Ultimately, it's intended to result in a non-omniscient but generally accurate IC guide - not everything in it is going to turn out to be able to correct, but I hope that after ref revision I will end up with something where I can say "everything in here has solid supporting evidence observable IC", and where it is usable as an OOC reference if people want to; I specifically am aiming for "this is a moderately authoritative reference about the currently local goblins, although not necessarily about all goblins everywhere" rather than just "this is one person's opinion, if someone else comes along and says goblins are blue, have three legs and need to eat babies to live then that's just as valid an opinion".
Anyhow, here's what I've written so far. I'm putting it up in this early stage so that if there's anything people don't want to be true about goblins then they can point it out.
--Jacob
Galwyn's guide to goblins
Introduction
For the past months, I have been dwelling amongst the goblins of the fens around Grantabrugge, as a missionary of St John and latterly – I flatter myself – as a friend. In this time, I have gotten to know these much-maligned (sadly, not entirely unjustly) uruks much better than most humans or elves ever do, and I hope that the publication of my observations may be both of interest to scholars and of practical use to those who live near goblins.
It is worth noting that the observations contained herein are based solely on a close observation of one tribe, the Great Willow (of which I am proud to say I have been adopted as an honourary member), and more distant observations of the other local tribes (primarily the Brown Bank, Big River, Kestrelwood, Spearchucker, Black Oak and Nightrunner), together with second-hand information gleaned from discussions with members of those tribes. I cannot vouch for how accurate they are as far as goblins from other areas are concerned – it seems reasonable to assume that they may exhibit as much or more cultural variation as humans do.
Goblin Tribes
Goblins mostly live in loose tribes. While the goblins within a tribe frequently squabble and infight, they care passionately about the superiority of their tribe to other local tribes. An external threat or challenge will usually not result in a goblin tribe unifying and pulling together, but an external threat or challenge from another goblin tribe almost always will – goblins hate to be second best to another tribe.
Tribes normally range in size from a dozen to upwards of two hundred. Occasionally a particularly strong, charismatic, intelligent or magically gifted goblin will succeed in declaring himself either “chief” or “king” (a goblin who claims that he rules the others because he is inherently better – more magically powerful, cleverer, picked by fate or whatever – is likely to call himself king, while one who claims that he rules because he will beat anyone who challenges him is likely to call himself chief, but functionally the two titles are largely interchangeable) of a tribe, but usually there will be a rough pecking order with numerous individuals at the top of it, and decisions – when they are made – will be based upon which of those can sway the most goblins to their point of view.
I know of slightly more cases of female than male chiefs having arisen, but apparently kings are almost always male – a female goblin with aspirations to lead will almost always base her rule on current politics rather than claims of inherent superiority, it seems. I believe Goblins queens have occurred – many of the goblins' best-known folk tales deal with them – but they are very rare indeed, and by all accounts almost always extremely exceptional individuals, and I know of none at present.
Goblin chief- or kingship, while rare, is usually fairly stable – that they could become a chief isn't an idea that occurs to most goblins, and so if it is accepted that so-and-so is chief, they are likely to remain so until either they die, a particularly egregious error of judgement or misfortune undermines their authority. On those occasions when a goblin chief dies or is replaced, their tribe usually undergoes a period of massive infighting and instability, as an entirely new pecking order is fought out, and the goblins realise that running the tribe is not as easy as the chief made it look.
Tribes with a chief tend to be unusually successful in warfare or competition with other tribes. On the other hand, assassinating the chief of a rival tribe is an achievement any goblin would be proud of.
Within a tribe, goblins live in families, and loose alliances exist between extended families – the smallest tribes usually consist of a single extended family, while most tribes will have several family-based factions within them.
Within a tribe, individuals will be constantly struggling for social status. In general, mates work together as pairs, and relatives may sometimes support relatives, but beyond that, goblin social life is one vast all-against-all melee. Respect can be attained through demonstrating mastery of a useful skill – fishing or other forms of food-gathering, theft, magic, warfare, hut-building, alchemy, or anything else that enables you to make yourself useful to other goblins – or through putting one over on your opponents – a goblin who can make her rival look silly, or steal one of his prized possessions, will gain great kudos. Goblin power struggles are fairly vicious, and murders are not uncommon.
