Saturday, September 5, 2020

What are goblins? d102 answers

Lots of things are goblins. Kobolds are goblins. Xvarts are goblins. Bullywugs are goblins. Grimlocks and kuo-toa and grungs and redcaps and boggles are almost goblins. Orcs certainly aren't goblins (unless you're Tolkien), but they might be related and mutualistic (if you're Warhammer). (Of course, since Warcraft III, orcs aren't orcs either, but seem to be some sort of dwarves. Gnolls are the principal orcs now.)

I wanted to see what I could come up with. Other people's ideas are on here too because I liked them but needed to write them down to get them out of my head so I could think of different ones.

Roll a d102. Goblins are:

  1. Dropped water-storage leaves from an awful succulent.
  2. Actually raccoons. (From Fists of Cinder and Stone.) (Or lemurs, or possums, or ...)
  3. Degenerated humanoids - you become a goblin by being around them and acting like them. (From Goblin Punch.)
  4. Like or(c|k)s, a stage in the life-cycle of a complicated fungus. (From Warhammer.)
  5. Kidney stones from a god.
  6. The same thing as gnomes - they're only kept different because two gods are fighting over who gets to own them.
  7. The immune cells of dungeons. (Probably from somewhere else, but I forget where.)
  8. Children who are abandoned as too burdensome to feed.
  9. The literal embodiment of fear and revulsion.
  10. The occasional and random offspring of goats, accepted as a fact of life by goatherds and killed if found before they can run away (but they can run away within minutes of birth).
  11. What happens to bull testicles if not burned (or eaten) after castration.
  12. Dust, cobwebs, and grit that gathers in the corners of forgotten places, come to life. (This feels like I ran across it elsewhere, too.)
  13. An allelopathic defense mechanism of certain trees to fight off attackers.
  14. Droplets of a god's blood.
  15. Part of the life cycle of a dungeon or cave cactus; they congregate together because they often forget what their purpose is.
  16. The first servant species of a god, abandoned now that they made better servants.
  17. What gnomes look like when born. (Or when they get old.)
  18. A servant species invented by a wizard to keep their crazy demiplane clean - whoops, they got out.
  19. What sprouts from a murderer's grave (or corpse).
  20. The leftover hanging around after a wizard casts Unseen Servant.
  21. A devolution from the warlike orcs (or elves). (From Tolkien, obvs.)
  22. Orcish travel rations. (Warhammer-ish again.)
  23. The tragic heroes of the story, a fact which nobody else can acknowledge.
  24. Escapees from a simulation, who had been designed to stand in for the greed of humans.
  25. Organ donor stock.
  26. Godshatter. (Vinge's original idea, or literally shards of a god.)
  27. Operators of a massive long destroyed machine. (On reflection, similar to Goblin Punch's halflings.)
  28. Sentient chew toys.
  29. Commoditized, customizable servant species.
  30. Magpies (or pigeons?), somehow.
  31. Chaos - the vines climbing over the stonework that eventually pulls a building down.
  32. The stagehands of reality, moving about unremarked to set the next scene.
  33. Minor fairies, as thoughtless as they are cruel. (Closer to folklore, obviously.)
  34. The only creatures that can safely handle gold.
  35. The only hirelings dumb - or desperate - or weird - enough to work for dungeoneers.
  36. Components of the ur-machine; when enough of them gather in one place, reality shakes. (More tenuous, but still Warhammer.)
  37. Clumps of seaweed left on the shore by the tide, their bones driftwood shaped by the waves.
  38. Every dog that goes missing, who eventually turn up again, eager to feel and repulsed by the light, yearning for but doomed to rend and gnaw at human warmth.
  39. Fastidious little creatures, yet remorseless killers, willing to murder anything smaller for sport, and then to curl up near a fire, satisfied with a good day's work - really, a lot like a cat.
  40. Children's toys; they have a fondness for knives bigger than their heads.
  41. The basic unit of computation. (Maybe something like Seven Billion Humans?)
  42. Just, skaven. They're deffo goblins. (From, uh, Warhammer.)
  43. Escaped clones from a Prestige-esque traveling magic show; they probably ate the guy controlling it. (Um, I guess spoilers for The Prestige, whoops.)
  44. The original progenitors of technical society - they are Prometheus, and you can bet they're resentful.
  45. Clone soldiers who escaped their creator, their madcap individuality a desperate denial of their enforced uniformity. (A gobbo take on the Clone Wars guys. And I guess the Unsullied.)
  46. It is from their dreams that our world is woven - for proof, look to its unfairness and cruelty and unpredictability.
  47. Mischievous little fae, their antics (barely) tolerated by their noble cousins.
  48. Somehow, the most convenient form of currency.
  49. Every monster is really a bunch of goblins in a costume. (Dark Lord of Derkholm vibes here.)
  50. Ogre turds.
  51. Packing peanuts.
  52. Only ever found as trireme oar slaves for the reavers that hound the shoreline settlements.
  53. Eusocial honey-producing bipeds. (Is this an Arnold K thing too?)
  54. Made in the image of God.
  55. Animate thorns from a freaky rosebush.
  56. Demons from a pocket hell, unspeakably glad to be free from bondage.
  57. Actors in an extradimensional play, and their deaths here are simply their cues to come onstage.
  58. Bred as sacrificial victims.
  59. A wildly popular new indulgence - you grind them up and snort them.
