Why are gnomes the 'techno' race in the standard fantasy setting?

Why are gnomes the 'techno' race in the standard fantasy setting?

You posted it.

They're not

Because in AD&D they included Gnomes as a weird hybrid of Elf and Dwarf and expected everyone to play them as illusionsits. Instead nobody played them as anything and they only scrap of use they got was in the Dragonlance setting. In the setting which gave us legitimately mentally retarded Dwarves and Socipathic klepomaniac Haflings they also gave us "hilarious" Gnomes that made high technology that didnt work.See it was funny because anything they built feel apart just like you were supposed to find Kender to be adorable comic relief and not use them for chum

The thing is a serious version of that was picked up by other forms of media and helped give Gnomes some sort of reason to exist besides being small El-Dwarves so i guess its a win

Because that's what they are in the book.

What else are they gonna do?

Dwarfs usually are the techno race.

No they are usually drunken miners who like gold any technology they have is just an extension of that.

They aren't, but.

>Be small and not very strong nor agile, but intelligent
OH GEE I WONDER.

Because manlets justify their existence by pretending that they're smarter than everyone else and stacy just doesn't understand.

In addition to this, dwarves are usually portrayed as the uber-conservative/traditionalist sorts, whilst gnomes tend to be portrayed as both really smart and, well, not as tradition-focused, so they get the "innovative" character hat.

Plus, given they're small and puny (unlike dwarves, who're small but strong), it makes sense that they'd turn to either magic or tech to get a leg up in the world around them. As elves are already the standard magic-using race, that leaves gnomes with tech.

Also, way back in Basic or whenever the fuck Mystara was, the gnomish homeland was a giant flying city defended by gnomes in biplanes and static defense gun turrets, all made by gnomes.

That's really just WoW.

>Why are gnomes the 'techno' race in the standard fantasy setting?
Because WOW did it, and no-one has managed to come up with anything better for them.

You jest, but that pretty much exactly describes a former coworker of mine.

Has there ever been an iteration of the tinker gnome that isn't silly?

Because they're descended from mythic archetypes like the Knockers and the original 'goblins'; the old shoemakers of European myth.

>the gnomish homeland was a giant flying city defended by gnomes in biplanes and static defense gun turrets, all made by gnomes.
how the hell is it flying

My preference would be gnomes not existing, they're like a worse version of halflings.

It's even worse when they're able to be fighters.

Cavorite plating

EQ did it before WOW. Makes sense since WOW was made by EQ players. It's probably not the first example though

Because if they didn't have high levels of tech for protection, then why won't they already be extinct via ogres/trolls/dragons/ what have you eating all of them.

Gnomish engineering, obviously.

Gnomes basically shouldn't exist

Eight fingers, binary comes natural.

dragonlance gnomes were best gnomes
need an elevator inside your hollowed out mountains? use catapults to fling people to other levels.
they miss? pull the emergency cord and sponges fall out of baskets to cushion their fall
pull cord too late? add water to sponges to clean up the mess

>the gnomish homeland was a giant flying city defended by gnomes in biplanes and static defense gun turrets, all made by gnomes.
Fuck, that actually sounds pretty rad.

GW2, fuck you plenty of people still play it. Not including me.

Nnnno, that really is WoW, that's why the picture says "blizzard" on it.

GW2 don't have gnomes, just weird rat-gnomes.

They should be Jews instead, and be the "mercantile" race that subjugates all the other races through their predatory lending practices.

Basically it's a justification of why a small race would even exist. Goblins work because they're dirty fighters and breed like rabbits while dwarves are built like bricks and weigh about twice as much as the elves that tower over them. When they eventually got to the halflings and gnomes they just went "lucky and clever" and didn't really elaborate much further than that. Let's face it this is coming from the people that insist humans are "adaptable" when in reality they pretty much get everywhere by being conniving and talking others into doing what they want.

Gnomes should be barbarous little eco warrior/terrorists whose main concern would be the protection and managing of flora and killing each other while they're at it
Knee high, half naked with crazy dirty matted bushes of hair and beards, covered in war paints, wearing shit like badger or wolverine skulls as helmets, wielding stone weapons or something, violent as fuck

>Because in AD&D they included Gnomes as a weird hybrid of Elf and Dwarf

This is the best. Gnomes are obviously Elf/Dwarf hybrids.

Dwarves are jews

In the DragonLance setting the gnomes were called Tinker Gnomes and their racial abilities were all focused around building Rube Goldberg-style machines.