Im remembering where I left off on my long term d&d campaign before we all realized our holiday seasonal schedules would make it incredibly difficult to play.
My players had made it to the dwarven city of my homebrew setting. And I had added on a detail from dwarf fortress to help enhance some of the weird culture they have. These are weird dwarves, after all. They have been grafting uranium into the skin for generations.
I added strange moods.
For those unfamiliar with dwarf fortress, you manage a colony of dwarves. You tell the dwarves what to do and they try to do it. You can micromanage just about everything. But every now and then a dwarf gets a “strange mood” or a “fey mood” (there’s a few names for it in game). You can’t stop this. When it happens the dwarf stops what they’re doing, enters a trance like state, hijacks a workshop in the fortress, steals a bunch of materials, and crafts what is usually an incredibly valuable artifact.
So I described this to my players, as part of the city was being cordoned off due to a particularly troublesome strange mood. And a player responded with “so. Crafting heat. Got it.”
And it killed a me a little. In a good way, of course. I had to stop and think about it for a minute before I could laugh but I did laugh.
Anyway, this is now the canonical way I think about it. The dwarves have a heat cycle, and it is not sexual in nature. It is for making cool and useless things. Like hats made of bone and rocks.