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Message: <blockquote data-quote="J.Quondam" data-source="post: 8696892" data-attributes="member: 7030100">The only campaign of mine where gnomes were significant in any way was in 3e. Those gnomes could neatly fit the "tinker" stereotype, but the setting had a fair bit of room for them to inhabit other roles like mages, scholars, assassins, soldiers, blackguards, pirates and sailors, inquisitors, rogues, merchants, and so forth. The weakest link to a particular class was probably to clerics.[SPOILER]Gnomes were an offshoot of elves, subjugated for generations by the hobgoblin empire and forced into mines and laboratories in support of their captors' expansionist aims. The gnomes revolted and eventually overthrew the empire when they conquered the massive capital city, Uum Cuprum. A period of brutal extermination followed, with the goal of the complete genocide of the hobgoblins and the eradication of "The Cancer," the revolutionaries' name for groups of "collaborators", an accusation which grew to include those gnomes who disagreed with the genocide.After the violence of the rebellion and subsequent infighting drew to a close, the gnomes set to work reshaping the ruins of the hobgoblin empire to their own ends. Except for a few key resource-rich holdings, most of the old empire's outlying territories were abandoned, left to be fought over by their former occupants. Neighboring kingdoms received wave after wave of tireless gnome delegations to stabilize diplomatic relations and trade. These efforts were boosted as the gnomes enhanced the old empire's shipping lanes with a vast network of causeways connecting the gnome capital to trading hubs on the coastline of the surrounding sea. The capital city itself was rechristened Copperknock City.*  Practically overnight it became the gleaming magitechnical wonder of the world during the era of gnomish hegemony.Within their own lands, the gnomes soon established a technocratic police state. This tamped down political dissent and simplified regulation of trade in a wide variety of alchemicals and magetech, monopolies the gnomes were loathe to give up. Despite their reputation for paranoia and a sometimes too-quick trigger finger on their weird weapons of war, the gnomes were generally regarded by their neighbors as a benevolently neutral power, and one to remain friendly with at all costs.The gnomes of Copperknock City were the last major civilization to rise and fall, not long before the fading of the City of Silver Cathedrals at the center of the world. When the spirit goblins and their spidery allies breached the dikes surrounding the gnome capital, their hegemony vanished in a matter of hours. From that day forward, the rest of world began its fitful collapse into eons of barbarism, never to recover.* The ruins of Copperknock City lie in what humans today refer to as "Copernicus Crater" on the Earth's moon.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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