Monkey Goblin

(Image comes from artist Brynn Metheney’s page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Pathfinder’s goblinoids have a certain elasticity about them…and I don’t mean their rubbery skin.  In addition to the usual goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears, Pathfinder’s goblin race exhibits variants that seem to be barely genetically possible, like murds, koblaks, goblin snakes (if you believe some sages), and of course the prehensile-tailed monkey goblins. 

And really that’s all you need to know—that these beasts combine the worst features of goblins with the flexibility and acrobatics of monkeys.  Oh, and they're usually raging barbarians and demon worshippers.  They’re also prone to burning down their own forests, but whatever, details.  Actually the worst part about them is that the tend to live in already dangerous jungles—in Pathfinder’s Golarion, that’s Mediogalti Island.  So after your PCs have escaped the temple of the assassin god, they still have the choice of dealing with a jungle full of dinosaurs, girallons, and weretigers…or facing down these jerks. 

The best part about them?  You can play them as PCs, of course.  That can only go well.

No-Tail was born a freak—a monkey goblin without a tail.  His tribemates have made no secret of the fact that they intend to sacrifice him to Oran-Ochob, the Ape Eater, when he is “ripe”—that is, of age.  Fleeing his tribe, No-Tail attempts to join a band of adventurers, repeating his sob story over and over again to win their affection.  Of course, he fully plans to sacrifice his new friends to Oran-Ochob himself.  Surely the demon will finally grant him his tail then.

A warband of monkey goblins prepares for a great feast.  But the meal lacks a rare delicacy the war chief has demanded.  Fortunately, some adventurers come tromping along just below their arboreal encampment, and the man-things just so happen to have the delicacy on hand—their spellslinger’s familiar.

A monkey goblin witch doctor has always eschewed the demon worship of his shaman rival.  By some unlikely miracle, he manages to commune with daemonic powers instead, and something in the darkness sends him a gift: two cacodaemons.  Barely able to cage the beasts, let alone control or train them, he is desperate to find meals for the ravenous outsiders.  Monkey goblin adventurers may come across the witch doctor capturing goblin whelps to feed to the daemons, while adventurers of other races may find themselves caught in net traps or hunting snares the witch doctor has set to catch big game.

—Inner Sea Bestiary 16

Monkey goblins come from the demented mind of Rob McCreary.  I’m sure I mean “demented” as a compliment.  Pretty sure.  Also, I still like the goblin snake for its connection to Pathfinder’s wild and weird early days.

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Wikkawak

Ages ago, I briefly—God, how short and tidy my entries were back then (#hadalife #notreally)—touched on how Pathfinder refashioned the bugbear in Classic Monsters Revisited.  At the time, said refashioning was pretty dramatic, almost jarring.  Could you really marry Gygax’s furry goblin bugbears with the classic monster-in-the-closet bugbears?  But looking back, it’s a harbinger of Paizo’s modus operandi for a lot of their monster/worldbuilding work: Reconcile the gaming heritage with the mythic heritage for a new cohesive whole, then upgrade.

What I didn’t get to in that entry—and what really made the bugbear come alive for me after my initial skepticism—were the many subraces that this mythical rework freed up the Pathfinder authors to create.  A bugbear that masks itself as a tree or rock like a tanuki?  Sure!  A bugbear that can turn into mud? Why not?  A half-dead bugbear whose victims rise as attic whisperers?  Hells yeah.  

And, of course, a polar bugbear that can quench fires.  Even better, only salt can reveal its tracks—a nice fairy-tale touch!  Now fully statted up in the Bestiary 4, the wikkawak is out there, lurking…

Clan elders discover an igloo painted in blood and only one traumatized survivor.  The forlorn man, who heard his whole family slaughtered out in the dark, is accused of being a murderer, a cannibal, or worse still, the thrall of a wendigo.  As a punishment, he will soon be frozen in a block of ice and sent out to sea (to keep him from running into the sky to join the evil spirit), unless the real culprit, a wikkawak, is found.

