FOr the most part, yes- this whole thing is to basically play with 'D&D, but with wuxia and elemental kung-fu instead of high sorcery'. I love D&D, but I'm just getting to the end of a high-level, standard arcane campaign and I really want to try something different for a while.

Certainly the dwarves can have settlements elsewhere- I figure that they originate in the mountains, but that was a long time ago and things have gotten fairly cosmopolitan since then.