Gnomes

Gnomes are a species of humanoid known for their diminutive height of three feet and their ingenuity. Gnomes live in societal groups known as colleges, with each college specializing in a different field.

The gnomic lifestyle is one of relaxation most of the time. They typically sleep for ten to eleven hours a night, going to bed at midnight every night. They eat several large meals a day, but somehow burn off all of the calories just in time for the next meal. Gnomes enjoy prolonged walks through the countryside, surveying the landscape, or through a library, grabbing the books that interest them then having their servants, visible in gnomic colleges by the black and white striped robes they wear, carry the piles of books into their rooms. They read for almost four hours a day, and enjoy a drink or a smoke a little bit too often. In the end, they manage to spend less than an hour a day working, yet produce more than any other humanoid.

Many have wished to take this to their advantage, but none have succeeded - when Emperor Throlkag II tried to force the gnomes to work for an entire day, they rose up and stopped providing his armies with supplies, his surveyors with machines, his farms with new plants or his bards with music. His printing presses became still, his aqueducts stopped working, and everything became rather bad rather quickly.