I'm a bad influence.
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Goblinholm
- Clap! Snap! the black crack!
Grip, grab! Pinch, nab!
And down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!
Clash, crash! Crush, smash!
Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!
Pound, pound, far underground!
Ho, ho! my lad!
Swish, smack! Whip crack!
Batter and beat! Yammer and bleat!
Work, work! Nor dare to shirk,
While Goblins quaff, and Goblins laugh,
Round and round far underground
Below, my lad!
-Goblin Song from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Life in the Core can be harsh, far from the glittering lights and false smiles of the cities of the land. Food must be hacked from the ground with months of backbreaking effort, and the spectre of starvation is everpresent. Winters are horrifically cold and long, five months or more of darkness and gloom. Wolves howl their sonatos of bloodlust at the edhes of man's fires. A single unexpected freeze or over-harsh rain can ruin a crop, and endanger a farmer's whole family.
Is it any wonder then that such a family, on the brink of ruin, might opt to sacrifice one member for the betterment of the whole? In some villages, the elders might opt to remove themselves, going to scavenge in the forest and just... not coming back. Children might not survive the winter... smothered in a bed with five others, huddled together for warmth.
Or you might take your little girl or old father to the hollow in the forest. There you will find an old tree-stump, wide around as a millwheel, though cut down at waist height. And just... leave them there.
Legends say that the Goblin-Folk will take them in, and give you luck. Crops will flower, animals grow fat and foal twins, and the winter might seem a little warmer. Just don't think about what happened to those left behind.
Sometimes, if you approach the stump at night, you can hear the hammers of forges below.
Nature: The nature of Earth-Fey of Goblinholm is to work. They labor endlessly in mines, in forges, in workshops of all manner. Goblincraft items are famed throughout the realms of Faerie. Swords, axes, armor, helmets, but also medallions, jewelry, traps, and even stranger things. A sample follows:
- -A goblin sword with a blade sharper than a gossip's tongue. It looks a little dull, a little heavy, poorly balanced and crude, but it is capable of felling a Falkovnian Talon with a single blow.
-A jewelry box that is cunningly constructed by the artisans of Goblinholm. Numerous false bottoms, sliding panels, little needle-traps and retracting blades. More, in fact, then a box of this size could physically hold.
-A thin strand of thread, crafted from cat whiskers. Anything tied to it cannot make a sound, and the little thread cannot be broken even by a rampaging dragon. A child's laughter shatters it forever, however.
No one is quite sure where these objects go. Some remain in Goblinholm, others are gifted to the great Lords and Ladies of Faerie. Yet others find their way to the packs of goblin merchants in the Midnight Market. Sometimes, though, a clever mortal can get ahold of goblin-craft.
Relations with Humans: But it is not for their craft that the goblin-folk are known. For if a mortal is left at Goblinholm overnight, then they become 'property' of the goblins, forever after.
The way the goblin-folk accept a slave is peculiar. One can willingly sleep outside Goblinholm for a week and suffer no more than a chill from sleeping outside. But if a person is brought to the tree-stump by someone with authority over them (usually the paterfamilias of a peasant family), then they are the goblins', and greatly valued.
A slave's lot is an odd one, for it cannot be said that they are mistreated, or even particularly
noticed. Once brought in, the new human is paraded with much fanfare throughout the Goblinholm, and presented to the King with a feast where the slave is treated as a guest of honor.
They are then promptly forgotten.
Sometimes the slaves are given work to do, old women to spin thread or young children to carry things in a forge, but there is always the feeling that this is mere makework. They are fed well, if idiosyncratically (fungi and insects are common threads in the meals). They are never mistreated, though often ignored. They just can never leave.
Provided they avoid the Goblin King. For if they do, they might just disappear.
Appearance: On the surface, the entrance to Goblinholm is cunningly concealed in a massive tree stump in a clearing. The tree stump is false, a construction of goblin-craft and goblin-cunning. When one knocks upon the stump thrice and breaks a single egg upon it, the top slides open, revealing a winding stairwell into the depths of Goblinholm.
Deep, deep into the ground the stairwell curls, until you reach the lair of the goblin-folk. Goblinholm is a series of underground lairs, with tunnels and chambers hewn from the dirt and soil, braced by timbers. The entire lair has a claustrophobic and labyrinthine feel. Roofs are rarely higher than five feet, and only the widest thoroughfares let more than two men travel abreast. Throughout the tunnels, the ringing of forges can be heard, and all of Goblinholm is uncomfortably warm.
A few visitors have compared Goblinholm to a vision of Hell.
The great exception to this rule of low ceilings and narrow passages is the personal lair of the Goblin King. This is a huge hall, as large as a good-sized auditorium, a slope-roofed chamber with treetrunks bracing the roof. Flags of vanquished foes hang from the rafters. Some are the standards of soldiers or nobles, but some are of no heraldic system known in the Core. Three fire pits are located in a triangle in the center of the hall, and at the end is a throne of bone and crystal.
The Denizens of Goblinholm: The goblin-folk are strange folk, twisted, stunted parodies of humanities. They tend to be only three or four feet tall, and their skin tends towards earth-colors (browns, ochres, dark reds). They possess large noses and large ears, and usually have lantern-like eyes of an unhealthy yellow color.
