Goblins

Everyone has opinions about goblins, so here are mine.

General notes

Goblins are small humanoids with sharp teeth, claws, opposable thumbs and the impulse control of a five-year-old on cocaine. They’re generally not very clever, but they can be very cunning.

It’s hard to say how intelligent goblins are or can be, because trying to get the little buggers to sit still and answer questions is substantially worse than herding cats.

In theory, they’re green, but they’re generally the colour of whatever shade the local dirt is. Anatomy and psychology

Goblins are not particularly strong, but they are pretty resistant to damage. They also have almost no fear of death. These factors, combined with their incredibly short attention spans, makes them extremely impulsive.

They’re not inherently evil, because I think built-in good/neutral/evil alignments are boring, but they’re inclined to violence, mainly because they think it’s fun. They’ll fight like mad against another race or creature that’s attacking goblins, but in the absence of another race, they’ll war between their clans. In the absence of another clan, they’ll fight amongst each other.

An isolated goblin with nothing to do will probably try to pick a fight with itself.

Goblins love random junk and music. They especially love musical instruments, and being in possession of one is enough to make a goblin royalty (at least for a while). They like well-played music, but they also enjoy just making a really loud, annoying noise with an instrument.

Reproduction

Goblins don’t have genders or reproductive organs. All goblins have a pseudo-penis, but this is solely used for pissing on things. Pissing on things is an important part of goblin “culture”¹. This will become obvious quite quickly to anyone who spends any time around goblins, because the idea of modesty is totally alien to a goblin.

They do usually wear clothes, thankfully. These usually serve two important uses:

• Looking fancy
• Keeping things from flapping about and getting in the way

Quite how you get more goblins isn’t entirely clear. Goblins will sometimes go off and build what they call a “trash egg”. They will carefully select items like a bird choosing twigs, although their criteria is a mystery. One trash egg might be made entirely from mud and carrion crawler entrails, while another will be made from priceless jewellery, oak leaves and pried-up floor tiles.

Eventually, a new goblin will emerge from the trash egg. It’ll look sort of like the goblin that built the egg, but not identical.

This process is an infuriating mystery to curious wizards and scholars. Being able to generate expendable minions from rubbish would be amazing, but no non-goblin has ever made a successful trash egg. You can build one that’s exactly the same as an existing trash egg, and nothing will happen. Somehow, goblins can tell what’s just a pile of rubbish and what is an egg (they steal from each other constantly, but will never disturb an egg).

Even their method of entering the world is annoying. This isn’t really surprising.

Some people think that goblin eggs might be able to spontaneously form in messy areas. No-one has ever seen this happen, but goblins do seem to turn up everywhere, even places they shouldn’t be able to get into.

Religion

Goblins everywhere worship Glog. Glog is not a god. All the gods and clerics agree, there is no god called Glog. They ought to know, after all, and while they all argue constantly, the non-existence of Glog might be the only thing they agree on.

Nevertheless, goblin priests and shamans are able to produce quite impressive magics sometimes by praying to Glog. Non-goblins have tried praying to Glog, and doing all the things goblins do to appease Glog, and nothing happens.

Glog seems to be a capricious god, or would be if he existed. Goblins claim he likes stealing, fighting, intoxicants and causing chaos.

In the game

Goblins are a staple of any game, but I find the usual “small evil level 1 speedbump” to be a waste of their potential. My goblins will attack players on sight, and then try to make friends with them next turn if they spot something they want. They don’t understand why you’d be mad that they just killed your friend. You killed their friends in the fight too, and they’re not being weird about it so why are you?

They can be a useful source of information on the dungeon and a source of convenient, cheap hirelings, if you can deal with their general chaos.

They can also be a source of fascinating interactions and items; at one point, the king of the local clan presented my players with his favourite treasure. It was a severed finger in an ornate wooden box. He was very proud of this severed finger. The party accepted it graciously, intending to toss it almost immediately, then found the finger had a ring of resist fire on it.

Of course, they can also just be mad little gremlins intent on causing chaos. One fun setup is to have the players find two warring goblin clans. They may try to sneak past in the chaos, but if the goblins see the party, they’re liable to suddenly team up with the other goblins they were trying to murder last turn and attack!