My Games

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Goblins

Goblins (1d20)Description
1. Mirage GoblinsWhimsical creatures inhabiting a plane parallel to reality. No matter how far one travels, no matter how wonderful their world may seem, they exist always, tantalizingly, just on the horizon.
2. Forget-me-not GoblinsBlue or pink-skinned creatures with poisonous scorpion stingers and petal-like manes. They are not immune to their own venom, and accidental goblin-slaughter and suicide is not uncommon. They have low self-esteem and must receive praise for everything they do, deserved or not, and to deny them their recognition can be fatal.
3. Chattering GoblinsCovered in dentate armour, with mouths full of large, chattering and gnashing teeth. Their armour, despite providing protection, is sensitive to the touch. They are nervous creatures, put on edge by even a gentle breeze.
4. Dissonance GoblinsThey reject all religion, science, and philosophy. They rely solely on heuristics and never analytics or evidence-based reason. They engage in repetitive, ritualistic behaviors for seemingly no reason. They lack imagination or abstract thinking skills. They never change their mind. Many of their beliefs and behaviors are contradictory, and no amount of arguing with them will get them to acknowledge this fact, even if they demonstrably understand the arguments being made.
5. Hate GoblinsFat, orange-skinned creatures with tiny appendages. For countless generations they have thrived on the riches acquired by their ancestors, which they have leveraged towards unearned and ineffective economic and political influence. Their words are mostly nonsensical, but empathic meaning can be inferred from their tone. In most cases, the empathic meaning is hate. They are hate-mongers, full of impotent rage. As the world advances, rather than facing their increasing irrelevance and making any effort to adapt, they reject progress and double down on their meaningless hate.
6. Dysmorphia GoblinsCreatures with exaggerated features- lanky, squat, weird bulges, eyes just a little too far apart. Their appearance changes based on the physical insecurities of those around them.
7. Viscera GoblinsTranslucent down to the circulatory system and organs. Their internals bring to mind raw and bloody steak, bacon, sausage, and other commonly consumed meat products. Villages near viscera goblins often lean towards vegetarianism.
8. Atavism GoblinsA degenerate goblin-like species, the inbred progeny of the royalty of a once glorious civilization. Very rarely, one will be born resembling its ancestors; a celestial, demi-god-like being. Most live short lives of pain, poisoned by their own tainted blood or driven to destruction by their jealous and dysfunctional society, but an even rarer few rise above these circumstances.
9. Twilight GoblinsBright, fluorescent, every slight bodily function or movement is audible and grating. Nocturnal creatures who enjoy the company of others. Will convince you to stay out for one more drink, to work for just another hour, to express your every racing thought all throughout the night. Fun in an indulgent way, but most people find the lifestyle unsustainable.
10. Panic GoblinsBody of a wolf, face like a lemur with the jaws of a hyena, curled goat-like horns, covered in oily black fur. Semi-intelligent goblins bred as soldiers, hunters, and police. They have excellent climbing, stalking, and striking skills, and work tactically as a pack. They are excellent hunters, but also herders, able to induce controlled panic and funnel crowds. Wild panic goblins lack discipline and are notorious for playing deadly tricks on unwitting victims like wandering gangs in a war-torn land.
11. BlackcapsCraft machinists, intelligent but myopic. They are creative and expressive solely for the purpose of personal gain or sowing mischief, but can't see the bigger picture of the consequences of their short-sighted actions. Their blood is like a sludgy diesel that leaks from their pores and orifices. They have no brain, the sludge is a distributed neural network. They have no skullcap, but a continual combustion force projects from the top of their head like an oily, inky, black, upside-down funnel.
12. Anthro GoblinsThey revere humans as gods, seeing themselves and other goblins as poor reflections of facets of humanity. Unfortunately, the traits they identify with humans are their size, ferocity, and materialism. Anthro goblins have bred themselves to be human-like but exaggerated in their features.
13. Genocide GoblinsSome anthro goblins practice "dark arts"- killing other goblins to absorb their power. Killing a family, a village, a city, an entire people, provides non-linear increases in power. The more goblins they kill, the larger and more monstrous they become, from hulking brutes to titans.
14. Singularity GoblinsSome anthro goblins are human-passing or close to it, and their goal in life is to trick humans into mating with them. These hybridized half-goblins are often the most exceptional and creative machinists, as the singularity of human and nature. Their machines are thought to contain a nature unto themselves; a fey, djinn, ghost, or tsukumogami.
15. Ru GoblinsThese goblins do not build machines, they build themselves as machines. Sometimes grinding themselves and re-composing their meat as golems and biomachines. In other cases the machine is abstract, a consciously designed bureaucracy of goblins who identify only as the whole.
16. AnonygoblinsThe anonygoblins have no faces, and their bodies are each identical. Their consciousnesses are not fixed to their bodies, and they regularly exchange bodies between themselves. They avoid expressing personal traits, and in fact have made themselves quite homogeneous in belief and behavior.
17. Knife GoblinsMasters of the knife- specifically in the trading of them. They revere the power of the knife; the more knives a knife goblin can acquire and sell (specifically to other knife goblins), the more powerful they become. The king of the knife goblins is demi-god-like in power, but his power is contingent on the belief in the power of the knife by the knife goblins.
18. Deference GoblinsSexual, masturbatory, orgiastic beings. They do not engage in these activities for the pleasure or art of it, but nervously and compulsively, as a way of avoiding other obligations. They do not seek sustenance or engage in any survival skills. Those who join The Orgy eventually transform into them- this is their only means of reproduction. Unfortunately, The Orgy can be a tantalizing thing.
19. Binata sa punsoBorn in the foundation of buildings, particularly grand buildings using modern techniques or modern architectural sensibilities. They struggle to fit into the world, always thinking too far ahead, but those who treat them with care and respect, and attempt to learn from them, often benefit in the future, as the world conforms to the binata. Those who reject, offend, or exploit the binata, especially the middle-aged or elderly, are cursed to be forgotten in their eldest and most vulnerable years.
20. ScapesatyrGoat-men sculpted from gold. Whimsical, magical, musical, mischievous, selfish, somewhat a-moral but mostly well-meaning creatures. They are always the life of the party, always the best lay, and always able to bring someone out of a funk. However, it is impossible to get anything done around them, and those who embrace them will transform into animals, fey, or other beings of nature. As a result, powerful institutions turn their people against the scapesatyrs, often undeservedly.

2 comments:

  1. I find these Phantasmos versions of fantasy tropes to be so much more metaphysically fun than any entry in a monster manual. Like Mirage Goblins: they only need to exist to pose some serious, grand, unsettling problems to the PCs about the nature of reality. Or the Genocide Goblins, now all I can think about is if a GenoGoblin formed a religion and indoctrinated all the other goblins on a continent, and then sacrificed them all to grow into a moon-sized ULTRAgoblin

    Or perhaps in the ancient days there was only the ULTRAgoblin, but its jealous foes split it apart into the millions of goblins we know of today, and only a few retained some shreds of memory and scheme and plot to merge the goblins once more...

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  2. I like the contraction of Genocide Goblins to GenoGoblins haha. It's funny, your first idea for the ULTRAgoblin and a cult-like GenoGoblin is kind of in-line with what I did with the Knife Goblins, but I think makes total sense here too. I think as with the elves, there is some overlap where some of these entries could be combined into one, I just wanted to discretize them for the sake of brevity. The second idea is a really cool take on it too, I'll need to consider these, thanks!

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