferably one with a beard.

No gender mod I know of. If you find one, let us know.

My theory has always been that Arcanum dwarves reproduce through a process of asexual budding, and that there are no females of the species.

Doesn't the manual go into this a bit? I remember it explaining that dwarves keep their women hidden from all outsiders, and never let them venture out into the world. But then again, maybe that's just what the dwarves told poeple, and really they just reproduce asexually.

I personally believe that the very first ore golem was the unplanned product of an encounter between a drunken Dwarf and a convenient boulder.

And I always thought that dwarves are reproducing by gemmation and thus they don't have and don't need female gender >.<

Hey, I simply said an encounter.

I didn't say what kind. ;)

Perhaps, in a crazy twist, it turns out they're all female.

I wouldn't mind a mod that actually made the dwarves all female. (Just keep the beards, OK?)

Whatever the case may be, female dwarves are a touchy subject.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140822094352/http://terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=14119

There's evidence that playable dwarf women were planned at one point: https://web.archive.org/web/20140823072533/http://terra-arcanum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=26&amp;t=19092#p262776

I remember drog saying something about female dwarves and gnomes. And I think it's hard coded into the exe so you can't select them... Maybe I'll poke around the hex code and see if something is there

I was highly looking forward to playing a female halfling thief/gunslinger... but apparently women of other races are rare in the Arcanum universe. >_<

So I went with a boring human female instead. It would be great if someone modded these options in.

The problem is that playable female sprites exist only for medium size characters. That was all the devs had time to do, in their race to finish the game before they got shut down.

If those sprites existed in the game code, even in raw form, someone like Drog Blacktooth (the creator of the UAP) would have uncovered them by now. So, adding them at this point would entail actually drawing and animating the sprites, modifying the code to allow for females of other races, and associating those new female characters with the relevant (and possibly some brand new) dialog trees.

Still, could you imagine a half-ogress trying to seduce Willoughsby in order to complete a quest? Or Raven falling in love with a woman half (or twice) her size? Or Ogdin's stunned reaction upon meeting his first female of his own race? Or poor Magnus's confusion when he learns that "Dwarven women never leave their caves" is yet another discredited myth from that godawful book he had the misfortune to take to heart?

Ah, the possibilities are endless.

Google "Virgil DEBUG" patch. This is a small .dat file that you just drop into your main game folder. It adds a cheat menu to Virgil's dialogue options, which allow you to tinker with sex and race, though I don't think you can change the character model you begin with. You can change your character at the beginning of a game and then remove the .dat without affecting your save.

Professor from Tarant: I once performed an experiment on a female dwarf. She was a very touchy subject. I couldn't get her to keep her hands to herself!