tolly bought a Coffee for Jay Eaton:

ive got two semi-related questions about burrow gnome communities: a) what do they tend to look like in a physical sense? and b) how do they deal w red attempts at predation?

Gnome burrows usually have an entrance hallway and a main connector room that leads to most of the other rooms in the complex. These other rooms tend to grouped loosely by guild association, so one group of rooms would house the queen and her consorts and activities, another could house the carpenters guild and their supplies and work spaces, etc.

There are many ways to defend a burrow, though each of them has their own trade-offs. Some burrows opt to have an entrance hall too narrow for a red dragon to pass through, but this severely limits the size of materials and livestock animals that can pass into the burrow. As a compromise most burrows make the entrance hall just narrow enough that a red would have difficulty turning around, limiting possible movement of the bird. Guards can be stationed outside the burrow entrance whenever the entrance door is unlocked, with backup guards on the inside in case the threat makes it through. Guards usually have an alert system– a whistle blow at the first flash of suspicious red on the mountain side tells the guards at the inner door to lock up, and the gnomes out on the mountain to either hunker down or scamper back to the burrow before the front doors lock up. Some burrows have silent alert systems, where the front guards can press a button on a mechanism that alerts the inner burrow of an emergency. There are also a lot of doors within the burrow its self, so even if a dragon makes it past one door it will likely find its movement impeded elsewhere.

None of these are foolproof, of course– guards can be killed, alert systems can be tampered with or fail, and doors can be broken in or neglectfully unlocked, and anyone outside the burrow is still at risk of being snatched by an airborne dragon. Dragons are smart and enjoy finding new ways to manipulate gnome safety systems, and as long as they can fill their belly with a panicked gnome or two they’ll consider it a success.