Gnomish

"Excuse me, may I have your name?"

The Gnomes are a chaotic, whimsical people whose culture defies easy categorization. Found most often in the mossy glens, hollow tree homes, mushroom gardens, and hidden crevices of The Otherworld or the fringes of The Folklands; Gnomes are creatures of pure expression, maddening curiosity, and unrepentant trickery. They are short, rotund or wiry, with beady eyes, wide grins, and clothing that appears handmade, enchanted, or assembled during a fever dream. No two Gnomes look, or behave, alike, sharing only their large, reflective pupils. While often mistaken for harmless jesters or pint-sized mages, Gnomes are infamous for their layered magicks, malicious pranks, and disturbing penchant for contractual mischief. A Gnome’s identity is self-forged: each chooses their own name, often long-winded, absurd, or poetic, changing it whenever it no longer fits, or simply when they feel like it. Their culture is a tapestry of clashing customs, bizarre arts, spontaneous festivals, and trickster deities with fifty names. Despite their erratic nature, Gnomes may become legendary artisans or night-creeping menaces. Their morality flows like water over glass, reflective, unpredictable, and rarely static. Tales persist of Gnomes stealing human children and replacing them with wide-eyed Changelings, though such stories are waved off as noble hysteria... usually.

Naming Traditions

Feminine names

• Nyra
• Callena
• Ossa
• Thimari
• Belaxa

Masculine names

• Ilios
• Voren
• Daskir
• Fenno
• Marzak

Unisex names

• Virel
• Tassi
• Ralor
• Mion
• Zekka

Family names

These are often descriptive, weird, or punny, meant to hint at the Gnome’s greatest exploit, magical specialty, or general vibe. These are not fixed across generations.
Nature-Based & Whimsical:

• Thistlewhistle.
• Mossblot.
• Honeyloop.
• Snailfeather.
• Flickerbranch.
• Puffcap.
• Wormlace.
• Petalshank.
• Bumblewink.

Mischief or Magic-Based:

• Hexbutton.
• Spindlecurse.
• Glimmercog.
• Bindlestitch.
• Whimwhistle.
• Trickledown.
• Fizzlesprocket.
• Knotquill.
• Scribblehex.

Some Gnomes replace surnames with elaborate honorifics or claims:

• the Unnamed Twice.
• of the Eighth Hat.
• Chairman of Toad Affairs.
• Mistress of the Seventy-Sixth Joke.
• Three-Times-Kicked-By-Moonbeast.

• Who-Signed-The-Sky.

Other names

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Culture

Major language groups and dialects

Gnomes speak Schnith, a buzzing, chattering tongue filled with rhymes, puns, and gestures. It is maddening to outsiders but layered with subtle meaning, contracts, and trick phrases. Some Gnomes speak in riddles by default. Common idioms:

• “Never trust a silent Gnome.”
• “A name is a meal; swallow wisely.”
• “One prank begets another, but the last one always bites.”

Culture and cultural heritage

Gnomish culture centers on radical self-expression. No custom or tradition is sacred beyond personal whim. Each Gnome builds their identity like a patchwork cloak, stitched with ever-changing hobbies, magicks, and identities. They are obsessive about things like mouse-hunting, hoarding oddities, inventing instruments, or writing nonsensical treaties on dream-honey. Music, painting, and sculpture are revered, but so are hoaxes and prank-wars that can last lifetimes. Magic is as common as breakfast and far more dangerous. Their enchantments often twist reality with clauses, puns, or verbal loopholes. Fables abound of scholars accidentally agreeing to be a Gnome’s chair or a noblewoman finding her name replaced with “Wiggletuft” on all official documents.

Shared customary codes and values

• One’s name is sacred, choose it well and change it often.
• Trickery is not cruelty unless done poorly.
• A good prank is better than a thousand truths.
• Never return a gift exactly as you received it.
• Contracts are binding, even the ones you don’t know you signed.