Family Life
Goblins – at least the ones I have met - do not use the word “marriage”, (the word they mostly use is “mate”) but are generally faithful to their mates (cuckoldry is a common source of mockery when it does occur). Goblin courtship and pair bonding is closely tied to impressing the other goblin with your competence in one, or preferably several, skills – to attract a mate, you have to prove to them them that you can do something useful for them – and a goblin who is crippled or otherwise becomes useless while their mate remains healthy is likely to be abandoned. Most goblins are monogamous, but exceptionally skilled or talented goblins may attract multiple mates – it appears more common for men than women, but I know cases of both.
Direct incest is taboo, but goblins most frequently choose their own cousins as mates, increasing the extent to which a large tribe will divide up into several extended-family-based factions. Matings between prominent members of different factions always make for an exiting few months in a goblin tribe – either the two factions will ally, or they will come to blows, and either way the social structure of the tribe is likely to go through a period of turmoil.
Were it not for accident, murder or injury, goblins would naturally live for 30-40 years. However, accident, murder and injury are so common that any goblin over the age of 20 is reckoned an elder.
Goblins children grow fast, able to walk within a couple of months of their birth, and to speak fluently within a year. Goblin parents raise their children until about the age of 4 or 5 and a goblin is considered an adult by about 8.
Pregnancy among goblin women lasts for about 5 months, I am told. Childbirth is considerably less traumatic than among humans or elves (usually – one of the worst nights of my life was spent assisting a goblin mother undergoing what I discovered afterwards is known as a “breech birth”, eventually being forced to hack the babies from her stomach with a hunting knife and use the power of St John to keep her alive afterwards; not something I ever wish to have to attempt again), and the birth of twins much more frequent than among humans or elves, although triplets or more are rare.
There is clearly a special emotional bond between goblin twins, but I do not fully understand it yet – goblin twins steal from, fight and bully with one another with if anything more alacrity than other goblins, but no goblin would ever dream of murdering its twin. I believe there may also be a supernatural element to this bond – goblin twins usually seem to die very soon after one another, and are often aware of one another's locations, and in those cases where one of a pair of twins does outlive the other for a long period of time they appear to have some special social status. I am not certain if this bond is magical or spiritual in nature, however, or even if there is a supernatural element to it at all. Discussing it in depth, at least with non-goblins, appears to be something of a taboo; I have not been able to learn much about it from them, and have refrained from including some of the little I have learned in this text out of respect.
Diet
While goblins are highly omnivorous, the core of their diet is provided by fish. When they can get them, however, meat, eggs, mushrooms, nuts and fruit all provide extremely welcome additions to their diet. Swog-meat is particularly sort-after; and indeed goblin-roasted swog is among the finest things I have eaten (the trick is to season it with the dried berries of the plant with small blue flowers and three-branched leaves that the goblins call “elf's eyes”, and then to roast it over a slow fire for about two hours) , although those with beards should avoid it in polite society. Goblins have little concept of agriculture for food, but some maintain herb gardens for alchemy or seasonings, and I have numbered among my friends a goblin fisherman who makes a practice of scattering mealworms at a particular site in a river every day so that the fish learned it as a good place to gather, and a hunter – sadly since killed by raiding kobolds – who explained to me his trick of driving wild pig onto a small island during times of drought, and then letting them breed there and only killing a few at a time.
Nearly all goblins can fish, which they do with either short throwing spears, simple lines made from braided plant stems, or their bare hands. They refer to it as “fish-stealing” - the first time I asked a goblin if he was going fishing, he looked at me blankly and said that “no, he'd rather go on goblining”. Many of their idioms and expressions deal with fish or fishing – a “fat trout” is anything particularly good, desirable or fortunate; a “minnow-grabber” is one who takes great pride in an insignificant achievement; “bank-stamper” is a term of utter contempt. Those goblins capable of magic also often use that to fish; freezing fish in place and snatching them out of the water with their hands. I have witnessed a goblin gather well over thirty large fish in an hour using this method. Many also specialise in another method of gathering food– hunting one beast or another, gathering fruit or wild honey, or similar. Swog-hunters are viewed with particular reverence by most goblins.
Cannibalism – especially of prisoners captured from other rival tribes – is uncommon but by no means unheard of, and usually accompanied by a fair amount of ceremony and ritual. Human and kender prisoners are also sometimes eaten, but no ceremony attends this – they are viewed as just another foodstuff. Kender are considered a particular delicacy, which may be one source of the historical enmity between the two species. However, I have succeeded in stamping out these practices among the Great Willow tribe. Travellers around Grantabrugge should note that they are particularly common among the Spearchucker, who dwell in the woods and fens to the East, around the borders of the lands claimed by the Mason family, and take according precautions.