Hunter of Midnight is a wikkawak that preys on lone trappers and lumberjacks.  Two black-hearted winter atomies (see Pathfinder Adventure Path #68) serve as his scouts.  Hunter of Midnight and the faeries leave clues behind, if investigators are observant.  In addition to quenching every fire, the monsters smash any saltcellars or cold iron objects, finding them threatening.

Parents in hamlets up and down Falcontal warn their children about Father Snatchclaw, who will come and steal them away if they are naughty before the Solstice.  But “Father Snatchclaw” is really the Clawfeet, a warband of wikkawaks that travel up and down the valley in winter.  Long ago the local mayors worked out a deal with the bugbears, promising no resistance if the warband only preys on designated households—which just so happen to be the dwellings of the poor and undesirable.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 278

Hobgoblin

Hobgoblins don’t need this blog’s help.  Most GMs already know hobgoblins are awesome…and if they don’t, there are a host of supplements—including Classic Monsters Revisited—eager to inform them so.  In fact, they’ve replaced orcs as a lot of GMs favorite military threat—after all, orcs may have hordes, but hobgoblins have armies.  Their disdain for elves and dwarves is well known.  They just as easily adapt to serve the khans of Eastern campaigns as they do the evil overlords of Tolkien-esque settings, and they even have aquatic cousins (koalinths).

So yeah, you know what to do with hobgoblins.  But if you want to weird them up a little, here are a few more ideas for inspiration:

A party of adventures reaches the afterlife, only to discover the City of Ordered Celestis is like nothing their priests have advertized.  While archons and angels still soar overhead, and inevitables perch statue-like at every major intersection, it is hobgoblins that walk the avenues and process—and punish—the many souls that stream through the Gates of Bone and Brass.

Orcs of the void build no ships of their own, prefer to seize the vessels of other races, then warp them to their own vile aesthetic.  Hobgoblins are another story.  Enslaving their goblin kin to mine for ore under the harsh whips of their bugbear cousins, hobgoblins smelt iron and starmetals to create gargantuan warblimps.  The aether dirigibles of the Yellow Legion are the worst: having already undergone their funeral rites, these hobs fight fearlessly in space side by side with the wights of their fallen companions.

On the world of Pylar, hobgoblin tale-drummers know a secret few civilized sages have ever guessed—that the Sundering of the elves and the devolution of the hobgoblins into goblins and bugbears share the same primeval source.  Now a squad of hobgoblin commandos has gone back in time to change history—by halting the Goblin Plague and eradicating the elven nations in one fell swoop.

—Classic Monsters Revisited 22–27 & Pathfinder Bestiary 175

Yeah, hobgoblins are pretty sweet.

Edward Terry’s “Paragons of War; The Ecology of the Hobgoblin” in Dragon 309 was one of the great late-period Dragon Ecologies.  One of the more interesting hobgoblin deities came from Mystara’s GAZ10 The Orcs of Thar: Yagrai, He Who Always Rises.  To be one of his shamans, a hobgoblin first needed to have 12 death scars, earned by being raised from the dead 12 times (…which didn’t make a lot of sense in terms of game mechanics, given that most humanoid shamans couldn’t cast such a spell, but it was an evocative detail nonetheless).

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Goblin Snake

Goblin snakes…could make a bit more sense.  (Okay, so they’re aberrations, but also goblinoids?  Check.  And as far as their origins…well, let’s just say we know more about where baby owlbears come from, unless you’re going with the discount naga angle…)  But they make fun low-level antagonists for just that reason: a talking snake with goblin blood and halitosis has the surprise factor built in.

Through guile and intimidation Hiss, a female goblin snake, and Roarc, an intelligent +1 handaxe, have taken control of a goblin tribe.  The two argue incessantly, especially during combat.

Years of living just downstream from the wizard’s college have granted a goblin snake crude sorcerous powers.  Billing himself as a naga called Death Adder, he lords over the local water moccasins and a few famished river kobolds.  Despite the sad state of his retinue, he should not be underestimated—“Death Adder” resents any creature larger than he is, and the combination of the kobold’s traps, his moccasins’ poison, and the rushing river can be lethal.

