What are your goblins like

I'm a sucker for stories about underdog races everyone else treats like shit but still have good somewhere in them. So for the most part, my goblins are still standard evil fuckers who want to steal your shit and stab you in the dick, but in their own asshole way they really are just trying to take care of themselves and their loved ones in a world that hates them, and if someone was willing enough, they could befriend the gobbos.

I don't use goblins, or any of that unoriginal high fantasy schlock trash.

Handsome/beautiful powerful spirits with tragic backstories tied to areas or even objects.

Labyrinth Goblins

armory

Six separate subspecies, who live all around (and under) the world, and usually contribute to mucking up somebody's day somewhere. You got:
>Mountain Goblins
Vaguley aztec in appearance, green skin, dark hair, miners, trapmakers, and civil engineers. Have been in a war with the dwarven mafia for decades.
>Sun Goblins
Dark skin, metallic hair and eyes, travel across the desert on domesticated giant beetles, on an eternal quest to sell loot and trade luxuries.
>Hobgoblin
Tallish, lanky, dress like american gothic, pale skin, light hair, and glassy monocolored eyes. They farm, make golems to help them farm, and are wildly, murderously xenophobic.
>Redcaps
Short, pale, albino-ish, and live in swamps. They kill and eat pretty much anything, and dye clothing using blood to denote status. Their king is basically a four foot tall palette swapped Xanthous King.
>Salt Goblins
Buff, coarse-skinned, tan, and blessed with secondary eyelids and serrated teeth. They live in coastal inlets and islands, being pirates, mercenaries, or shark fishermen.
>Deep Goblins
Frail, emaciated, and symbiotically fused to glowing magical fungus, these dudes catalog and research ancient lore in between trading with drow and stabbing underdark beasts to death with their bony, bony claws.

I like my goblins.

My goblinoids have lamprey mouths, black mottled skin and communicate through low-frequency chatter that isn't audible to humans but causes sensations of dread and mild hallucinations in a few people. I don't quite remember when or why they turned into blood-drinking murder salamanders on two legs, but it's been a thing for years now that this is how it goes.

See you, you have taste in goblins.

I'd be sort of okay with it as in universe development, some smarter ones learning tech from what they steel and eventually better nutrition too which gives them healthier looks, but they get shunned by the more classical goblins for it

I respect such dedication to goblins.

Basically anything that happens is blamed on goblins, but, they aren't really active and mostly do whatever will be the fastest and easiest thing to get a giggle out, like moving your shoes just a few centimers to the side so you won't find them at first, or taking one of your socks off your feet during the night and fleeing with it.

Vaguely like flightless bats

Korea, plz

Literally sex goblins but also jews

Domestic goblins are pretty close to the sexy goblins meme, a couple millennia of good nutrition and sexual selection have resulted in a goblin that's heartier, rounder, and generally more pleasing and proportionate to the eye of other humanoids. They still breed like their wild cousins though, so most of them are lower class and poorly educated, so they wind up working brothels, as housekeepers, or anywhere small hands would be of use.

Wild Goblins, or Grobelins as they are more widely known, are scrawny and bug-eyed, with sharp, elongated features and bizarrely oversized extremities. In small groups they're largely an annoyance, stealing small items or bits of food from poorly defended farms and such. Larger tribes can form raiding parties equipped with crude or stolen arms capable of ransacking large swathes of countryside unless put down quickly.

Anything other than these guys are pleb tier.

>did she say it?

Have fun with that hipster setting

where to begin?

i got standard dumb sword fodder goblins
i have slightly smarter sneaky grot goblins
i have the brown cunning ones in the manual
i have smart-ish lawful ones from Adventure time (hi im gummy)
i have insane evil-gnome tinkering goblins with no sense of safety and a love of explosions
i have semi-intelligent goblins who hang around civilized spaces for scraps (fantasy vorcha?)

you want goblins, i have goblins
i have goblins then every issue of spider man
heck, you got an original goblin, i will steal it for my setting

Gentlemen, I love goblins.

>I can't use goblins, or any other pre-existing race, without making it unoriginal

It's fine. Not everyone has a good imagination.

>with hyper-voluptuous figures was one of the worst memes I've ever seen, I fucking despise the way Goblins have become smarter, bustier Halflings.
I don't think goblins are portrayed as sexy/voluptuous outside of porn/basically porn shit like Corruption of Champions and Towergirls.