Physiology
A fully grown goblin man usually stands about 5 foot or 5 foot 2 inches and weighs about five or six stone; the women are slightly shorter and lighter. Their bones are much finer and lighter compared to their frames than ours are, making them faster and more agile, but considerably more prone to bone breakages – in the last six months, scarcely a day has gone past when I did not have to set at least one splint. Goblin teeth are similar in most respects to those of humans or elves, but somewhat smaller and sharper, and tend to point backwards into the mouth. The jaw is highly prone to dislocation, which can last for days; I have discovered that a sharp blow to the cheek, from below and a little in front, is the the best way to fix this.
The fingers and toes are somewhat webbed, and the pads of the fingers are extremely thick and rough. Their nails are claw-like, and the feet are somewhat prehensile – I have had a goblin child dangle from a roof by its hands to steal the hat from my head with its feet, and seen a master fisherman perform the same trick from a branch to pluck a full-grown trout from a river.
Goblins have larger noses than humans. Despite – or possibly because of - their watery nature, they are highly prone to sicknesses similar to the cold that afflicts humans, especially during the summer months, accompanied by much sneezing. Some of their alchemists claim to be able to treat this with a herbal concoction brewed from rosehips “among other things”; I reserve my judgement – in the cases I have observed goblins taking it, the mucus they sneezed up turned from green to purple, but they did not appear to recover any sooner. This ailment – goblins just call it “the sniffles” is not serious, except in as much as it impairs stealth, and seldom lasts more than a fortnight.
Two other ailments that I have observed in my time amongst the Great Willow are worth mentioning. A particularly violent fever, which the goblins told me they know as the bonebreaker, appears to have initially entered the tribe from eating tainted swog, but can also be spread from goblin to goblin. It first shows itself after about 24 hours, and soon results in hallucinations, near-coma and extremely violent convulsions, for about two more days. Apparently it is usually fatal, but I found that keeping the afflicted warm, clean, and well-hydrated, is enough to save most sufferers (except in some cases the very young, sadly). I subsequently experienced this fever myself, and while it appears to be milder in humans than in goblins, it was nevertheless an extremely unpleasant experience, and I am very grateful indeed to the goblins Tikrit and Sithic for nursing me through it. I was unable to discover how it is transmitted, but keeping the infected quarantined from most of the tribe, and subsequently burning their bedding, may have helped reduce its spread. The goblins tell me that those who have already suffered from the bonebreak three times are immune, and certainly several such helped me nurse others without catching it, but whether this was purely coincidence I do not know.
Secondly, the arcanophage plague, a supernaturally induced form of possession caused by magical parasites, has recently ravaged the goblins around Grantabrugge. There are various accounts of it available elsewhere, however, and I am afraid it cost me too many friends for me to wish to dwell on it. However, in brief, the initial stage is marked by sickness and fever, and can be treated by exposing the infected goblin to magical items – even minor ones – with about a 50% success rate per attempt (so provided you have access to a number of small scrolls, foci or similar, you should almost certainly be able to cure it). If untreated, it is invariably fatal, after which the goblin will rise again as a “taint beast” unless the body is rapidly destroyed. These are often powerful mages, completely evil and should be killed as soon as identified for certain. Be warned that they are capable of magic of multiple colours, and that using magic on or even – for a mage, elf, uruk or similar magical individual – touching either an infected goblin or a taint-beast can lead to infection.
Magic and alchemy
Goblins are what are known as “lesser water uruks” - cladistically, they are associated with orcs (medium water uruks), trolls (greater water uruks), kobolds (lesser fire uruks) and the like. I must confess to not fully understanding the magical metaphysics of this, but I will attempt to set out some observations on the practical consequences of it.
About one goblin in three manifests magical powers. I have never seen a goblin use magic of a colour other than green, but I don't know if it is impossible or simply rare (note that taintbeasts sometimes appear to be goblins, and use magic of all colours). Young goblins are seldom capable of more than very basic magic, but their elders sometimes command much more potent powers.
