Quick Overview
Sicco Thermaplugg stood close to Gnomeregan's leadership before the city was lost. The defenders could not hold every tunnel against the creatures burrowing through their works. Twisted by the radiation, he remained amid the ruins and proclaimed himself ruler over the leper gnomes.
Full History
Sicco Thermaplugg stood close to Gnomeregan's leadership before the city was lost. An inventive engineer and adviser to High Tinker Gelbin Mekkatorque, he was entrusted with problems that threatened an entire people. Beneath that position lay a hunger for authority. When troggs surged into the subterranean capital, Thermaplugg's proposed solution would become one of the most ruinous decisions in gnomish history.
The defenders could not hold every tunnel against the creatures burrowing through their works. Thermaplugg urged the use of powerful radiation to destroy the invaders. The plan was carried out in desperation, but the poisonous release struck the gnomes themselves. Many died; others were horribly changed. Mekkatorque led survivors into exile beneath the protection of the Bronzebeard dwarves in Ironforge, leaving their achievements and homeland behind.
Thermaplugg did not share that exile. Twisted by the radiation, he remained amid the ruins and proclaimed himself ruler over the leper gnomes. What had been offered as a means of saving the city ended in its devastation and the rise of a tyrant. The disaster shattered gnomish society not because its inventors lacked skill, but because ambition and a false promise of salvation had been trusted at the worst possible moment.
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