>Disrespecting JRRT this much
Anons, tech goblins aren't a meme. All the way back in The Hobbit, Tolkien stated that they love crafts and inventions, "especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them."
They're sexy because WoW is a game made by hacks, but the technological penchant has been there for 80 years now.

and just like that, i have a new goblin to add to my world

Sexy gobbos are just a natural progression of WoW's thottie jews.

>when the only way to ensure your races' survival is to go full lewd

Wasn't one of the D&D lore bits that female goblins regularly run away from the goblin tribes because of shit conditions?

The grimlocks are prodigious breeders and eugenicists. When they required shock troops, scouts, and other specialized military roles, they crossed themselves with humans to produce a genetically-unstable creature with great breeding potential due to a very high frequency of mutation.
3000 years later, a variety of races bred from that original stock populate large swathes of the world. The most common such race is the goblin, a small creature bred for both stealth and savagery. The group as a whole is named after this race - "goblinoids" - since the origin of these creatures has long been lost to ancient records while the grimlocks themselves have long disappeared.
Goblinoids of all types maintain their creator-slash-ancestors' penchant for breeding, and are known to produce excellent animals for both labor and war.
In the "future" version of the same setting, goblins have split into a large variety of spacefaring races. Many of them breed their technology rather than build it, creating organic ships and equipment that many other races find quite disturbing.

Did WoW really started? Goblins were introduced to the game in like 2010 and Unamed Text Game(the predecessor for Corruption of Champions) was also released around the same time.

Tiny nimble sneaky rude cowardly cunts.

I think you mean "old" :^)

I don't know if they were the first, but WoW goblins definitely contributed to sexy green shortstacks becoming a thing.

Goblins were introduced in vanilla (2004), they just got hotter when they became playable.

>ask a dwarf for a gun and he'll make you a canon
>ask a human for a gun and he'll make you a musket
>ask a gnome for a gun and he'll make you a revolver
>ask a goblin for a gun and he'll make something halfway between explosive ordinance and a possessed blunderbuss
>ask an elf for a gun and he'll give you a bow

Doing something like that. Standard goblins are pretty much warhammer goblins, but some living outside of traditional tribes, usually in lawless places, go other ways.
Not necessarily geniuses, they face a brutal culture shock and react strongly, often violently. They often dedicate themselves fully to something to prove everyone including themselves that they are someone, or at least useful. They are often quite bitter behind a facade of playing dumb (a very usual defence mechanism to them).
So the goblin "mad lab-assistant" is a thing, but so is the goblin criminal, the suicidal "blaze of glory" goblin... I've also got a goblin bard jester.

Basically they are people that got cut from (admittedly shitty) traditional cultures where they could have some (admittedly shitty) place and throw completely lost in hostile crime-filled cities, completely uprooted and stranger everywhere.

Lots of races can be explained with shitty cultures, no need for worship of evil gods

In my Appalachian setting, Goblins were once men that ate and drank at the table of a moon hag.

Mad, 'ornery little things, when they sleep they remember what it is to be men. In the morning, they lose those dreams, and, knowing they've lost something important and that just makes them meaner.

They're also aware enough to be lonely, so when they're not causing havoc in the name of the moon hag that made them, they're known to waylay folks just to haul them off and force them to join the feast. Misery does love company.

But we wouldn't have InCase porn without it!

This is why I made all of these up here. So that I can have my freaky nightmare goblins, my cute green shortstacks, my weird lorwyn hobgoblins, and whatever else the world needs.

What goblins need is flavors.

I make most of my variants different mostly as a result of culture and regional differences, basically different ethniceties then species

I do the same for haflings, with leprechauns and gnomes as just different tribes of halfling

Goblins are corrupt fey, and the term is generalized to include things like gremlins and kobolds too.

Standard goblins often have features of small, verminous animals, toxic plants or fungus.

Gremlins are the techy ones but only for sabotage.

Kobolds are thieving miners who replace the good stuff with shiny, poisonous rocks.

dead

I don't necessarily agree.
At some point, you diversify a race so much it loses its identity. Like, is still goblin-like, but by the time you get to you might as well just call it something different.

