Gnomes

Core concept

To stop asking is to start dying.

Curiosity as life

A Gnome may live four or five centuries, and to a Gnome the whole point of so much time is to never run out of surprise. Boredom is treated almost as an illness; an unanswered question is a small debt owed to the world. They begin projects they cannot possibly finish, purely for the joy of the asking.

Rock gnomes aim their curiosity at made things: clockwork, tinkering, how it all fits together. Forest gnomes aim it at living things: illusions, small beasts, the secrets of green places.

Where the questions lead

Gnomes are over-represented in Memberia’s Athenaeum, where curiosity is currency, and where their appetite for any answer, even a dangerous one, sometimes leads them toward knowledge better left sealed, such as the fragments of the Immortal Soul legend quarantined in its lower stacks.

Friction

Others find Gnomes flighty, forever chasing the next question, rarely finishing the last. But a Gnome who has stopped asking has, by their own lights, already begun to die.