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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 2310309" data-attributes="member: 32164">Actually, all of (the Midnight world of) Eredane's non-human races are offshoots of the elder fey, or elthedar. Gnomes are more closely related to dwarves than they are to elves or halflings, but not as closely related as, say, halflings and elves, or dwarves and orcs.That said, Midnight did manage to make gnomes interesting, by making them wandering charismatic gypsy people (who use boats) and are tied quite closely to the Eren River. Interesting, but not exactly like D&D gnomes (or as described by Gygax).The problem isn't gnomes, halflings, or what have you. The problem is that fantasy only has room for so many archetypes. If you start overloading the categories with extra archetypes, you create confusion. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb that will probably bother some people, but bear with me:Traditional European myths and legends contain a few very solid archetypes: strong, brave warriors; cunning, dextrous rogues; wise wizards; pious crusaders; woodsy, mystical fey (alfar/sidhe); reclusive warrior craftsmen (dwarves); and the small fey race (whether you call them gnomes, brownies, pixies, hobbits, warrows, nelwyn or whatever). When Gygax was creating D&D, he was so conscious of this that the very first "classes" were DESIGNED this way. You could play a fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric, elf, dwarf, or halfling. Of these, the first 4 were all human by default and the latter 3 represented the "non-human" options. Interestingly enough, 3e's "Core 4" iconics even harken back to this early setup. You've got a cleric (human male - Jozan), an elf (female wizard - Mialee), a dwarf (male fighter  - Tordek) and a halfling (female rogue - Lidda). So similar are they to the early iconics that the 4 main characters run through the exact same adventure set forth in the 1e DMG (which I believe goes back at least to the magenta boxed set) with almost no changes.So why do gnomes have no niche? Because there aren't that many archetypes, and as soon as you start trying to include 2 "small fey races" you're subdividing the archetype. As a result of the Professor's work, halflings have more "name recognition" than gnomes. In fact, Tolkien's "hobbits" may well be closer to classical "gnomes." They live underground, in tune with the environment, and they're even miners. They're also inventive, tough, and like songs and stories. However, they don't talk to burrowing animals. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />So that's why gnomes are hosed. Hobbits (i.e. halflings) were based (loosely) on classical myth "gnomes." Kinda makes separating them now difficult, no?</blockquote>

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