Drug Addled Organic Exosuits

This will probably be the last of these little classic fantasy RPG race rundowns for a while, as I am having a hard time in scraping together enough original ideas regarding dwarves and halflings to merit their own posts. Anyway this particular post concerns itself with GNOMES, the absurd little fairy men that so often go overlooked. Not without reason however - I'm not particularly fond of the portrayal of gnomes in most fantasy games myself. Next to stubborn dwarves, sombre elves, ambitious men and brutal orcs a whimsical race of tinkerers sticks out like a sore thumb. This is likely because gnomes have no basis in Tolkien while most of the other races are drawn nearly whole-cloth from his work. Some people think this reliance on Tolkien is a bad thing, and I used to be one of those people. But that's a an entirely different discussion, and I have pointy hatted men to talk about.

Regardless of their inherent dissociation from the tone of a typical fantasy RPG, some people like to play gnomes (and its always good to have more small sized PCs... heheh...) so it seemed unfair to simply remove them from my nascent setting without at least attempting to make them interesting. With this in mind, I took an aspect of gnomes I did like - their connection to faeries, or fey - and ran with it until my legs gave out.

A terrifyingly alien consciousness inhabits this little chunk of ceramic

To fey, the planes of existence inhabited by humans and other 'mundane' creatures are as hostile to them as a plane made entirely of fire is to a paper crane. This analogy is somewhat misleading however - It's not a matter of the physical components of the material world being actively dangerous to fey so much as its contents are mentally toxic. Planes inhabited by fey are constantly shifting explosions of noise, light, smells and more esoteric stimuli typically only visible to the fey themselves.

Compared to this cavalcade of stimulation, the material planes are like extreme sensory deprivation chambers - the sheer emptiness of the material plane is enough to drive them completely mad, and often one of the first things to slip through the widening cracks in their psyche is how to return home. When it is considered that most fey are nearly as old as the worlds they inhabit and have likely spent their entire lives there, its surprising the shock doesn't just kill them outright.

Like this, but the angle never changes, you can't move your eyes, and you will likely never die

This begs the question then, why even attempt to enter the material world? Well all faeries, for reasons unknown, feel a constant powerful desire to meddle in the lives of mundane creatures. This urge unfortunately could not be sated through the notoriously unreliable methods of interplanar communication. So to achieve their noble goals of curdling milk, hiding keys and stealing babies some method of getting fey into the material world and keeping them sane had to be devised. This is where the gnomes come in.

This guy's speciality is chewing on your toothbrush while you're asleep.
He doesn't know why he does it either.

No one is sure whether they were altered from some ancient proto-gnome or fabricated entirely, but regardless of their origin they were the first 'vehicles' of the fey, and allowed them to spread their meddling tendrils through much of the material world. The gnomes' usefulness as vehicles stemmed from their unique neural architecture.

To a gnome, the intensity of any stimuli is amplified nearly ten times in an attempt to reproduce the vibrant madness of the fey planes. This prevented the gnome's 'pilot' from being driven insane, but this amplification was not quite enough to enable permanent residence on the material plane. Fey pilots were frequently swapped out to prevent excess mental strain, and the gnome mind was engineered to make this process as smooth as possible. The first gnomes possessed a 'neural net' similar to that used by wizards to hold spells, allowing the fey to not only see through the eyes of their creations, but directly control their actions.

Why are there so many results for this

The process of exchanging pilots was not perfect however, and occasionally a gnome would be left without a fairy to control it. Early gnomes were about as intelligent as toddlers without fey influence, and were often left to their own devices until the next pilot slotted in. Though these periods of freedom were brief, eventually some gnomes ended up breeding outside the supervision of their controllers. Gnomes proved to be much more fecund than the fey expected, and soon there were far more vehicles than pilots. Small communities of free gnomes went feral, multiplying rapidly and often dying just as quickly.

Alas, the world is too cruel for one so innocent...

A few 'true' gnomes remained in the service of the fey - growing fairy rings, confusing travelers, cavorting and howling in the moonlight - but they are exceedingly rare, and considered urban legends by modern gnomes. The fey for the most part discarded the gnomes as a failed experiment, and were eventually able to craft more suitable, permanent, and most importantly sterile vehicles in the form of satyrs and gremlins.

Meanwhile in the feral communities, the massive energy demand and intelligence suppression required by the neural contortions that house a fey pilot resulted in it quickly being removed from the budding communities through natural selection. The relatively benign sensory amplification, on the other hand, remained relatively intact. This amplification of stimuli is typically cited as the cause of the 'obsessions' commonly seen in modern gnomes, especially when that obsession involves creating something - both a complex mechanism and a simple clay pot can hold incredible sensory appeal to a gnome.

