Gnomesummer: A Gnome Warband for Paper Miniature Jam 4

Last October, Goblintober filled my table with 31 snarling green faces. This summer, Korrigan Press is going in a very different direction: Gnomesummer.

The occasion is Paper Miniature Jam 4, hosted by Hairic Lilred and running until August 9th. The brief is refreshingly open: make one or more paper miniatures, any character you like, anywhere from fantasy to sci-fi and from RPG to wargame, with any level of experience welcome.

Since it isn't a month of daily prompts, I'm not promising one mini a day this time. I'm aiming for something smaller and tighter instead: a complete little gnome warband, designed as a set, released as a set.

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Not Those Gnomes

When most people hear "gnome" in a tabletop context, they picture the tinkerer: goggles, wrenches, a malfunctioning contraption, blue hair. That's not what I grew up with.

My gnomes are the gnomes of David the Gnome – the ones from the storybooks and the cartoon. Red shirts, pointed hats, boots, spectacles. Forest folk who live for four hundred years, heal wounded animals, and are pacifists to the core. They don't fight. They mend. They ride foxes, they set broken wings, they know every root and burrow in the woods.

I've changed one thing, and only for practical reasons. In the books a gnome stands six inches tall – fifteen centimetres, small enough to shelter under a mushroom. That's charming on the page and hopeless on the table: at that scale they can't share a board with anything else you own. So I've scaled mine up to roughly three feet, hat included. Nowhere near pixie-sized, and able to stand next to the rest of your minis without a magnifying glass. Shorter than a goblin from head to foot, mind you, and taller than one the moment you count the hat.

That's the practical change. The other one is less forgivable.

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The Premise: When the Woods Are Found

Here's the pitch behind the warband:

For centuries the gnomes' forest was simply not on anyone's map. Too deep, too tangled, too easy to walk past. 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 willing to feed 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, an intimate knowledge of every thicket and tunnel in the forest, and a sudden, unwelcome need to learn.

So they improvised. A spear is a very long walking staff with a bad idea on the end. A shield is a tabletop with a strap. The healer who has been setting animals' bones for two centuries turns out to be terrifyingly good at knowing exactly where a body breaks.

These are pacifists who have run out of options – and I find that far more interesting to design than another crew of professional soldiers. Every mini in this warband should look like someone who would rather be somewhere else, doing something kinder.

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The First Recruit

The warband opens the same way Goblintober did – with someone standing in the way:

• 1. The Spear-Guard – Blue hat, red shirt, a spear that is mostly walking staff, and a round shield with a leaf on it. She is holding the line, and she does not look happy about it.

And here she is as an actual mini: front and back on a 55 mm strip, 22 mm from her boots to the top of her head and 29 mm to the tip of the hat, ready to print, cut, fold, and base.

The spectacles are deliberate. She is not a soldier. She is somebody's mother with a pointy stick.

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What's Coming

I'm keeping the roster small and characterful rather than chasing a big number. The shapes I want to hit: defenders improvising with tools, a healer who has never treated a wound that someone meant to cause, a fox-rider scout, someone who talks to the woods, and at least one gnome who is very obviously too old for this.

Like the goblins, they're paper minis, so print as many copies of each as your table needs – a lone lookout or a whole hedgerow of spear-guards.

When Gnomesummer wraps up, the whole warband will be collected into a single printable PDF set, free or pay-what-you-want, from Korrigan Press – and they should slot straight in against last year's goblins. That fight, at least, is now canon.

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Follow Along

Progress goes up here on the blog as the warband fills out, with more frequent updates on Instagram at @lostinbrittany, under the jam's #paperminijam hashtag.

Sharpen your scissors, and mind the mushrooms: Gnomesummer has begun!