• Monster of the Week

Welcome to Goblins.

Goblins were added because they are one of the consistently most popular monsters in D&D style fantasy games. I placed them as the 'battle ready nuisance' that sits in order between kobolds and orcs. Right now I've placed goblins as more difficult than kobolds. This is a D&D trope. You'd rather fight a kobold than a goblin.

Kobolds are more like cowardly bandits, they're stronger in groups. Goblins are dangerous alone or in pairs because they are driven to their cause, possibly by devotion to a sort of goblin-king type figure.

I am considering making goblins a bit weaker – more like a labyrynth goblin. Currently the 'labyrynth golbin' is essentially a Croky monster. But for now, if you see a Goblin early on, make sure you have come prepared!

NetHack treats goblins as the weakest member of the orc family (o, gray, level 0, 1d4 weapon, speed 6, AC 10, chaotic −3). They have infravision, pick up items, and are genocidable. They are often among the first things you meet; they commonly carry an orcish dagger or helm. Peaceful to chaotic PCs. They count as orcs for Sting and Orcrist. Their encyclopedia entry is the Hobbit paragraph: cruel, wicked, bad-hearted, clever makers of ugly useful things, good miners when they bother, usually filthy.

There used to be a unique Goblin King who was the Elf quest nemesis (guarding the Palantir of Westernesse) until the Elf role was removed in 3.3.0 when race became a separate choice. Variants still have him. NetHack’s goblin is Tolkien’s goblin/orc mashup wearing a D&D name. D&D itself split the two: orcs are Gruumsh’s people; goblins are Maglubiyet’s underclass. That split is one of the ways D&D stopped being a Tolkien clone.

While AD&D's split into “Maglubiyet's people” is interesting, in popular culture Henson and Bowie's depiction of a Goblin King and Goblin Castle did more to cement the idea of goblins in the mind of fantasy genre players than anything else. The “Goblin Castle/Goblin King” zone immediately appeared in MUDs and other games; codebases like Merc, Envy, and ROM shipped with variations of the zone.

I think what made Labyrynth stick is that it did not make D&D goblins prettier. It respected the trope; it put a face on what everyone was thinking and showed how it could be fresh and exciting. It gave a depth to goblins and it gave them a purpose; their King. Who even he himself was full of depth and character.

The film locked in the baby-stealing motif for a mass audience. D&D goblins kidnap for slaves and food. Labyrinth goblins kidnap because a girl said the wish out loud. That comes from older folklore, but the movie is how millions of people learned it.

The lasting impact is that if you drop a Goblin King and a Goblin Castle into a campaign, most players will assume it's Jareth without thinking. That assumption is so hard to shake because Labrynth seems to define what Goblins are out of giving the original legends such a charming face.

Jareth. The “goblin king who is not a goblin” defines goblins moreso than the goblins give purpose to Jareth as their king. Brian Froud designed him as Sarah’s inner collage: Heathcliff, Rochester, a leather-jacket rebel, a German knight with “worms of death” in the armor, a ballet dancer, and a pop star whose crystal-topped scepter is a visual microphone. Bowie played him as a reluctant, vain, temperamental rock-star landlord who inherited a kingdom of goblins and rules it under duress—then becomes obsessed with the girl who walked in. What this really adds to goblins is depth.

That is a different archetype from Maglubiyet. Maglubiyet is a conqueror-god who broke other gods and drafts the dead into Acheron. Jareth is a faerie-lord *Demon Lover*: he offers the dream (the ball, the crystals, “just fear me, love me, do as I say”) at the price of a child and a self. Henson said out loud that Bowie was there to embody adult sexuality and the disturbing side of growing up. The film flopped in theaters and then became a VHS-and-TV cult object, so a generation of kids met “Goblin King” as *that* man first.

In a way this makes goblins something that they aren't in a game like NetHack or AD&D and I think that's great.