Elf Sternberg

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.