They are jolly, cheerfull and generally a joy to be around. Some see that as a weakness that can be exploited, but that is a mistake. Those engineering marvels of theirs can get real dangerous when they get creative...
— A merchant after having witnessed a pirate raid on a gnome town
Cheerful Disposition
A gnome is almost always cheerful. They greet the world with a wide and genuine smile on their face, and with the twinkle of exitement in their eyes. Even though they do not hide their feelings in the slightest, outsiders are often thrown off by their high-baseline joy. A gnome that is bothered by something does not look any less cheerful to a non-gnome, and indeed they aren't. Fellow gnomes will however notice that their friend is worried, and will attempt to help.
Probing the Boundaries
Gnomes love living life, and want to see and do everything that there is to see and do. Gnomes can live up to a millenium, but to outsiders they seem to worry that even with all that time, they can't fit everything in it. One thing a gnome likes more than doing something possible, is to attempt and do the
impossible. Both for their own enjoyment, and to make the world an even more delightful place for all the other gnomes. A surefire way to get something hard done, is therefore to tell a gnome you think it is impossible.
Natural Engineers
Gnomes love to tinker, construct or build things. Where
dwarves have affinity with heavy machinery and metalwork, a gnomes construction tends to be more delicate and fiddly. That is not to say they are fragile, as anyone who has stepped on a piece of
Rifguro can attest.
Gnome engineers usually hold with the phylosophy that if you can do something well with mundane components, you can do it even better when those components are magical. But to enhance something with magic, it needs to work propperly first. Due to this line of thinking, most gnomes will default to non-magical techniques like
Gearomancy first, and only when they cannot stretch that any further will they apply magic.
Comments