Cheers fellow Dawi!

I wasn't sure if I should post this on the fireplace or here, because it seemed to fit both places, but here goes:

I don't know if many of you have played DND or anything, but I personally fell in love with the Gnomes as a race, and I often played gnome characters. Back in 3.5 edition DND, Gnomes and Dwarves were somewhat like cousins...both were "Races of Stone" and had similar ties and lifestyles. This got me thinking about Warhammer and the void of Gnomes in Warhammer, and I wanted to gauge your guys' opinions about adding Gnome characters to the Dwarf army. I think it would be awesome, but I'm sure many dwarves with longer beards than mine would have a problem with it.

The way I see it, it is thematically appropriate, and would help us integrate with the rest of the game and maybe be a better balanced army.

THEME. Our main antithesis is Orcs and Goblins. They managed to lump two races into one army, being "Greenskins, and tricky, magical, smaller Greenskins". I am basically proposing the same thing, so we can better serve as an antithesis. We would be the Dwarves & Gnomes army, having Dwarves and tricky, magical, smaller Dwarves, in essence. That way we would be more complete in our juxtaposition of them.
BALANCE: I think there are many threads about how magic is OP and too many races have access to board-wiping or game-clinching spells. Also from what I have seen, our anti-magic/dispel abilities have decreased since 7th Ed and many believe they don't cut it in this 8th ed with the new book we are playing. Instead of trying to balance our race who can't have access to magic with every other race who does have access to magic, the Gnomes will be able to have wizards, and so our race can have access to magic if we choose. I'm sure they can do something similar to the orcs and goblins too, where if we field an all-dwarf army or at least an army with no gnome wizards, we retain our bonus to dispel, etc.
ARMY VERSATILITY: Obviously, having Gnomes with access to magic in our arsenal would improve our army's versatility, so that people playing against us would have to worry about more things or could enjoy playing against more types and builds of armies instead of just the usual gunelines/Strollaz lists. We could maybe work other means of versatility to our army, like if the Gnomes would have access to any sort of skirmishers/fast attack/flyers that our army relatively lacks.
TACTICAL VERSATILITY: The Dwarves, as a race, are stubborn, favoring tradition, etc., and in general I think everyone knows what we do, how we might play, etc. I just (almost) finished reading the Blood in the Badlands campaign setting, and I am just kind of sickened by the attention and freedom allowed to the other races, especially the tricky races like the Skaven and O&G. The Dwarf rules provided were relatively static and reliable, like the Dwarves, whereas with the Skaven players it seemed they had a lot more tricks in their arsenal, and a lot more freedom of creativity. One Skaven player somehow teleported one of his armies across the map and conquered territory far from where his empire was, with no adjacent territory to attack from. The Skaven player was allowed to custom-make his own 2000 pt. siege weapon of ultra-death (thank goodness for their shoddy workmanship, it misfired and blew up on the first shot!). Also, late in the game, the Skaven tried to attack the Dwarf player underground, so they created 5 sequential scenarios specifically for the Skaven players to simulate underground battles with the dwarves, progressively getting closer and closer to the Dwarf capital. What upset me was that if the Dwarf player won, then they were forced to replay that battle again the next time they tried to attack underground, ie, if the Dwarf won scenario 3 the Skaven weren't allowed to progress and had to replay scenario 3 until they beat it to get to the next one. There was no backwards advancement (ie, if Dwarf won scenario 3 they'd be forced to replay scenario 2). I felt like there was a total double-standard, because it was just about the Dwarf player defending his homeland from the invading Skaven...there was no opportunity for reclaiming his own underground territory, let alone trying to invade the Skaven in their warrens and dens.

Therefore, I think if we allow the Gnomes to be a part of our army we would have access to more non-static tactics, and we could benefit from what GW does with the Skaven and O&G, namely "They are tricky and inventive, so they can make up whatever junk they want and we will allow it and try (unsuccessfully?) to balance it.

Sorry for the long post. In summary, I think having a Dwarves and Gnomes army in the future could add a lot of fun, versatility, and individuality for our army, and I wanted to see if you guys felt the same. If we agreed, I don't know if it is something that we could petition GW to add or if we could make our own house rules for them or something. (I know from my WE friend that before there new book came out, some guy on their forum pretty much made posts of an army list that everyone agreed was balanced and they played with that.)