Marandahir
Crown-Forester (he/him)
In D&D lore, sure.
In mythic archetypes, a Forest Gnomes are smaller elves and Rock Gnomes are smaller dwarves. There's a reason that they've been a response folks have given for "what is a Dwelf?" But then the Halfling comes into the mix, and people say wait, Gnomes are kinda like Halflings too.
That's because Rock Gnomes are based on diminutive mining faerie people, Forest Gnomes are based on the same, but woodland people, and Halflings are based on the same, but house/hearth/homestead/farming spirits (like the Tomte or the Cobbler Elves that make shoes overnight).
Dwarves and Rock Gnomes occupy the same mythic archetype, but Dwarves inherited a larger (still short, but stocky enough to be Medium) size from Tolkien, while Wood Elves and Forest Gnomes occupy the same mythic archetype, but Elves inherited the taller form because again, Tolkien.
I don't care what FR or Greyhawk says is the origin of a lineage. The point here is about narrative overlap. If we have small sized Elves and small sized Dwarves available, people are going to ask why do Gnomes exist, the same way some people are asking why Halflings and small sized Humans both exist (the latter is because Humans by necessity need to be representative of the diversity of real world Human body shapes and sizes, and there are real world Humans that would fit the Small size category, and telling them to just play Halfling is unacceptable and otherising because it suggests that they are a fantastical non-human creature… we don't want to go there).
I'm 100% on board with Small Humans as a default choice. My issue is that Gnomes are literally just the Small version of Dwarves and Elves, split into two categories, with Svirfneblin falling on the Duergar side rather than the Drow side of that equation. There's no real reason to have Gnomes if you take the logical step and incorporate folklore that depict Dwarves and Elves as small (entirely acceptable stories that contrast with their Tolkien forms that are based on older mythological takes of Medium size that are ALSO entirely acceptable). The only reason we then have Gnomes is because they're baked into the game.
If that's the case, why aren't Half-elves and Half-orcs there? They're just as much sacred cows as the Gnome is. What happens to House Medani and House Lyrandar? Are those dragonmarks now available to what are mechanically Humans and Elves? In 5e, Dragonmarks are actually their own lineages or sublineages, depending on what they replace. Things get really messy here, from a mechanical point of view.
Gnomes are important to D&D's settings; I'm not saying get rid of Gnome. I'm saying that there isn't consistency here in how lineages are being approached from a mechanical standpoint. Ardlings did not exist before this playtest. They are being created wholecloth to fill a niche, much like how the player-lineage Deva were in the 2009 PH2 (instead of Aasimar, mostly because they were afraid of planar mixed-lineages and because of the problem scientists have when talking about Uranus). I'm all for adding in missing archetypes. But if we have archetypes stepping on each others toes, we should either clearly delineate those differences both narratively and mechanically, or we should not be deleting anything for that sake and just open the floodgates…
