Do games have the lock on "Gnomepunk?"

[elfs]

The video game Warcraft II introduced a new fantasy genre: gnomepunk. In it, gnomes went from being tricksters to being the geniuses of blending engineering and magic, creating giant mage-powered machines that rolled over enemy forces and made a mess of the local ecology.

This genre has been expanded by Warcraft III, World of Warcraft, and more recently by the epic Lineage II game series, in which clanking magically-powered mecha stride across the terrain on their way to battle, stomping everything in their way.

But outside of these video games, I haven't seen a lot of gnomepunk. I've rarely seen it in written fiction, and I've long wondered why. Is there gnomepunk fiction, or is just too juvenile a combination to justify writing about?

Comments

[manawolf.livejournal.com]

The Dragonlance franchise/series took that slant on gnomes. Except their inventions are usually a hazard to anyone and everyone, not just the enemy.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

And one can't forget the extension of Dragonlance gnomepunk to the Spelljammer universe!

[mouser.livejournal.com]

...and in this case AD&D absorbed the idea.

Not sure how far back it goes - all my AD&Dv1 stuff is in storage.

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

As someone else says, it goes way back. My ex-husband's gaming gnomes were gnomepunk, as you call it -- they were engineers and had a lot of tech. That was in the early '80's. I think he was influenced by the Drangonlance take on them. There were also novelists he read that had tech-gnomes; he would know who they were, but I don't remember. It was pretty popular in the mid-late '80's, though.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Mostly echoing the other folks, here, on seeing gnomes and their predisposition towards engineering in various D&D settings. I can't say that they all were/weren't in the dragonlance universe or not, my memory is hazy on that score. I've probably run into it in various fantasy novels as well. I'd need to scour my library to name them, though.

In the warcraft series you also have goblins on the other side filling mostly the same role of people in charge of technology that functions, but looks like it shouldn't. Their contraptions always look like something that a coyote should be ordering out of an acme catalog.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

That sounds a lot like the take some anti-Bayreuth productions of Wagner's Ring have towards Albericht and the Nibelungs.

[pieforeveryone.livejournal.com]

Also worth investigating is the D&D setting Iron Kingdoms, from Privateer Press. I'm not exactly clear on whether the D&D setting or the painted miniature wargame came first, but it contains many great takes on the crossover between magic and mecha. It even has a version of goblins taking over the role of the gnomes you mentioned. I haven't read any of the novels from this setting yet, but the setting itself sounds like what you're looking for.