"Magnificent!"
-Every gnome

Unfortunately, this also results in gnomes being incredibly susceptible to even the mildest of addicting substances and activities. Most notably, many modern gnomes have taken to smoking copious amounts of nutmeg, being intoxicated not only by its somewhat toxic narcotic properties, but the simple fact that it has a very powerful aroma. Other strong sensations gnomes have been known to become hopelessly addicted to include staring at fractals/fields of flowers, rubbing their hands on bricks and obnoxiously loud humming.

Gravity Falls helpfully provides a sobering depiction of gnome drug abuse

Don't let this apparent absurdity fool you, however - The sensory amplification also grants gnomes the ability to detect illusions along with supernaturally keen senses. Though not nearly as much as elves, their fey heritage makes them predisposed to the use of magic, and their interest in mechanisms and creation makes them valuable as craftsmen.

Fear and Loathing in the Middle of Nowhere

Oh wow I did not follow through with the whole 'actual posts in an actual time-span' thing. Oh well. This post was heavily inspired by Arnold K.'s ideas on orcs, which you can read here (The equally good follow up is here). And I recommend you read them, not only because this post is essentially the same ideas shoved into my setting but because his stuff is absolutely brilliant, and much more creative than anything I've ever done.

Orcs are problematic though, to say the least. Intelligent races being slotted into a single alignment has never sat well with me, and I have had multiple Orc PCs in my campaigns. It's just kind of boring to assume all Orcs and all Orc societies have the same homogeneous world view. However at the same time I understand the desire for and convenience of having a non-human Other that players can fight with relatively little moral issues, and that can be flung at 'civilized' areas for dramatic effect.

This face just screams "If you kill me you get to take my stuff without feeling bad"
(source)

However, that's a discussion for another time, and others have said it far better. Arnold's posts mostly solved that dilemma for me, giving the Orc an interesting culture with great potential for individual/group variation, while keeping their usefulness as a hostile enemy Other. The key ideas I gleaned from Arnold's posts is that orcs believe that the gods view them with disdainful apathy at best and immeasurable hatred at worst, and that the main purpose of rituals is either to appease and be ignored, or ask for the gods to ignore their enemies in battle. In my still unnamed, rather amorphous generic fantasy setting, the most obvious example of this is the relationship between the orcs and the setting's also unnamed god of conflict. Unbeknownst to most of its worshipers, this god possesses three major 'aspects' of vastly differing alignment, and the orcs have a different way of dealing with all of them.

THREE aspects, you say?????

The lawful good aspect is asked to ignore the orcs; an Orc will attempt to convince it that it is too weak to pay attention to in an attempt to avoid being cleaved in half by a paladin. Worship of the neutral aspect alternates between appeasing it with glorious victories, and asking it ignore the Orc's enemies. The destructive eye of the chaotic evil aspect is kept far away from Orc settlements by frequent bloody raids against non-Orcs. This results in no small amount of cognitive dissonance as an Orc may in the same chant declare itself a lowly, incompetent nothing unworthy of divine attention, and in the next breath promise to personally sacrifice twenty decapitated heads. Of course, this hypocrisy is so routine that it is never questioned by any Orc. Outsiders tend to focus on the violent aspects of Orc religion, confusing appeasement for reverence, resulting in the stereotype of Orcs worshiping evil deities. From the Orc's point of view, they are simply taking a reasonable course of action in a universe that actively seeks their destruction: offering the most dangerous gods what they want (pillaging, death, pain, glory, etc.) in the hope that Orc lives will be spared from excess suffering. A life free of suffering is an absurd notion, and any Orc knows this well by the time their first set of tusks erupt from between their 'baby teeth'.

This fella died of natural causes at the ripe old age of  31!

This is one of the reasons half-orcs are treated so poorly in Orc society - they lack many of the physical and mental handicaps possessed by full-blooded Orcs. Half-orcs have smaller and fewer tusks, reduced bone spurring, almost no instances of childhood arthritis and far keener minds. It is believed by many Orcs that the lack of hardship provided by their bodies will bring woe to any Orc settlement that harbours half-orcs. However their value as leaders, tacticians, bookkeepers and diplomats (yes, orcs have diplomats) makes killing them outright a poor decision, so the Orcs in a tribe simply make sure themselves that the half-orcs suffer as a proper Orc should. This is a task they perform with no small amount of zeal, as they despise the human aspects (pampered god-blessed soft skinned bastards) of their half-blood kin almost as much as their Orc aspects. No one hates an Orc like an Orc hates an Orc.