Gnomesummer: The Complete Gnome Warband

Back in July I set out to make a small warband of paper miniatures for Paper Miniature Jam 4. The jam has closed, and Gnomesummer is done: five gnomes and two geese, and you can download the whole set now.

If you missed the start, the introduction post has the full story. The short version: these are not the goggles-and-wrenches gnomes. They're the gnomes of David the Gnome – red shirts, pointed hats, spectacles, four hundred years old, healers of wounded animals and pacifists to the core. Then their forest, hidden on nobody's map for centuries, was finally found. Orcs came for the timber. Goblins came because goblins always come. Elves came to "protect" the woods. And the wolves found new masters.

The gnomes had no warriors. They had no word for warrior. So they improvised – with whatever they already had in their hands.

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The Warband

1. 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. Not a soldier – somebody's mother with a pointy stick.

2. The Mender

The village doctor, and the reason I started the whole project – the gnome I grew up with was a physician too. 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.

3. 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 will meet his eye any more, and he has noticed.

4. 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.

5. The Geese Keeper

The village matriarch, with the store-room keys on her apron and four hundred years of authority. When the invaders came she did not 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. 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, and she might be the most dangerous gnome in the warband.

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Not a Uniformed Army

Look at the five of them together and the colours don't match. That's on purpose. A uniformed warband implies a quartermaster handed out kit; these gnomes grabbed whatever they already owned and walked out the door. They are civilians, not a force – a village that had to improvise, right down to what it was wearing. The one thread I kept constant is the silhouette: the pointed hat and the round build, so they still read as one band however far the palettes drift.

The geese get their own bases on the print sheet, so they are yours to reuse – field a whole gaggle, or just drop them into any game as very cross farm animals.

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Print and Play

The whole set is up now, free or pay-what-you-want, on itch.io: Gnomesummer – The Complete Gnome Warband.

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

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 that had 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.