Tag: goblins

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Goblins

The eggs are laid unfertilized. They’re wet and soft-shelled, about the size of a grapefruit and slightly bean shaped. If they’re fertilized within a week, the shell hardens. They hatch in about a year. Unfertilized, they dry out in about a month.

The horror stories of goblindom often involve female goblins watching their eggs dry out and die.

Dread, warlord of Celephias, broke open eggs and killed developing ‘wetlings’ after the siege of Bloodharvest. This horror has no meaningful equivalent in goblin history. Thousands of goblins died at Bloodharvest, and tens of thousands of eggs, for it was one of the great nurseries and hatcheries of ancient Whitehall. Those were colocated with their governments. Dread destroyed them all.

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Goblin names

Goblins in general have a language more devoted to function over form than most human tongues. Names of places and things are often concatenations of nouns or simple phrases. Phonetics are not as commonly used. Personal names are occasionally pure phonetics as well as shortened phrases that no longer have intrinsic meaning, but for places and things, this is uncommon. The separation between names and titles in non-people is slight in most goblin tongues.

Bloodharvest itself was named so because it was what goblins call a prison and what humans would call an extermination camp. The prisoners were inflicted with needless cruelty in the form of toil. While literal efforts were devoted to digging, the end goal of such labor was death of the prisoners. Their blood was harvested.

Complexity arose as it does in all aspects of goblin society by the effects of Krat. All fights are one on one in Krat. Astrologamage Elegy found no humans or elves in Bloodharvest other than Aehr’s comrades, but a great many goblin prisoners. These prisoners could not be executed explicitly, for in Krat they could fight their captors one on one until death or freedom. The combination of beating, starvation, and the perils of unsafe digging itself executed the prisoners instead.

The Temple of Luminance is another goblin location. That is the location’s name, and it is important to keep in mind that the distinction between ‘Temple of Luminance’ as a proper noun and temple as a title with luminance a modifier simply isn’t a strong distinction. Another location called the Temple of Thunder is not necessarily closer connection to the Temple of Luminance than two men, George Phillips and George Smith, are because they share a given name.

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Goblins 1

The average adult goblin is eight to nine feet tall, 2.4-2.7m, and weighs between one hundred and seventy and three hundred pounds, 77-136kg. There is little to no significant difference in height or weight between males and females. While female goblins do have slightly more developed pelvic areas, this is small compared to individual morphological variance.

In coloring the typical goblin has dark, muted skin without bright pigmentation. Gray, blue, and brown are common, and individuals are rarely monochromatic. Exceptions are often due to albinism or melanism. Skin colors do not vary based on morphological position, except as dictated by exposure, injury, and growth. Like humans goblins tan, and outdoor goblins will frequently have darker coloring on their heads, shoulders, and arms. Blue pigmentation often turns blackish-gray as it darkens, but gray and brown both remain.

Albino goblins are typically killed in infancy. This does not seem to be related to mythological or religious reasons. Goblins exhibiting melanism are often indistinguishable from dark-pigmented goblins save by professional inspection, an infrequent phenomena.

Goblins possess two arms and two legs. Legs and arms are slightly longer than proportional human limbs by ten to twenty percent. Some clans (Throathurters primarily and lineages) have elongated fingers as much as three times human lengths and fifty to one hundred percent longer proportionally. The Throathurter clan combines this with augmented grip strength due to sexual preferences. Grip strength is considered attractive to the point of being a primary sexual differentiator. Other clans usually do not, and suffering from reduced manual leverage have weaker hands than humans. Goblin feet are large and flat. Stonefoots do not have especially hard feet but often have thicker sole-skin.

The goblin head is a large organ. Eyes are deep-set and dark colored with large pupils. Ears are slightly lower than human normal, increased in size, but limp. Goblins are not known for being particularly aural, with typical variance between individuals comparable to humanity. The tusks or fangs are six large teeth similar to human canines. Two primary pairs of teeth, one pair top jaw, one pair bottom, mesh outside the incisors and protrude between the lips. These fangs do not serve predatory purposes typically. Their function is to maintain a parting of the lips to allow breathing. Smaller fangs on the bottom jaw may partially interface outside the upper fangs. The layout is small bottom-jaw fang 1, large upper-jaw fang 2, large bottom-jaw fang 3, incisors top and bottom jaws, large bottom-jaw fang 4, large upper-jaw fang 5, small bottom-jaw fang 6. The ‘clicking’ of the fangs is an inherent part of goblin language. It is sometimes written as a click, and often a part of how goblins pronounce the human sound T.

The goblin nose is located in the center of the roof of the mouth. It has two nostrils, though they meet in the nasal cavity only a quarter inch, <1cm, from the mouth cavity. They are separated by an intrusion of the palate.

Goblins are fully capable of taste but have reduced smell compared to humans. Function is similar, though the morphological constraint of the nostrils being internal should not be underestimated. (The common superstition that goblins smell as well as canines does not seem to be supported at all, and author speculates it is caused by the sound of sniffing created when a goblin attempts to use scent identification. Audible sniffing may imply great capability in this field. Author reiterates this is speculation, but included due to frequent appearance in human culture.)