Hobbin

A Hobbin is the child of a hobgoblin and a human. They are not a small people, not a halfling, and not a variety of either parent: they are their own name, and they have been on Erôth for well over a thousand years, which is long enough that nobody treats them as anything unusual. The small folk of three feet who live in and around Eldamar are the Hafuwë, a different people entirely, with a different homeland and a different tongue. The two are confused constantly by people who have heard both words once.

The parents are a hobgoblin and a human. The fuller written accounts of the peoples of the continent allow a Peren in the human’s place, and the child is called the same thing either way. What comes of the crossing was never written down in any detail: not a Hobbin’s lifespan, not what they take from which parent, not whether there is any telling one from a hobgoblin at a glance. In practice there often is not, and the question of which of the two a given person actually is has been argued over more than once by people who knew them.

There is a piece of speculation attached to them that will not go away. Some scholars hold that it was the plain existence of the Hobbin, a crossing that happened by itself and bred true, that first gave the Mól the idea of making a people to order, and so led to the Abstergo line and the Peren at the end of it. Nothing supports this beyond its neatness. Whatever the origin, Hobbin now are simply people getting on with their lives like anybody else.

They are among the commonest peoples on the continent, third by numbers, and among the commonest to go adventuring. Idir and Yovance are where most of them come from, but they are found everywhere the roads reach: thirteen in every hundred in Loshev, ten in Haudh-Gwenn, nine across Peredhel. In the mountains of the Vala some are raised by the monster slayers of Alqadim Al-Qasr, who take a Hobbin or a hobgoblin and nobody else, drill them from childhood, tell them the legacy of the Muharib rests on their shoulders, and send them out at the end of it carrying an inherited weapon.

Campaign Updates

The first the company met was Kogi, who keeps the River’s Edge in Haudh-Gwenn and had lately buried the mother he inherited it from. He gave them a room and no trouble.

Lady Talia Salahaudhi is Hobbin, and it is held against her. Her grandfather named her heir to a hobgoblin clan over the objection of a good many of its members, who count her not fully one of them; she is six feet tall and slender, and the face and the ears are the only part of her that argues the other way. On the council of Haudh-Gwenn sits Dalvaar Rashaa, an aged Hobbin in his late fifties and a Grayeras vote on every question that matters.

Two more the company met as enemies. Zarif, who ran something near martial law over the Haudh-Gwenn guard, was put down as a Hobbin by Aldo after a week of watching him and as a large hobgoblin by Rheem after an evening at his employer’s table, and it was never established which of the two he was. The other was never named at all: a Hobbin with a carpenter’s toolkit, found in a cellar standing over Rainan Marr tied to a chair, and killed there.