Note: Originally, I had planned to put all the content generated by this idea into a single entry, but I ended up having so much to say about goblins that it's going to have to be another series -- if I end up talking this much about every species, putting it into a single post is unworkable. So welcome to the first installment of Take Their Stuff, where I dissect the official descriptions of sapient monsters in order to show that it's all human propaganda designed to justify killing them & taking their stuff. The idea is that this should eventually generate enough material that you could build a workable campaign setting where the traditional “player races" are clearly the villains, and the XP-on-legs races are clearly the heroes. If there's interest, I'll do more of these... anyway, the original post starts after this picture.
So I was flipping through the past entries of the (sporadically-updated, possibly-dead) Your Dungeon is Problematic, and was struck by something the author noted: in the old AD&D Monstrous Manual, the entries on the various “evil humanoid" races read almost like old-fashioned propaganda, and tend to hit all the same notes. They're inevitably described as ugly, stupid, and smelly -- like racist caricatures of themselves -- and accused of whatever are the most atrocious crimes the author can think of. Tellingly, this often includes cannibalism, reminding one of the wildly-exaggerated claims colonial powers made about various indigenous populations, or even of the blood libel.
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| From Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick. |
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| From Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary. |
So, in this entry, I'm making notes towards a potential D&D setting in which all of the descriptions of “evil" races are just that -- libel, slander, and propaganda perpetuated by the villainous humans, elves, dwarves, &c. in order to justify killing off other peoples and taking their stuff. We'll be making the following assumptions:
- Every sapient race in the Monstrous Manual is actually in the opposite position on the Good/Evil axis -- so any entry with the notorious “Always Chaotic Evil" label is actually “Always Chaotic Good".
- Actually, “always" is a stupid thing to say about the moral position of an entire society. So instead, we'll assume that the alignment labels describe only the philosophical underpinnings of the society -- i.e., a “Chaotic Good" society is one whose basic moral tenets value the sorts of things we'd expect CG people to value, but the degree to which any individual actually follows those tenets varies widely.
- Anything that sounds like colonialist propaganda actually is. All negative features of the society being described or the physical features of its members are assumed to be wildly-exaggerated.
- There's probably a very slight basis in fact, though. Maybe some of those “cannibal" species have religious rituals that involve the symbolic consumption of flesh or similar, and it's been blown all out of proportion.
- The Monstrous Manual is also clearly written with the intention of sweeping all of the negative characteristics of the traditional player races under the rug. We'll be flipping the script and focusing on any negative characteristics alluded to in the documentation, so we can more fully understand the imperialist bastards who composed this propaganda piece.
- Yes, this means that we're dangerously close to just composing another propaganda piece. But it's more fun this way. If it helps, think of this as the same information from the opposite perspective.
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| Also from Schlock Mercenary. |
Oh, and I will primarily be using the old AD&D materials. As far as I can tell, 3e and Pathfinder both dialed the problematic stuff down a few notches (partially by including less background information in their core-rulebook entries, thus not giving themselves room for propaganda), the 4e Monster Manual was mostly soulless stat blocks and maybe a paragraph of bland discussion not worth mentioning, and I still haven't gotten around to giving any of the 5e stuff a proper readthrough.
Let's start with a classic, hm?
Goblins
The Manual says that goblins are Lawful Evil -- this immediately strikes me as odd, since I've always thought of goblins as chaotic, but maybe I've been indoctrinated by human propaganda. So, in this entry, we'll assume that Goblin society is, on the whole, Lawful Good.
The entry begins:
These small, evil humanoids would be merely pests, if not for their great numbers.
Goblins clearly reproduce quickly, which makes the humans of neighboring lands uncomfortable -- after all, in situations of population pressure, humans tend to violently expand1, so they worry that goblins might be prone to the same thing. This trait of the goblins actually makes perfect sense, though; the entry gives them a maximum lifespan of 50 years, and later editions stay in the same ballpark. Extrapolations by various sources give the age at which a goblin reaches adulthood as somewhere between 8 and 12 years. So what we actually have here is a species that goes through two generations in the time it takes humans to go through one, making their population growth appear rapid by human standards.
In addition, it is known that goblins are a pretty standard choice for an evil overlord's disposable minions, or the first real challenge of novice adventurers, &c. They are pretty much constantly kicked around and, by all accounts, have a high mortality rate. In that kind of situation, one would expect most goblin parents to have as many children as possible to increase the chances that some of them will survive. So, yeah, rapid population growth.
We also get:
Goblin speech is harsh, and pitched higher than that of humans.
Okay, first, it's clearly higher-pitched because goblins are physically smaller. A scan through the standard goblinoid deities indicates that “harsh" probably refers to the language having a high proportion of stops and rhotics, plus a trend towards consonants pronounced in the back of the mouth.
And here's the physical description:
Goblins have flat faces, broad noses, pointed ears, wide mouths and small, sharp fangs. Their foreheads slope back, and their eyes are usually dull and glazed. They always walk upright, but their arms hang down almost to their knees. Their skin colors range from yellow through any shade of orange to a deep red. Usually a single tribe has members all of about the same color skin. Their eyes vary from bright red to a gleaming lemon yellow. They wear clothing of dark leather, tending toward dull soiled-looking colors.I think we can consider most of the first sentence to be neutral statements and just let goblins look that way... however, I would suggest that the “wide mouths" bit is an example of exaggeration. Here's a picture of a Pathfinder goblin:
You cannot convince me that the standard Pathfinder goblin isn't some human-made racist caricature of the poor things. That huge, lipless2 mouth barely fits in their heads -- and it looks like the artist gave them disproportionately huge heads just so there would be room for the mouth. It is legitimately difficult to find a picture of a Pathfinder goblin where they aren't showing off as many of those sharp little fangs as possible. So I'm going to assume that the “wide mouth" line is actually something that's been associated with them not literally, but metaphorically -- a lot of material describes them as ravenous creatures that eat anything they can get their hands on. (Look how skinny that guy is! Of course he's hungry!)
The sloping foreheads and dull eyes... that sounds like the sort of thing that would be made up whole cloth to further dehumanize them. We'll assume it's false. Also, they probably do have arms that are slightly longer (proportionally) than human arms, but not to the degree that the description suggests -- you know, that description that very specifically says that they don't knuckle-walk, but look like they could. Also, that line about skin tone is clearly an example of the writer generalizing out of ignorance; maybe the goblins near him have orange-y skin, but that goblin above has green skin, and this goblin here has blue skin.
So there's a whole constellation of goblin ethnicities that the author ignores here. This also explains the line about goblin tribes usually having the same shade of skin -- yeah, because they're organized in small tribal societies, which are likely extended kinship-groups, so there's not a lot of ethnic variation. The qualifying “usually" indicates that goblin tribes, like most small populations that don't end up inbreeding themselves into extinction, practice exogamy. Actually, the fact that the writer doesn't seem to even realize he's dealing with different ethnicities suggests goblins are more tolerant within their species than, say, humans.
As for the clothing. Dark leather, soiled-looking colors... okay, do you mean brown? Like, the color leather is if you don't dye it something else? This sounds like a particularly insulting way of saying “they wear leather but don't fuss about whether it's a pretty shade or if it has some irregular patches". Good for them.
Now the combat section:
The rest of the combat section is just packed with weird contradictions of the image we're supposed to be getting. They're supposed to be violent and dangerous, right? I mean, that's why you're off fighting them, right? Because they were a threat to someone nearby, right, buddy? You're not just killing them because they're goblins, are you? But they prefer weapons that take little training, suggesting that maybe they don't prioritize weapons training. The author is trying to make out that this is because they're stupid, but we're assuming that's propaganda. I'm going to say it's because they're not particularly militaristic, so their tribes can only defend themselves with the equivalent of untrained militia -- or just regular goblins who grabbed something pointy because someone had to do it.
Also, goblins are “known to" carry shortswords (known by whom? doesn't matter. it is known), and the leaders may have metal armor. But the entry tells us later:
Goblins, according to this entry, use “simple and crude" tactics, and prefer ambushes to face-to-face fights because they're “cowardly". Take a moment to parse that. This sounds a heck of a lot like someone trying to communicate “goblins are dangerous opponents because they engage in guerrilla warfare" without admitting that this indicates cunning. You just know that if this entry were about a “good" race, a force made up of physically smaller, weaker individuals avoiding face-to-face combat would be portrayed as a sound tactical decision.
Now for the best part -- the Society section:
I think this is what's going on with the goblins. They eat and sleep communally, it says -- that probably means that their common areas, especially the ones underground, build up a sort of “lots-of-people-live-here" funk over time. Humans interpret it as “no form of sanitation" -- kind of absurd coming from people who have cities but no modern plumbing, really... who's living in their own poo, exactly? -- but it's really just the natural consequence of large amounts of living beings sharing space. Goblins are, if anything, hyper-aware of sanitation concerns, since they all sleep in the same room every night. Nobody wants to be known as “that guy who always smells bad", so they're as scrupulous as it's possible to be in a low-tech setting.
Also, check out that second paragraph. They're... communists. Literally, they live in fully-functioning communes. There's no private property (though, since they do have “possessions", there is personal property), and goods are distributed by the leadership. They go to an extreme with the no-privacy thing, but I bet that's just the most dehumanizing way the author can think to put it. I suspect they also have no secrets -- members of a goblin tribe are 100% open and truthful with each other. Surviving as goblins in a human's world is hard enough without backstabbing from your own tribe.
There is a problem, though... who is this leadership that gets special privileges and distributes the goods?
The rest of the “society" section is mostly statistics on the makeup of a goblin tribe. There are some interesting things there, though. For instance:
Actually, back up. This might be why Pathfinder goblins have huge heads. Dunbar's number -- the maximum community size -- correlates directly with the relative size of the neocortex. Maintaining a close, stable personal relationship requires the allocation of brainpower, and maintaining the kind of relationships that allow for functioning communities of the size we're talking about means goblin brains have to be physically quite large just to model the communities in which they live. So that's why the swollen heads -- it's necessary to make their communes work.
(Note: I have some questions about the gender divide there... we'll come back to that.)
Also, there's this little tidbit:
They've also got some other stuff going on:
So here's how I'm going to interpret this. First, it's clearly wild exaggeration. Second, it's not unheard of for people from colonial societies to defect to the other side, attracted by the lifestyle. Maybe the occasional human or what-have-you learns enough about how goblins really are that they decide a goblin commune is better than their current situation, and join up. The rest of the humans, of course, assume that nobody could possibly go to the goblins voluntarily, and decide that the missing person has been kidnapped and enslaved. And maybe when intolerant humans bust into a goblin commune and start stabbing folk for being the wrong anatomical configuration, sometime the humans lose, and the goblins have to decide what to do with their prisoners... so they try to convert them. They can't just let them go, but don't want to kill them, so they keep them in the commune and have them participate in everyday life. Yes, this involves forced labor, but they're laboring alongside of the goblins and being treated like one of them. The goblins try to teach them Goblin language, culture, and philosophy, with the goal of convincing them that they're not a threat to humanity. This rarely works, but it makes sense to the goblins.
