Hobgoblins

Hobgoblins ruled Erôth once, and then they did not. The Mól Empire was theirs, or near enough: the people called hobgoblins today are what became of its leaders’ descendants after it came apart, seven hundred years ago. Since then they have held no country, no province and no quarter of any city. They are among the most numerous peoples on the continent and they own no part of it.

A People Without a Place

They keep no homeland and no sovereign nation, and no territory where the great families of them gather. They do not hold neighborhoods in the freer countries, or blocks of land near one another, or anything a map would show. They are found everywhere instead, and by numbers they stand third among the peoples that produce adventurers.

The written survey of the peoples of Erôth is blunt about what became of them. Under the Empire they were industrious and inventive, opening markets before anyone else had noticed there were goods to sell in them; in the present age they have been reduced to bandits, gangsters, commoners and cutthroats. The same account holds that almost every major crime syndicate on the continent is either led by hobgoblins or advised by them, and names Yovance, war-torn and brought near destruction by Peredhel, as the hub of hobgoblin gangs and hobgoblin political influence. The Yovan Empress, desperate to save her nation, went to the syndicates for help. It is said in some quarters that she would have got a better bargain out of the Peren.

Where they are counted, they are counted heavily. Three in every ten of Loshev, three in every ten of Haudh-Gwenn, roughly one in five of Amulta, thirteen in a hundred across Peredhel. Idir has never counted anybody, and the figure repeated for it runs somewhere between a third and two fifths of everyone living there.

What They Look Like

Two descriptions of them stand side by side and do not agree.

They are commonly described as red-skinned and dark-furred, and short: about five feet on average. The survey has them near-hairless. In that account the fur belongs to the bugbears, their cousins, and what a hobgoblin carries is a dense patch on the forearms and the shins and nothing else worth the name. Males grow hair on the top of the head, some of them eyebrows, and no more. It puts a male at a little under five feet to a little under six, between a hundred and twenty and two hundred pounds, with females smaller, and the people as a whole a few inches shorter than the average human rather than short outright.

The two agree on the skin. It runs deep burnt orange to red and darkens with long exposure to the sun. The survey adds the eyes, which are what strangers report first: green to chartreuse, and glowing. It also makes a great deal of the difference between the sexes, more than it makes of anything else. Females lack body hair, keep larger ears, and carry notable markings on the face. Males are heavier and thicker in the torso, with broad faces and sharply pointed ears that give them, in the survey’s phrase, a nearly feline look.

What They Speak

The tongue is given two ways as well. The tables of languages put G’lin down as the speech of hobgoblins, goblins and bugbears together, and it is commonly said of a hobgoblin that G’lin is what he speaks. The survey looks at it from the cradle instead, and reaches a different answer: Taal, the language of the Empire, is barely used by anyone now, and the likeliest first language of a hobgoblin born today is Peren, which serves as the common tongue of the continent.

What a Taal name still does is mark a family. Daric, the one prisoner of goblin-kin the company has questioned at length, answered in Taal, and his name means striker, which is not the sort of name a hired sword usually carries.

Where They Came From

The oldest account of the goblin-kin makes the hobgoblins one branch of four.

It begins with a tribe of lesser goblin-kin: taller than their neighbors, sharper, and a great deal hairier. Their chief cared more for his harem than for his tribe and handed the running of it to his siblings, and a sister of his took charge of the births. She noticed how much the children differed from one another. She began experimenting on the tribe’s tamed wolves, bred four distinct kinds of dog out of them, and made the tribe better at hunting and better at war; and she found she liked the work. From the dogs she went to the parentage of children, arranging marriages, until she had remade both the bloodline and the order of the tribe. She chose and trained a successor. Then she made the office permanent: Ra’ees Al-Murabbi, the Chief Breeder.

A thousand years later the tribe had split in two. One half, shaped toward the animals running wild in the country around them, grew in height and girth into the muscular, fur-covered bugbears. The other, slightly taller and near furless, met a reagent newly brought out of Eldamar; the reaction was an accident, and it left them red-skinned and bald. Those were the hobgoblins.

Neither was the end of the work. Four primary subgroups came out of it in all: hobgoblins, bugbears, a goblin kind, and a fourth that was never named plainly. Baseline goblins were the stock the whole program was run on. The same hands turned the same craft on their slaves rather than their kin and made the Peren, and the Peren revolt that followed took the Empire apart. How anyone came to know this was never written down.

Traits

The Empire counted them finished work: a thousand years of selective breeding and alchemy, ending in a people it held to be perfect. No Pathfinder traits have been written for hobgoblin characters yet.

Campaign Updates

Every town the company has walked into has had hobgoblins in it, and no two of those hobgoblins have been doing the same thing.

Draazstone keeps hobgoblin patrols on its mountain passes, four to a band in reinforced brigandine, praying to Drozom the Frozen. Rakhzan led the one that guided the company toward the Valley of Doom, and lost an eye, his freedom and his family’s name for the trade he made along the way. The same town produced the alchemist who fancied himself Mól and went to work for Beltran Grayeras.

In Haudh-Gwenn the Chantry of Tranquility is run in large part by them: Baku, the Drowsy Duchess of Faith, who tutors Mikhail and took her mask off for him, and Müde, the Drowsy Duke Hospitalar, beside her. So is a good deal of what Beltran built. Tazrih was his spymaster and Boras his bookkeeper, and it was Oshuun Karral who carried the Wraithblade out of a dead clan’s keep, handed it to Beltran, and was killed for it. Katalia pours drinks at the Color Stay and has been the steadiest source the company keeps in that city.

A hobgoblin clan can still be a clan. The Salahaudhi named Lady Talia their heir over the objection of a good many members who count a Hobbin not fully one of them, and Jalal, the old steward whose mind is going, keeps her house. And the hobgoblin the company knows best answers to a name that belongs to somebody else’s people: Bhir, of the Free Folk, whom everyone calls Bugbear because of how he fights.