Overview
Gnomes came to Amra after catastrophe struck their original world. Their arrival was not a whimsical migration but a survival story: repair the city, adapt to strange lands, and build a future from salvaged knowledge.
Over time, gnomes integrated into Amra while keeping a fierce love of innovation and experimentation. Tinkertown became a center of commerce, craft, and culture, guided for centuries by the Council of the Nut and shaped by inventors who treated failure as a necessary tool.
How Gnomish Lineages Work
Gnomish sub-species show how one displaced people found different ways to belong. Forest, rock, arcane, and underground gnomes all preserve curiosity, but each applies it to a different environment and danger.
Gnomish Sub-Species
Forest Gnomes
Forest Gnomes live close to Amra's woodlands, hiding homes in trees, hillsides, and natural cover. Their small size and woodland knowledge let them move through dense terrain where larger travelers leave obvious traces.
They are herbalists, trackers, hunters, and quiet friends to small animals. Use Forest Gnomes for hidden villages, woodland warnings, small-scale diplomacy, and clues that only someone close to the forest floor would notice.
Rock Gnomes
Rock Gnomes are engineers, metallurgists, artificers, and makers of intricate devices. Their mountain and underground settlements are filled with workshops, forges, clockwork, steam machines, automata, and experimental tools.
They bring Tinkertown's spirit into stone and metal. A Rock Gnome may solve a dungeon problem with a device no one trusts, or create a political crisis when an invention makes an old industry obsolete.
Arcane Gnomes
Arcane Gnomes devote themselves to magical research. Libraries, schools, laboratories, and spell archives are their natural terrain, and curiosity often drives them farther than caution permits.
They are versatile spellcasters, theorists, magical auditors, and dangerous experimenters. Use Arcane Gnomes when magic needs a researcher who is brilliant, helpful, and one question away from trouble.
Underground Gnomes
Underground Gnomes live in deep caverns and subterranean tunnels beneath Amra. They negotiate with other underground peoples, mine difficult resources, and survive poisonous or unstable environments that would defeat most surface travelers.
Their culture is practical, wary, and socially complex. They can serve as guides to the underworld, brokers between buried communities, or guardians of passages that surface powers do not know exist.
Campaign Use
- Use gnomes to connect invention, migration, and adaptation.
- Let Tinkertown be both refuge and source of disruptive technology.
- Make every gnomish device a social object: someone built it, funded it, fears it, or wants it stolen.