Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Goblin-Kin of Myganos

In Myganos goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs are all basically the same thing. The biggest difference between them is how they go about their day to day lives and where they tend to lair. For the most part what they get called is as much a regional thing as anything else. Technically these are specific classifications for distinct branches of the breed but the only people that really care about that are scholars that don't deal with them and the adventurers that get hired to hunt them down. Additionally ogres and bugbears are related to goblins but they're both special cases.

Goblins are creepy little spastic sadists. They have a thing for harming living creatures and tend to nest in deep dark forests, abandoned halfling burrows, mines, and caves. They don't form hordes/raiding parties very well, usually instead of it being a planned thing a group of goblins will start getting "friends" together and heading to a nearby village to hurt people and burn things and it'll build until it's a proper raiding party. Individually they have an innate sort of cunning, cobbling together tools, weapons, and armor out of scrap and scavenged goods; and being able to recognize valuable objects for decorations and sometimes trade if a shaman or chieftain that can organize them better has risen up from the rabble.

Orcs are basically bigger goblins that live above ground, generally in the mountains though migrations (both natural and forced) have scattered them pretty much everywhere on the face of Myganos that there aren't enough civilized beings to root them out.

Hobgoblins are the end result of an ancient sorcerer-king deciding that goblins would make pretty decent soldiers if only they'd work harder and got organized better. So now there are goblins that have soldiering burned into their very being. They stand up straighter then orcs or goblins, organize more readily, and are better craftsmen then any of their cousins. Neither of the previous sorts of goblin-kin are good at making anything, effective maybe but not really good as a general rule; hobgoblins however have actual smiths, carpenters, and masons to make their goods and evaluate captured goods so their equipment tends to be of a higher quality and their homes are more than repurposed caves, captured dwellings, cobbled together hovels. While orcs and goblins will raid a village, take everything that they can carry and then burn and despoil the rest; hobgoblins will raid carefully so as not to destroy a good source of future goods or to actually take over a village and give them a permanent settlement and a large number of slaves to use and sell.

Ogres are an odd mutation of sorts that happens with goblin-kin sometimes. Periodically a whelp is born that's bigger than the rest of it's siblings and hungrier. It looks odd compared to it's kin and is box-of-rocks dumb to boot. Usually ostracized and tortured while grow that stops once the rest of it's tribe realizes that it hasn't stopped growing and comes to the conclusion of what it is. Ogres stand 8-10 feet tall, have distended jaws fill with rows of teeth that never stop coming in and are constantly hungry. They are usually found singly in tribes of other kinds of goblin-kin and how they live varies according to what kind of clan they were born into. With orcs and goblins they get treated about the same as any other member of the tribe, just with some added respect for their size and strength. In a hobgoblin tribe they get trained to be living weapons and equipped with the best armor they can afford to make in it's size, usually maille, and serve as the point of a vanguard or the chieftain's bodyguard.

[I'll be posting racial templates for each of these in the coming days along with actual stat blocks for examples.]

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