Magic is common enough that simply being able to perform it is not in itself regarded as anything special, but being skilled with it – either in terms of raw power, or of being good at using what one can do effectively – is greatly respected. By far the commonest usage of goblin magic is fishing – goblins will freeze a fish in place and pull it out of the water. Magic is also very frequently used in squabbles between goblins. Some goblins also practice alchemy. While again I am not an expert, Goblin alchemy appears to me to be haphazard and far less systematised than among humans, but often remarkably effective. Side effects are, regrettably, common, but I have seen goblins brew up potions and poultices capable of curing extremely serious wounds, as well as some remarkably potent combat drugs and hallucinogens (and, on one unfortunate occasion, a hallucinogenic combat drug). They also make a variety of dies and pigments from common herbs and substances, which are mostly used as body paints (a warning: the blue one made from the plant I believe is known as “butterweed” does not come of for days and days, with any form of cleaning product I was able to aquire. Goblins find this hilarious).
A large part of goblin alchemy is recreational in nature – stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens and the like are all extremely popular among goblins. These are often taken by large numbers of goblins together, and form a central part of tribe culture, at least for the Great Willow – when the relevant herbs and mushrooms are ripe, the tribe shamans will brew up a cauldron, and the whole tribe – starting with the children, and progressing to the most senior and respected members – will partake, and then the entire tribe will spend a night lying on their backs in the middle of the village watching the stars, a ceremony that they refer to as the “Whole Tribe Eye Night”. On one occasion I have been privileged to take part in this, and I can testify that it produces an intense feeling of community and oneness, and probably plays a large part in enabling goblins – who are fractious at best – to coexist with one another without more infighting than is currently the case. I believe that this specific ceremony is unique to the Great Willow, but that most other tribes have equivalent or similar rites.
Most goblin tribes have at least one, and usually several, individuals referred to as shamans. Usually, goblin shamans are older goblins skilled in magic, alchemy or both, but this is by no means always the case – goblins are familiar enough with magic that it is actually much easier to impress them with well-performed conjuring and sleight of hand than with magic, and some shamans are use this to good effect.
The role varies greatly from tribe to tribe, but goblin shamans are usually expected to absent themselves from the day-to-day power struggle of goblin life, and to act as “referees”, ensuring that the tribe does not fly apart at the seams. In practice, shamans who actually take this approach are few and far between; most are simply older, more cunning goblins who have spotted that the title gives opportunities for self-advancement, but most goblins *believe* that their shamans are not part of the tribe's power struggle, and will react with anger and surprise if this is challenged. When negotiating with a goblin tribe, the shamans are usually a good place to start – they tend to have a better idea than anyone where the levers are.
Folk tales
The primary “racial hero” of goblins – at least those around Grantabrugge; I have no idea how much these stories vary from region to region – is Queen Narticula. Each of the local tribes claims that it was their tribe she was queen of. Goblins accounts of how long ago she lived range from “a long time ago” to “back in my grandfather's father's day” to “once” to “she's just a story, silly, she was never real”, but studying the history of goblin raids on humans and vice versa recorded in the Great Library (I am indebted to the scholars there for their invaluable aid with research) leads me to believe that the legends do at least have some basis in a historical figure who rose to power around about 1150, and was killed on 16h february 1161 by a force recruited by the church of Malan.
Each tribe has its own stories about Narticula, but the outline remains the same – she was a goblin noted for her short stature, alchemical ability and cunning who rose to be queen of her tribe by challenging the previous chief to a duel in what she knew to be a swog lek and then not turning up; she managed to prevent the dissolution that usually follows the death of a goblin chief by addicting the leaders of several of the various rival factions to a philtre extracted from mushrooms (the goblins still refer to a species of blue-grey toadstool with red spots as “Narticula's Mushrooms”), she managed to persuade goblins from many of the other local tribes to flock to her banner, and she set about ravaging the surrounding countryside through cunning and guile.
A great many other tales deal with “Glab”, the First Goblin, and his adventures. Where Narticula appears to be a fairly archetypical trickster figure in her stories, similar to the Teutonic hero Owlglass in some ways, Glab is remember as a giant hero, taller than a man, mighty and wise. The general theme of the stories is always that back in the First Days goblins did not have to hide and skulk, but walked about tall and unafraid; every tribe has its own legends of the Fall, but the general theme remains the same, and “When We Are As Glab Was” is a standard goblin idiom for “some day”.