Most of the stuff in is still fairly goblin-like (I'd make each subspecies more diverse in culture, though). But when adding flavors you really gotta be careful that you're not just creating new things entirely and sticking old labels on them.

>Gremlins are the techy ones but only for sabotage.
This user knows and respects history.

In your settings, are these all members of the same race?

I agree, though to be fair, what I wrote in is heavily condensed from the five pages of setting focused on the goblin tribes that I wrote back when I first got them together. Culturally, they're all pretty wildly different, either via lifestyle, environment, or just general exposure to others.

That said, I definitely agree that there's a point where you can diversify so hard that it loses all recognizability.

About 50 years back the Last Orc Horde formed and attacked the civilized nations from the northern lands, pouring out in a great tide of axes and bows and so on.

It was a *slaughter* of orcs, as my world is not technologically stagnant and has developed gunpowder weapons, pike-and-shot formations, large-scale organized professional armies, and so on. The orcs were defeated and driven back to an area that's best described as Alaska. They became scattered enough, and supply lines had been stretched thin enough, that the civilized races pulled back, with what's now being called the Orcish Dominion being allowed to squat and have their piece of shit icebox while dodging white dragons. For all intents and purposes, the orcs have been defeated as a race and will need to majorly reorganized and rethink their lives if they want to keep on living.

The hobgoblins saw this happen and basically went "holy fuck, we need to get our shit together". So a powerful hobgoblin named Haraskan took over a large number of goblinoid tribes and led them on a great exodus to what can best be described as Saskatchewan, founding the Haraskan Empire in unclaimed lands and basically trying to create an entire modern (say 1680s) nation from the ground-up.

Other, more traditional goblinoid tribes are still scattered around throughout the land, of course, but a lot of goblinoids (mostly goblins and hobgoblins; bugbears seem to prefer their current lifestyle) are hearing of the promise of Haraskan and heading out there, looking for a new life in actual homes rather than cold, dank caves.

>I hate the goblin = tech genius.

I don't hate it, I just try and remember that at least in 3.5 the average goblin and hobgoblin are just as smart as the average human (10 INT). So they're just as capable of technological innovation.

The tech genius monsters in my setting, though, are the kobolds, who by this point have become a "standard" race...much to the chagrin of gnomes.

sort-of
they are considered "goblins" since they all look kind of the same, some blame it on the gods, others blame some long dead mage

my universes version charles darwin does not exist yet, but presumably there was once a proto-goblin that eventually turned into the various goblins, or were forcefully transformed

whatever the case, we have as many goblins as their are grains of sand

You might have misinterpreted my culture comment, and it's an important one to me so it bears repeating.
I'm not saying the subspecies need to be differentiated from each other. I'm saying that WITHIN each subspecies, there needs to be a higher amount of cultural variance than what was presented in . Because members of any race or subrace have the capacity to move around and modify their culture over time.
Basically I hate monolithic races and that also applies to subraces.

I really like D&Ds, and especially PFs take on Goblins.

To understand the goblin, you must first understand their creation story. According to the First Songs, the goblin creation myths, goblins were created from human blood spilled by the four Goblin Hero-Gods. From the most powerful barghest-god, Hadregash, goblins gained the gift of the tribe, giving them strength in numbers. From his mate Venkelvore, they gained the gift of raiding and learned to steal from other races. From Zarongel, they gained the gift of riding, learning to master wolves and other animals. Finally, from Zogmugot, they gained the gift of scavenging, harvesting the bounty of the sea's flotsam and jetsam.

At their most simple form, they are small chaotic scavenging raiders who fear many things. Dogs, horses, humans, their gods, and so much more, especially the written word which steals the thoughts out of their heads.

The bigger Hobgoblin is the the complete opposite of the goblin when it comes to organization, preferring a much more militaristic and deeply hierarchical group structure. In appearance, their bodies share an almost brutish ape like form, with gray skin and nearly hairless bodies, with a face like a very ugly elf. They share the goblins love of explosions and fire but have far greater technical abilities, they share the fear of writing though which limits their tech abilities in the long term. these are very much Tolkien's orcs/goblins but repurposed

The bugbear is the brutish inhuman serial killer and bogeyman personified. Incredibly stealthy yet often standing over 7 feet tall, these brutes delight in nothing else but stalking the edges of civilization for people to kill and torture. In appearance, they look like a goblin that just kept growing, with ears that flop about and eyes that are almost too alien in size.

