Goblins

Goblins are the smallest and the least of the goblin-kin, and the written survey of the peoples of Erôth files them among the very rare: the sort of thing a traveler half doubts exists, and the rest of the time takes for an animal.

Which of those it is has never been settled, and the argument is not idle. A goblin cannot work words; it has not the wit for them. It can understand a good deal more than an animal can, take a trained task and build on it, and it dresses itself and uses tools. That leaves it above the ceiling of what a beast can be and below the floor of what is usually called a person, which is a place nobody has a decent word for. Some hold them animals outright. Others hold there is plainly more there than that. Koa has met a few and belongs to the second party: put to him that a caged goblin in a traveling show is no different from a dog on a leash, he would not have it. The tables of languages give G’lin to hobgoblins, goblins and bugbears alike. How much of it a goblin actually uses, nobody has written down.

The oldest account of the goblin-kin puts them at the bottom of the family and at the start of it at once. One ancient stock of the region spent more than a thousand years being bred and alchemically refined by its own hand into four primary subgroups: hobgoblins, bugbears, a goblin kind, and a fourth that was never named plainly. Baseline goblins were the material the work was done on. Everything the Mól later made, the Peren included, was learned on them first. How anyone came to know this was never written down.

Campaign Updates

For three seasons the only goblins on the company’s road were the ones holding Wraithblade Keep north of Ridh, and everything about them was wrong. Dwayne came out of that keep the sole survivor of his crew and described spears and hatchets in their hands and one of them commanding the others with a proper sword. Kithul scouted it, retreated, and went looking for help against the goblins in it. They ambushed, they covered one another, they shut doors behind them and ran rather than throwing themselves forward. Going in at midnight, the company drove the sentries and their hounds west with a ghost conjured out of light, on Mikhail’s reckoning that goblins living under a wraith would run from one.

They were not goblins as the word is ordinarily meant. They were the Zarkhi, blood-species of Clan Zarkhûn, whose forge that keep had been, and the coordination was the residue of a cursed sword that had left the building years before. Nobody arrived at that quickly. A clan is not a blood-species, and a Zarkhi is not what a farmer means when he says he saw a goblin.

They keep dogs. The G’lin hound is a goblin breed, keen-nosed, dark-sighted and hard to sicken, and the breed is commonly reckoned the cleverer half of the arrangement.