Gnome

Overview
Gnomes are an eccentric race, often mistaken for children in their hyperactive wonder with which they pursue their interests. Fans of shiny, ostentatious metals and needlessly complicated mechanics, Gnomes are a powerhouse of Magitech employment. In every world across the skein, where gnomes haven't been simply disbelieved into nonexistance, their influence is subtle, but noticeable.

Gnomes are nearly as singleminded in their professions as the Dwarves, however, gnomes are prone to dabble. Being jacks-of-most-trades, masters-of-one, is the standard Gnomish principle.

Gnomes are typically confined to family groups in cramped districts of cities, or underground warrens that allow plenty of space for workshops and stores for peddling their wares. Their religions primarily seem to concern good-natured pranks and jokes, and general japery. Many believe in a trickster god, who demands of them a light-hearted approach to many things, to dissuade them from becoming too focused on their work, and taking themselves too seriously.

Statistics
Gnomes are small and slight, and clever. Not much bigger than Goblins, they have an innate talent for illusion magics and although small, make stellar mages. Their magical potential is high, and they are often exceptional at a wide variety of skills, studied over their long lives. Gnomes generally live to be Two to Three hundred years old.

Gnomish Technomages are almost a requirement for any airship company, for the maintenance of the incredibly complex Magicore engines used to power them.

Advantages
Gnomes are exceptional sorcerors and sorceresses, often coming into their magical powers before they are even aware of them. This magical aptitude often manifests as an uncanny luck, or unpredictable events.

Gnomes are quick and logical thinkers, and any mechanical device they come up against, they are prone to be able to at least hazard a decent guess about it's workings. Living among massive amounts of mechanics for the duration of their lives, they develop a sort of 'sixth sense' concerning automata.

Disadvantages
Gnomes oftentimes suffer from an inability to focus on a singular task for long periods of time, and even when working diligently, will occasionally find themselves distracted without the use of various alchemical substances to keep their focus.

Gnomes are not exceptionally frail, but much like Goblins, they require specialized armor and weapons to be made for their smaller frames, and suffer from significant injury in protracted martial combat.

Presence in the Shatterstorms
Gnomes have always been curious creatures. In worlds far from the shatterstorm, a thousand, thousand streams away from the nascent shatterstorm, Gnomish engineers worked around the clock on various devices, hungry to understand the nature of the universe. In a standard industrial accident, which is a common thing among gnomes, Two Magiton particles were hurled at one another at excessive speed, and the impending reaction destroyed the magiton particles, rending a hole in space not unlike a far reaching Void spell. So violent was the reaction, that it simply voided the existance of the entire universe, the detonation energy of the violent explosion causing a ripple. The ripple affected the resonance of the Reality constant. The energy rippled through every reality containing a single trace of gnomes and their technology, and within a few scant years, which is subjective in an altered timestream, the Shatterstorms tore at the edges of Gnomish realities, tearing young and old screaming into the Tempestuous slurry that was the Shatterstorms, and hurling them violently into the Realm, where they continue to pick up the pieces, and rebuild their technocracy.