Average technological level

Though the full-scale wars of the Schism and the Fall never properly bled into the Otherworld, the consequences echoed loud and long in Gnomish society. Unlike many of their mortal neighbors, Gnomes never industrialized or sought mechanical dominion over nature. Their realms, threaded through the dreamlike folds of the Otherworld, thrived on magick, barter, and absurdity, not engines or empire. Gnomes are unpredictable inventors. Their level of advancement ranges from mushroom-powered clocks to self-writing quills and magickally suspended outhouses. Their understanding of The Arcane's loopholes often surpasses that of mortal scholars, though few Gnomes document anything sensibly. But Gnomes relied on trade, with the Gaiatians of The Folklands for the tools and oddities they found endlessly delightful: clockwork parts, printed paper, refined dyes, tinkering instruments, and various shiny things they couldn’t replicate with enchantment alone. With the collapse of those networks when The Great Schism broke out, shuttering of much of Gaiatia’s industry after The Fall, Gnomes found themselves isolated, their supply of delightful nonsense and practical arcane tools cut off. Their response was… uniquely Gnomish.

• Black-Market Nonsense: Gnomes began constructing secret, semi-magickal trade routes through moss tunnels, teacup mirrors, and stolen postal systems. Smuggling became a whimsical art form. A gnome might hide contraband gears inside a fruit, or bribe a fox to deliver enchanted ink in exchange for riddles.
• Bitter Inventions: Deprived of outside tools, some Gnomes embraced a wild kind of internal innovation, dream-gadgets, made of mushrooms, echoes, or promises. These devices often worked… but rarely in expected ways. One Gnome city replaced all mechanical lighting with laughing fireflies that require nightly jokes to stay lit.
• The Lost Markets: The fading of reliable contact with the Folklands and Gaiatia led to what Gnomes call The Great Misplacing, a slow and surreal mourning for lost trade. Entire Gnomish enclaves now host annual mock marketplaces, where nothing is actually sold, and everything is negotiated in gestures and puns.
• Cultural Fermentation: Cut off from external goods, Gnomish culture did not stagnate, it compounded. Their arts grew stranger, their magicks more recursive, their contracts more layered. Isolated from “sensible” worldviews, their philosophy splintered into entire schools of thought over the ethics of binding a hedgehog to a haiku.
• Alchemical Weirding: With no access to industrial catalysts, Gnomes redoubled their alchemical efforts. Potion-making became extreme: tonics that turn you into your worst pun, elixirs that let you remember someone else's dream, teas that taste like forgotten truths.

In many ways, the Schism and the Fall made the Gnomes even more Gnomish, cut off from the grindstone of progress, they turned inward, or sideways, or sometimes upward at odd angles. Some scholars speculate this period may have strengthened their connection to the deeper layers of the Otherworld, giving rise to new species of fungi with semi-sentience, dream-plants that whisper history, and whole cabals of Gnomes who consider time an optional feature.

Common Etiquette rules

• Always read the fine print, even in song lyrics.
• Don’t say your name too loudly near a Gnome’s garden.
• Return a prank with flair, or risk losing face.
• Never eat a meal without asking it three questions first.

Common Dress code

Mismatched, multi-layered fabrics, many enchanted, shimmering, or utterly impractical. Cloaks of mothwing, hats with bells or bird feathers, patchwork boots, and masks for formal occasions. No Gnome dresses the same two days in a row unless cursed.

Art & Architecture

Gnomish homes are either impossibly small or hidden in impossible places: inside tree trunks, beneath boulders, in teapots, or halfway into the Otherworld. Their architecture defies logic, with upside-down staircases, floating balconies, or doors that only open with song. Art is frenetic and deeply personal: moss paintings that shriek, musical murals, collapsing sculptures. Their instruments, especially the lute and harp, are masterworks, often considered their most prized cultural export.