The goblin snake Vulp lucked into a malfunctioning ring of flying (the sputtering magical item provides only three rounds of flight) that he wears on his tail.  If cornered in his lair, he hides in an ogre skull and hovers aloft, posing as an undead spirit and using his goblin breath to ward off anyone who comes to close.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path 1 88 & Pathfinder Bestiary 3 132

Goblin

It’s not a long stretch to say that goblins made Paizo.  The goblins that kicked off the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path showed Paizo’s flair for reinventing and reinvigorating the classics, making a familiar race feel new without feeling foreign.  (That trick, as I’m discovering every day I try to write this blog, is not easy).  The rewrite was a masterstroke pure and simple…and for a community already feeling jittery about the impending 4^th Edition, it made the Pathfinder magazine/book hybrid (now Pathfinder Adventure Path) a life preserver.

So what will your goblins be?  The Gremlins-esque dog-slicing, horse-fearing, fire-setting vandals laid out in the Pathfinder books?  The grunts of Krynn’s evil armies?  The toad-faced backstabbers of Mystara’s Broken Lands?  They’re your monsters; go nuts.  (They might even be PCs!)  If you’re feeling stuck, here are a few more ideas…

The goblins of Vrin are a stunted, shriveled race, toiling beneath their human masters in the sewers and boilers rooms of great stone cities that used to be theirs.  In caverns far below that, however, their priests still rule, still perform blood sacrifices, and still pray to strange dark powers for their redemptions.  Their prayers are answered twice over: a pack of barghests arrive in the summoning pentacles, and the first generation of hobgoblins is born…

The Silk Road to Far Lu-Shong is a dangerous one.  The wolf-riding goblins of the steppes are numerous, and while most are simple warriors, some develop into fierce barbarians and rangers.  They are also deeply in touch with the spirit world, with their summoners commanding eidolons of surprising power.

On land, goblins are a nuisance.  Aboard ship they are a threat—able to climb ratlines with ease, hide in tiny bolt-holes, and demolish a ship’s stores with their ravenous appetites.  In space, they can be downright lethal, as a surprising number of them can hide in the crevasses of almost any asteroid with an atmosphere, and their mutinous exploits are notorious for fouling or consuming a voidship’s air envelope.

—Classic Monsters Revisited 16–21 & Pathfinder Bestiary 156

After the reader reaction to yesterday’s post, I realize I should have just called my blog The Daily Gnoll 11 months ago and saved myself a lot of typing.  Thanks for the reblogs!

Backlog alert: Took care of some azatas.  Bralani and brijidine entries are up.

Bugbear

Classic Monsters Revisited did for the rest of the humanoids what the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path had already done for goblins: making too familiar, almost passé monsters exciting and vital again.  Bugbears opened the book, and they were one of the most radical revisions in it.  By returning to the bugbear’s bugaboo roots, Paizo made them creatures that fed on fear—a far cry from the furry thugs they’d been in most incarnations of the world’s oldest role-playing game.  Their more mythical reincarnation may feel alien to veteran players, but the revamp definitely turned an also-ran goblin subrace into a truly exciting threat.

A young noblewoman complains of being stalked in her new estate, which her parents have rented for the city’s fashionable season.  Investigation reveals not only that she has been a target of a bugbear, but also that the house is riddled with secret passages, including some to caverns below the city.

A superstitious ranger fears for his young charges and his sanity, as members of his scouting patrol begin vanishing one by one, and the culprit defies his attempts at tracking it.

A hobgoblin general’s bugbear strike team has gone rogue, looting at random and pursuing fear-addled prey (including other goblinoids) rather than military targets.  After surrounding and surprising an adventuring company that stumbled too close to his encampment, the general offers them a choice: whether to remove his bugbear problem or be dinner.

—Classic Monsters Revisited 4–9 & Pathfinder Bestiary 38

I’ve stuck to the core bugbears for this post, but check out Classic Monsters Revisited for a host of bugbear subraces displaying a variety of intriguing powers and habits.  It’s a must-read if you like new monster variants.