Tinker Gnomes

Tinker Gnomes are the Gnomes of the Dragonlance setting, and one of the three official "comic relief" races of the same. With the other two being Gully dwarfs and Kender... yeah, that set the alarm bells ringing, didn't it?

Tinker Gnomes were once humans who served Reorx, God of the Forge. Eventually, they pissed him off and he cursed them, transforming them into the first gnomes. Not only did he shrink them down, he also cursed them to be obsessed with technology, but utterly incapable of using it right. In practice, this manifests as an obsession with making their contraptions as ridiculously complicated as possible, and with failure. Yeah, that's right; these dumb fucks would actually rather find a new way to fail than a way to succeed -- it's actually considered quite embarrassing by Tinker Gnomes to succeed at making something that does what it's supposed to. There are gnomes in Krynn that actually don't have this curse... Tinker Gnomes have the audacity to call them "Mad Gnomes".

In fact, tinker gnomes are so bad at doing science that they have been called out as the primary reason for the setting's Medieval Stasis; every culture in Krynn has seen what tinker gnomes can do, and has formed the opinion that magic is a hell of a lot quicker, more reliable, more convenient, safer to handle, and generally the saner option in comparison. The only exception is Solamnia, whose knightly rulers distrust and fear magic... and even then, they are notoriously hidebound, and so the chances of them doing anything useful with technology are pretty much non-existent.

Tinker Gnomes also proliferate throughout Spelljammer, due to being smart enough to figure a way to get up into the phlogiston but too stupid to figure out a way to get down. Regular gnomes are noted as hating them to the point of hunting them down as embarrassments and dangers to all that live.

Understandably, this race is not very popular, though some people like to try and defend that at least they're more unique than the "dwarf/elf hybrids lite" crap used for vanilla gnomes in Dungeons & Dragons... except that, guess what? Gnomes as masters of technology is something that dates all the way back to 1e, where the gnomes of Mystara had a flying city of their own that they defended with airplanes and heavy artillery.