Goblins In-Depth

its rare that i find exactly what i want but thanks malfoux

Goblins, by nature, are a wild and chaotic bunch and are just as likely to be running into trouble as they are as running away from it.  Goblins gravitate to acts of stupidity like moths to a flame and most goblins last words are “HEY Y’ALL WATCH THIS” or some deviation thereof.  They seem to lack a concept of property beyond ‘mine’ and ‘soon-to-be-mine.’   Often squabbling, fights, even over little trinkets can lead to a gunfight.  Goblins are pint-sized horrors with an unhealthy fascination with hogs, hooch, and hand cannons.

Physically goblins are squat, bright green creatures not much bigger than a human child.  They are wiry and thin and seem to always been twitching or fidgeting when not napping or inebriated.  Their large eyes are oversized for their small faces and their ears are long, pointed, and often have whole chunks bitten off.  Their smiles are rife with gaps and mismatched teeth, with the occasional false gold tooth.  The most distinctive feather about the goblins however is their apparent lack of a nose - presumably an advantage in the fetid swamps.

They speak a chittering mock of common and sound like a drunk even the few hours of the day when they aren’t.  Their clothes are raggedy and patched, often mud caked blue overalls or just shorts with rudimentary camouflage (or are just dirty to the point that the overlapping stains look like camouflage) and pig-leather boots.  They wear an eclectic menagerie of hats, all of which are studded with things like fishing lures, coins, hunting trophies, good luck charms, ammo, and anything else shiny that has caught the goblin’s eye.   Always close to each goblin is his hooch jug, often clay or glass, marked with the universal symbol for alcohol, the triple ‘x,’ and his gun, less a firearm and more of a tube filled with explosives that is hopefully pointed the right way.

Goblin society is a dark childlike mockery of human society.  They have small shanty huts made from driftwood, broken crates, pig leather, and what other scrap they can grab out of the muck.  They play music, mostly banjo, harmonica, or ‘bucket with strings’.  They have farms and grow strange stumpy looking corn (actually a mushroom) for their liquor mash and fatten hogs on slop.  Goblin villages are all based around a still, a chugging cranking ramshackle device covered in knobs and levers with long spiraling lengths of copper that extrude clear liquor the goblins refer to as ‘shine’.  The highest station in society that a goblin can ascent to is that of brew master; as he who runs the stills runs the village.

The central lynchpin of goblin society is that of its clear homemade liquor.  This liquor goes by a number of names; hooch, shine, whiskey, firewater, and most appropriately ‘trouble.’  The brewing process it not difficult, the organic nature of the Formless Sea and the sheer amount of fungus and molds that exist within it means that distilling consists mostly of throwing things in a bucket and waiting.  Goblins will do just about anything for just a taste of shine.  Many tides of battle have turned in favor of the goblins with just the idea that the boss might up the daily ration if they win.  The quality of this brew is questionable and bad batches have been known to drive goblins blind, insane, or both.

Goblins have an understanding with their hogs, this is not to say that the relationship is one where the goblin sits firmly on top.  Rather the hogs and the goblins are relatively equal in standing.  The two in fact keep each other in check and without this balance either the hogs or the goblins population would bloom to unstable levels.  Only by aping humans have the goblins learned domestication, and have begun to have the upper hand in the hog/goblin dynamic.  The domesticated hogs the goblins use for just about everything; from a food source, to a beast of burden, to mounts, and to even to a rather efficient corpse and trash removal system.

Goblins seem to have been born with an innate understanding of their simple machinery as well.  Any goblin can operate a gun almost straight out of the womb.  Most tinker with their guns adding all sorts of ‘gubbins;’ sights made from old telescopes and old bottles; bayonets from jagged pieces of scrap metal; and extra barrels, some of which even shoot!  The more inventive goblins have made their own guns from the ground up and these ‘gun nutz’ pack enough firepower to put a gun line to shame.  Goblins have nefariously poor aim and the kickback from their supped up guns often sends their tiny green bodies flying with a misfire.  In addition to firearms goblins can, with enough trial and error tinkering, make a still from any pile of scrap they find.  Not all goblins are as technically skilled as the others; some are born with ‘da spark’ and have the ability to build all sorts of half-mad and full-mad inventions.

An individual goblin is not much of a threat.  They can’t hit the broad side of a barn and are more likely to scurry under a stump than take on anything equal or larger to them.  Some of the more friendly, or dumb, goblins may be open for trade but would much rather steal or bully what they want out of their target.  Unlike other more ‘savage’ creatures goblins see outsides not as an immediate threat but as something they can copy and learn from.  The goblin fascination with hats came with early interactions with ship captains; seeing that the captains wore the hats and were in charge, therefore if they wanted to be in charge, they to needed to wear a hat.