Gnomesummer: five gnomes, two geese, and no soldiers at all

A village with no warriors, and what it grabbed instead

Last October I filled my table with 31 snarling green faces for Goblintober. This summer I went in the opposite direction – fewer minis, softer faces, and a project that turned out to be much more personal than I expected.

Gnomesummer is done. Five gnomes and two geese, built for Paper Miniature Jam 4, and the whole set is now up on itch.io, free or pay-what-you-want.

Not those gnomes

When people hear "gnome" at a gaming table they picture the tinkerer: goggles, wrenches, blue hair, a contraption about to explode. That's not the gnome I grew up with.

Mine are the gnomes of David the Gnome – the storybooks and the cartoon. Pointed hats, boots, round spectacles. Forest folk who live four hundred years, set the broken wing of every bird they find, and are pacifists right down to the bone.

That's where the whole project started, honestly. David was a physician. That detail stuck with me for about forty years, and when I sat down to sketch a warband it was the first thing that came out of the pencil.

I changed exactly one thing, and only because tables are unforgiving: in the books a gnome is six inches tall, small enough to shelter under a mushroom. Charming on the page, hopeless next to your other minis. So mine stand around three feet, hat included – shorter than a goblin from head to foot, and taller the moment you count the hat.

When the woods are found

Here's the premise I built the warband around.

For centuries the gnomes' forest simply wasn't on anyone's map. Too deep, too tangled, too easy to walk past, and the gnomes liked it that way. Then one season it stopped being true. Orcs came for the timber. Goblins came because goblins always come. Elves arrived to "protect" the forest, which turned out to mean deciding who was allowed to live in it. And the wolves – old neighbours, old understandings – found new masters who fed them better than the woods ever had.

The gnomes had no warriors. They had no word for warrior. What they had was four hundred years of patience and whatever was already in their hands.

So that's the design brief I gave myself: every single mini should look like someone who would rather be somewhere else, doing something kinder. Pacifists who ran out of options are far more interesting to draw than another crew of professional soldiers.

The warband

The Spear-Guard

A spear that is mostly a walking staff. A shield that used to be a tabletop. She is holding the line and she does not look happy about it. The spectacles are deliberate: she isn't a soldier, she's somebody's mother with a pointy stick.

The Mender

The village doctor, and the reason this project exists at all. Four hundred years of setting birds' wings and badgers' legs. He is the only one in the warband carrying nothing that could hurt anyone – he has mended a thousand broken bones, and not one of them was broken on purpose.

The Woodcutter

Everyone else is improvising a weapon out of a tool. His tool was already a weapon. Two hundred years of splitting oak, and an axe doesn't care what you swing it at. He didn't want to be good at this, and he is. Nobody in the village meets his eye any more, and he has noticed.

The Acorn-Slinger

A shepherd's sling and a pouch of acorns, the same one she has used for eighty years to keep the crows off the seedlings. Nothing about it was ever a weapon. She does not miss.

The Geese Keeper

The village matriarch, store-room keys on her apron and four hundred years of authority behind her. When the invaders came she didn't go looking for a weapon. She had a rolling pin, and she had the geese – territorial, furious, and almost as tall as she is. She just pointed them at the treeline.

If the Spear-Guard is somebody's mother with a pointy stick, this is somebody's grandmother with a rolling pin and two very angry birds. She might be the most dangerous gnome in the set.

Why nothing matches

Look at the five of them together and the colours clash. That's on purpose, and it's the design decision I'm happiest with.

A uniformed warband implies a quartermaster handing out kit. These gnomes grabbed whatever they already owned and walked out the door. They're civilians, not a force, and I wanted that visible right down to what they're wearing. The one thread I kept constant is the silhouette – pointed hat, round build – so they still read as one band however far the palettes drift.

The geese got their own bases on the print sheet, so you can reuse them freely: field a whole gaggle, or just drop them into any game as extremely cross farm animals.

Print and play

The complete set is up now, free or pay-what-you-want:

→ Gnomesummer – The Complete Gnome Warband on itch.io

Every mini prints front and back on a 55 mm strip, roughly 30 mm to the tip of the hat, so they stand comfortably alongside 28 mm miniatures. Print as many copies of each as your table needs, cut, fold, base, play. And since a certain green warband came through here last autumn, they drop straight in against the Goblintober goblins – that fight is now officially canon in my house.

Five minis is a very different rhythm from 31. Goblintober was a daily sprint where the constraint did the thinking for me; Gnomesummer let me sit with each character for days and actually give them an interior life. I'm not sure which I enjoyed more, but I know which one made me think about my childhood books more often.

Thank you to everyone who followed along through the summer, on the blog, on Instagram, and on the forums, and threw feedback in along the way. A village with no soldiers, no warriors, not even a word for it, defended its woods with walking staffs, kitchen tools and poultry – and now it's on your table too.

Mind the mushrooms.

Cheers,

Horacio Gonzalez - LostInBrittany

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Gnomesummer is published by Korrigan Press. The full project write-up lives in the introduction post and the release post. Daily progress goes up on Instagram @lostinbrittany.