A Story for the Gnomes

When World of Warcraft was first planned, there were only going to be six playable races. You might notice that of the vanilla starting zones and cities, there are only six, not to mention that the original cinematic has only six playable races show up.

Gnomes and Trolls were added later.

When it comes to Trolls, even if they aren't the most popular race among players, their presence in Azeroth is massive. Long before Horde players went to Zandalar, we came to learn that there's no humanoid civilization (excluding the Titanforged) that has a greater history or is as widespread as the Trolls. Indeed, while the Orcs are the flagship race of the Horde, it you want to talk about clashes of Azeroth's most widespread civilizations, making the Warcraft series about Trolls versus Humans might actually make more sense, which of course is reflected quite well in the two continents of Battle for Azeroth.

So in retrospect it's hard to imagine a Horde without the Darkspear representing Troll-kind.

Gnomes, on the other hand, have far less exposure.

We did learn about their origins in Wrath of the Lich King - the seemingly erroneous claims of a "curse of flesh" in Borean Tundra turned out to be true, and we gradually realized that this was not only the origin of the Gnomes, but also the Dwarves, Humans, and other formerly Titanforged races.

But the Gnomes' story has remained remarkably static since Vanilla.

The Gnomes are ancient allies of the Dwarves - despite being separate races, they never seem to have ever had any conflict with one another. Instead, the Gnomes always provided the Dwarves with assistance, even preserving many of the Earthen from the Curse of Flesh while the then-Mechagnomes succumbed to it.

The Gnomes built their city of Gnomeregan not far from Ironforge - the Dwarves' sacred city. But at some point during the Third War, things went terribly wrong, as the Gnomes, expanding their underground city, encountered the Troggs, and then irradiated their city in a misguided attempt to defeat these mutants.

In Cataclysm, we had a final push to re-take the city, but this ended with only a partial success - a story contrivance that allowed the Gnomeregan dungeon to continue to exist, while the old "outside the dungeon" area (something you used to see with a lot of Vanilla-era dungeons, which sort of required you to fight through a bunch of elites as a party before running the dungeon proper) was remade as a new Gnome starting area (prior to Cataclysm, Gnomes and Trolls simply started in the exact same place with the same quests as Dwarves and Orcs, respectively.)

Gnomeregan is officially reclaimed - the Gnome faction changed from "Gnomeregan Exiles" to simply "Gnomeregan" but the Gnomes haven't gotten much in the way of story since. Indeed, they are the only vanilla-era race to never have appeared in an expansion's cinematic - a long-sore sticking point.

Now, 8.1 datamining suggests that High Tinker Mekkatorque will actually be one of the bosses the Horde fights in the Siege of Zuldazar raid (and the Alliance will fight him in a flashback.) As always, I worry when established characters show up as bosses. Rastakhan and Jaina are both going to be bosses in that raid, and I'm worried for them, but Mekkatorque is particularly worrying because they really haven't even given him an arc.

The Gnomes, to be clear, have always served as comic relief. For whatever reason, Blizzard finds small people who are really into engineering to be hilarious. But I think that the Gnomes' Horde counterparts, the Goblins, while not getting very serious stories, at least have a more fleshed-out identity. Goblins aren't just inventors, but they're also utterly ruthless capitalists, making everything they do some kind of business. Gnomes seem to come off more benign in their exploits - it's not about profit, but pure scientific discovery.

There is one detail, though, that I think is really interesting. I don't remember exactly where it was mentioned, but the High Tinker position is actually a democratically elected one. This makes Mekkatorque the only person who is in power entirely because of the will of his people.

And in this case, that actually means that there's a potential opportunity if Mekkatorque dies in the Siege of Zuldazar - we could actually see the gnomes go to the polls.

Azeroth is a setting that is only sort of medieval - like most good fantasy in my tastes, it remixes ideas of the middle ages (or any past age) with more modern ones and even futuristic, science-fiction ones (consider the fact that the Burning Legion is less the classic "legions of hell" and more of an evil space empire.)

I don't think we would need to lose the amusing tone of Gnomes in order to give them more story exposure. But I do think that, as one of the longest-running members of the Alliance, they deserve some time to shine.