Gnome
Millennia ago, gnomes were among the many fey creatures cavorting about the First World, a realm of abundant light, life, and remorseless fancy. However, a long-forgotten event led to many gnomes’ fleeing from their ancestral home. Banished to a world bound by cause and effect and physical limitations, the gnomes of Golarion struggled to adapt—not just to find food and shelter, but to retain their identity and supernatural grip on life. With their connection to the First World severed, gnomes began withering slowly, bleeding their color, curiosity, and vitality in a process known as the Bleaching. Only by engaging in new and wondrous experiences can gnomes sustain their minds and stave off this ancestral curse, recapturing just enough of the whimsy of their lost homeland to survive—and even thrive.
Although the Material Plane initially seemed lethally drab by comparison to the First World, gnomes have adapted to their new environment. In addition to their natural curiosity and creativity driving them to explore every possible niche available, gnome infants form innate connections to the supernatural features that suffuse their surroundings. Like dry sponges, gnomes absorb elements of arcane, divine, occult, or primal magic, partially filling the voids left from the absence of their connection to the First World. These energies also shape a young gnome’s features, coloration, personality, and innate magic, often causing children to diverge dramatically from their parents’ natures based on where they grew up. Thanks to gnomes’ penchants for traveling, the majority of any gnome community can share a number of physiological traits while still having a motley assortment of appearances. Individual gnomes’ appearance span the full range of human eye, skin, and hair colorations and beyond, including shades of green, blue, pink, purple, and other hues. The color of these features are most vibrant early in a gnome’s life, growing slightly more subdued with age.
The need for novelty drives many of a gnome’s actions. Periods of idleness are harmless and even refreshing, yet weeks, months, or years without some goal, project, or other stimulus to fuel a gnome’s imagination leaves them vulnerable to the dreaded Bleaching. Whereas on the First World, any energy lost would quickly be replaced by that plane’s ubiquitous wonders, on the Material Plane, a gnome’s innate magic gradually seeps into their surroundings in a losing battle, much as a warm body inevitably loses heat in cold weather. Most gnomes can’t perceive this transfer as anything other than additional anxiety or stress. Engagement and activity cause a gnome to generate enough magic to counteract this loss, but once a gnome’s succumbed too far, the final stages of the Bleaching drain their remaining color over a span of several years. The process is painful and typically lethal, though a tiny fraction survives to become so-called Bleachlings, strangely calm and pale gnomes that most other gnomes view with fearful respect.
Thanks to their natural curiosity, sharp senses, stubborn resourcefulness, and sheer tenacity, gnomes make natural adventurers who thrive in a variety of roles. Combined with their long lifespans, gnomes often accumulate an eclectic array of semipractical skills that can prove unexpectedly useful, and few develop the same depths of expertise in esoteric subjects as gnomes.
Always hungry for new experiences, gnomes constantly wander both mentally and physically, attempting to stave off a terrible ailment that threatens all of their people. This affliction—the Bleaching—strikes gnomes who fail to dream, innovate, and take in new experiences, in the gnomes’ absence of crucial magical essence from the First World. Gnomes latch onto a source of localized magic where they live, typically primal magic, as befits their fey lineage, but this isn’t enough to avoid the Bleaching unless they supplement this magic with new experiences. The Bleaching slowly drains the color—literally—from gnomes, and it plunges those affected into states of deep depression that eventually claim their lives. Very few gnomes survive this scourge, becoming deeply morose and wise survivors known as bleachlings.
If you want a character with boundless enthusiasm and an alien, fey outlook on morality and life, you should play a gnome.
You Might...
• Embrace learning and hop from one area of study to another without warning.
• Rush into action before fully taking stock of the entire situation.
• Speak, think, and move quickly, and lose patience with those who can’t keep up.
Others Probably...
• Appreciate your enthusiasm and the energy with which you approach new situations.
• Struggle to understand your motivations or adapt to your rapid changes of direction.
• See you as unpredictable, flighty, unreliable, or even reckless.
Physical Description
Most gnomes stand just over 3 feet in height and weigh little more than a human child. They exhibit a wide range of natural skin, hair, and eye colors. For gnomes that haven’t begun the Bleaching, nearly any hair and eye color other than white is possible, with vibrant colors most frequent, while skin tones span a slightly narrower spectrum and tend toward earthy tones and pinkish hues, though occasionally green, black, or pale blue. Gnomes’ large eyes and dense facial muscles allow them to be particularly expressive in their emotions.
Gnomes typically reach physical maturity at the age of 18, though many gnomes maintain a childlike curiosity about the world even into adulthood. A gnome can theoretically live to any age if she can stave off the Bleaching indefinitely, but in practice gnomes rarely live longer than around 400 years.
Society
While most gnomes adopt some of the cultural practices of the region in which they live, they tend to pick and choose, adjusting their communities to fit their own fey logic. This often leads to majority gnome communities eventually consisting almost entirely of gnomes, as other people, bewildered by gnomish political decisions, choose to move elsewhere. Gnomes have little culture that they would consider entirely their own. No gnome kingdoms or nations exist on the surface of Golarion, and gnomes wouldn’t know what to do with such a state if they had one.
By necessity, few gnomes marry for life, instead allowing relationships to run their course before amicably moving on, the better to stave off the Bleaching with new experiences. Though gnome families tend to be small, many gnome communities raise children communally, with fluid family boundaries. As adults depart the settlement, unrelated adolescents sometimes tag along, creating adopted families to journey together.
Alignment and Religion
Though gnomes are impulsive tricksters with inscrutable motives and confusing methods, many at least attempt to make the world a better place. They are prone to fits of powerful emotion, and they are often good but rarely lawful. Gnomes most commonly worship deities that value individuality and nature, such as Cayden Cailean, Desna, Gozreh, and Shelyn.
Names
Gnome names can get quite complex and polysyllabic. They have little interest in familial names, and most children receive their names purely on a parent’s whim. Gnomes rarely concern themselves with how easy their names are to pronounce, and they often go by shorter nicknames. Some even collect and chronicle these nicknames. Among gnomes, the shorter the name, the more feminine it’s considered to be.
Sample Name S
Abroshtor, Bastargre, Besh, Fijit, Halungalom, Krolmnite, Neji, Majet, Pai, Poshment, Queck, Trig, Zarzuket, Zatqualmie
Related Organizations
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