doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Of course.
I’m not sure I agree, even in principle.
Wait...what? They do? You sure? I’m pretty big on player agency and choices mattering, and on making sure each PC gets their time to shine, but I wouldn’t change the campaign to make a water genasi’s aquatic nature be a big deal. I mean water is a pretty common thing to encounter in most places, and I don’t run a whole campaign in one environment, so their water stuff will matter at some point, but that’s about it.
Um...why is that a problem? Well, first, no, they don’t negate those elements, they just make one character capable of ignoring part of sea travel, but...I can’t imagine drowning is actually the primary threat of nearly any seafaring campaign. That seems...really odd. Generally monsters and other seafaring people are the primary challenge of a pirate game.
That isn’t at all necessary to gnomes. I’ve never even had a prankster among any of the gnomes I’ve run games for or played beside or played myself.
My current forest gnome PC is a swashbuckler of sorts, though we flavor his persuasion and performance skills as him applying intellect and understanding of how people work and what affects them to those activities, more than any natural charm. He’s also a “tinker” in the sense that he crafts mechanical toys as a hobby, and advanced crossbows and bows, and is an amateur/aspiring shipwright, and an enchanter in the sense of crafting magic items, and is an alchemist. He’s also a polytheistic animist whose religion places the Sidhe at the top of a loose and informal hierarchy of spirits worthy of devotion, and capable of transactional magic and of teaching mortals. His Wizarding magic is flavored as partly Intellectual Druidry, partly rediscovery of lost Fey magic (especially his Bladesong, and partly his creativity and intellect turned toward arcane science. To him, science and religious ritual are parts of the same thing. The Magic Circle that underpins his magic and his sword fighting is also part of his deeply esoteric and syncretic religious beliefs.
His cultural theming is a mix of pagan Irish Gaelic, and Heathen Scandinavian, culture and religion, mixed liberally with the aesthetics of modern reconstructed paganism and occultism.
He comes from a mountain kingdom that was once the one of the two twin thrones of a Fey kingdom that was lost when the greatest peak exploded and thousands of fiends poured out into the world. There is a human king to the south, but the northern folk don’t care about him or recognize his authority beyond token fealty and paying trade tariffs, and allowing him an advisory representative observer at the yearly Allthing. The dwarf and Goliath populations are descended from escape slaves of the giants, with new refugees showing up every year, and often moving on to softer, warmer lands. The mountains have magic deep in their roots from the Fey that once ruled there, and the tree line is vastly higher than it could be naturally, with scrub brush even upon the peaks, and giant redwood sized trees in the lower mountain. Broken stumps of trees as large as towns dot the landscape, with towns and Gnomish clan holds built into them, a memory of a glory long lost. Gnomes live fairly high in the mountains, as do the dwarves, with humans rarely living past what would normally be the tree line in a natural environment
My DM had a peninsula with little detail there, noting mostly the mountain with a broken peak and the demonic history. I suggested the Gnomish culture, my wife asked if her Goliath could come from the same mountains, we had several conversations from there as we made the characters and started play, and over the course of several years of play we now have a region that we are all deeply invested in, having all contributed to the development of who and what is there.
In our FR game the gnome PC is from Myth Drannor, her parents are a messenger and a spy/treasure Hunter, respectively, and is the closest to an inventor gnome stereotype as we have, since she is an artificer/rogue. We don’t care about canon, so conversations with her helped me determine what Myth Drannor is like in the 1490s.
We generally use gnomes as clever, tending toward optimism and healthy social adjustment, I guess, naturally curious and desirous of a challenge, creative, friendlier than many other races, etc. I have said, and the DM of the above campaign agreed to the suggestion for his world as well, that gnomes’ first expression upon birth is laughter, rather than crying.
I literally can’t imagine gnomes of the kind I’ve had at my tables having a negative impact on any game.
I mean, maybe if the DM wants grimdark crapsack world, where good people are either faking it or are doomed suckers, I guess? I’d never agree to such a campaign, of course. I’ve little respect for such media, so the thought of playing out such a story is...distasteful, to me.