As for the eating people... well, we'll come back to that, too.
From the ecology section, we get this contradictory mess:
Why, do you ask, can't they farm food? Well, look at that list of stuff they eat. And look at these pictures of goblin mouths:
Heck, maybe that's why the author keeps insisting they live underground. Some have probably been driven underground by human expansion, but others are just mining communities -- but calling them that gives them too much credit, so the claim is that they live in their underground tunnels. Really, though, they mine for metals and precious stones, just like the dwarves. In fact, they have more than one thing in common here -- the “dwarf" entry tells us:
Well...
Oh, and one more thing that needs to be addressed -- the weird goblin gender ratios. Why do men outnumber women nearly two to one? Obviously, there are a lot of possible explanations, but the one I've settled on is: they don't. Human observers can't tell the difference between male and female goblins; besides them being a separate species, all goblins have the same emaciated build, making them look vaguely, skeletally, androgynous. Humans have noted that some goblins go out hunting, herding, and defending the tribe, while others stay home watching the children and doing... whatever goblins do.4 Humans being the patriarchal asses that they are, they assumed the hunting-and-fighting goblins were the men, and the staying-home goblins were the women. The fact that this assumption led to some weird gender ratios in their documentation never seemed to bother them. In reality, the goblins are roughly evenly split between genders, as one would expect, and their intensely meritocratic, practical-by-necessity society means that goblins do what they're best at and what needs doing, regardless of their gender. So about half of those “male warriors" in the Monstrous Manual entry are actually female warriors -- and if they're even aware that the humans are misgendering them, correcting that assumption is low on their priority list.
Now that we've covered the material in the Monstrous Manual, I had planned to wrap up with a more “accurate" goblin entry, but in the process of writing this, I came across a source that put the lie to my earlier claim that Pathfinder wasn't as bad with the racist-sounding “evil humanoid" entries. Check out this mess -- that's not even from their bestiary, either. That's the material they put out for goblins as a player race, in a book that was about adapting traditionally “monstrous" races into player races. I feel the need to go through it paragraph-by-paragraph.
I think it's more likely that when they're especially hungry, they might eat things that aren't meat and that they get no real nutrition from out of a desperation to feel full -- in the same way that starving humans have been known to eat dirt. And then there's another “eating people" bit. The rest of this is basically saying “they fight battles they know they can't win out of hunger and desperation, but we've decided to blame it on them being stupid and evil."
Then check out this double-think. Since they apparently can't farm, they “live where food is abundant" -- so, like everyone else, they prefer to live in nice areas with plenty of resources -- or “near places they can steal it from" -- i.e., sometimes other people want to live in that same area, and they object to sharing the space with goblins. Then, in the very next sentence, “Since they... have been driven out of most easily accessible locations, goblins tend to live in unpleasant and remote locations..." How, exactly, does that square with them living where food is abundant? What I'm getting here is that they try, like any culture, to live in places where there are enough resources to sustain them, but they're kicked out of those places as soon as someone else decides they want to live there.
Then we get this whole thing about how they can't build structures, which is clearly bullshit. Remember, they're not stupid. And we know from earlier that they're decent miners. Those “crude caves" are actually mines, and what exactly makes their villages “ramshackle"? Also, what abandoned structures -- abandoned by whom -- and are they really “abandoned" if people are living there? We then get the familiar “if goblins have anything nice, it's because they stole it from someone else" bit -- note that, in the Pathfinder bestiary, goblins are armed with shortswords by default, so the obvious question of where they're getting all these swords if they can't use tools properly comes up again. It sounds like this is just an excuse to take the goblins' stuff -- “oh, it's not really theirs, they just stole it from someone more civilized... it's really like we're taking it back."
Then we get another line where “goblins are starving" is basically played as a moral failing on their part. This is followed by a completely-uncalled-for insult that... basically confirms my earlier claim that humans can't tell the difference between goblin men & women, and the society is actually egalitarian. However, the way they phrase it is that male & female goblins are equally ugly and vicious... real nice, guys.
Then there's the childcare bit. Goblins mature quickly because of their shorter lifespan, and the author somehow manages to characterize this as a moral failing too -- they have to mature quickly because the adult goblins don't know how to take care of them. Goblins practice communal parenting, but the author tries to spin this as sticking all the kids in a cage like livestock and ignoring them. Then, once again, the food-insecurity that defines so much of goblin life is their fault, somehow.
Finally, here are some tidbits from the goblin bestiary entry:
All right, so that being dealt with, here's a proper “Goblin" entry...
The sloping foreheads and dull eyes... that sounds like the sort of thing that would be made up whole cloth to further dehumanize them. We'll assume it's false. Also, they probably do have arms that are slightly longer (proportionally) than human arms, but not to the degree that the description suggests -- you know, that description that very specifically says that they don't knuckle-walk, but look like they could. Also, that line about skin tone is clearly an example of the writer generalizing out of ignorance; maybe the goblins near him have orange-y skin, but that goblin above has green skin, and this goblin here has blue skin.
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| I mean, he's blue because he's a member of a psionic subspecies, but still. Image from the 3e Psionics Handbook. |
As for the clothing. Dark leather, soiled-looking colors... okay, do you mean brown? Like, the color leather is if you don't dye it something else? This sounds like a particularly insulting way of saying “they wear leather but don't fuss about whether it's a pretty shade or if it has some irregular patches". Good for them.
Now the combat section:
Goblins hate bright sunlight, and fight with a -1 on their attack rolls when in it. This unusual sensitivity to light, however, serves the goblins well underground, giving them infravision out to 60 feet.They can use any sort of weapon, preferring those that take little training, like spears and maces. They are known to carry short swords as a second weapon. They are usually armored in leather, although the leaders may have chain or even plate mail.Goblin strategies and tactics are simple and crude. They are cowardly and will usually avoid a face-to-face fight. More often than not, they will attempt to arrange an ambush of their foes.In the Monstrous Manual, goblins have issues with sunlight because they mostly live in dungeons. That's kind of silly, though, and I think I've mostly seen goblins living above ground in games I've been in... so I'm going to let them keep the same penalty and bonus, but say it's because they're crepuscular.
The rest of the combat section is just packed with weird contradictions of the image we're supposed to be getting. They're supposed to be violent and dangerous, right? I mean, that's why you're off fighting them, right? Because they were a threat to someone nearby, right, buddy? You're not just killing them because they're goblins, are you? But they prefer weapons that take little training, suggesting that maybe they don't prioritize weapons training. The author is trying to make out that this is because they're stupid, but we're assuming that's propaganda. I'm going to say it's because they're not particularly militaristic, so their tribes can only defend themselves with the equivalent of untrained militia -- or just regular goblins who grabbed something pointy because someone had to do it.
Also, goblins are “known to" carry shortswords (known by whom? doesn't matter. it is known), and the leaders may have metal armor. But the entry tells us later:
Most of their goods are stolen, although they do manufacture their own garments and leather goods.Bullshit. Where are they stealing goblin-sized swords and armor? It's not like Joe Peasant has that kind of thing lying around. Are we supposed to be assuming that goblin tribes are regularly mugging halfling soldiers or something? And if they are, we just heard about those long arms of theirs, and surely there are all kinds of other adjustments that need to be made so a suit of plate armor will fit a member of another species. Clearly, goblins are fully capable of manufacturing metal weapons and armor. Maybe this is just left out because it doesn't fit the image the author is trying to craft. Maybe they just don't make a lot of them, or don't treat them as culturally important artifacts.
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| Goblin, AD&D Monstrous Manual |
Now for the best part -- the Society section:
Humans would consider the caves and underground dwellings of goblins to be dank and dismal. Those few tribes that live above ground are found in ruins, and are only active at night or on very dark, cloudy days. They use no form of sanitation, and their lairs have a foul stench. Goblins seem to be somewhat resistant to the diseases that breed in such filth.
They live a communal life, sharing large common areas for eating and sleeping. Only leaders have separate living spaces. All their possessions are carried with them. Property of the tribe is kept with the chief and sub-chiefs. Most of their goods are stolen, although they do manufacture their own garments and leather goods. The concept of privacy is largely foreign to goblins.Okay, so we already adjusted things so that they can live above ground just fine. That bit about sanitation and filth is actually one of the things that inspired this when reading “Your Dungeon is Problematic" -- the author quoted that same passage and responded:
And this sounds like just outride [sic] puerile propaganda. “They’re so dumb they probably live in their own poo, hurr-hurr-hurr!”Yeah, I agree. Here's what I think is going on: have you ever had to spend an extended time in a poorly-ventilated room with a bunch of people? The year I spent teaching high school, the classroom I was assigned had one door and zero windows, in open defiance of fire codes and common decency. There was no ventilation whatsoever, and it was filled with teenagers eight hours a day. For most of the school year, that place stank.
I think this is what's going on with the goblins. They eat and sleep communally, it says -- that probably means that their common areas, especially the ones underground, build up a sort of “lots-of-people-live-here" funk over time. Humans interpret it as “no form of sanitation" -- kind of absurd coming from people who have cities but no modern plumbing, really... who's living in their own poo, exactly? -- but it's really just the natural consequence of large amounts of living beings sharing space. Goblins are, if anything, hyper-aware of sanitation concerns, since they all sleep in the same room every night. Nobody wants to be known as “that guy who always smells bad", so they're as scrupulous as it's possible to be in a low-tech setting.
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| Goblin, 3e Monster Manual |
Also, check out that second paragraph. They're... communists. Literally, they live in fully-functioning communes. There's no private property (though, since they do have “possessions", there is personal property), and goods are distributed by the leadership. They go to an extreme with the no-privacy thing, but I bet that's just the most dehumanizing way the author can think to put it. I suspect they also have no secrets -- members of a goblin tribe are 100% open and truthful with each other. Surviving as goblins in a human's world is hard enough without backstabbing from your own tribe.
There is a problem, though... who is this leadership that gets special privileges and distributes the goods?
A goblin tribe has an exact pecking order; each member knows who is above him and who is below him. They fight amongst themselves constantly to move up this social ladder.Stripping out the propagandistic elements, and the implication that they have Klingon-style promotions, what I'm getting there is that goblin communes are highly-organized meritocracies.