Foods & Cuisine

Honey-root tarts, pickled petals, moon-milk, glowing mushroom stew, and spiced thistle buns. Gnomes prize food with visual flair and magickal properties. A well-cooked Gnomish meal may sing, whisper, or temporarily give you gills.

Common Customs, traditions and rituals

• Name Days - Each time a Gnome adopts a new name, they throw a party and invite only those who will forget their previous one.
• Reverse Theft - A Gnome will occasionally sneak into a home to leave a “gift prank”, such as switching a family’s furniture with near-perfect replicas made of sugar.
• The Contractual Waltz - A magickal dance-prayer where each step is a legally binding clause.
• Changeling Plays - Performed in hushed groves, these inverted fairytales feature stolen children, crumbling castles, and heroes who never ask the right questions.

Birth & Baptismal Rites

No birth name is permanent. The child is given a placeholder, usually a sound, scent, or idea, and later chooses their true name through a riddle posed during their second bloom (a magical event marking Gnome maturity).

Coming of Age Rites

To come of age, a Gnome must outwit their own family in a prank war, end the chaos with a song, and inscribe a self-penned contract about their purpose. Most clauses are ignored. But not all.

Funerary and Memorial customs

Gnomes rarely stay dead. When one does, they are buried in a way that prevents resurrection, typically upside-down and wrapped in bells. Their home becomes a prank shrine where visitors are expected to be tricked at least once before leaving in peace.

Common Taboos

• Saying someone’s true name without permission.
• Failing to prank a prankster.
• Binding someone with a contract without flair.
• Selling one’s creativity for coin.
• Laughing too little at your own misfortune.

Common Myths and Legends

• The Three-Eyed Trickster - A Gnome who tricked Death into a game of riddles and has yet to lose.
• The Thirteenth Teacup - A cursed vessel said to hold a scream so powerful it warps time.
• The Mouse King’s Pact - A treaty forged between the Gnomes and all mice, renewed in blood every 100 years.
• The Hollow Queen - A changeling who replaced a noble child and ruled for thirty years before vanishing into moths.
• The Great Unnaming - A future calamity when all names are stolen and language falls apart.

Historical figures

• Zekka of the Wasp Choir - Composer, poisoner, and lover of four dukes.
• Ralor Pinbind - Stole the moon’s reflection and sold it back for a dozen names.
• Fenno “Fingers-in-Pockets” - Famous for vanishing into a lord’s coat and living there for six months.
• Ossa Under-Root - Writer of the infamous “Guide to Binding Without Saying So.”

Ideals

Beauty Ideals

Asymmetry, strange hair color, overly long eyebrows, glittering clothes. To look like you chose to be strange is considered beautiful. Nothing natural is better than something personalized.

Gender Ideals

Gnomes are largely post-gender in cultural practice. Expression defines the individual, not category. Some choose new genders as part of new names.

Courtship Ideals

Courtship often begins with a prank war or trick duel. Love is proven through creative annoyance, absurd gifts, and contract duels resolved with poetry.

Relationship Ideals

Fidelity is flexible. Loyalty, however, is sacred. A partner who cannot make you laugh is considered a failure.

Interesting Facts & Folklore:

• The phrase “Don’t sneeze in court” refers to rumors of changelings losing form mid-sneeze.
• Gnomes are believed by some to steal children and replace them with silent, too-blinking impostors.
• It is illegal in several cities to accept Gnomish gifts without witnesses.
• Many bards study Gnomish law just to avoid getting trapped in songs or poems.
• A Gnome once convinced a prince to trade his kingdom for a sock that smelled like prophecy.

Idioms and Metaphors:

• “He’s riddling the teacup.” (Making a situation needlessly complex.)
• “That’s a name too tight.” (Someone who takes themselves too seriously.)
• “Dance before the contract.” (Enjoy the moment before consequences catch up.)
• “Mice don’t lie.” (Used when someone’s being surprisingly honest.)
• “She stepped through her own clause.” (Got caught in her own scheme.)