I quite liked Volo's Book of Monster's addition that all three goblinoids were once separate cultures, but were united after their prime god conquered the rest of them.

I'd kinda like to see someone run with "industrious goblin/orc" theme in D&D and make tech-savvy Hobgoblins, with craft arms, Iron Defenders and Warforged as their elite troops. But still as militaristic and disciplined as Hobgoblins usually are.

Mongols.

Something like original Age of Wonders game.
I rather see them as somewhat clever version of weaker orcs that cannibalize tech, so I guess they are Chinese.

goblins are orc dwarves

they have four heart points, use a standard sword, have resistance to terror attacks, vulnerability to emotion attacks, and are represented by triangles with two lines running vertically on them.

in this setting, everyone is digital. your heart points represent your vulnerabilities. anything can reduce them - being "stabbed", being manipulated, showing your affection,
even freely lowering them yourself. If they run out, you're at the mercy of whoever reduced them and they can make you do what you want to do, including self running the terminate()
command which is the only way to truly die in the setting. goblins came as a result of a computer virus that corrupted itself while trying to breach a security system, only acquiring half the "Human" data. They were originally supposed to create "Chameleons", an ai that looks like a human user but is an imposter.
Naturally, once given the spark of will the Goblins now hate Chameleons who continually try to wipe them out.

There's the garden variety dumb greedy goblins and then there's the more intelligent and ambitious goblins a la Styx like

>they just got hotter when they became playable
I strongly fucking dispute this. The models might be higher quality, but they look like worn-out junkies. And not in a good way.

They were decent if low res back in Vanilla-Wrath.

Yeah, in early 2e it was stated in Dragon Magazine that PC goblinoids and Orcs occur for that reason.

Mom gets sick of starving, being beaten, and waiting to die for some asshole dragon or lich so she takes the kids and fucks off to find refuge with a good aligned church.

Sounds like a good basis for a quest

Does Veeky Forums prefer Goblins as magical, malevolent demi-spirits made flesh, or tragi-comic fodder for the Dark Lord's hordes?

Dark lords hordes for sure

little bit of both actually

I reject this dichotomy. Goblins can be part of the Dark Lord's hordes without being tragi-comic fodder (as long as you're not playing Warhammer).
In my setting, they are scouts and skirmishers in armies consisting of a variety of related races serving in different roles.

My goblins are very good, thank you.

Fodder.

Although I prefer them acting on their own merits.
Then again, that's because I play them in Warhammer.

Everyone see that Night Goblins got squatted by the way?

didnt all of Warhammer Fantasy get squated though?

T. a guy who has no knowlage of Warhammer Fantasy outside of a hand full of bits that friends tell me about

WarhammerFantasy ended, and was replaced by Age Of Sigmar which is a Spelljammer-esque far future continuation of the story while the game itself is vastly different.

But other than the complete death of Bretonnia and Tomb Kings ranged plus a harsh trimming from a lot of the surviving armies, the models remained the same and the lore largely stayed similar.

But now Night Goblins, now called Moonclan Grots, are kill. Squigs and Squig Herders remain, actual boxes of Night Gobbos are now inavailable rather than just out of stock.

Goblins in my setting are very situational, sometimes you find a village of really chill ones, just farming, mining, fishing, whatever, might be an inn or smith or something, pretty much the same as any human npc village you'd come across, but some goblins are just bandits, your stereotype "evil goblins" and want to kill you and take your stuff, some goblins are just mercs and sit around in taverns, ruins or camps waiting for jobs like any other adventurer types, some goblins are smart, some are not, some are tribal, some are civil, it all really just depends on their background and how they interacted with the world, and how they come to see it, you can find goblins of any alignment or class really, same as any other basic race, I think people generalize goblins too much, always making them evil greedy little bastards, but they could be anything really, even their physical features (again just like any other basic race) can vary greatly, I think goblins are cool and that people don't use them in so many ways that they could, but what I've always wanted to see is goblins in a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic setting, the ones in adventure time are a pretty good example, but I think goblins could add a lot to any setting really, you just have to try.

Goblin Dabbing

In my setting all the races of the world were created by one of several titans. One titan valued innovation and determination so it created humans, another valued honor and duty so it made dwarves, etc. etc.