The rest of the “society" section is mostly statistics on the makeup of a goblin tribe. There are some interesting things there, though. For instance:
A typical goblin tribe has 40-400 (4d10×10) adult male warriors... In addition to the males, there will be adult females equal to 60% of their number and children equal to the total number of adults in the lair.This means that the maximum size of a goblin tribe is 1,280, only 40 of whom, at most3, get their own sleeping quarters. That's insane. Human tribal societies split into subdivisions long before they reach that number. Neolithic farming villages tended to cap out at 150, just to give you some perspective. There's a theory with some pretty compelling support that human brains are wired for communities of under 200 people -- past that, tribes fracture into different sub-groups who live in separate communities.4 It's a hard limit based on relative neocortex size... but compare goblins. These guys can keep cooperating with each other with quadruple the human number just counting adults. They must be cooperating, too, because they live in a close-knit commune and all sleep in the same room. That is a highly successful social group right there.
Actually, back up. This might be why Pathfinder goblins have huge heads. Dunbar's number -- the maximum community size -- correlates directly with the relative size of the neocortex. Maintaining a close, stable personal relationship requires the allocation of brainpower, and maintaining the kind of relationships that allow for functioning communities of the size we're talking about means goblin brains have to be physically quite large just to model the communities in which they live. So that's why the swollen heads -- it's necessary to make their communes work.
(Note: I have some questions about the gender divide there... we'll come back to that.)
Also, there's this little tidbit:
For every 40 goblins there will be a leader and his 4 assistants...Run the math on that. Fully 10% of the tribe have the official post of “assistant". If you count the “leaders" (who come below the “sub-chiefs", who come below the chief), one in eight goblins are apparently some sort of low-level organizer. I bet this is how they keep all that communal property in order.
They've also got some other stuff going on:
There is a 25% chance that 10% of their force will be mounted upon huge worgs, and have another 10-40 (1d4x10) unmounted worgs with them. There is a 60% chance that the lair is guarded by 5-30 (5d6) such wolves, and a 20% chance of 2-12 (2d6) bugbears. Goblin shamans are rare, but have been known to reach 7th level. Their spheres include: Divination, Healing (reversed), Protection, and Sun (reversed).Oh, and here's our nice little libelous “they're eeeeevviiiilll" passage:
They often take slaves for both food and labor. The tribe will have slaves of several races numbering 10-40% of the size of the tribe. Slaves are always kept shackled, and are staked to a common chain when sleeping.You like that? “Both food and labor." Just tossed out there. Luckily, we're assuming that this is malicious propaganda... and it doesn't actually work all that well. Think about it. “10-40% of the size of the tribe"? Up to forty percent? When seventy percent of the tribe are noncombatants? That doesn't seem possible with the goblins described in this entry. They're supposed to be small, weak, and cowardly, with only very simple weapons and armor -- but they can accumulate non-goblin slaves to the point that they outnumber the goblins capable of actual combat? There's no way that works.
So here's how I'm going to interpret this. First, it's clearly wild exaggeration. Second, it's not unheard of for people from colonial societies to defect to the other side, attracted by the lifestyle. Maybe the occasional human or what-have-you learns enough about how goblins really are that they decide a goblin commune is better than their current situation, and join up. The rest of the humans, of course, assume that nobody could possibly go to the goblins voluntarily, and decide that the missing person has been kidnapped and enslaved. And maybe when intolerant humans bust into a goblin commune and start stabbing folk for being the wrong anatomical configuration, sometime the humans lose, and the goblins have to decide what to do with their prisoners... so they try to convert them. They can't just let them go, but don't want to kill them, so they keep them in the commune and have them participate in everyday life. Yes, this involves forced labor, but they're laboring alongside of the goblins and being treated like one of them. The goblins try to teach them Goblin language, culture, and philosophy, with the goal of convincing them that they're not a threat to humanity. This rarely works, but it makes sense to the goblins.
As for the eating people... well, we'll come back to that, too.
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| Goblins, 4e |
They do not need to eat much, but will kill just for the pleasure of it. They eat any creature from rats and snakes to humans. In lean times they will eat carrion.
Goblins usually spoil their habitat, driving game from it and depleting the area of all resources.Think about that. They don't eat much, but they'll eat anything. And somehow this leads to “depleting the area of all resources". Here's what I'm reading there: goblins have been observed to survive on very little food, and to eat pretty much any meat they can get their hands on. That sounds like they're starving. They don't deplete the resources in their area; they're forced into areas that are already resource-poor. Because they're small, and weak, and can't stand up to the imperialist human war machine. And this is especially tough on them because they can't farm food.
Why, do you ask, can't they farm food? Well, look at that list of stuff they eat. And look at these pictures of goblin mouths:
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| Top, left to right: 4e goblin, 3e goblin, 5e goblin. Bottom: Pathfinder goblin. |
Yeah. Those are the teeth of a carnivore. That is not a species that can grow their food. Goblins have to hunt, or herd, or raise livestock. All of those things require more resources and more space than agriculture. So being forced into the crappiest, most barren parts of the world means they're constantly on the edge of starvation, eating any animals they can catch and scavenging carrion.
And that brings us back to the whole “eating people" thing. Imagine you're living in a goblin commune, and one day these bigots twice your size burst in and start slaughtering your comrades because you all happened to commit the sin of existing too close to their settlements. You and your people rally, grab some weapons from the communal armory, and end up victorious. Some of the humans are still alive, so you tie them up with the hope that they can be reasoned with in the morning, once everything calms down. The others, though, are definitely dead. And they're huge. And well-fed. And, you know, giving them a proper human-style burial might be the “right" thing to do, but do the assholes who killed Ghork and Rebla right in front of you really deserve that? And you're so hungry. All of you are so hungry. Would it really be so wrong to, you know, get a cookfire going and toss the bodies on? The tribe could go to sleep with full stomachs for the first time in weeks. You have to be practical about these things. And you might not even realize that your captives, tied up but awake, will never be able to see this meal from your point of view.
The other statement in the ecology section is also contradictory:
They are decent miners, able to note new or unusual construction in an underground area 25% of the time, and any habitat will soon be expanded by a maze-like network of tunnels.Miners? Miners of sufficient caliber to emulate the famed dwarven “stonecunning" one time in four? Are these the same people who, according to this same entry, steal most of their goods, except for “their own garments and leather goods"? If they only make leather items, what are they mining for? The implication is clearly that they're just digging out new tunnels to live in -- but they all live in one common room, so a “maze-like network" does not remotely qualify as goblin living space. Besides, the author didn't say that they're “burrowers", he said that they are “miners". That means they're mining for something.
Heck, maybe that's why the author keeps insisting they live underground. Some have probably been driven underground by human expansion, but others are just mining communities -- but calling them that gives them too much credit, so the claim is that they live in their underground tunnels. Really, though, they mine for metals and precious stones, just like the dwarves. In fact, they have more than one thing in common here -- the “dwarf" entry tells us:
Dwarves usually wear one or more pieces of jewelry, though these items are usually not of any great value or very ostentatious. Though dwarves value gems and precious metals, they consider it in bad taste to flaunt wealth.“Your Dungeon is Problematic" did a great bit about how if any other species behaved the way the dwarves do, they'd be accused of hoarding their wealth like greedy misers, but when dwarves mine massive amounts of precious metals, only sell a small portion, and keep the rest locked away, it's because they're just too humble to openly flaunt their wealth:
Oh, so when dwarves are greedy and hoard their wealth, it’s because they’re just so humble, you guys. When orcs or ogres are greedy and hoard their wealth, though? They’re just greedy and envious of those better races who earned the wealth that just happened to be in the ground around where they settled by sheer luck or (depending on who’s doing the telling) the will of the gods (who hate the orcs and goblins as a matter of principle). -- Your Dungeon is ProblematicWell, the goblins definitely one-up them there. They've got their own mines, but they flaunt their wealth so little that nobody realizes they have it. They all wear simple undyed leather, and everyone assumes their swords and armor are stolen from someone else. So what do they do with the stuff they mine that can't be made into tools and weaponry? If they find gold or gems, surely they don't just ignore it?
Well...
Sometimes, late at night, a human will come to the goblin commune, holding a token that lets the guards know he comes in peace. He's one of the tiny handful of humans who has spent enough time talking with the goblins, gaining their trust, to be let in on the secret. A guard will escort him into the great goblin hall, leading him on a winding path among the makeshift sleeping-places, empty now that the hunters are out, keeping a wide berth around the clusters of goblins sharing meager rations, so as not to spook them. The human is led through a door to one of the cramped rooms that the goblins call “private quarters", where one of the goblin “leaders" sits. This one's title is... something guttural the human can never pronounce, but it means something like “The one who makes monetary bargains with the enemy." The leader speaks in high-pitched Common, greeting the human visitor peremptorily but politely, and asking him to please avert his gaze for a moment.
When the human turns back, the leader has produced several small leather-wrapped packages from some hidden compartment the human has never been able to locate. A tingling on the back of the human's neck tells him that the leader's “assistants" have arrived behind him -- grim little characters with quick eyes and thin knives, watching him now that there are valuables at stake. The leader begins gently unwrapping the packages, and produces things of unparalleled beauty. A figurine of a griffon that looks as though it might take flight at any moment. A ceremonial dagger that nobody without noble blood or poor judgment would dare use, too lovely and delicate to be seen as a weapon, but strong as steel and sharp as glass. A golden necklace covered in tiny carvings that tell the story of the creation of the world. A tiara composed entirely of impossibly delicate filigree, thin as cobwebs, twisting in convoluted arabesques. A statue of a dragon, with gems for eyes, that looks into the viewer's soul like the idol of a forgotten god hungry for sacrifice.
The human asks the only question he ever asks -- what do you want for them? The goblin leader smiles, and touches each piece in turn, naming his price. For this one, he wants a cauldron of stew that never empties. For this, a map to rich lands undiscovered by humanity. For this, the staff that hangs behind the high priest's altar three kingdoms from here. For this, the secret word that the first hunter used to summon game. For this one, a human soul, to be traded to a certain devil in a desperate bargain to save his tribe from starvation, so no goblin has to risk their own. The prices are always high, and they're never as simple as currency -- it's too dangerous for a goblin to carry money into any population center, so coin means nothing to them -- but the human knows that seeking out these things will be worth it.
Any item of goblin craft is worth a king's ransom, but it's far too risky for the goblins to sell them in the open market, so middlemen like him make their fortune taking on these quests. Or they throw idiot adventurers at the problem until one group succeeds. Nobody but the middlemen even know where these unparalleled artistic masterpieces come from; if outsiders learned the goblins had them, they would take them. So no goblin ever admits, to anyone except the most trusted of allies, that they make any trade goods at all.
