Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8177087" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Personally, I kind of love gnomes, but a decent chunk of that is because a buddy of mine did an adventure about the Lost Ladies and I ended up heavily filling out some gnomish lore. See, Gnomes are kind of distilled joy in a way, they were (according to lore) literally born of the laughter of their God. So, I ended up taking that and a few other details (such as the long journey underground) to create something roughly like this. Garl and his siblings were not originally gods (very few of my gods were anymore), they were members of a terrible race who were tasked with the goal of finding and harnessing magic. Garl actually succeeded, and the beauty of what he discovered, the light and color he saw for the first time, sparked within him a joy and laughter which resonated in his workshop. See, this race, following a DnD tradition, had gemstones that acted as control modules for them, implanted inside their minds to act as a way to force obeying them. These gems reacted to the magic and laughter and gave birth to new life. Life born of these gems, with minds complex and fractaled (my reasoning for their resistance to mental effects. Gnomish minds are very different). Garl gathered his siblings and his new children, and fled. They took a portal through the Elemental Plane of Earth, and spent generations underground, looking for a place to call home. To place where they belong. This journey is usually depicted in DnD as the Gnomes traveling from deep underground to the surface, but I wanted to make it more planar, because of this last little bit of Lore. See, DnD lore says that after the Gnomes exited the tunnels from this journey, they exited into the Golden Hills, the divine realm of Garl and his siblings, the Gnomish Heaven (at least the version I found claimed this). However, Gnomes exist in the material plane, which is when I realized the biggest thing that separates gnomes from the other races, the biggest change in the lore which make them fascinating to me. The Material Plane is Gnomish Heaven. The Gnomes are a race that love exploring ideas, they love finding new things, new interactions, they are full to bursting with a love of life and all of its complexities. And nothing in the multiverse is more complex and shifting as the material plane. IT has bits and pieces from every plane in existence, it is infinitely discoverable. Being here, now, seeing the world and figuring out how it works, why it works, and can we change this to make it work differently, that joy is the reason Gnomes exist. It is only my take on it, and I have a few more bits and pieces, since I wrote a whole Genesis for them, but it makes them infinitely interesting to me, because so many races have this instinctual "perfect heaven" that we have created for them, but the Gnomes are like "are you kidding? This place is amazing, why would we want to go somewhere else?"</blockquote>

Verification