Making Room for the Gnome

 Believe it or do not, but the road to the Redcastle Gnome took a great many twists and turns before I found the ingredient I was looking for in the books of B.B.

I honestly don't even remember first setting out on it - though it would have been at least fifteen years ago. I rolled a Gnome character (Wrangfauld Orpin, a Thief/Illusionist, if memory serves) who never got used in my heady AD&D days, and even started on a large-scale adventure storyline that would eventually be resurrected around 2005 to become the Dwarven minecrawl Barbigazl.

The Gnomes that featured in Barbigazl were where I thought I would take the class if a regular gaming group had spun off: a largely subterranean culture with woodland roots who were devoted to exploration. Their paragons were the Delvers, who dared to go farther and deeper than those before them in search of the secrets of the earth. They would be spellcasters, after a fashion, with their requisite staff/rod analogue being a highly practical and desirable crozier or 'crook'. I allowed them options for invention and professions as 'tinkerers', themselves drawn to creating the most miraculous and fanciful of machines to serve Gnomekind. They would trade with Dwarves, war with kobolds, and build great and unfathomable subterranean cities incorporating fungi, giant arthropods and diminutive architecture.

It doesn't look too bad on paper, but it was probably too complicated, relied on too much buy-in to meet the rather necessary worldbuilding... and unless there were whole campaigns built around this sort of thing, who could be bothered? So it was abandoned.

Nearly ten years later I read the little grey men books, and my mind was re-sparked, and everything seemed to fall into place - a new race-as-class option for Basic D&D games (the Gnome as Druid) emerged, and there was enough cultural integrity to ensure that this player character option was recognisable, believable, and relatable. And if in the Barbigazl days I was at risk of reinventing the Deep Gnome or Tinker Gnome, I was later at risk of just reinventing the Forest Gnome, then whatever. The Druid spells papered over the gaps the ratification exposed.

Could I have made a similar problem for the Gnome in declaring them a woodland creature as the original game had in having them encroach across the Dwarf template? Maybe. But in my Redcastle world, that's a largely empty ecological niche, Elves being more widespread than just the green bits on the map, and most definitely not flower-wearing earth warriors. Instead, I move the Elves out of the forest; up mountains, in elaborately-excavated hill fortresses and under the sea. The woods no longer ring with their noble song, and have become more wild, dangerous and full of ancient mystery. 

And there, in the tangled roots and fallen trunks of ancient trees, under the bends of whispering brooks and between to fissures of weathered cliffs, the Gnomes live, and watch the outside world.