What's up with the gnomes being quirky, rambling fools?
Chronicler
Member Posts: 1,391
Is that just their thing as a species?
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It's such a weird narrow archetype to restrict an entire race to.
Is it genetic? Would a a gnomish ward of Gorion be like that, even with little exposure to larger gnomish culture?
Well, Tiax is just insane. Genius types are probably prone to that in my experience...
quayle acts like he is smart
glint rambles
and jan is making stuff up and is obsessed with turnips.
Tiax and Quayle were just companions in games where companions had less dialogue, but I think it's still understood that they ramble about their nonsense obsessions.
See, Quayle rambles too. I don't have any saves with Tiax to check right now but I bet you'd find something similar in his biography.
Where is everybody getting that Tiax is crazy?
He claims to speak to his god, but he seems to have the divine power to prove it.
Right, so where are we getting that he's crazy? It's quite likely that Cyric did tell him everything he says Cyric told him. It's not that outlandish in The Realms.
He seemed more like he was just profoundly gullible to me. To think Cyric had such grand plans for him.
But as to the original question, I think it's because gnomes have always had trouble carving out a solid niche for themselves in a fantasy setting. Dwarves are the dour, resolute, industrious short race, while halflings are either the shy, peaceable, rural race, or the curious, adaptable, nomadic race (depending on the edition). In contrast, the gnomes don't seem to have much of a memorable niche for themselves; pranking and trickery and a talent for illusion magic are not really sufficient enough traits to build a racial society on.
At least Pathfinder's gnomes are required seeking out stimuluses in order to survive. The concept of Bleaching was rather interesting to learn about in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. But their D&D counterparts are just being a pain in the butt for the heck of it...
I can totally stand behind races having a preference towards certain behaviors or genetically coded traits, but to have them all being the same? Sigh, it's just so Star Trek boring.
DA:O's version of dwarfs comes to mind as a much better example of how to take the old trope and expand it into something really, really interesting. Dwarfs still felt very much like dwarfs, but the added social context, the cast system, the political intrigues etc made them feel like a real race and not a cliché trope of uniform robots.
@Zaxares speaks with insight. Never thought about it like that before, but it seems plausable. Could also explain how they later became fey to even further separate them from the standard races and create a niche for them perhaps? Personally I prefer gnomes to be something else, whether if it's yellow, green, furry or something to separate them from dwarfs and halflings, ie like the Orlans in PoE who feels like the "gnomes" of that setting.
Btw, anyone knows where the idea of gnomes came first? They are not based on Tolkien like the rest of the stock races I guess? - Wrong, according to Wiki Tolkien did indeed have gnomes but they were very different from the generic gnome nowadays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome
Reading this it seems gnomes share a lot of characteristics of (nowadays standard) dwarfs from the beginning mainly but also having other qualities being "earth elementals". Heh, sounds cooler than the trope used mostly today.
In that sense the Record of Lodoss War franchise is closer to its origin than D&D ever was. Which is interesting, given that it derived as a homebrew AD&D campaign setting.
Some brief research on "little people" and "gnome" did not turn up this stereotype. There is a common thread of mischievousness from some of the oldest traditions, but not the "silly, babbling" bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_people_(mythology)
Yoda from Star Wars behaves as the stereotype while he is testing Luke in "The Empire Strikes Back", and Lucas has said he based Yoda on a "wise little person" archetype mentioned by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero's Journey", but I couldn't find the reference just now.
For anything I can find during a brief ten minute search, it is entirely possible that Baldur's Gate is responsible for the stereotype via Alora (actually a halfling, but she behaves like the gnome stereotype), Tiax, Quayle, but then most especially Jan Jansen. Still, my intuition is that it has to go back further than that.
Since Baldur's Gate predates World of Warcraft, it is possible that Blizzard took their ideas about gnome characters from Baldur's Gate. I don't know anything about the Warcraft games, how they depicted gnomes, and whether they pre-dated Baldur's Gate. That would take more research. Does anyone know of any gnome characters that follow the stereotype from the old Warcraft games that came before World of Warcraft, or any other older games with an example of the stereotype?
None of the literary examples of gnomes seem to follow the stereotype. The examples in literature seem to depict gnomes as something closer to an evil version of dwarves - they live underground, horde treasures, engage in trickery, and are seen as very dangerous, borderline monstrous.
I think we definitely have to go to games to find the emergence of this stereotype. It may be that it emerged among tabletop players of D&D, or there could be references to a "silly, frivolous, babbling" nature in the D&D sourcebooks. Can someone with a tabletop D&D background who has studied all the sourcebooks shed any light on that?
YES! That was precisely why I loved DA:O's interpretation of dwarves and dwarven society. It ticks all the classic tropes of the race (conservative, insular, places great importance on family/house/tradition), but the introduction of the caste system and the way it plays into dwarven politics just made SO much sense and helped breathe new life into a race in a way that brings to life a functional society.
I think that that's actually where the original concept of gnomes came from, as a sort of "brothers of the earth" faerie-kin, not too dissimilar from the original Nordic concept of elves. However, this led to the gnome's shortcomings in fantasy culture because they then overlap too much with the classic concept of halflings (the shy, rural agricultural version that was clearly heavily influenced by Tolkien's hobbits), or, if they were trying to embrace more of the traditional fey ideas, they then become too similar to other fey races like brownies, pixies and sprites. (Even now, I'm willing to bet that the average D&D player probably doesn't know what differentiates those three fey races, even before muddying up the waters further by throwing a fey-styled gnome race into the mix.)
Reply to the bolded text: According to Wiki it's actually the exact opposite, original gnomes was the direct opposite to Fairys (which I assume is the base for Fey?). Pixies I guess is just a classic fairy with another name. Brownies I don't even know what it is (yeah I know I can google it, hehe).
Maybe the trope comes from the "Mad Scientist" type of behaviour, but distorted to fit standard fantasy setting in which the games take place? I.e. when talking to someone which is supposed to be super-intelligent anyone not up to their level would only hear non-sense (for them) and would have a hard time interpreting the actual meaning.
This is all just conjecture from me, of course... I have no idea on the actual history of PnP and such
Gnomes have +1 intelligence and -1 wisdom, so it would make some amount of sense for them to trend a bit more verbose and a bit less sensible than the other races.
But I think the highest intelligence any gnome companion has is like 16, and their wisdom scores aren't too crazy either. If that was the sole reason you'd think Edwin would be gnomier than Jan, with his higher INT and lower WIS.
Well, to be fair, Edwin muttering under his breath about me being a 'monkey' and musing about his grandiose plans right in front of me like I'm not there is almost as insane as Tiax. Edwin is basically Tiax with a narcissistic personality disorder...