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| Goblin goldsmithing. (Actually Scythian, from the 4th century BC) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Фрагменты_Пекторали.jpg |
Now that we've covered the material in the Monstrous Manual, I had planned to wrap up with a more “accurate" goblin entry, but in the process of writing this, I came across a source that put the lie to my earlier claim that Pathfinder wasn't as bad with the racist-sounding “evil humanoid" entries. Check out this mess -- that's not even from their bestiary, either. That's the material they put out for goblins as a player race, in a book that was about adapting traditionally “monstrous" races into player races. I feel the need to go through it paragraph-by-paragraph.
Goblins are a race of childlike creatures with a destructive and voracious nature that makes them almost universally despised. Weak and cowardly, goblins are frequently manipulated or enslaved by stronger creatures that need destructive, disposable foot soldiers. Those goblins that rely on their own wits to survive live on the fringes of society and feed on refuse and the weaker members of more civilized races. Most other races view them as virulent parasites that have proved impossible to exterminate.Holy crap. Everything about that is problematic. They're “childlike"? How, exactly? Is this entirely built of condescension? The entry says they're often “enslaved by stronger creatures" and then implies that they deserve it for being such awful little pests. Free goblins “live on the fringes of society" -- probably because society despises them so much -- and “feed on refuse" -- probably because they don't have another option. Then we have our “eating people" accusation. And that last sentence... I mean, I'm not even going to touch that.
Goblins can eat nearly anything, but prefer a diet of meat and consider the flesh of humans and gnomes a rare and difficult-to-obtain delicacy. While they fear the bigger races, goblins’ short memories and bottomless appetites mean they frequently go to war or execute raids against other races to sate their pernicious urges and fill their vast larders.Okay, can they really eat “nearly anything"? Because we saw those teeth earlier, and Pathfinder goblins -- remember, this is a Pathfinder book -- are the most obviously-carnivorous by far. Pathfinder may not list “diet", but AD&D did, and:
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| This sort of thing is genuinely useful information. I don't know why later editions stopped including it. |
Goblins are short, ugly humanoids that stand just over 3 feet tall. Their scrawny bodies are topped with over-sized and usually hairless heads with massive ears and beady red or occasionally yellow eyes. Goblins’ skin tone varies based on the surrounding environment; common skin tones include green, gray, and blue, though black and even pale white goblins have been sighted. Their voracious appetites are served well by their huge mouths filled with jagged teeth.Wow. Just straight-up calling them “ugly" for not conforming to a different species' beauty standards. And then their skin tone “varies based on the surrounding environment" -- yeah, they're not chameleons, man. What you're saying is that different populations of goblins, in different places, have different skin tones; i.e., it varies between different ethnicities of goblin. There probably is some environmental pressure, like how human skin tones are adaptations to different levels of UV radiation, but just saying it “varies based on the surrounding environment" is erasing the actual cultural differences. And then we get another bit about how goblins are always hungry, probably because they're forced out to the fringes of society.
Violent but fecund, goblins exist in primitive tribal structures with constant shifts in power. Rarely able to sustain their own needs through farming or hunting and gathering, goblin tribes live where food is abundant or near places that they can steal it from. Since they are incapable of building significant fortifications and have been driven out of most easily accessible locations, goblins tend to live in unpleasant and remote locations, and their poor building and planning skills ensure that they dwell primarily in crude caves, ramshackle villages, and abandoned structures. Few goblins are good with tools or skilled at farming, and the rare items of any value that they possess are usually cast-off implements from humans or other civilized cultures.First, I'm going to just say that “tribal = primitive" is a deeply problematic assumption embedded in modern-day society, and if the phrase “primitive tribal structures" doesn't rub you the wrong way, you may need to re-examine your assumptions. Moving on... unable to sustain their own needs. Well, this is probably because every other sapient race kicks them around and forces them to live on the fringes, like the first paragraph said. The implication that they're just too incompetent to feed themselves is absurd -- note that goblins do not have any penalties to Intelligence or Wisdom in Pathfinder, so the average goblin is just as smart as the average human.
Then check out this double-think. Since they apparently can't farm, they “live where food is abundant" -- so, like everyone else, they prefer to live in nice areas with plenty of resources -- or “near places they can steal it from" -- i.e., sometimes other people want to live in that same area, and they object to sharing the space with goblins. Then, in the very next sentence, “Since they... have been driven out of most easily accessible locations, goblins tend to live in unpleasant and remote locations..." How, exactly, does that square with them living where food is abundant? What I'm getting here is that they try, like any culture, to live in places where there are enough resources to sustain them, but they're kicked out of those places as soon as someone else decides they want to live there.
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| Goblin, 5e |
Goblins’ appetites and poor planning lead to small tribes dominated by the strongest warriors. Even the hardiest goblin leaders quickly find out that their survival depends on conducting frequent raids to secure sources of food and kill off the more aggressive youth of the tribe. Both goblin men and women are ugly and vicious, and both sexes are just as likely to rise to positions of power in a tribe. Goblin babies are almost completely self-sufficient not long after birth, and such infants are treated almost like pets. Many tribes raise their children communally in cages or pens where adults can largely ignore them. Mortality is high among young goblins, and when the adults fail to feed them or food runs low, youths learn at an early age that cannibalism is sometimes the best means of survival in a goblin tribe.This constant harping on goblins' “poor planning" reminds me of those racist assholes who justify their racism by pointing to Haiti or to various African countries and saying “see, they can't manage their own countries properly." Now, as anyone with actual critical thinking skills knows, the issues these countries have are because the West absolutely trashed Africa and deliberately sabotaged Haiti -- I bet it's the same with goblins. They're constantly being run out of any place that's halfway decent, and then humans criticize them for having underdeveloped communities. Yeah, of course their settlements aren't as nice as yours; maybe it has something to do with the way you keep wrecking those settlements every time you decide you want access to the land they're living on.
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| Goblins, 5e Dungeon Master's Guide (I think) |
Then there's the childcare bit. Goblins mature quickly because of their shorter lifespan, and the author somehow manages to characterize this as a moral failing too -- they have to mature quickly because the adult goblins don't know how to take care of them. Goblins practice communal parenting, but the author tries to spin this as sticking all the kids in a cage like livestock and ignoring them. Then, once again, the food-insecurity that defines so much of goblin life is their fault, somehow.
Finally, here are some tidbits from the goblin bestiary entry:
Goblins are also quite superstitious, and treat magic with a fawning mixture of awe and fear.Yeah, it's magic. Even in a setting where magic is relatively common, it's still dangerous. Awe and fear is the appropriate response.
Goblins believe that writing steals words out of your head, and as a result of this belief, goblins are universally illiterate.Well, isn't that a great way to make them look uncivilized. Oh, here's a quotation from The Art of Not Being Governed that puts a different spin on that...
Early colonial history is rife with indigenous resistance to the first colonial census; peasants and tribesmen alike understood perfectly well that a census was the necessary prelude to taxes and corvée labor... The first target of peasant wrath was often not so much the colonial officials themselves as the paper documents -- land titles, tax lists, population records -- through which the officials seemed to rule... Much of early state-making seems to have been a process of naming units that were once fluid or unnamed: villages, districts, lineages, tribes, chiefs, families, and fields. The process of naming, when joined to the administrative power of the state, can create entities that did not previously exist... For many stateless, preliterate or postliterate peoples, the world of literacy is not simply a reminder of their lack of power and knowledge and the stigma attached to it. It is, at the same time, a clear and present danger. The acquisition of writing, associated as it is with state power, could as easily be an avenue for disempowerment as for empowerment. To refuse or to abandon writing is one strategy among many for remaining out of reach of the state. (Scott 228-9)But no, goblins just have some crazy primitive superstition about the words being stolen out of their heads, right?
While they prefer human and gnome flesh, a goblin won’t turn down any food—except, perhaps, vegetables.Ahaha -- you see what they did there? Goblins are like little children who won't eat their vegetables! Aren't they just so hilariously incompet -- oh wait no they're carnivores. They're not childishly refusing to eat their veggies; it's a dietary requirement.
All right, so that being dealt with, here's a proper “Goblin" entry...
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| Kyren Glider, Daren Bader |
Goblin
Goblins are small humanoids who live in communal societies. Due to their small size and relative weakness, they are usually pressed into marginal areas or wastelands nobody else wants.
In the past, goblins had a successful culture -- a largely acephalous, rhizomatic society built on a network of communes agreeing to cooperate with each other in limited fashion. When they came into contact with other humanoid species, however, this fell apart pretty quickly. The strict hierarchical structure of, for example, humans, allowed for a quicker mobilization of large military forces; rapid human expansion led to a total collapse of the goblin societal structure. Most, if not all, humans are completely unaware that there ever was such a structure; they interpreted the groups of goblins they fought as individual tribes of about 1000 individuals. With no central authority the humans could recognize, goblin society was completely illegible to humans, and still is. To the goblins, contact with humans was a Great War in which everything they knew was systematically destroyed -- to the humans, it was a series of unrelated skirmishes against an array of primitive tribes.
Today, the only physical evidence of the goblin society is the occasional ruin of a Goblin Hall, cathedral-like structures that once functioned as self-contained village-communes and meeting spaces for goblins from disparate parts of the region. Human sages sometimes idly speculate as to what these structures were and who built them; most ruined Halls are still occupied by goblin communes who lack the resources to restore them, but humans are generally of the opinion that goblins just like living in ruins because it's easier than building something.
Goblins live either on the fringes of human civilization or deep in the most inhospitable wildernesses, constantly ready to move further into the wastes when the humans next expand, as they do not have the strength to defend their homes from any concentrated colonialist efforts. They live in constant fear of humanoid adventurers, who are inevitably hostile towards goblins, seeing them only as primitive savages and interpreting any proximity to “civilized" settlements as a threat.
The survival of the goblin species is due primarily to their adaptive biology. A healthy goblin is an obligate carnivore who can reach up to seven feet in height with an impressively muscular build; a goblin who grows up malnourished tops out at about half that height with a skeletal frame and a more omnivorous diet, the result of some internal trigger recognizing the environment's limitations and not expending precious caloric energy on growth. The shrunken creatures that outsiders consider the “normal" goblins mature quickly, reproduce prolifically, then die of old age in their fifties; healthy goblins have a lifespan and reproduction rate similar to humans. This tidbit of information is completely unknown to most outsiders, who remain convinced that “hobgoblins" and “bugbears" are entirely separate “goblinoid" species -- in reality, they are just what happens when goblins grow up healthy.
