If you travel back, even 2000 years, or even longer, you will find the Dwarves to be wise builders, always making new and useful things and bringing beauty into the world.
And a remarkable amount of fishhooks being added to the flesh of anyone who described the Dwarven experience otherwise. Dwarves are no more perfect than anyone else, and no doubt their obsession with building was expressed in definitively unhealthy ways.
And this is from a people who do NOT necessarily consider constructing cyclopean engines of war to be an immoral use of their skills.
Dwarves are not without rebels or those who buck the system. But such persons do tend to be tragically opposite to the (usually) opposite sex and deeply sexy and cool to everyone else. They also tend to be quite young. They don’t usually want to die to make a point about how cool they are, which is why they are often hired as advisors to young Elf royalty.
Just take our word: the Dwarves have made a lot of stupid stuff. Some of which was other Dwarves.
So a race which loves technology and can see several steps towards some complicated end, but none of the implications of that end, merely reminds the Dwarves that it’s a pity they no longer serve Loki. They like Gnomes. They will probably let their daughters marry Gnomes; they likely won’t have a choice.
The Dwarves are builders.
The Gnomes are people who can’t and won’t stop building things.
There appears to be a world of difference.
II.
The Gnomes and the Great Truth Machine
The Gnomes spent a hundred years on a machine which could tell the Truth. The capital-T, philosophical, whole, objective Truth; or if there was such a thing, it would let you know.
Gnomes wanted people to know that their perpetual fascination with slightly-magically-altered technology was simply a phase and they could give it up any time they wanted; and in the meantime, the combination of Magic and Technology sometimes—not often, not by any means, but SOMETIMES—worked.
So they spent a hundred years developing a machine which could answer questions. Now creating just the design interface would have taken Dwarves forever; you can’t really use technology to create a giant floating mechanical head that answers questions.
You can sort-of combine Magic and Technology. And it will sort-of work.
Eventually, the Machine determined that it was ready and, given that it had a sense of drama, it gathered all of the Gnomes in the Great Arena to listen to it.
However, since it also had a sense of compassion, it used its dabbling in the stock market to buy everyone present a small homemade cookie and a handwritten (by one of several thousand happy, temporarily-employed monks who drink well that night, and the note explained that the machine could either:
-Explain Everything, but no-one would understand it.
-Explain Everything, but no-one would believe it.
-Claim that it already knew everything and had passed it on to certain select Gnomes, and was slowly dispensing some of the wisdom throughout the Gnomish tribe. This last would not be true, but it certainly would be popular.
Which did they choose?
Ask it yourself; Alice eventually bought it and it floats in one of her Labyrinths, making horrible threats it has no intention of carrying out.
We respect the Gnomes, but they are not an entirely practical people.
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