Goblins were a mistake, a prototype made by a titan who was trying to build a ruthless killing machine but they instead came out tiny, weak, and cowardly. He tried to wipe clean his flawed creation but his wife adored the ugly little things and hid a few of them away in secret. Their new mother blessed them with a few gift to help them survive, she gave them strong legs to outrun danger, large ears to hear enemies approach, and large families to help protect one another.

When the mortal races rebelled against their creators, the goblins hid and refused to take a side. Although they survived with little casualties, they were hurt the worst of all in the aftermath. The titans cursed their creations with mortality for defying them, goblins worst of all for refusing their call to arms. The other mortal races in turn despise the goblins for refusing to aid them in their rebellion, an animosity that has carried on long after most races had forgotten about the rebellion.

Hopkinsville Goblins

>Goblins in my setting are just people
Real cool and interesting, user. Definitely made me want to find out more about how your goblins are basically humans.

"If your enemies catch you, O Lord of One Thousand Enemies, they will kill you.

But first, they must catch you."

Good Watership Down reference if that's what you were going for.

Goblins been around since Warcraft 2 mang.

It was indeed, good catch. Although it's the halflings in my setting that drew a lot from watership down.

They weren't actually created like the other mortal races. The earliest age of the world was an age of myth and legend. A world so suffused with magic that smiths could pluck stars from the sky and forge them into gems, where mighty heroes could tunnel through mountains with their bare hands or move rivers like John Henry or Hercules. Halflings were originally rabbits, makes sense given they're small, communal, and live in holes in the ground. There's an old folktale halflings tell of a clever rabbit who tricks a pair of squabbling gods into giving it a humanoid form, then fucks off to eat, sleep, and lay about all day instead of running from predators all their life. Still working out the exact details of the tale though. I really like adding small bits of flavor to the world that probably won't come up in the game itself.

There's a keen difference between the quirky steampunk tech of a Warcraft goblin and the type of tech Tolkien Orcs had, which was basically World War 1 style nature-destroying industry.

They weren't sexy yet, though.

They both make things that explode and burn and hurt. And you're thinking of gnome tech. Goblins are all about environmental degradation and exploitation in the pursuit of new explosions.

this is lewd

Precursor race with some Greek and other cultures slapped on them, some taken from Eberron.

>you might as well just call it something different.
Actually the official translation seems to be goblin, sorry you don't like Korean mythology.

>dungeonsdragons.wikia.com/wiki/Dekanter_Goblin
>realmshelps.net/monsters/block/Goblin,_Dekanter

Neat.
Thanks a bunch, user!

Animals that gained a crude intelligence after generations of genetic engineering by hobgoblin magic.

>Let me tell you about my non-English-speaking religion
>It has a race of tall, beautiful, magical people who dwell in trees
>The official translation is "hobbit"

You are welcome, other user.

>Super puffy nips

bat-face goblins = best goblins

Basically the mites of civilization. Scavengers and thieves, they're essentially diminutive humanoid rats that are ever present in the shadows of settlements, picking through the refuse and waste. Easily cowed with violence, they end up working for other races fairly commonly, though their loyalty is as weak as their scrawny little frames. Outside of settled areas, it's not uncommon to find their warrens in dark places, especially around canyons and gorges.

They are clever bastards, though, and so while they may not innovate, they are pretty good at scavenging and kitbashing trash into completely unreliable knick-knacks. They also raid less frequently than orcs, and when they do, they tend to be better planned. Though that isn't saying much. They generally stick to their strengths, try desperately to avoid situations that risk their weaknesses, and are content to eke out a pathetic living. It's still living, after all.

Wow, those are fucking cool!

I also like the Vril, though it was hilarious that they forgot their main statblock that included the rules for skinshifting and the sonic scream. And the -cha instead of -wis.

Small humanoids of fey ascendancy. About one meter tall, they're apelike humanoids, with big ears that remind of those of bats and coarse, brownish hair covering their bodies. They're intelligent and, though naughty and malicious, most of them aren't truly evil.
They're fast and silent, with an uncanny sense of hearing (specially in subterranean areas), so those that leave their clan burrows in the wilds for the city usually work as scouts for adventurers, sewer wardens and the city watch; the most talented, however, usually join the local guild of thieves, or become adventurers themselves.

I bet your homebrew settings are so creative and fresh