{ "authority": "proposal_package", "note": "NOT canon — versioned proposal package for human review.", "package": { "id": 99, "title": "The Mugyul (Gnomes) — a species entry for the people who founded Izheim", "origin_kind": "mcp", "source_summary": "Grounded on organizations.republic_of_izheim (canon_json), which states Izheim's \"population consists mainly of gnomes formerly oppressed by the high elves\" and that it is the first democracy in Nixxia; countries_and_continents.continents.silgolt.nations.izheim.izheim_union (canon_json); history.events.the_namuzdus_izheim_innovation_boom, the_deepmetal_accord, the_echoforge_compact, the_revakgol_namuzdus_border_war, the_deepmetal_wars (canon_json), all of which turn on \"gnomish ingenuity\" and gnome-dwarf defence; species taxonomy shape from species.firgol.sentient.julhel.overview_julhel and species.firgol.sentient.lahkiin.overview_elves (canon_json); Kaelotaedhel supremacism and subject-peoples framing from countries_and_continents.continents.siniath.nations.thalon. Proposed Sigtaara name drawn from the generated lexicon entry MUGYUL / mugyul, adj. \"small, short, low\" (lookup_lexicon, sigtaara).", "created_at": "2026-08-13 09:33:38", "updated_at": "2026-08-14 13:32:31", "rollup": { "state": "canonized", "counts": { "accepted": 1, "canonized": 2 }, "total": 3, "accepted": 1, "canonized": 2, "resolved": 3 } }, "items": [ { "id": 99, "key": "primary", "title": "Package overview", "kind": "overview", "status": "accepted", "version": 2, "target_entity_id": null, "payload": { "markdown": "# Ask\n\nGnomes carry a remarkable amount of canon weight and have **no species entity**. They are:\n\n- the majority population of the Republic of Izheim, canonically \"formerly oppressed by the high elves\";\n- the founders of the **first democracy in Nixxia**, which canon says directly influenced the founding of Brogar and Lyalas;\n- the \"gnomish ingenuity\" half of the Namuzdus–Izheim Innovation Boom, and therefore the origin of Kori-infused machinery, clockwork guardians, and geothermal forges;\n- half of the \"dwarven-gnome defences\" that held the Empire of Revakgol off in both the Border War and the Deepmetal Wars.\n\nElves, 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.\n\n## The thesis\n\nThis 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).\n\nWhat 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*.\n\n## On the name — corrected\n\nThis 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThat 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.\n\n## Items\n\n1. **`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.\n2. **`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.\n\n## Open questions for the human reviewer\n\n- **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.\n- **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.\n- **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.\n- 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." } }, { "id": 100, "key": "mugyul-gnomes-species-entity", "title": "Ka'sen / Gnomes (species entity)", "kind": "entity", "status": "canonized", "version": 2, "target_entity_id": "species.firgol.sentient.kasen.overview_kasen", "payload": { "id": "species.firgol.sentient.kasen.overview_kasen", "name": "Ka'sen", "native": "KÄSEN", "type": "species", "subtype": "sentient", "aliases": [ "Gnomes", "the Small Folk", "Izheimites (colloquial, inaccurate)" ], "summary": "The people who founded the first republic in Nixxia and built the machinery that followed it. Displaced from Kaelotaedhel dominion and resettled on Silgolt, the Ka'sen rebuilt as a landless, lineage-poor population whose only transferable capital was knowledge — and who consequently made knowledge transferable on principle. Their craft tradition is analytic rather than monumental, their institutions are deliberately non-hereditary, and their scholarly name is an exonym given to them by the people who ruled them.", "tags": [ "gnomes", "kasen", "izheim", "silgolt", "craft", "diaspora", "kori" ], "content": { "description": "The Ka'sen are a small-statured sentient people, long-lived by human measure though well short of Aedhel spans, with the fine motor precision and close-focus eyesight that their craft tradition both selects for and exploits. Physically unremarkable in strength and endurance, they have historically been dismissed by larger neighbours on that basis — an error the Empire of Revakgol made twice at Namuzdus and paid for both times.", "naming": "Ka'sen is a Sigtaara scholarly term, from ka'sen, simply 'small.' It is an exonym, and a pointed one: a bare adjective applied to a subject people by the scholarly register of the culture that ruled them. What it conspicuously lacks is a lineage marker. Kaetijul and Medesjul carry -jul for Julhel; Kaemisaedhel and Kaelotaedhel carry -aedhel; Saarotsos and Zegtuzsos carry -sos for the Dovagoraan. The Kaelotaedhel taxonomists who coined Ka'sen declined to assign these people to any lineage at all, and Ka'sen scholars have never been sure whether that reflected genuine uncertainty or a deliberate refusal to place them anywhere in the order of created things. Both readings are current in Izheim, and neither is flattering. The Ka'sen use the term with outsiders and rarely among themselves, where community, workshop, and guild names do the work a species name does elsewhere.", "lineage_disputed": "The origin of the Ka'sen is genuinely unsettled and this entry does not resolve it. Three readings are current. The first holds them a divergent Julhel branch — land-born like the humans of Fir'Gol, separated early enough that the connection was lost — in which case a correct scholarly name would end in -jul and the Kaelotaedhel omission was