Package overview — framing for reviewers, not lore to import into canon.
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Gnomes carry a remarkable amount of canon weight and have no species entity. They are:
- the majority population of the Republic of Izheim, canonically "formerly oppressed by the high elves";
- the founders of the first democracy in Nixxia, which canon says directly influenced the founding of Brogar and Lyalas;
- the "gnomish ingenuity" half of the Namuzdus–Izheim Innovation Boom, and therefore the origin of Kori-infused machinery, clockwork guardians, and geothermal forges;
- half of the "dwarven-gnome defences" that held the Empire of Revakgol off in both the Border War and the Deepmetal Wars.
Elves, humans, greenskins, and Dovagoraan all have full species trees. The people who invented Nixxian democracy and Nixxian machinery have a footnote in an organization entry.
The thesis
This package writes them as a species entity while deliberately refusing to settle their lineage, because that is a cosmological decision rather than a taxonomic one (see below).
What it does commit to is the shape of them: a people defined by displacement and by the two things displaced peoples build — portable expertise and institutions that cannot be inherited. Their craft tradition is analytic where Kaetijul craft is permanent; a dwarf builds to outlast, a gnome builds to be understood, repaired, and improved by a stranger. And the reason Izheim became a republic is not that gnomes are natural democrats but that a refugee population arriving with no land, no lineages, and no surviving hierarchy had nothing to reconstitute an aristocracy out of.
On the name — corrected
This package originally proposed Mugyul, from the lexicon's mugyul, "small, short, low." That was a mistake, and the author caught it: since -jul is simply the short form of -julhel, the name asserted Julhel descent — exactly the claim the package said it was declining to make.
The name is now Ka'sen, from KÄSEN / ka'sen, adj. "small." It keeps the intended reading — a bare, faintly contemptuous adjective handed to a subject people by the scholars of the culture that ruled them — and carries no lineage marker at all.
That absence is now doing deliberate work in the entity. Kaetijul and Medesjul carry -jul for Julhel; Kaemisaedhel and Kaelotaedhel carry -aedhel; Saarotsos and Zegtuzsos carry -sos for Dovagoraan. The Kaelotaedhel taxonomists who named the Ka'sen assigned them to nothing. Whether that was uncertainty or a refusal to place them anywhere in the order of created things is written in as an open wound in Izheim's own scholarship — which turns the unresolved lineage from an authorial gap into an in-world one.
Items
entity— Ka'sen (Gnomes). Species entry: physiology, the naming and its missing suffix, the analytic craft tradition, the flight from Kaelotaedhel dominion, and why their politics came out the way they did.relationship— Izheim Union → related_species → Ka'sen. The canon Izheim Union entity lists five related species and does not list the population canon says it mainly consists of. This edge fixes that.
Open questions for the human reviewer
- Lineage remains the decision this package is asking you to make. Julhel are the Ego of the living world, Hah-Kula'as the Superego, Dovagoraan the Id of the sundered Pah'Nad. The entity presents three readings — a lost Julhel branch, a distinct Fir'Gol-native line, or something shaped by proximity to Hah'Slen work — and endorses none. If you settle it, the name should probably change again to carry the correct suffix.
- The id path is a placement of convenience.
species.firgol.sentient.kasen.*sits the Ka'sen as their own top-level branch alongside julhel, lahkiin, gragrahgot, and dovagoraan — which is itself faintly an answer to the lineage question. I could not avoid choosing a folder. Treat the path as provisional, not as an argument. - Geography needs checking. Canon has gnomes oppressed by high elves (a Siniath power) and Izheim founded on Silgolt. I've written a sea crossing. If gnomes were always a Silgolt people and the oppression was exercised through clients or at distance, the migration section is wrong.
- Their relationship to the Kaekreaedhel diaspora — two peoples who fled the same persecutors to the same continent — is gestured at and could carry a package of its own.