Really I could probably generate an entire game out of Goblins as characters. Goblins & Gadgets? Hobmaster? The Game of the G’mork? I mean –this goes back to D&D times, long ago. We’d gotten jaded, you understand. Elves? Sure, yes, they’re different than people but still people – they’re pretty & quick humans & Dwarves and Halflings & oh man – kind of on and on.
The experience at the time was something like the old forehead of the week trope. We’d play a character of a different species and run up against enemies of a different species and then there would be a fight and one side would rob the other. When characterizations came up it was to reinforce the cardboard cutout axioms of the species. Elvish disdain & Dwarven drunkenness – the old touchstones (and there’s nothing wrong with those!) but they were falling flat. We were getting bored.
Years before as a kid I’d been playing at having the NPCs- the Monsters – have a culture. Be People. Goblins, when they’d come up talked in a specific tone, wanted certain kinds of things – but also – were at least a little distinct, one from another. Gribblesnick might wish for true love and bargain with the pretty elf PC, while Rundlescrud is merely hungry and tired – a worn out mine-slave looking to escape the warren. The PCs – naturally – could play through and run the traditional dungeon-cleansing – and they sometimes did – but they’d remembered Gribblesnick & Rundlescrud and tried to keep them alive, tried to interact with them. They weren’t any-longer just HP bags that dispensed treasure but characters.
Years later we’d really grasped the utility of this type of thing & there the complexity really got rolled into it. So let’s allow that all the people who can talk (and are thus – People) in you campaign setting are individuals with drives & hopes and ideas – they’re living & breathing and they breathe life into your setting. Now we’re into the other problem – the Forehead of the Week. Now the goblins were just sneery monsters with grouchy attitudes. They’d become predictably two-dimensional. This was probably inevitable but it was something I thought I could get out ahead of. So I started to think about Goblins – who are they, what are they about?
The basic text we always refer back to is Tolkien – Good & Old – but JRR doesn’t have a whole lot of useful things to say concerning the goblins. Flat feet & living in caves, vain & weirdly indistinguishable from Orcs? Huh. Well, the flat flappy feet was a nice touch. And the caves, that just makes sense.
Thanks Ridley Scott for Blix
(not the name I'd choose)
So what else is there? For me I like the Goblin in the movie Legend – all ears & chin & nose – sharp angles. Warhammer style Gretchins – those are a nice, evocative, fun look. But bristling, uglier, somehow. Gobliney-er. One of the players, playing a goblin in that early game was speculating, he’d wanted a prize from a surgeon they’d helped out and decided he’d be more gobliney if he had more teeth. He wanted them installed.
There’s where it made sense to me – change & aspiration. I’d figured out that the basic nature I’d want to imbue my goblins with were those two things. From there it was easy.
The Ur-Goblin, in my construction is Rumpelstiltskin – who I don’t know is actually called or described as a goblin in any stories – I don’t know. But he’s magical in that he can transform things, make changes, and beyond that he really, really wants things. When he can’t get them he loses his mind and stamps his foot until he splits himself in two! That’s the kind of dedication to bizarrely specific goals & riddles you just don’t see. But I liked that figure – a magician with inscrutable objectives and boundless frustration.
I threw that into the mix and realized that I’d figured out Goblins, as a people. They’d have priorities, and here I mean – Physiological priorities – like our need for cooked food & shelter and clothing – the big & real needs that are baked into us, Humans, as people – I’d pen some in for Goblins.
They change & mutate. They respond to their environment and they’re made of Chaos. So they want Change – Chaos and they want to build. So Goblins are Makers – that’s the first thing.
Chaos in the changing environment though – there you’re up against something. People, humans – Us – we adapt to environments, sure, but we also change our environments to suit us. I wanted it to be more personal, more fraught for the Goblins. They’re chaos – that’s essential in their creation – so I want them to change, not in response to their environment & no to change the world around them exactly – but rather to change in opposition. Their opposition to the rough & dangerous world is to become more Gobliney. So Goblins have a sense of a sort of idealized Goblin form. They have some thought, some sense of their own perfection. So Goblins aspire – they Want – that’s the next thing.
From there I thought about what it means that they’d have these things – Making & Wanting – that adds competition to the mix, almost by default – and it adds denial into consideration. So what happens when goblins compete? What happens when they fail? I saw them as being incredibly temperamental, hugely emotional – they’d kill and die for seemingly nonsensical reasons – they’d have casual ideas about mortality, about the value of life itself. They’d put Things first. They’d be Materialists, strictly.
So that took religion out of it. There’s no spirituality for goblins – what use is it if you can’t have and hold it? If you can’t show that you’ve snatched it up?
After that – well I didn’t want to lay it on too thick – with the speciesist caricature. Just make them different from people – in a meaningful way – so that they pop & become a Real & Distinct group when they’re met or played. People – not Humans. That’s a tricky thing to play and a difficult thing to portray well – but I thought I’d found the cues that would really help players & help me to get to a place where we’d be telling the best stories we possibly could.
Crazy right? That all of this is in aid of that? All this thought, effort, deliberation & planning & it’s so that We can tell a better story.
So I’m curious – and if you feel like it maybe you’ll let me know in the comments – what’s your favorite story that’s had a goblin in it?
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