An Introduction to the Sea-Faring Gnomes

An Introduction to the Sea-Faring Gnomes

Written by Professor Yorin Argirus Brunton

While spending time in Glastig on holiday to study the Under-Road, I was fortunate enough to be present when one of the trade shipments from the east arrived. Such an occasion was not one that I could bear to miss, so I made my way to the docks to question the sailors. This paper is a condensed version of the chapter on them that will be in my next book.

     At first glance they seem to be similar enough to those of us that live within the Green Coast. Slightly shorter than dwarves but not as stout, though a large number of them have blue eyes and hair. It wasn’t until I began to catalogue the gnomes that I was speaking to that I realized that almost exactly half had the exact same shade of blue in their eyes and their hair.

     It took nearly three days before I was able to learn the cause of this phenomenon: magic. Similar to the trend in halflings to express a form of wind-based sorcery, these gnomes have a tendency to express oceanic-based sorcery. Though unlike the halflings, one can spot one of these gnome sorcerers at a glance.

     Part of the difficulty in learning this came from the language. As is customary when dealing with a foreign informant, I consumed a potion to allow me to understand their language. The problems arose from the fact that their language is linguistically related to Gnomish. In some cases, this is of little issue, the tongue of the Sylvanor orcs is distinctive enough that the potion has no difficulties when imbibed by a speaker of Green Coast orc. In the case of the sea-faring gnomes, their language is close enough to Gnomish that some words are not translated even though they are of a different language.

     While to some degree I managed to blunder my way through half-translated sentences to learn about my sea-faring counterparts, a large amount of information came from the non-gnome crew members. It was through these motley sailors that I was able to learn the features of their society.

     To my immense surprise, these gnomes don’t have cities to the east that they take all of the goods that they trade for to. Most of them spend at most a decade on land in their lives. The goods that they trade for here are either used or sold in market places for other goods that they need.

     Their society is based around their ships, each one being the home of a family and traveling together in extended family group-fleets. An admiral, to use the local term, is elected amongst the various family heads within a fleet, often the son of the current admiral, but not always. On the occasions where the election does not go the way that a given family wants, they are free to break off and either join another fleet or start a new one.

     The various non-gnome crew members are either merchants traveling with their wares or hired hands, but in either case they have limited political power. A charismatic individual may convince the captain or admiral to their point of view, but that is the extent of their influence. The hired hands are hired for a period of service lasting five years, with a renewal of their contract possible if both the ship’s captain and the hired hand both desire it.

     One such hired hand, a rather exuberant and enthusiastic half-orc named Vadasslar, told me some tales of the things that he had seen both in his homeland during his time aboard the gnome ship (for some odd reason the potion kept translating gnome as dwarf). Some things that he claimed to have seen are far too ridiculous to be true. A turtle so large that it took days to sail around? Madness!

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