Beyond that, the goblin-folk are a random assortment. Some are fat, either hideously obese or at least pot-bellied. Others are so slender as to be collections of sticks. Few are in between. Some have short, stubby limbs, others have arms that reach to the floor. Many have tusks, or flat molars like a horse, or triple-rows of teeth like sharks.
The clothing of the goblin-folk tends to vary wildly, but likewise tend to extremes. Most dress very poorly, in simple homespun, often poorly fitting. Some, however, dress as well as any Dementlieuse aristocrat, with colorful outfits, vests, jackets, often accented with monocles, pocketwatches, and gentlemen's canes.
The Goblin King: No one is quite sure how many goblin-folk dwell beneath the earth, but all those in Goblinholm acknowledge King Hob. He is a great, gross, obese boar of a goblin, tall as a man and wider than he is tall. He wears food-splattered bearskins and fine, goblin-craft armor, though King Hob is so vast in size that he barely moves, carried everywhere upon a litter. In his past, King Hob claims to have been a mighty warlord, and certainly the dozens of captured battle-flags in his hall bears it out. Now, though, King Hob is merely a great glutton of a goblin, a hideous monster of excess...
...except when he isn't. For sometimes, a young man wanders Goblinholm, and he too answers to King Hob, though he waves off the 'king' part with a self-conscious smile. A polite, handsome youth with golden-blond hair dressed in the clothing of a young scholar or student, Hob never says anything threatening, is always friendly and personable. One just can't shake the feeling that he's laughing at some massive joke behind his facade of manners, a joke at
your expense.
Of course, his friendliness has a cost. People who talk to King Hob sometimes disappear, dragged away by the goblin-folk... somewhere. But every time this happens, the great, gross goblin is seen a little less, and the young scholar a little more...
Defeating the Goblin-Folk: As with all Faerie, it is better not to have to fight King Hob and his crew. The goblin-folk are friendly enough, and if a stranger can find them then they are willing to deal with them, provided they don't try to escape with a slave. The goblin-folk are born wheelers and dealers, and for the right price, anything is possible... even a slave's freedom. Of course, what price would satisfy King Hob is a question all its own.
Experienced adventurers may thing of goblins as something weak, pathetic, to be destroyed by any competent warrior. Such visitors are in for a
very rude surprise. The goblin-folks are skilled strategicians and cunning engineers, using fiendish traps to hold foes at bay, using the tunnels and their size to their advantage, presenting foes with masses of spears and hails of crossbow fire.
Moreover, the Goblin King is a lethal foe. As the Warlord, King Hob may be slow and fat, but one blow from his stone morningstar can shatter rock, and he can shrug off sword blows and arrow wounds with his vast layer of blubber. As the young scholar, Hob fights with a rapier, as a duelist, all quick strikes and rapid evades. In either form, he fights well, and uses a double-handful of sinister spells to aid him, summoning fogs, causing tunnel-collapses, or similar.
Fighting all the way through Goblinholm is likely to be suicide without a very good plan or a great many allies.
There's a trick, of course, if you know it. King Hob, you see, has an obsession. The eggs of a goose. Should one be presented to him, then the Goblin King
must have it, crawling over his own troops to reach it, ignoring all else until he cracks it and sups on the contents. It has to be specifically the egg of a goose. Why a goose? Who knows?
DM Notes: King Hob and Goblinholm can be an interesting challenge for lower level PCs, or particularly benevolent PCs. The obvious choice is for the PCs to get involved trying to rescue someone given up to the goblin-folk. Perhaps a farmer has second thoughts, or perhaps the PCs are in Goblinholm for another reason (directed there by someone from the Midnight Market to purchase weapons, perhaps?) when they find out.
Of course, something to remember is that every slave has been given up, sold away once already. And the goblins are not cruel masters, if passing strange. Will they even
want to return?
Alternatively, on a grander scale, they might need to stop King Hob's transformation, perhaps as a favor for another Faerie. Fighting all of Goblinholm's forces is likely impractical, so this would be an adventure of clever maneuvering and politicking, to find his secret and somehow destroy it. What's the secret? Well, that's up to you to figure out... an old ritual, perhaps, or a secret artifact, or a bargain with a creature even older and viler than King Hob.
Combat Notes: The basic goblin-folk are, well, goblins. Something to remember, however, is that goblins do
not have an Intelligence penalty. So they can be smart. Look up Tucker's Kobolds for an idea of how Goblinholm's goblins should fight, but basic goblins from 3E or 4E work stat-wise, perhaps with more emphasis on spellcasters.
The Goblin King, on the other hand, can work as a goblin or human with a
lot of class-levels. The Warlord-type has a huge Con and Str and lots of Fighter or Barbarian levels, while the Scholar has rogue or better yet, swashbuckler levels. In either case, a few SLAs are appropriate.
In 4E terms, Hob is an Solo Soldier or an Solo Skirmisher, though PCs should really have fought at least one, possibly more encounters with goblins before him. In either case, he has several powers such as conjuring a sickness inducing cloud or causing cave-ins. Also emphasis on high survivability and high manueverability, respectively.
Thoughts anyone?