The Shadow Council

History: "...With only one mandate, to maintain the stability of Espen and the interest of the Gnomish people."
The Shadow Council was given this mandate in UE 227 after The Great Goblin Migration threatened halt Gnomish expansion. They were not given official positions in the council, instead they were to exist among the people in non-Gnomish cities acting in theaters of war, commerce, and trade that facilitated the Gnomish councils highest ideals.
The Shadow Council operated at the highest levels for years until they suddenly went silent around UE 894. The cause was unknown but within a month each of the Shadow Council's memeber ceased the intervaled checkin, and with it all coorespondence.  The working theory, is that somehow the other governments dicovered their presence and worked in coordinated effort to eliminate them.  However, as they were shadow agent, operating outside the purvue of the Gnomish Council, both them and their exploits were lost to history.
Recently, a theory has arisen, that was eliquently (if not a bit hyperbolically) described in The Kobold Dispatch of Spritzlewerks as "a dark mirror of the Gnomish Council wildest ambitions casting a worrysome pall over inter-cultural dealings.  The very notion that there could be an active Shadow Council makes negotioations with the Gnomes trublesome." 
The theory goes onto state that as the Shadow Council, whose existance was made public knowledge in that same article, was never officially disbanded by the Gnomish Council before they went silent, they could in theory be operating today. This report was made all the more troubling by the fact that the writer of that story met his untimely demise following the story's wide publication in other Dispatch editions.

Cultural Reception

The current presence of the Shadow Council is widely debated, and outright denied by the current iteration of the Gnomish Council.