Making Goblins Gross Again

Gory Greasy Gangbang? Great!

In the complex ecosystem of fantasy RPG “trash mobs”, goblins are typically positioned somewhere between the giant rats in the tavern cellar tutorial level, and the group of bandits who spend their days milling around a rustic campsite in the woods, waiting for the player to come and put them to the sword.

Across the various creative mediums (tabletop games, video games, television series, written fiction, and so on), goblins have been represented in countless ways, ranging from cowardly sword-fodder that are easily dispatched in the dozens by even novice warriors, to expert guerilla fighters known for their savage cunning and boundless cruelty.

The purpose of this post isn’t to tell you how to use goblins in your own game, I expect that there are many articles already out there that do just that. Instead, I’d like to offer a sort of “origin myth” for goblins, which also serves to address one of my major issues with many fantasy role-playing games.

You see, I’ve always disliked how bloated and over-taxonomised many fantasy bestiaries or “Monster Manuals” are. What I mean by this, is that you might have an entry for “Orcs” (for example), and then you’ll have a dozen seperate entries, outlining variants such as “Snow Orcs” or “Desert Orcs” or “Underwater Orcs” or whatever else has been shoehorned in to fill out the page count. Honestly, I really dislike this kind of padding, I think this sort of “variant” of an existing monster can easily be put together by any halfway-decent referee.

In a similar vein, there is no need to have five hundred distinct monstrous races, all of which fulfill the same exact role in the game. By that, I mean there’s no need to have seperate monster entries for goblins, kobolds, norkers, nilbogs, xvarts, and whatever else. At most, these races are distinguished from one another by a crude gimmick, but for the most part, they are all simply a reskin of the same small, weak, cowardly, and numerous enemy type, which generally exist solely to give the player characters some low-challenge adversaries that they can kill by the score.

With this in mind, I imagined a mythological origin story for the goblin race in my game world, which served to address these dissatisfactions of mine. I imagined that all of the “beast races” of my campaign setting (boar-like orcs, hyena-like gnolls, crocodile-like lizard-men, and so on) had emerged from a common source, that being a Tiamat-like “Mother of Monsters”.

I imagined that at some time in the world’s antediluvian past, all the beasts of the earth, sea and sky had copulated with this primordial deity, with the resulting offspring being the progenitors of what would eventually become the recognisable “monstrous humanoids” that are commonplace in many D&D settings.

Of course, this raises an interesting question. Which creature’s genetic contribution resulted in the birth of the goblin race? The answer to that is simply “all of them”. I envisaged that the “Mother of Monsters” would be an enthusiastic participant of group liaisons, and as such, there would be significant mingling of genetic material (quite the set of euphemisms, I know).

I expect that it is from this “mix-up” that the first goblins were created. I imagine that they weren’t even “born” in the traditional sense, but rather, they were thrust harshly into being, crawling weakly out of a steaming puddle of bodily fluids, arising from an amalgamation of genetic leftovers.

As a result of this uniquely muddled origin, I imagine that the primary “gimmick” associated with the goblin race is that they are tremendously mutable, in the sense that they will physically evolve at a very rapid rate, in order to adapt to whatever environment they find themselves in. I imagine that the short lifespan of a goblin, combined with their great fecundity, would lead to entirely new subspecies emerging within a few years.

For example, if you have goblins living in the snowy mountains, they will grow thick white fur to help camouflage them and protect them from the cold, as well as developing hooves like a mountain goat to help them navigate the alpine terrain. If you have goblins living in a coastal area, they will quickly develop webbed hands and feet to help them swim, as well as a great capacity for holding their breath underwater. I’m sure the readers can speculate as to how goblins would adapt to various other environments, such as deserts, jungles, subterranean caverns, and whatever else.

When the hyper-adaptability of goblins is considered, another question comes to mind. If goblins inhabited a bucolic agrarian region for an extended period, would they gradually morph into a peaceful hobbit-like race? I don’t use halflings or the like in my own games, as I feel like they’re too distinctly Tolkien-coded, but for those of you who do have halflings in your game world, you might consider them having some shared heritage with goblins, I think that would be pretty interesting.

I invite the reader to make use of whatever elements of this invented mythology that you like. You may decide to adopt this mythology wholesale, and have it be an undisputed truth in your own campaign world. Alternatively, you might use parts of this mythology as a local “backwoods superstition”, popular amongst some village rustics, but with no correspondence to what is actually true within the fiction of your game world. Again, I leave this wholly to the discretion of the reader, and I only hope that you have found something of use or interest within this post.

As always, I welcome any discussion and contributions. Feel free to reach out to me on Discord, or on this Substack.