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Category: God-Created Races

The gnomes are a sundered people, without a home. When the peoples of the Meraluk Imperium united, their first act was to unite their territories and conquer the surrounding lands. Most of this territory was occupied by gnomes, who had no chance of successfully fighting back. Instead, to survive, the gnomes had to flee.

Roughly half of the gnomes fled to Dwarven Lands, while the rest sought shelter with the elves. Both races saw this arrangement as a compassionate but temporary one, with the assumption that the goblinoid alliance would collapse and the gnomes would be able to return home. That hasn't happened. The gnomes have now integrated into Elven and Dwarven society, as forest gnomes and rock gnomes respectively. They are free, but have no legal status or citizenship. Each sells their talents and labor to their hosts to earn a living, working at magic or industry. The host races look down on gnomes, viewing them as unwanted refugees while happily profiting from their labor. Both gnomes and halflings pity the other's plight.

Gnomes all over the world are bright, funny, thrifty, and clever. They are often involved in finance and trade, and each major city or settlement involves a gnomish market that sets standards and prices for buying and for selling goods and services.

Among the dwarves, a gnome finds his artisan skills most in demand. They often find employment carving stone, metals, gems, wood, and other materials. They have honed this to a fine art, and some gnomish artisans can create mechanical constructs of breathtaking complexity and beauty. At the same time, they conduct research to advance the sciences, such as astronomy and alchemy.

Living with the elves has changed the gnomes as well. They find more and more opportunities for their natural talent for magic, especially in the area of illusion. Combined with a flair for writing, music, and drama, gnomes have entirely cornered the entertainment industry. In addition, as elves become more civilized, some gnomes have begun reconnecting with the plants and animals around them, serving their communities and helping them to live in continual harmony with nature.

At the center of all gnomish society is the idea that everything has a value. Objects, time, knowledge, labor, skill, and even people have a price which can be fixed, analyzed, negotiated, and (with effort) even increased. When other races use words like worthless and priceless, any good gnome will roll his eyes; he knows that everything and everyone has a price.

Because of this, other races have stereotyped the gnomes as greedy, cynical, or miserly. This just isn't true. Most value in the world is in the form of social debts and obligations. For example, when a child is born, a complex series of debts is created. The child owes its mother for his life, a debt that it must replay through a childhood of obedience. The mother owes the child for increasing her social standing, since large families are a gnomish status symbol, and she repays this by feeding, clothing, and caring for the child. The father owes the child for the extension of his family name, which he repays by educating and housing his progeny. The child owes a debt to his father for giving it a name, history, and family, which the child will repay by achieving and succeeding in order to add to that history. And so on.

This arrangement can seem cold and unfeeling to outsiders, but gnomes feel the same depth of emotions as others. They merely express it in a different way. I offer you my friendship, and you offer yours in return. I love my bride, as she loves me. Gnomes see a perfect relationship as creating something of an emotional zero balance sheet.

Several other quirks emerge from this worldview. Status and prestige come not from wealth hoarded or power exercised, but instead from debts accrued and favors owed. Gnomes are horrified by the idea of treasuries overflowing with gold and silver. That wealth should be moving through the world, bettering lives, creating and settling debts. This means that gnomes have less use for the sort of hard wealth that other races use and pursue. Instead, they have developed a series of promissory slips, describing an item transferred or service performed. These slips are imprinted by both parties in the transaction. The slip can be called in at any time for an item, service, or favor of equivalent value. Once used the slip is burned. Slips can be freely traded, exchanged, sold, or given. Anyone who bears a strip can hold a gnome to it.

The gnomish monarchy once kept an immense record of these sorts of slips, freely filing them away and exchanging slips for the equivalent in hard currency. This exchange also kept a vast index of the comparative value of countless goods and services, which anyone could consult in the course of trade. This obsession with value and record-keeping naturally led gnomes to a profession the other races considered distasteful; moneylending. Scrupulously honest and with an excess of currency, gnomes were and remain the perfect place to get a quick loan or to safely store excess funds. The result over time was that nearly every noble and nation owed the gnomes enormous debts in either cash or favors. At any time, the gnomish court could have called in slips that could upend merchant houses or bankrupt kingdoms.

Then, the goblins attacked. The gnomes possessed great intelligence, but little strength. They controlled vast wealth, but had few weapons. And while the allies of the gnomes took their time gathering forces to send aid, the Great Library in the Lord's Palace burned to the ground, taking the record of those nations' debts with it.

Every gnome still carries a promise token on their belt. This is a metal disk, punched through the center, that has been beautifully and intricately carved. This token is given to a gnome at birth, and includes their name, as well as those of their parents and where certain stars were in the sky when they were born. This token is used to seal a promissory slip, and can be impressed in wax or ink for the purpose. A gnome will do or pay nearly anything to recover a lost or stolen token. When two gnomes are married, the reverse sides of their tokens are engraved to match their partner's.

Concepts common to other races are foreign to a gnome. What is forgiveness? If you wronged me, you owe me a debt. If I were to forgive you, I just gave you something equal in value to the original debt, and so nothing has changed. Likewise, a gnome doesn't haggle. While people may work together to determine an item's true value, the idea of paying or being paid more or less strikes them not just a strange, but as morally wrong. Charity is another nonstarter. While gnomes are happy to help, that help must be earned, or benefit the helper in some way; by creating a debt. All of this combines to make gnomes seem honest but selfish, helpful but greedy, friendly but stubborn.

In recent years gnomes' less attractive traits may been growing stronger. They refuse to integrate with their host nations, holding strong to their traditions. They are bitter and untrusting, since they suspect their "friends" let the goblins take their homes to erase their debts. They are sad and angry, seeing a once united nation fraction into two increasingly different groups a world away.

RPGlink

Use the "Rock Gnome" and "Forest Gnome" species from Dungeons & Dragons 5.24.

Articles under Gnomes

• Rock Gnome: Skyldi
• Wood Gnome: Glethi