Goblins, in the form humans know them, stand between three and four feet tall, with emaciated builds and disproportionately large heads. They have pointed ears, sharp teeth, and red or yellow eyes. Goblins range from completely bald to genuinely furry, depending on how they grew up; their adaptability will allow goblins who spent their formative years in colder climates to develop light coats of fur, if they're getting enough food to spare the calories. They are generally lanky types, with long, dexterous arms and fingers. Goblin skin comes in any color you can name, provided you immediately forget the word “fluorescent" or any other terms in that semantic field -- goblins spread far and wide when their culture was at its height, and have diverged into a variety of distinct ethnicities. Goblins dress in simple leather clothing, undyed and unadorned. Even if they have the resources to produce better garments or decoration, they generally don't; an underrated goblin survival skill is looking so downtrodden nobody will think you have stuff worth taking. Their fashion is therefore limited to simple ornaments of bone, fur, and twigs, if they bother at all -- a certain egalitarian ethos makes some goblins unwilling to set themselves apart from their comrades. A few tribes still practice scarification and tattooing, as their ancestors did, but the majority are of the opinion that such decoration will make it too easy for the humans to tell them apart -- they want to go unnoticed, and identifying marks are counterproductive.
They are, however, not pacifists. Goblins are nothing if not practical, and they recognize that sometimes armed conflict is necessary in order to survive in their reduced circumstances. A goblin commune threatened by encroaching outsiders or desperate for resources will fight if victory seems possible -- though they don't do glorious last stands. If the odds are clearly against them, they will shamelessly pull up stakes and evacuate.
It is not only their penchant for strategic retreat that has earned the goblins their reputation as dishonorable fighters. In fact, unlike humans, they have no concept of honor-in-combat. In battle, goblins make extensive use of ambushes, traps, and archers firing from a distance. They use guerrilla warfare almost exclusively, and see a “stand-up fight" as a sucker's bet. This intense practicality comes partially from the aforementioned cultural divide -- “honor in combat" and “glorious battle" are completely foreign concepts to the goblins. If they're in a situation where they have to fight, their only priority is the survival of their commune. If that means sniping Sir Jackass McPaladin off his horse when he rides out to challenge the goblin champion to single combat, that's what they'll do. It's okay, they were never going to accept a challenge to single combat anyway -- why would they?
The lack of a warrior culture does hamstring them in other ways, though. Since there is no status associated with martial courage and military exploits, only a small portion of goblins end up as skilled fighters. Humans will claim that a full third of a goblin “tribe" is made up of “male warriors", and the rest are women & children. Literally the only true part of that is that about half of a commune's population is made up of children, due to the aforementioned high reproductive rate. The fifth of the commune that are labelled “women" are noncombatants of all genders, and the “male warriors" are made up of any goblin capable of grabbing a weapon from their emergency armory and fighting -- most of them only use weapons for hunting in everyday life. The actual breakdown of goblin combatants is as follows:
Goblin society has no concept of privacy, which is one of the aspects of it that so disquiets humans. At all times, goblins are completely open and honest with other members of their commune; lying, theft, or mistrust are completely unknown within the commune, and the goblins have no secrets from one another. If it were not so, the communal society would be at risk of breaking down, so goblins see any attempt to deceive another member of their commune as a betrayal of the highest order. However, goblins are not naive -- after centuries of contact with humans, they're downright cynical. Every ounce of suspicion, secrecy, and mistrust that goblins don't show to each other, they show to outsiders tenfold. To another goblin in their commune, they are willing to openly discuss their deepest and darkest thoughts without a shred of self-consciousness; to a goblin in a different commune, they moderate this behavior to a point that a human would consider their conversation more or less normal; to a human, they are unlikely to even provide their name.
One of the most important features of a goblin commune is the Fire. At a central location, the goblins maintain at least one large cookfire over which they prepare their ubiquitous stew. In a move towards complete egalitarianism, all the food that goblins can gather goes into the stew, and all goblins eat the same stew, carefully ensuring that everybody gets a fair share of the same food as everyone else. During the darkest part of the night, the entire commune gathers around the Fire for a shared meal and entertainment provided by their Master Storyteller.
Some have noted that an unspoken side benefit of the stew is that everything put into it is chopped and boiled into unrecognizability, as a lot of what goblins eat is not something you'd want to consume if you could tell what it is or if it hadn't been thoroughly boiled. Goblins regularly resort to eating carrion, and their intense practicality means that, in lean times, their own dead might go into the stewpot. (This leads to a lot of accusations of cannibalism, which is technically true, but it should be noted that goblins never kill someone in order to eat them; they're just capable of recognizing when things are dire enough that they can't afford to waste calories -- think Donner Party, not Sweeney Todd.)
Goblin collectivist ideology demands that they ensure every member of the tribe gets equal opportunities, equal resources, and so on. Moreover, surviving at the margins requires a lot of coordination. As a result, goblin communes are highly organized, each member having a role and knowing exactly where they fit in the network. A sample goblin commune is diagrammed here:
Under the leaders, subchiefs, and chief, every goblin has a specialized role in the commune, most of which are hierarchical. Some professions are organized by seniority, and others work on a master/apprentice system. Some also carry less formal hierarchies within them -- the smith who works bronze defers to the smith who works iron, for example.
Goblins are meritocratic. Whenever a position needs to be filled, there is substantial discussion about who could do the job the best, whether that person is of more benefit to the commune in their current position, and so on and so forth. These discussions can get heated if there is a difference in opinion, and as a result, human observers are prone to say stuff like “goblins spend a lot of time squabbling over status" or “A goblin tribe has an exact pecking order; each member knows who is above him and who is below him. They fight amongst themselves constantly to move up this social ladder." In fact, every major decision in a commune is made collectively -- a chief has the last word, but they are not vested with the power to push the others around.
Within the commune, as mentioned, the chief is the ultimate arbiter, but has little power over an individual goblin. Their job is to know what is going on in all parts of the commune, and to ensure that every member of the commune is treated fairly. If a chief shows themselves to be incapable of properly organizing things, the goblins are not shy about kicking them out of their position and appointing a replacement. If, heavens forbid, a chief is proven to abuse his power, the commune will exile them. The crime of arranging for personal gain at the expense of the commune is unforgivable in goblin eyes -- they call it rakgra, which is best translated as “to turn bugbear".
In larger tribes, the chief has what humans insist on calling “sub-chiefs" under him -- the more accurate Goblin term would be “elder". There is generally one elder for every 200 goblins, and they perform the same function as the chief for a specifically-defined range of activity. The elders in the example commune above hold the titles “elder of hunting", “elder of crafting", “elder of gathering", “elder of fighting" and “elder of storing". Below them are what humans call the “leaders", who have much more specific jobs. Where chiefs and elders have bodyguards who are occasionally called upon to do more menial work, leaders have assistants who are occasionally called upon to do bodyguard work. The assistants are the record-keepers of the commune, a job that is much more complex than one might assume for reasons that will be elaborated on in the “language" section -- but suffice to say, if someone asks, e.g., “how many pounds of meat do we need to collect a day in order to survive the winter," the assistants are the ones expected to have an answer.
Other jobs in the goblin commune, from the example chart above:
Much like humans, goblins venerate a wide variety of gods, and there's even some overlap between the gods goblins worship and the gods humans worship -- as one might expect in a world where the gods are literally real and constantly, visibly, interfering in the affairs of mortals. Goblins also maintain a certain traditional nature-worship, generating what humans see as weird syncretic cults; this system is maintained by a shaman, stationed outside of the organizational structure.
Now, normally humans use “shaman" just to describe a religious leader they see as primitive, but in this case they got it right by sheer chance, and goblin shamans really do tick most of the necessary boxes to fit in the fairly-specific category of actual shamanism. The primary function of the goblin shaman, other than to be the religious center of the tribe, is to visit the spirit world in order to keep matters in balance. When a goblin is too far gone for the healers, or the commune is out of food, or guidance from beyond is needed, the shaman goes into a trance of religious ecstasy.
A shaman's trance can only be performed successfully once a month, so it is reserved for emergencies. It is also dangerous -- a successful shamanic trance results in astral projection. The shaman's astral form navigates the world(s) beyond, where they speak to knowledgeable denizens therein, and return with a solution. Some goblin communes use entheogens to induce a shamanic trance, but techniques vary widely.
What truly characterizes goblin religion, especially to the human outsider, is the specific nature of those denizens with whom the shamans speak. These creatures have many names -- black dog, padfoot, shuck -- but the established, scholarly name is barghest. They are otherworldly, shapeshifting entities that most commonly manifest as either a large, healthy goblin or a great wolf. Ever since the earliest goblin shamans met them in the spirit world, the barghests have, in their own special way, looked after their favorite earthly peoples. It was barghests who, in the dim mists of prehistory, brokered the first alliance between goblins and worgs.
Barghests are highly intelligent and magically talented, and they're generally well-informed enough to be very helpful to the shamans in question. Shamans with a particularly good reputation among the barghests can even convince them to intervene directly. Some goblin communes even gain great favor among these spirits by raising barghest whelps among their own -- the barghest life cycle requires their young to mature on a material plane before joining them in the other world, and they prefer to leave their whelps with respected, powerful shamans. However, despite their ancient alliance, many goblins find it a little morally concerning to traffic too much with barghests.
Humans will tell you that barghests are unrepentantly evil creatures, vicious and sadistic, who kill for fun and prefer to prey on virtuous humanoids. This is transparently propaganda -- some barghests are evil, yes, but they are not the quasi-diabolical entities that the humans would want you to think they are. This is just a case of colonialists demonizing the spirits worshiped by a “savage" people. However, as mentioned, barghests are not exactly shining beacons of morality. They are selfish, violent, and without empathy; they know no law but the law of the jungle, and while they are not necessarily evil or immoral, they are as amoral as beasts. When the goblin race was young, hundreds of millennia ago, the barghest philosophy worked fine for them; it translates poorly into the modern age, and into their current situation. Some goblin communities, however, do listen to the brutal wisdom of the barghests, and leave their peaceful, collectivist philosophy behind -- and some small, isolated groups never became collectivists at all. This is where bugbears come from.
Further, there are three distinct strands of Goblin, which are not mutually intelligible. Humans, in their ignorance, call these “Goblin", “Hobgoblin", and “Bugbear", if they're even aware of the difference. The actual goblin terms translate as, respectively, “Tongue of the Cookfire", “Tongue of the Sun", and “Tongue of the Moon". In the golden age of goblin society, being able to speak all three was a requirement for any sort of political or diplomatic work: one spoke the Tongue of the Sun in all official contexts, with outsiders, on formal occasions, &c.; one spoke the Tongue of the Moon in private discussions, and anything said in the Tongue of the Moon came with the unspoken implication that it was being said in confidence6; one spoke the Tongue of the Cookfire in everyday interaction within one's own commune. This trilingual system did not survive the collapse of Goblin society, and the different directions that different groups of goblins developed in resulted in... well, a scenario where a human could reasonably assume that the Tongue of the Sun was just the hobgoblin language, the Tongue of the Moon the bugbear language, and the Tongue of the Cookfire the goblin language.
