Gremlins!

What does Veeky Forums think of using Gremlins as a mechanically-minded fantasy race? Is there anything they can offer that Gnomes and sometimes Goblins can't? Are Gremlins an offshoot of Goblins? Are the three races in some kind of technological arms race? Is there anything we can do with Gremlins?

Gnomes as a race and not a magical force just end up trying to push into the territory of dwarves and halflings. One of them has to go.

But I could imagine Gremlins as Goblins who just spent generations living around Airfields, Military Bases, and Junkyards and just started to gain a fetish for machinery and taking it apart and putting it back together.

between kobolds, goblins and bandit-[playable race]s so don't i think it's necessary for an entirely new race that would function in the same way. possibly some form of "designed to be a mediumhard fight for low level players, and designed to introduce them to concepts that might come into play later" such as resistances to certain weapon attacks or magic. but a race? na.

Gremlins don't use their mechanical intuition to build anything helpful, not even things that would help themselves. They could theoretically build an army of robots to defend their homes, or an army of robots to wage war on others, but they would much rather use their skills for sabotaging the machines of others.

In my setting, Gremlins are driven by goblins.

Really, gremlins are sort of like anti-gnomes.
While gnomes are invisible spirits credited for everything that goes right, gremlins are invisible spirits that are blamed for everything that goes wrong.

This is a Japanese Gremlin.

Honestly, gremlins as "mechanically minded short humanoids" as opposed to devious little trap-making anti-tech fae, are essentially "tinker gnomes who look like goblins". Unless you want to give the three races very distinct fields - say, gnomes are all about the magic, gremlins are all about the tech, goblins either use both or don't use either - it's hard to make them seem viable. Honestly, I'd probably just have either gremlins/goblins as tech users vs gnomes as magic users, or replace goblins AND gnomes with gremlins.

Honestly, I'd place Gremlins as the combo, a mixture of magicians and machinists with Gnomes and Goblins handling the singular focus respectively.

Though honestly, I rather like the idea of Gremlins being Goblins that took Fae magic and ran wild with it with their machinery until it changed them as a species. I'm more fond of the modern Gnome status that makes them tricksters and illusionists more than tinkerers, so it's a neat little niche for Gremlins to fill in my eyes as opposed to the solely technical and alchemical minded Goblins.

Actually, I think that these guys would probably be used best in a Sci-Fi game as the setting's race of small, strange scientists. Humans just call them "Gremlins" because their innate curiosity and their "Kerbal Space Program" approach to technology makes them somewhat dangerous to have aboard their ships.