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

[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.