The written form of all the Goblin tongues has fallen almost completely out of use -- some remote hobgoblin communities keep it alive, but on the whole, goblins do not write their language down. Many of them are completely illiterate -- many others can read the various non-Goblin scripts just fine, but never admit to it in front of outsiders. This is by design; goblins want nothing to do with human laws, censuses, taxes, and so forth, and being subject to such things is pretty much the best-case scenario for goblins within reach of human states. One of their strategies for avoiding this is to feign illiteracy, never keeping written records, and doing their best to keep anyone else from writing down information about them.
Sometimes, however, goblins -- usually the commune's various Assistants -- need to write down information, as memorization really only gets you so far when you're tracking and allocating resources for hundreds of goblins. For this, each Assistant is encouraged to come up with their own system of record-keeping, which is to be kept completely secret from everyone else. Assistants might string colored stones together in specific patterns and wear them as jewelry, or wear hundreds of idiosyncratic and oddly-knotted braids, or walk with staves that are covered in crude pictograms, or wear cloaks made of dozens of separate patches of leather with carefully-placed pinholes and embroideries, or any of a hundred different things that allow them to make notes without any non-goblin realizing that they are doing so. Humans who have observed Assistants making or reading their records usually characterize this in some condescending way and move on, without ever figuring out the trick. If another goblin is able to decipher an Assistant's notes, that Assistant risks losing his position and respect in the commune.
The better items, the true masterpieces, are kept carefully hidden until such time as the goblins happen to meet an outsider they're willing to trust (this may take years). They will then, in secret, show the outsider some of the hidden masterpieces, and offer a trade. In exchange for the goblins' work, which is inevitably valuable enough to leave an average merchant set for life, they ask for very rare and powerful things, things that could allow the commune to escape their current dismal circumstances. Powerful magic items or hidden knowledge that could keep them forever safe from outsiders, or ensure they never starve, or similar goals. They know what to ask for -- the shaman will have consulted with the spirit world, allowing the goblins to be supernaturally well-informed about what is out there that could help them. But the things they want are always very, very difficult to retrieve, and more than one hapless merchant has vanished trying to fulfill the goblins' price. It's one of those things where you really want to hire a group of competent PCs, if one happens to be about.
Not every goblin commune was reduced to the barely-surviving state described above. A handful were able to hold out, mostly groups with more militaristic beliefs and martial talents; those capable of defending themselves when the humans came calling. Non-coincidentally, these communes are mostly located very far from human settlements, in locations where it would be nigh-impossible to bring military force to bear against them.
These goblins have managed to hold on to enough of their resources and land, and to avoid being conquered or displaced, that they don't suffer from the malnourishment that keeps “normal" goblins small and weak. Your average hobgoblin is a little taller and stronger than your average human, with a lifespan nearly as long. Their skin tones are noticeably more vibrant than those of a goblin, and hobgoblins' degree of hirsutism is usually well-matched to the environment in which they were raised.
Since, to the human eye, hobgoblins look so vastly different from goblins, non-goblins are largely convinced that they are separate-but-related species. They will also claim that hobgoblins have a distinct, highly militaristic culture. This is, as alluded to above, a result of sampling bias; more peaceful groups of goblins were trampled early on by human imperialism, so by the time the sages got along to classifying things, the only surviving “hob"goblin communes within a wide radius of human settlements were the ones that produced large numbers of talented, well-organized warriors.
To plan a hobgoblin commune, you can follow the same general guidelines as with goblins, but with the following changes:
When the goblin civilization was at its height, “bugbear" meant “outlaw".8 To be a bugbear was to be exiled from goblin society, and to get no protection from the law, like vargr in the Sagas. Bugbears had to live by their wits, and they risked being killed as intruders if they were ever caught in a commune's territory. Being declared a bugbear was the ultimate punishment in goblin law. As a result, the bugbears are the only goblins who are better off since human encroachment caused their society's downfall.
In the many, many generations since the first bugbears were exiled, bugbears have built up a culture of their own that is, intentionally, the antithesis of goblin society. No bugbear will take instructions from another, or do anything they do not wish to do. To bugbears, the individual is all, and alliances are immediately broken if they are seen to impinge on the bugbear's personal freedom. Do as thou wilt is the whole of the law.
Bugbears take some delight in cultivating the sadism, ferocity, and savagery of which their law-abiding cousins are falsely accused. They are enthusiastically willing and able to kill any travelers outside the closely-policed larger settlements; the only trick, as far as non-bugbears are concerned, is getting them to kill the right people. Bugbears are often hired as assassins, though the job has to be simple and enjoyable, or they're liable to decide they'd rather do something else and just walk away. Bugbears are also the only goblins to practice anthropophagy out of preference rather than necessity.
Being a bugbear comes with a high mortality rate, as one might imagine. Successful bugbears, who survive and thrive in this environment, are easily the largest, strongest, healthiest, and most dangerous goblins you could ever meet. They regularly top seven feet, and are generally built like Andre the Giant without the health problems. This build belies their incredible stealth, and success as ambush hunters. For many a party of travelers, the first sign a bugbear is in the area is the violent death of whoever was on watch that night.
Bugbears do cooperate with each other, but they don't do it well, and rarely form permanent groups. In stark contrast to the hundreds-strong communes they have rejected, the largest band of bugbears ever reported was only about two dozen individuals, and a number of those were children.
In the past, goblins had a successful culture -- a largely acephalous, rhizomatic society built on a network of communes agreeing to cooperate with each other in limited fashion. When they came into contact with other humanoid species, however, this fell apart pretty quickly. The strict hierarchical structure of, for example, humans, allowed for a quicker mobilization of large military forces; rapid human expansion led to a total collapse of the goblin societal structure. Most, if not all, humans are completely unaware that there ever was such a structure; they interpreted the groups of goblins they fought as individual tribes of about 1000 individuals. With no central authority the humans could recognize, goblin society was completely illegible to humans, and still is. To the goblins, contact with humans was a Great War in which everything they knew was systematically destroyed -- to the humans, it was a series of unrelated skirmishes against an array of primitive tribes.
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| Kyren, Mercadian Masques style guide. |
Goblins live either on the fringes of human civilization or deep in the most inhospitable wildernesses, constantly ready to move further into the wastes when the humans next expand, as they do not have the strength to defend their homes from any concentrated colonialist efforts. They live in constant fear of humanoid adventurers, who are inevitably hostile towards goblins, seeing them only as primitive savages and interpreting any proximity to “civilized" settlements as a threat.
The survival of the goblin species is due primarily to their adaptive biology. A healthy goblin is an obligate carnivore who can reach up to seven feet in height with an impressively muscular build; a goblin who grows up malnourished tops out at about half that height with a skeletal frame and a more omnivorous diet, the result of some internal trigger recognizing the environment's limitations and not expending precious caloric energy on growth. The shrunken creatures that outsiders consider the “normal" goblins mature quickly, reproduce prolifically, then die of old age in their fifties; healthy goblins have a lifespan and reproduction rate similar to humans. This tidbit of information is completely unknown to most outsiders, who remain convinced that “hobgoblins" and “bugbears" are entirely separate “goblinoid" species -- in reality, they are just what happens when goblins grow up healthy.
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| Pathfinder, Rise of the Goblin Guild |
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| Goblin Recruiter, Scott Kirschner |
Combat
Goblins are fully aware of their unimposing statures, and have limited martial skill. They prefer to avoid combat whenever possible, which has garnered them a reputation for cowardice and a lack of honor. Goblins will only engage in face-to-face battle if desperate or cornered.They are, however, not pacifists. Goblins are nothing if not practical, and they recognize that sometimes armed conflict is necessary in order to survive in their reduced circumstances. A goblin commune threatened by encroaching outsiders or desperate for resources will fight if victory seems possible -- though they don't do glorious last stands. If the odds are clearly against them, they will shamelessly pull up stakes and evacuate.
It is not only their penchant for strategic retreat that has earned the goblins their reputation as dishonorable fighters. In fact, unlike humans, they have no concept of honor-in-combat. In battle, goblins make extensive use of ambushes, traps, and archers firing from a distance. They use guerrilla warfare almost exclusively, and see a “stand-up fight" as a sucker's bet. This intense practicality comes partially from the aforementioned cultural divide -- “honor in combat" and “glorious battle" are completely foreign concepts to the goblins. If they're in a situation where they have to fight, their only priority is the survival of their commune. If that means sniping Sir Jackass McPaladin off his horse when he rides out to challenge the goblin champion to single combat, that's what they'll do. It's okay, they were never going to accept a challenge to single combat anyway -- why would they?
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| Goblins of the Flarg, Tom Wänerstrand |
- 3% of the tribe are guards; if the commune is threatened, they station themselves around the chief, elders, and other noncombatants. These generally are the only goblins who wear metal armor, and they traditionally carry battleaxes.
- 2% are watchmen and perimeter scouts. They have some weapons training, and are usually armed with shortswords.
- 1% are trained sword-wielders and can acquit themselves fairly well in traditional martial combat.
- 2% are worg-riders, and are probably the most dangerous by virtue of this.
- 1% are skilled archers, though their skills are honed through hunting rather than combat.
- 5% are hunters, miners, and other goblins in good fighting shape. They wield a motley assortment of spears, hammers, maces, and picks.
- 15-20% are completely unskilled in combat, but are young and strong enough to grab a spear, club, or improvised weapon and try their best.
So a sizable commune of a thousand goblins can field over 300 combatants in an all-out fight, but at least half of them are pretty useless.
Goblin communes are sometimes also defended by outside allies. It is fairly common for a goblin commune to be on good terms with at least one pack of worgs, and if given sufficient time to contact them, a few dozen of these intelligent wolves may fight alongside the goblins. Goblins who are in particularly desperate straits may be willing to call on a band of bugbears for aid. (Though, as mentioned above, bugbears and goblins are members of the same species, the subcategory that humans ignorantly call “bugbears" are actually a divergent cultural group whose values and mores make other goblins uncomfortable.)
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| Goblin Mountaineer, DiTerlizzi |
Society
As mentioned, goblins live in communes. They take this to an extreme that humans find deeply foreign, furthering the gulf between the two species. In a goblin commune, all property is public property, with the exception of a small quantity of personal possessions -- usually no more than a set of personal tools, trinkets, and garments, so that a goblin usually carries the extent of their belongings on them. Furthermore, all space is public space; a goblin “village" usually has, at most, a couple dozen small buildings or enclosed areas, all of which are specialized workshops, storage, or small huts in which the commune's leaders meet and discuss their business. Otherwise, a goblin commune resembles a ramshackle tent-city, as the members either all sleep in one large structure or just set up outside if no structure of sufficient size has been constructed.Goblin society has no concept of privacy, which is one of the aspects of it that so disquiets humans. At all times, goblins are completely open and honest with other members of their commune; lying, theft, or mistrust are completely unknown within the commune, and the goblins have no secrets from one another. If it were not so, the communal society would be at risk of breaking down, so goblins see any attempt to deceive another member of their commune as a betrayal of the highest order. However, goblins are not naive -- after centuries of contact with humans, they're downright cynical. Every ounce of suspicion, secrecy, and mistrust that goblins don't show to each other, they show to outsiders tenfold. To another goblin in their commune, they are willing to openly discuss their deepest and darkest thoughts without a shred of self-consciousness; to a goblin in a different commune, they moderate this behavior to a point that a human would consider their conversation more or less normal; to a human, they are unlikely to even provide their name.
