There is the obvious surface level treatment of gnomes being greedy, devious bankers, always shown with exaggerated hooked noses (doesn't exactly take a genius to see which real world racial stereotypes the large nosed, powerful bankers are meant to reference). But that is, unfortunately, fairly standard fantasy stuff. Just wait until you get to the quest where you uncover a grand conspiracy of powerful gnomes pulling the strings on society from behind the scenes, orchestrating the systemic forced breeding of half orcs, and controlling the media so no one can speak the "truth" about them. Arcanum is a classic crpg that unfortunately had at least one writer on the team shoe-horning his/her bigoted, anti semetic conspiracy theories about real world racial groups into the actual cannon of the game world. Its kind of impossible to have a brain, play this game, and not notice how blatantly anti semetic parts of it are. Or, ya know, open any youtube video on the game and look at the comments. You'll see hoards of this games biggest fans gleefully calling for the genocide of gnomes in a very "No, I swear, I was just JOKING about wanting to exterminate entire races, I would never want that to actually happen =) " kind of way. You'll see fans of the game posting Ado**h Hit**r quotes and replacing "juden" with "gnome" like its the funniest thing they've ever heard and no one will be able to decipher this brilliant code they've come up with to be openly bigoted with plausible deniability. It's no secret who the gnomes are meant to represent and what the devs thought the players opinion of them should be. I don't think the devs were racist (aside from the writer of that one quest), I don't think playing this game makes you racist, but if you're a racist, chances are arcanum is your all time favourite RPG.
