Gnomes - in BR?

[Fizz]

I can recall something from Rich Baker that talks about gnomes in Birthright. I can't recall the exact source, possibly from an old email thread, i can look it up later. He envisioned gnomes as being very nature oriented, basically another type of fey.

I'll see if i can find that source later...


-Fizz

[Fizz]

I'll see if i can find that source later...

Ah, here it is... the source is from Mark Aurel. In prepping for the BRCS, Mark went through every item in the Birthright mailing list from Rich Baker. In this listserv note about potential player races, Mark explained what he learned from Rich's notes.

Sorry if that's a bit convoluted... anywho...

The crux is that Rich envisioned a very different niche for gnomes- that they are very much like "nature-spirits", with forest gnomes, mountain gnomes, meadow gnomes, etc., and that they should be very rare, and not a PC race.

I like the potential take on that. Too bad nothing official ever came of it.


-Fizz

[otomodave]

I think my request has been largely misunderstood. I was not looking for a way to shoehorn them into BR with minimal changes, but adding them to the background wholesale.

I am running my game using Pathfinder, and wanted to use the races from that game. Therefore, I took all of the background halflings, and applied it to gnomes instead In my setting, gnomes are accepted by elves (often) and so form their own communities in elven lands. The more mechanically inclined amongst them live among the humans.
Halflings are just halflings.

[Outlaw Pope]

Casts Animate Army to raise a legion of dead gnomes.

Baker's ideas about gnomes were something in line of my own headspace for them.

I cannot recall its exact name right now but the in game source I saw referencing gnomes living in one of the dwarven realms which normally in old DnD terms was the tradition rock or svirfneblin.

How do you guys handle your gnomes?

I am considering treating them at core as "Forest Gnomes" in vein of the Finnish haltija/tonttu - happy little red hats.

I do have a few ponders on them however in their flavor

• Religion. What would they believe in - do you think they are more core gnomes and might venerate some of those powers? Perhaps they are more shadow-realm in origin and fall toward a fey origin with the Seelie or Unseelie giving a sort of gnome/spriggan/redcap dichotomy with a reverance?
  
• Do they have their own language?
  
• [cursed] Perhaps they are true-breeding child race of elves and dwarves?

[Malphas]

I cannot recall its exact name right now but the in game source I saw referencing gnomes living in one of the dwarven realms which normally in old DnD terms was the tradition rock or svirfneblin.

a lot of sourcebooks of this dnd era are seemingly written in part by writers with only passing familiarity of the setting. I've seen several statblocks of spellcasting darksun bards and rangers with plant spells memorized (neither should be in the setting).
in birthright i've seen enough of random psionics (hydra springs to mind) that i'm legitimately thinking if writing them properly in might be easier than writing them out.
so i wouldn't focus too much on a single source.

How do you guys handle your gnomes?

in short i don't, but i've seen somewhere on the net gnomes used as a more magical halfling. in that fanlore they were halflings who escaped shadow into elven lands rather than human lands and thus kept more shadowmagic and developed it a bit more.
so if gnomes i would probably start in that direction (kind of works the tiny illusionists)

I do have a few ponders on them however in their flavor

• Religion. What would they believe in - do you think they are more core gnomes and might venerate some of those powers? Perhaps they are more shadow-realm in origin and fall toward a fey origin with the Seelie or Unseelie giving a sort of gnome/spriggan/redcap dichotomy with a reverance?
  
• Do they have their own language?

well this strongly depends on where they came from.
in my example they would likely just like halflings have lost their original language but instead of a human one adopted Sidhelien. they probably be agnostic atheists
if you go by the dwarven cousins option they would likely either speak Karamhul (or something similar) and have dwarven religion.
if you chose to place them in the world alone they would have their own language. religion becomes complicated in that scenario (a good reason not to do it IMO). Azrai is a prime candidate, but an interesting twist would be to make their religion basically empty. basically priests have no powers because the god ain't real.
you could also place them in shadow world with new implications. language might be anything from a dialect of sie, to a derivative of lost halfling, to something unique. religion would again likely be nonexistent although it might be interesting for them to revere lost sie...

side-note: whats the forum stance on thread necromancy? couldn't find anything in rules but i might've missed something

[*] [cursed] Perhaps they are true-breeding child race of elves and dwarves?

not touching this

[Sorontar]

side-note: whats the forum stance on thread necromancy? couldn't find anything in rules but i might've missed something

Personally, I don't mind it. Why start a new thread if you can find one where people have already been discussing the same topic.

Sorontar

[Fizz]

Baker's ideas about gnomes were something in line of my own headspace for them.

I cannot recall its exact name right now but the in game source I saw referencing gnomes living in one of the dwarven realms which normally in old DnD terms was the tradition rock or svirfneblin.

How do you guys handle your gnomes?

Personally, i don't use them. However, i did have a player with a gnome character in another setting, and he wanted to convert the character over. This was only shortly after Birthright was released. I allowed it because he was such a good and fun character. (He was converted from a standard 2nd ed illusionist/thief to a magician/thief.)

-Fizz

[Fizz]

a lot of sourcebooks of this dnd era are seemingly written in part by writers with only passing familiarity of the setting.

True, though in this case the Core Rulebook does list gnomes as potential monsters. So gnomes do exist on Cerilia, they're just not defined as a playable race. So if a Birthright sourcebook / adventure refers to gnomes, it's not necessarily inconsistent.

-Fizz

[Doyle]

While noting that Gnomes were mentioned in the core book and even had a warcard allocated (might have been a fan based creation), I tended to ignore them in my games as they tended to be more irritation than effective.

Now running a 5th edition game where Gnomes and many other races have been dragged back out of the monster manual and made playable, I needed a species backstory. I could have gone the Fey / Shadow world path but that was the bucket I was using for anything too fantastical for traditional fantasy.

Considering the stereotype of the scrawny tinker and the Tengu of Japanese mythology, I could see Dwarf, but only as an outcast. Not having the muscle or constitution for working in the mines, with an agility and cleverness that might be viewed as a thief stereotype to a Dwarf, and that is just not tolerated in the mines. These marginalised and shunned Dwarves escape to the surface and form their own clan, keeping away from other humanoids. With a small gene pool and centuries of isolation, the traits that made the individuals 'different' became standard over the generations. As the progenitors of the clan passed, so too did the true origin of the Dwarven sub-race, now a unique people known as Gnomes.

[Malphas]

True, though in this case the Core Rulebook does list gnomes as potential monsters. So gnomes do exist on Cerilia, they're just not defined as a playable race. So if a Birthright sourcebook / adventure refers to gnomes, it's not necessarily inconsistent.

-Fizz

damn must've missed it. but that same list has bugbears (and goblins, but no hobgoblins) a species that together with hobgoblins was rolled into goblins 2 pages prior. so that's fun.