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| Keeper of Kookus, Scott Hampton |
Some have noted that an unspoken side benefit of the stew is that everything put into it is chopped and boiled into unrecognizability, as a lot of what goblins eat is not something you'd want to consume if you could tell what it is or if it hadn't been thoroughly boiled. Goblins regularly resort to eating carrion, and their intense practicality means that, in lean times, their own dead might go into the stewpot. (This leads to a lot of accusations of cannibalism, which is technically true, but it should be noted that goblins never kill someone in order to eat them; they're just capable of recognizing when things are dire enough that they can't afford to waste calories -- think Donner Party, not Sweeney Todd.)
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| Mons' Goblin Raiders, Jeff A. Menges |
Organization
Goblin collectivist ideology demands that they ensure every member of the tribe gets equal opportunities, equal resources, and so on. Moreover, surviving at the margins requires a lot of coordination. As a result, goblin communes are highly organized, each member having a role and knowing exactly where they fit in the network. A sample goblin commune is diagrammed here: |
| You should be able to click on the image to get a better look. |
Goblins are meritocratic. Whenever a position needs to be filled, there is substantial discussion about who could do the job the best, whether that person is of more benefit to the commune in their current position, and so on and so forth. These discussions can get heated if there is a difference in opinion, and as a result, human observers are prone to say stuff like “goblins spend a lot of time squabbling over status" or “A goblin tribe has an exact pecking order; each member knows who is above him and who is below him. They fight amongst themselves constantly to move up this social ladder." In fact, every major decision in a commune is made collectively -- a chief has the last word, but they are not vested with the power to push the others around.
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| Goblin Cavaliers, DiTerlizzi |
In larger tribes, the chief has what humans insist on calling “sub-chiefs" under him -- the more accurate Goblin term would be “elder". There is generally one elder for every 200 goblins, and they perform the same function as the chief for a specifically-defined range of activity. The elders in the example commune above hold the titles “elder of hunting", “elder of crafting", “elder of gathering", “elder of fighting" and “elder of storing". Below them are what humans call the “leaders", who have much more specific jobs. Where chiefs and elders have bodyguards who are occasionally called upon to do more menial work, leaders have assistants who are occasionally called upon to do bodyguard work. The assistants are the record-keepers of the commune, a job that is much more complex than one might assume for reasons that will be elaborated on in the “language" section -- but suffice to say, if someone asks, e.g., “how many pounds of meat do we need to collect a day in order to survive the winter," the assistants are the ones expected to have an answer.
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| Goblin Lookout, Jim Nelson |
- Under the Elder of Hunting:
- Trappers, Trackers, and Archers are pretty self-explanatory.
- “Spears" is the blanket term for traditional goblin hunters, armed with melee weapons or thrown javelins. They go after larger game much in the way wolves take down a moose.
- “Poachers" are the goblins who risk going into areas where humans and other hostile populations are known to hunt. In desperate times, they may even venture into human settlements to steal livestock.
- Under the Elder of Crafting:
- Most jobs here are pretty self-explanatory, though one should note than an informal hierarchy prevails among craftsgoblins.
- The Master Gemcutter actually has a much broader job description, as an expert in stones of all kinds, including those with ritual or magical significance.
- The “Engraver" is a producer of petroglyphs and similar, usually at the behest of the Master Storyteller or the Assistants. The petroglyphs are completely incomprehensible to non-goblins, and to pretty much all goblins except the ones involved in making them. They are non-representative, and do not display the consistency of a writing system, but goblins treat them as records. For further details, see the “Language" section.
- The Head of Trade is the goblin with the parcels in that self-indulgent business about goblin crafters and middlemen above.
- Under the Elder of Gathering:
- “Scavengers" are goblins who collect carrion and other food that doesn't require hunting, fishing, or raising livestock.
- “Thieves" are much like scavengers, but for artifacts rather than food. They gather everything they can from abandoned caravans, shipwrecks, ruins, and similar. Goblin “thieves" only engage in what humans would consider actual thievery when the commune is desperate.
- Under the Elder of Fighting:
- By convention, goblins translate the titles of the leaders in this category as “Captain" rather than “Head".
- “Swords" are the handful of goblins actually trained in swordsmanship.
- “Riders" are the feared worg-riders.
- “Watchers" are perimeter guards; “Guards" remain within the borders of the commune in case there is an attack.
- Guards are often deputized to do odd jobs, since they're just standing around otherwise.
- Under the Elder of Storing:
- The Head of Food is tasked with making sure the stewpot has enough food each night to keep the commune alive. They salt meat for preservation, store water in barrels and cisterns, all that sort of thing. They have no subordinates other than their assistants, but have broad authority to deputize anyone not involved in critical work to help them with whatever they're doing.
- The Head of Beasts manages the livestock, if the commune has the space to raise any. They are also in charge of maintaining alliances with the worgs, who are often paid for their help in said livestock.
- The Head of Tools organizes and maintains the tribe's store of weapons, armor, tools, and pretty much all artifacts they might have.
- The Head of Bodies is not only in charge of keeping the healers well-supplied, but also deciding what to do with the dead. They consult with the shaman on this matter, but they also consult with the Head of Food if times are lean.
- The “Psychopomp" is the goblin in charge of doing whatever needs to be done with the dead. Goblins trend towards cremation, but customs vary.
- The Head of Children manages the commune's children, who are raised as a group rather than in family units. They and their assistants oversee the childrens' education and safety.
- The Master Storyteller spends most of their time telling the commune's children the ancient myths and legends of the goblin people, so that goblin culture is preserved into the next generation.
- Older goblins who have stepped down from their previous positions, as well as goblins who have been crippled and are no longer able to do strenuous work, are assigned to take care of the children and given a title that roughly translates as “parent". The eldest among them is referred to as “grandparent".
- It has been said that goblins keep their young in cages and pens (“Many tribes raise their children communally in cages or pens where adults can largely ignore them." -- Pathfinder Advanced Race Guide). Regrettably, this is true.
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| Pens and cages. Shameful. (I'm pretty sure this is actually a nursery at an East German collective farm, so make of that what you will.) Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-29407-0001 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5350596 |
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| What sorts of creatures put children in a pen? |
Religion
Much like humans, goblins venerate a wide variety of gods, and there's even some overlap between the gods goblins worship and the gods humans worship -- as one might expect in a world where the gods are literally real and constantly, visibly, interfering in the affairs of mortals. Goblins also maintain a certain traditional nature-worship, generating what humans see as weird syncretic cults; this system is maintained by a shaman, stationed outside of the organizational structure.Now, normally humans use “shaman" just to describe a religious leader they see as primitive, but in this case they got it right by sheer chance, and goblin shamans really do tick most of the necessary boxes to fit in the fairly-specific category of actual shamanism. The primary function of the goblin shaman, other than to be the religious center of the tribe, is to visit the spirit world in order to keep matters in balance. When a goblin is too far gone for the healers, or the commune is out of food, or guidance from beyond is needed, the shaman goes into a trance of religious ecstasy.
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| Goblin Wizard, Daniel Gelon |
What truly characterizes goblin religion, especially to the human outsider, is the specific nature of those denizens with whom the shamans speak. These creatures have many names -- black dog, padfoot, shuck -- but the established, scholarly name is barghest. They are otherworldly, shapeshifting entities that most commonly manifest as either a large, healthy goblin or a great wolf. Ever since the earliest goblin shamans met them in the spirit world, the barghests have, in their own special way, looked after their favorite earthly peoples. It was barghests who, in the dim mists of prehistory, brokered the first alliance between goblins and worgs.
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| Barghest, 3e Monster Manual |
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| Barghest, 5e |
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| Goblin Soothsayer, Robert Bliss |
Language
The goblin language -- which is usually just called “Goblin" by humans, of course -- is, as you would expect, actually a family of related and roughly-mutually-intelligible dialects. Goblins can generally understand foreign dialects of Goblin reasonably well, though there may be some misunderstandings... imagine grabbing native English speakers from Yorkshire, from Atlanta, from rural Australia, from Ireland, and from Singapore, then having them converse with each other in their local dialects. Non-goblins who speak Goblin as a second language (i.e., probably the PCs) might have much more difficulty, and a stickler GM might demand that they roll against their Intelligence to understand an unfamiliar dialect of Goblin.
Further, there are three distinct strands of Goblin, which are not mutually intelligible. Humans, in their ignorance, call these “Goblin", “Hobgoblin", and “Bugbear", if they're even aware of the difference. The actual goblin terms translate as, respectively, “Tongue of the Cookfire", “Tongue of the Sun", and “Tongue of the Moon". In the golden age of goblin society, being able to speak all three was a requirement for any sort of political or diplomatic work: one spoke the Tongue of the Sun in all official contexts, with outsiders, on formal occasions, &c.; one spoke the Tongue of the Moon in private discussions, and anything said in the Tongue of the Moon came with the unspoken implication that it was being said in confidence6; one spoke the Tongue of the Cookfire in everyday interaction within one's own commune. This trilingual system did not survive the collapse of Goblin society, and the different directions that different groups of goblins developed in resulted in... well, a scenario where a human could reasonably assume that the Tongue of the Sun was just the hobgoblin language, the Tongue of the Moon the bugbear language, and the Tongue of the Cookfire the goblin language.
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| Marsh Goblins, Quinton Hoover |
Sometimes, however, goblins -- usually the commune's various Assistants -- need to write down information, as memorization really only gets you so far when you're tracking and allocating resources for hundreds of goblins. For this, each Assistant is encouraged to come up with their own system of record-keeping, which is to be kept completely secret from everyone else. Assistants might string colored stones together in specific patterns and wear them as jewelry, or wear hundreds of idiosyncratic and oddly-knotted braids, or walk with staves that are covered in crude pictograms, or wear cloaks made of dozens of separate patches of leather with carefully-placed pinholes and embroideries, or any of a hundred different things that allow them to make notes without any non-goblin realizing that they are doing so. Humans who have observed Assistants making or reading their records usually characterize this in some condescending way and move on, without ever figuring out the trick. If another goblin is able to decipher an Assistant's notes, that Assistant risks losing his position and respect in the commune.
