Gnomeregan

Full History

Long before its fall, Gnomeregan embodied gnomish engineering ambition. Workshops, transit lines and laboratories were built beneath Dun Morogh, where mechanical ingenuity supported an extraordinary density of invention. The city's culture trusted technical solutions and the people capable of constructing them, a faith that made its disaster especially bitter. It was not an invasion alone that doomed the gnomes, but their attempt to defeat the attackers through a dangerous technological countermeasure.

When troggs threatened the city, radiation was released in an effort to cleanse the lower passages. The strategy destroyed or changed far more than the attackers; sections of the capital became unsafe and many gnomes were killed or driven away. High Tinker Gelbin Mekkatorque and the survivors took shelter among the dwarves of Ironforge, turning the once independent city-state into an exile community reliant on allies. The treachery and ambition of Thermaplugg make the disaster a moral and political story as well as an engineering one.

At the original patch 1.1 world state Gnomeregan is not a recovered gnomish capital. Adventurers descend into a technological ruin while its people rebuild lives aboveground. The relationship between Gnomeregan, Dun Morogh and Ironforge should remain central, with later reconquest attempts excluded.