an error or an insult. The second holds them a distinct native line of Fir'Gol belonging to none of the known lineages, which would make the bare exonym accidentally accurate. The third, favoured by a minority of Izheim's own scholars and disliked by most, holds that Ka'sen aptitude with Kori-responsive material reflects long ancestral proximity to Hah'Slen work rather than descent from any lineage at all. Nixxia's cosmology attaches real meaning to these categories, and the Ka'sen's position within it is therefore a live theological question in Izheim as well as an academic one.", "craft_tradition": "The defining Ka'sen cultural achievement and the sharpest contrast with their Kaetijul allies. Kaetijul craft aims at permanence: a thing made to outlast its maker, ideally without alteration. Ka'sen craft aims at legibility: a thing made so that a stranger can understand it, repair it, improve it, and build the next one better. Mechanisms are documented, standardised where possible, and taught outward rather than guarded. This is why the marriage of Deepmetal to Ka'sen method during the Innovation Boom produced Kori-infused machinery, clockwork guardians, and geothermal forges rather than merely better tools — and it is why a people with no natural affinity for great works produced the most rapidly compounding technical tradition on the continent.", "society_and_politics": "Ka'sen social organisation is built around the workshop, the guild, and the community assembly rather than around family line or landholding. This is usually explained by outsiders as temperament and by the Ka'sen as history: a population that arrived with no land, no surviving noble houses, and no hereditary claims worth asserting had nothing from which to reconstitute an aristocracy, and by the time it might have done so it had built institutions that made the attempt unattractive. The Republic of Izheim's foundation as the first democratic state in Nixxia follows from that, as does Izheim's canonical openness to other displaced peoples — a policy the Ka'sen understand as self-description rather than charity.", "magic": "Strong practical facility with Kori, particularly its resonant and material applications, and comparatively little cultural investment in Tazri. Ka'sen practice treats magic as an engineering discipline with unusually strict tolerances, an attitude that Kaelotaedhel arcane academies find vulgar and Kaetijul runesmiths find congenial.", "history": "Ka'sen history before the flight is poorly preserved, in part because much of it was not theirs to keep. Canon records them as having been oppressed under High Elven dominion and having removed themselves from it, resettling on Silgolt and founding the Republic of Izheim at the beginning of the Sixth Age. From there their story is one of rapid institutional and technical consequence: the Echoforge Compact with the dwarf clans of Namuzdus, the Deepmetal Accord's alloys flowing into Izheim workshops, the Innovation Boom, the defence of the Namuzdus fortifications against Revakgol in the Border War and the Deepmetal Wars — where canon credits gnome inventions with turning the tide — and the export of the democratic model itself to Brogar and Lyalas across the Summer Sea.", "distribution": "Overwhelmingly concentrated in the Republic of Izheim on Silgolt, with workshop communities in Namuzdus (particularly at the gate holdfast of Varkgrum), in the furnace-towns of the western cluster, and as resident factors and agents throughout the Deepmetal trade. Small populations persist under Kaelotaedhel jurisdiction; their status there is not good.", "outlook": "Ka'sen culture is inquisitive, procedural, and impatient with mystification, with a strong ethic of documentation and a corresponding contempt for guarded knowledge. Its characteristic blind spot is an assumption that a problem correctly explained is a problem solved, which has served the Ka'sen poorly in every dealing they have had with the Empire of Revakgol." }, "relations": { "x_relations_extra": { "home_continent": "Silgolt (current); origin disputed", "magical_affinity": [ "Kori" ], "related_organizations": [ "Republic of Izheim", "Izheim Union", "Namuzdus Dominion", "Stonecrown Council" ], "related_events": [ "The Echoforge Compact", "The Deepmetal Accord", "The Namuzdus-Izheim Innovation Boom", "The Revakgol-Namuzdus Border War", "The Deepmetal Wars" ], "lineage_status": "disputed - see content.lineage_disputed" } }, "timeline": {}, "sources": {}, "meta": { "status": "proposed", "note": "First species entity for gnomes. Lineage deliberately unresolved; name chosen specifically to carry NO lineage suffix. Id path species.firgol.sentient.kasen.* is a placement of convenience, not a lineage claim - see overview." } } }, { "id": 101, "key": "link-izheim-union-to-the-mugyul", "title": "Link Izheim Union to the Ka'sen", "kind": "relationship", "status": "canonized", "version": 2, "target_entity_id": "countries_and_continents.continents.silgolt.nations.izheim.izheim_union", "payload": { "subject_entity_id": "countries_and_continents.continents.silgolt.nations.izheim.izheim_union", "predicate": "related_species", "object_ref": "Ka'sen", "operation": "add" } } ], "reviews": [ { "id": 71, "item_id": 101, "candidate_id": 104, "decision": "accepted", "notes": null, "created_at": "2026-08-14 13:32:31", "item_title": "Link Izheim Union to the Ka'sen" }, { "id": 70, "item_id": 100, "candidate_id": 103, "decision": "accepted", "notes": null, "created_at": "2026-08-14 13:32:31", "item_title": "Ka'sen / Gnomes (species entity)" }, { "id": 69, "item_id": 99, "candidate_id": 105, "decision": "accepted", "notes": null, "created_at": "2026-08-14 13:32:31", "item_title": "Package overview" } ] }