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| Scarwood Goblins, Ron Spencer |
“I observed one goblin obsessively fiddling with some sort of crude fetish -- a stick covered in notches, leather cord, and bits of fur. No doubt he imagines this device brings him luck and power..."
“The goblins remain unable to craft proper pottery; today I saw one make an attempt, only to end up with an asymmetrically curved slab of clay covered in deleterious indents and lumps -- an item actually worse for their purposes than a simple flat rock. This supports my theory that the pottery the tribe uses is stolen from elsewhere..."
“The goblin I have nicknamed Bug-Eyes (the savages continue to refuse to tell me their names) has made an art out of being the most incompetent fisherman I have ever seen. Nearly every day, he works on assembling his new net, which resembles a cobweb made by a drunken spider and could only catch something through instilling a baffled fascination in its target. With precise attention to detail, Bug-Eyes will unknot a string, only to tie it in an equally infelicitous place; he spends a sizable portion of each day in this manner, carefully examining each juncture in his webwork and apparently failing to understand from whence the flaws originate..."
“I still do not understand why one goblin in the tribe persists in covering himself in ritual paints; my original theory that he is the tribe's shaman has long since been debunked. Perhaps it is a childlike fascination with the pigments..."
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| Goblin Tinkerer, Hannibal King |
Crafts
Goblins are amazingly talented craftspeople, with a special gift for sculpture and metalwork. They keep this well-hidden, out of a (justified) fear than unscrupulous humanoids would plunder their homes if it were known that they had valuables there. Every so often, a particularly courageous group of goblins will bring a selection of the commune's lesser crafts to a market, or meet with a trade caravan while they're stopped for the night. They will sell these items to any merchant who is willing to not ask questions about where they came from for a price far less than their value, then use that money to buy whatever supplies the commune currently needs. This is a risky venture, as any human they meet in the process is liable to try to kill them & take their stuff, then justify it by saying the goblins were carrying stolen goods, and the humans have taken them “back".The better items, the true masterpieces, are kept carefully hidden until such time as the goblins happen to meet an outsider they're willing to trust (this may take years). They will then, in secret, show the outsider some of the hidden masterpieces, and offer a trade. In exchange for the goblins' work, which is inevitably valuable enough to leave an average merchant set for life, they ask for very rare and powerful things, things that could allow the commune to escape their current dismal circumstances. Powerful magic items or hidden knowledge that could keep them forever safe from outsiders, or ensure they never starve, or similar goals. They know what to ask for -- the shaman will have consulted with the spirit world, allowing the goblins to be supernaturally well-informed about what is out there that could help them. But the things they want are always very, very difficult to retrieve, and more than one hapless merchant has vanished trying to fulfill the goblins' price. It's one of those things where you really want to hire a group of competent PCs, if one happens to be about.
Hobgoblins
Not every goblin commune was reduced to the barely-surviving state described above. A handful were able to hold out, mostly groups with more militaristic beliefs and martial talents; those capable of defending themselves when the humans came calling. Non-coincidentally, these communes are mostly located very far from human settlements, in locations where it would be nigh-impossible to bring military force to bear against them.
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| Hobgoblin, AD&D Monstrous Manual |
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| Hobgoblin, 3e Monster Manual |
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| Hobgoblin, 5e |
- Discount everything about goblins being peaceful or cowardly. Also discount everything about not having a warrior culture; hobgoblins come from the groups who managed to develop one. Keep the stuff about a talent for guerilla warfare, but ignore anything about avoiding face-to-face combat.
- Roughly one fifth of the commune consists of hobgoblins with genuine military training and command structure; feel free to just look up standard infantry-battalion organization and follow that template.
- The following parts of the Hobgoblin entry in the Monstrous Manual are true:
- Hobgoblins in a typical force will be equipped with polearms (30%), morningstars (20%), swords and bows (20%), spears (10%), swords and spears (10%), swords and morning stars (5%), or swords and whips (5%). [Those are proportions, not probabilities]
- Hobgoblins fight equally well in bright light or virtual darkness, having infravision with a range of 60 feet.
- Hobgoblin villages possess artillery in the form of 2 heavy catapults, 2 light catapults, and a ballista for each 50 warriors.
- The following are kind of true:
- In addition to the warriors present in a hobgoblin tribe, there will be half again that many
femalesnoncombatants and three times as many children asadult maleswarriors. The remaining 20% are surface villages which are fortified with a ditch, fence, 2 gates, and 3-6 guard towersHobgoblins are skilled at building fortifications, and their communes tend to be surrounded by sturdy walls -- possibly incorporating moats and guard towers -- or whatever the equivalent is in the given terrain.Underground complexes may be guarded by 2-12 carnivorous apes (60%).Hobgoblins are somewhat less likely to have worgs hanging around, as they don't need the extra protection. They do, however, keep a domesticated species of carnivorous ape that is sometimes trained for combat.- Hobgoblins are a
fiercestubbornly independent humanoid race that wage a perpetual [defensive] war withthe other humanoid racesimperialistic and/or colonial states trying to absorb, conquer, or eliminate them. - The following are blatant propaganda:
- Hobgoblins hate elves and always attack them first.
- [Hobgoblins are well-acquainted with the “kill the wizard first" tactic; some of the best wizards are elves; ditto archers. Human observers ascribe attempts to eliminate dangerous (frequently elven) wizards and archers to racism rather than sound tactical doctrine.]
- Hobgoblins are nightmarish mockeries of the humanoid races who have a military society organized in tribal bands.
- [Presented without comment]
- Fully 80% of all known hobgoblin lairs are subterranean complexes.
- [They're miners, not cavemen; discussed previously in this post.]
Bugbears
Bugbears, broadly speaking, are the goblins who listened to the barghests' advice too long and adopted aspects of their philosophy. They have wholeheartedly thrown away the collectivist ethos that other goblins ascribe to, and live only for themselves. Some groups of bugbears have been living this way for uncounted generations; others only left the commune last week.7
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| Bugbear, AD&D Monstrous Manual |
When the goblin civilization was at its height, “bugbear" meant “outlaw".8 To be a bugbear was to be exiled from goblin society, and to get no protection from the law, like vargr in the Sagas. Bugbears had to live by their wits, and they risked being killed as intruders if they were ever caught in a commune's territory. Being declared a bugbear was the ultimate punishment in goblin law. As a result, the bugbears are the only goblins who are better off since human encroachment caused their society's downfall.
In the many, many generations since the first bugbears were exiled, bugbears have built up a culture of their own that is, intentionally, the antithesis of goblin society. No bugbear will take instructions from another, or do anything they do not wish to do. To bugbears, the individual is all, and alliances are immediately broken if they are seen to impinge on the bugbear's personal freedom. Do as thou wilt is the whole of the law.
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| Bugbear, 3e Monster Manual |
Being a bugbear comes with a high mortality rate, as one might imagine. Successful bugbears, who survive and thrive in this environment, are easily the largest, strongest, healthiest, and most dangerous goblins you could ever meet. They regularly top seven feet, and are generally built like Andre the Giant without the health problems. This build belies their incredible stealth, and success as ambush hunters. For many a party of travelers, the first sign a bugbear is in the area is the violent death of whoever was on watch that night.
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| Bugbear, 5e Monster Manual |
- The following parts of the Bugbear entry in the AD&D Monstrous Manual are true:
- ...they are not actually related to bears in any way.
- The typical bugbear’s sight and hearing are exceptional, and they can move with amazing agility when the need arises. Bugbear eyesight extends somewhat into the infrared, giving them infravision out to 60 feet.
- Whenever possible, bugbears prefer to ambush their foes. They impose a -3 on others’ surprise rolls.
- The species survives primarily by hunting. They have no compunctions about eating anything they can kill, including humans, goblins, and any monsters smaller than themselves. They are also fond of wine and strong ale, often drinking to excess.
- The following are lies:
- Though vaguely humanoid in appearance, bugbears seem to contain the blood of some large carnivore. Their eyes recall those of some savage bestial animal...
- [They look as humanoid as any of the other goblins.]
- Extremely greedy, bugbears love glittery, shiny objects and weapons. They are always on the lookout to increase their hoards of coins, gems, and weapons through plunder and ambush.
- [They give no shits about hoards. If it isn't useful, they'll trade it for beer or something.]
- If a lair is uncovered and 12 or more bugbears are encountered they will have a leader...
- [Any bugbear claiming to be a “leader", “chief", or anything similar is probably going to end up as “lunch" if he doesn't shut his yap.]
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| Bugbear, Pathfinder Bestiary |
Ecology
Goblins prefer to live somewhere in the hills, for two reasons. First, difficult terrain means their commune is just that much further out of the reach of growing human empires; just the fact that any humans looking for them have to spend an extra couple days on the road buys one a lot of freedom. Second, that's where the best mining is.
Goblins are crepuscular -- they live most of their lives in the hours around dusk, and the hours around dawn. During the middle of the night, they have their nightly feast around the cookfire. During the day, they usually sleep, though there are always watchgoblins on shift.
Goblins are crepuscular -- they live most of their lives in the hours around dusk, and the hours around dawn. During the middle of the night, they have their nightly feast around the cookfire. During the day, they usually sleep, though there are always watchgoblins on shift.
1 By which I mean that human nations engage in territorial expansion, not that individual humans inflate like balloons, funny as that might be.↩
2 Which has to be inaccurate, because it's impossible to pronounce “Maglubiyet" without using your lips.↩
3 “For every 40 goblins there will be a leader... For every 200 goblins there will be a sub-chief... The tribe has a single goblin chief..."↩
4 This has been experimentally verified by the Hutterites, a religious sect that practices rural, communal living -- they derived the same number through trial and error. Hutterite communities are able to maintain their communal lifestyle through social pressure alone (i.e., the “nobody wants to be that guy" model) as long as they remain below the 200 threshold. If a community grows larger than that, they split off "daughter" communities; the Hutterites themselves say that this is because they would otherwise have to establish a police force or something similar, as social pressure alone stops working at that point. (Dunbar, R. I. M. “Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 16, no. 4, 1993, pp. 681–694., doi:10.1017/S0140525X00032325.) ↩
5 Mining and crafting, for starters.↩
6 The relationship between the extreme intra-commune honesty of goblins and the decreased fluency in the Tongue of the Moon is unestablished.↩
7 The bugbear stats only apply to goblins who were born as bugbears; (hob)goblins who personally left their communes and “went bugbear" still use (hob)goblin stats. In the view of the goblins, though, they are just as much bugbears as the creatures that a human would identify as such.↩
8 Okay, the goblin word that humans translate as “bugbear" meant “outlaw".↩
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