If I remember right, gnomes cannot move through stone. Therefore, any wall or castle set upon stone is safe. Further, if your castle had a stone floor, the gnome could only come up under it, not through it. And I would add one further detriment to using the gnome carrying method-- gnomes are stupid. If you tell a gnome to carry you from point A to point B it will. Unfortunately, it will just flow around rocks that happen to lie along that path, a point that is not true of the person being carried. There is a very good chance that the person carried will hit an underground rock headfirst.
(As an aside, in my own campaign, there is a PC Carmanian sorceror skilled in the use of gnomes. When he was in the process of constructing his new tower, he called up gnomes to move the stones to the correct place. The gnomes did so, but without regard for the wooden palisade around the entire fort. After this fiasco, the sorceror switched to a conveyor belt approach with the use of the Fly spell.)
My take on it is this. In Prax, as Peter Michaels points out, Raven is associated with Darkness and thievery. Conceal is appropriate. But in Pent, Raven (which may or may not be the same spirit) does not have this association. The Pent Raven is a brother of the winds. He changes flies in the air along with the clouds and winds and is clearly not associated with the sun. Here he offers the ability for others to fly with him, becoming a raven too. This seems perfectly reasonable for a non-Praxian spirit. In Imther (and I suspect in Humakti areas), Raven is a battle spirit (or maybe post-battle spirit) who glories in promoting combat and then picking the remains (though always quite openly). In this case, the raven spirit is neither thief nor windassociated shapechanger, but a harbinger and promoter of strife.
Just because a spirit may look the same from one region to another does not mean they always carry the same myths with them. I think this is particularly true of animal spirits, less so for elemental spirits.
Harald
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