The Gnomish Depths

Beneath the mountains of Masada lies a second world, one older than most surface nations remember. It is not a kingdom in the traditional sense but a network of bastions, fortresses, and hollowed caverns, sealed from the light and sustained by fire, steel, and will. This is the realm of the gnomes, a people who live not in comfort but under siege, forever at war with the things that stir in the black beneath.

Where surface dwellers speak of prosperity or faith, the gnomes speak only of survival. Every law, every tool, every song and festival is bent toward a single truth: the Core Spawn are coming, and they do not stop.

The Ironwrights

Each Hold of the Depths is ruled not by kings but by a Triumvirate of Ironwrights, elected from three castes: the Forge-Speaker, the Lorewright, and the Tactician.

• The Forge-Speaker commands the forges and production halls. They ensure weapons, armor, engines, and provisions never falter. Their authority rests on the anvil and the output of their workshops.

• The Lorewright maintains records of the enemy, codifies stratagems, and oversees archives where every encounter with the Core Spawn is recorded in exhausting detail. To misremember is to die, so their word is treated as scripture.

• The Tactician commands the soldiery of the Hold, drilling every gnome in arms from childhood. When the tunnels shake, it is the Tactician who orders who will hold, who will retreat, and who will be buried alive to buy time.

The Triumvirate does not reign in leisure. Their tenure ends in disgrace if the Hold falters, or in honor if they die at their posts.

A People Under Siege

Childhood in the Depths is short. A gnome learns to clean, repair, and fire a rifle before they reach their tenth year. Every household keeps weapons locked and oiled. Play is indistinguishable from drill: chasing games through tunnels double as training for alarm signals, counting games teach rationing, and every lullaby carries coded lessons on how to move silently in the dark.

Adulthood is earned by trial. Some pass through invention, crafting a tool or weapon adopted by the Hold. Others earn it through blood, standing in the firing line during a breach and surviving. Those who fail are not exiled, but they are never treated as fully grown.

The gnomes are a people bound by pressure. They are clever because they must be. They are ruthless because hesitation kills.

Cities Below

The Holds of the Depths are feats of engineering unlike anything above. Vast caverns reinforced with iron struts and lined with firing galleries stretch for miles, with reservoirs of water and fungal gardens sustaining life. Streets are straight and functional, designed for lines of fire, and walls are bare save for warning glyphs.

The greatest of these Holds is Khadrum Deep, a bastion carved around a bottomless chasm where the Core Spawn rise most often. Here the forges burn day and night, casting weapons in quantities no surface army could match, and the walls are layered with gun pits that face both inward and outward. Khadrum is the shield, and every Hold connected to it by tunnel treats it as the keystone of their survival.

War Without End

The Core Spawn are never gone, only delayed. Some come as swarming insects that blot out tunnels. Others as colossal burrowers that shatter walls with their passage. Each Hold has its graveyards of breaches where entire regiments died buying time for civilians to retreat.

Surface dwellers rarely see this war, but they see its marks: gnomish caravans arriving with crates of firearms, powder, and steel, trading desperately for food, timber, and medicine. Every bullet is tallied, every pound of grain rationed. Nothing is wasted because waste is death.

Relations with the World

The Depths are not isolationist by choice. They trade because they must. New Antioch values their weapons and trains alongside their rifle companies. The Concordat honors their sacrifice and grants them safe-passage caravans. Even the halfling Stonefasts deal with them, though always at a careful distance.

But there is no mistaking the gnomes’ purpose. They are not diplomats, not missionaries, not colonists. They are survivors, and survival is their only creed.

The Gnomish Dilemma: Between Siege and Sunlight

In recent years, more Holds have collapsed, their survivors fleeing upward to live among surface peoples. These gnomes, born or raised under the sky, question whether their people should keep dying underground for a war that cannot be won. Some dream of abandoning the Depths entirely, founding new settlements in the open where the Core Spawn cannot reach.

Others see such talk as betrayal. To abandon the Depths is to leave the enemy free to rise unchecked, and to dishonor the dead who built every Hold with blood.

The dilemma grows louder with every breach, and the Triumvirates strain to hold unity. For the first time in memory, the gnomes are not only fighting the Core Spawn, but themselves.