“The Friction Devotion” is a small cult started by a gnome rogue turned priest named Dinomoda Skipssmas. She taught that existence is a struggle of friction and viscosity: too much and everything grinds to a halt, too little and everything falls apart. The light is an expression of heat, stasis, and order, while shadow is contraction, flow, and freedom.
The group quickly found a niche focusing on reducing friction, because so many gnome inventions are built around wheels and parts with a fixed point of rotation. Early on they developed new formulas for shadow oils, and a HEAT Power Word that would stop machines that started running out of control. Unfortunately the shadow oils did not prove to be cost effective for there intended purposes, and inventors were unhappy with the results of using the HEAT Power Word on their devices because it frequently warped, melted, or fused parts. One inventor was quoted to say that it would have been better if they had “..smashed the whole thing with hammer, at least I’d have some salvageable scraps!”
The group experienced a schism after one of their high ranking member, Faxflex Clutchwydth, purportedly produced a mathematical formula showing that their ultimate goal, to produce a friction-less substance, was impossible. The teachings of Dinomoda Skipssmas were updated by her followers to suggest that finding something perfectly friction-less was an ideal and not meant to be taken as a literal goal. Despite this update, there is still a small fundamentalist group working toward this ‘idealistic’ goal.
The majority of Friction Devotion members that remain continue to search for more efficient lubricants, and their configurations for braking systems are still taught in every level of gnomish schools.
First, here are both from a front view. The spider tank is a round body with four ‘claw-legs’ and a smoke stack on the back. On the gnome pounder, the round spider body is used 4 times. Each shoulder is a spider tank body, with the front turned towards the pounder’s pilot. The others are in the body. The spider tank cockpit is used directly as the cockpit of the pounder, and the last spider tank body is rotated to face downward and scaled up to make the boiler that is the bulk of the torso/midriff. The open flap on the front of the pounder is the lid of the spider tank in the open position.
The legs of the spider tank are the claws of the pounder.
The Smoke stack is reused without any modification and the exhaust pipes are bent upwards.
Well to be honest, I was really hoping they would do it again. They made an awesome new spider tank model, and when Endgineer Omegaplugg started to be referenced in the data mining, I was hoping that they would remake the gnome pounder with the assets they created for this new spider tank. The green skin and shadow skin for Sicco are new, but the model and animations are still over 15 years old.
Mekgineer Sicco Thermaplugg 