Lini is the last of the "original" Paizo iconics, by which I mean, the last one that actually represents one of the original core, base classes. Of course, Paizo kind of did a number on the gnomes, and she's also the first gnome iconic character, so she's kinda weird. To be fair, gnomes were never really that iconic of a race in D&D. I know that they obviously existed, of course, but they just didn't seem to have a place the way the other races did, and TSR and later WotC couldn't quite decide what to do with them. Were they like nature-loving skinny dwarves? Sorta like halflings but different? Tinkerers and inventors? Tricksters and illusionists?
I have to at least give Paizo props for trying to make a fundamentally uninteresting race have some kind of unique spin on it so that it could be interesting. But I still have no use for gnomes. She looks, and acts, like a little kid. That's kinda the gnomes' thing in Golarion. Sigh.
There's a bio for her, but it reads less like a bio and more like a weird tiny little micro-short story of a single moment in time, when she met her snow leopard animal companion. Who, unfortunately, looks almost exactly like the bad guy in Kung Fu Panda instead of, y'know, like a real snow leopard.
One thing that I'll say about Lini is at least she doesn't reek of DEI, wokeness and grrlbossiness. She's just not that great of a character, but she's not an offensively bad one, just a mediocre one that I have little interest in.
Somehow her 2e update in the art makes her look even more like a little kid and less like a weird little fairy girl.
Sigh.
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