  60. Condemned to eternal reincarnation until they attain enlightenment (which nobody else can achieve).
  61. The result of a curse placed upon the fields of a gourd farmer who once insulted a disguised goddess by not offering her a drink of watered melon-wine as she passed by his house, as was the custom in that country.
  62. What you get if you keep hacking off troll limbs without burning them.
  63. Counterfeit squirrels.
  64. The shed skins of lizards and snakes.
  65. The only source of a key component of health potions.
  66. Kept by rich nobles and used to hunt small, deadly animals.
  67. Anything that isn't an elf.
  68. What you become if your bank balance dips below 100gp.
  69. Anyone below 3rd level.
  70. Obsessed with gossip and drama amongst the "big folk."
  71. Assembled out of the scraps and leftovers from the meat foundries.
  72. Caught in a struggle between their sentience and their inexorable migratory instincts.
  73. The descendants of opportunistic scavengers and pack hunters who first crept closer to human refuse pits millennia ago and were slowly selectively bred and domesticated. (What? No, dogs don't exist, they're still wolves, goblins got there first.) (Why else would Paizo's goblins be so neotenous?)
  74. House spirits, fickle and silly but ultimately genial.
  75. Healing potions. You gotta bite the head off to get the benefit.
  76. Responsible for picking the choicest tea leaves.
  77. Human children before they age out of it at age 10.
  78. An alchemist's invention for reclaiming metal from waste material - they accrete lumps of it beneath their skin, sorted by element.
  79. The only creatures for whom gunpowder works.
  80. Both particle and wave - why do you think they're so good at tunneling?
  81. The traditional costume of devotees of the green thief god during the annual mystery plays.
  82. Due to a curious loophole, immune to the divine consequences of burglary and theft.
  83. What blooms when you plant pig teeth in good soil and water them lovingly.
  84. The discarded tails of lizards when they escape from predators.
  85. The motile egg sacs of huge freshwater turtles, driven to find new water sources and drown in them, spawning a new turtle.
  86. Just statues, which definitely do not ever move, ever.
  87. What springs out of the corpse of a wizard who has mastered a certain secret spell and who will reincarnate if the damn things would just all sit still in one place for ten minutes.
  88. A wizard's homunculus, created to perform all unpleasant bodily functions for him.
  89. A rain god's favored children.
  90. A wizard's homunculus, created to experience all earthly enjoyments for him, so that he can reach enlightenment via self-denial.
  91. A collective entity that together occupies the throne. (One's the king's eyes, one his voice, one his ears, one his ... you know what, never mind.)
  92. The source of a rare and delectable tea, brewed from their toenail clippings.
  93. All refractions of the same creature, which exists in 19 dimensions.
  94. Gigantic (by their standards) bio-mecha piloted by hyperintelligent ants.
  95. Exclusively hallucinated by starving and lost dungeoneers, the uniformity of their descriptions a matter of minor academic interest.
  96. Trellises for the husbandry of exotic fungi.
  97. A single entity named Jake, who will remember everyone he meets, and look at you quizzically if you ask him why there are 8 of him in the room, or how he can be here when you stabbed him in the gizzard three dungeons ago.
  98. Cheerful and tireless beasts of burden, if you can just collect enough of them to carry or pull anything of appreciable weight.
  99. Impersonating dwarves (2 or 3 goblins in a big cloak, lumpy beard, and godawful accent), since everybody treated dwarves pretty well and apparently nobody has realized that they died out years ago.
  100. The physical manifestation of each time someone sins.
  101. Not recognized as food by most dungeon dwellers, so they can come and go mostly freely.
  102. Just a weird shared cultural hallucination - during childhood, everyone has a goblin friend only they can see, but you grow out of it.

I wrote these up in groups of six (hence 102) on my phone over the course of a couple of months at work. I thought it'd be fun to follow some advice I saw in a comment somewhere (ah, found it) - basically, to write down ten ideas on a theme, throw them away, write down ten more, throw those away, and then you'd start to get creative (presumably once you'd flushed out the retreads).

But to my eye, just examining entries of my own, there's not an obvious gradient of quality or creativity in this list. (I make no claims about the absolute level of either, just their derivatives...) I like the idea of goblins being water-storage leaves more or less just as much as I like the idea of them being some sort of sentient packing peanut. So I think the advice may be as dubious as most general advice given to creative types is.

(It wasn't until I was polishing this up that I ran across Konsumterra's recent d100 goblinoid rumors post. (There is some absolute gold there, check it out.) I think we're aiming at different things - his post is an actually usable rumor table that seems to work within a single consistent world, while this one is mostly half-baked setting seeds masquerading as a table. In any case, the world can't be poorer for one more goblin table, right?)

The exercise was fun, but felt like a bit of a slog at times. I think there are probably a dozen or so good ideas here, and I might try and write them up in more detail someday.

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