The Nature of Goblinhood

What Dogs Smell

The little wild people smell of dirt, sticks, and poison fruit. Two-legs are very worried about them so they must be dangerous, we will bark and chase them. It's fun to chase them but they taste awful (which is saying a lot for a dog, they'll eat nearly anything.)

What Common People Know

Goblins are hideous little thugs. They spring from the ground covered in filth and full of hate. They cannot create things for themselves, but they enjoy things made by others. They are angry magpies and cattle rustlers. Anyone who knows of an infestation of them would do best to kill the pests now before they gain the confidence to come and take your children and make them into Hobgoblins. They are the most common and pernicious demons left behind in the Time of Fire and Madness.

What The Spirits Know

Goblinhood is a punishment for those who commit the most horrible crimes. It is the final punishment for those too abhorrent to be allowed the final release of death and too dangerous to be exiled. Goblination is for enemies for which you have only disrespect.

First their tongues are cut from their mouths. A replacement is then provided made of mud and leaves. This new tongue is incapable of articulating Sylvan. With it comes the Goblin language, which to the ears of all spirits is a horrid babble, so that they will not suffer their presence to learn to pity them.

The criminal then undergoes a ritual of abuse. Those who knew the traitor are invited to come individually and to disgorge in private all of the things which they ever mildly disliked about you, everything you have ever done to offend, true or not. The target grows hideous, warty and misshapen.

The traitor, now full of hateful feelings, is then entered into conceptual surgery. All of their better natures are extracted,  The body and animus of the victim is divided and diluted. The result is a gaggle of goblins, each possessing some fragment of the original personality. Goblins never remember what occurred to them, though they do sometimes develop pre-occupations with things that were in their sphere, or places that they once guarded.

What the Ancient Spirits of Weathered Rocks and Old Oaks Know

Before the Time Of Fire And Madness there was no such thing as a goblin.

At the peak of that conflict many lost their way and joined the armies of the Defiler. One such being was an ambitious general, Maglubiyet. In the wake of the Defiler and his horde a mountain fortress was left under siege and Maglubiyet was given command of the forces there. He considered this a minor outpost, beneath his notice, and he grew restless.

Maglubiyet came to the commander of the outpost and offered them a compact. He had seen the sorrow of the spirits at their wounds, he saw how deeply they lamented the blemishes on their forms, how the trenches in their landscapes wounded them, and how the dust of passing armies occluded the sunset and heard their weeping at that terrible vista. "Give me your wounded, your criminals, and traitors, from now until the end of time, and I will swear with you an eternal alliance" and they accepted.

what goblans know

me no nuffin'. me only eat sticks and chase chicken... you got any chicken ? oh you do don't ya, tall ones always 'ave chickens and pigs and shiny coins. giz a chicken and ill tell ye everythin' about goblans.