Psychology
Superficially, the minds of goblins do not appear very different from those of humans, elves, dwarves or kender – albeit usually cruel, childish, self-centred humans etc. But closer, more prolonged interactions with them has, I think, given me some insight into how – in general; goblins differ from one another every bit as much as we do – their minds work and how they differ from ours.
The most striking such difference I have found is the lack of empathy; the inability to imagine oneself in another's shoes, as it were. This was most strikingly demonstrated to me early in my time with the goblins, when in a fit of mischief one of them kicked me in the shins, and I lost my temper and yelled at him “How would you like it if I did it to you?” Rather than taking this as a rebuke, as I expected, he appeared genuinely puzzled, and over the course of the next few days I witnessed him repeatedly kicking himself on the shins with an expression of concentration, and a week later he approached me and informed me, completely unrepentantly, that he thought he would dislike it a great deal.
This permeates several aspects of goblin culture. Their art (goblin art is rare, but by no means unheard of) almost always takes the form either of direct representations drawn from life, or of very basic abstract designs based on simple rules – goblins find it very difficult to imagine what something will look like until they've done it. They have no melodic music of their own, but extremely advanced traditions of percussion – goblin dexterity makes them natural drummers; one of the most wonderful sounds I have heard was half a dozen of them beating out overlaid rhythms in 11/8 on a bunch of hollow trees. I have succeeded in teaching several of them to play musical instruments, and they take to in enthusiastically, but the only tunes they know are ones I have taught them, and the idea of composing tunes for themselves baffles them.
They *do* have some tradition of song – goblin songs usually have very simple tunes, but sometimes quite complicated rhythmic structures, sometimes with multiple singers overlaying different rhythms over one another. Many of these songs share tunes with one another, so that each tune is likely to have many sets of well-known words.
They also have a strong tradition of storytelling. Goblin stories almost always deal with past events and the deeds of goblins of old, and are frequently comic in nature; most of them appear to have evolved over time – very few goblins can make a story up out of whole cloth, but most of them can “improve” the ones they know a little, and so they have evolved and bifurcated in a fascinating example of the folk process. I surmise – although I have no proof – that this limitation of the imagination may be a big part of the reason why mind-altering drugs – especially hallucinogens – play such a large role in goblin culture. Entering an altered state of consciousness must be an even stranger and more mystical experience for a goblin than it is for a human.
This difficulty in imagining “what would it be like if...” also has a notable impact on their conceptions of the future. Goblins are very bad at thinking far ahead, or considering the consequences of their actions. A goblin will take care that it has enough to eat tomorrow, but they very rarely try to husband food for the long-term future (I know of a couple of instances, detailed above in the section on diet, but they are very much exceptions). The idea of exchange of favours – that if you are nice to people, they will be well-disposed to you, whereas if you are nasty to them they will oppose you – comes to goblins as a surprising insight, when pointed out to them (with the noted exceptions of between mates – “do things for your mate” is something that goblins learn works well by witnessing one another doing it, I think; I suspect that a group of goblin children raised in isolation would treat their mates as cruelly as they tend to treat others, rather than working this out from scratch). In a similar way, goblins tend not to have any innate conception of ethics. Human ideas about being kind to people being good and being cruel to them being evil – of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you – stem, I think, from being able to imagine what it would like to *be* them. Goblins, not having that faculty, have not arrived at such notions. They do what they feel like, without regard for the suffering it may cause others.
This lack of empathic faculty and limiting of the imagination is also notable in goblin learning. It is very difficult to teach goblins practical skills by explanation, but they are very able to repeat and replicate most skills they see demonstrated. They find learning to read or write extremely difficult, but use an extremely advanced system of pictograms.
When trying to give them basic grounding in ethics, the approach I have found works best is to give them some very simple, very clear-cut rules, and lots of concrete examples of how those rules apply to everyday situations; only a few of them have managed to graduate to a more philosophical understanding of good and evil (although a few have; there are several amongst the tribe of the Great Willow who I think are better people than most humans I know, and certainly refute those that there is no such thing as a good goblin).
Goblins have a great many natural predators (most frequently, humans), nearly all of which are more than capable of killing a goblin in a straight fight, and this is reflected heavily in their psychology in several ways. Goblins tend to be extremely uncomfortable in wide-open spaces – their huts and homes tend to be small, and they build lots of them close together, and they tend to inhabit areas with a great deal of natural cover. A goblin trying to get from one side of a field to the other will almost always walk around the edge, by the hedge rather than going straight through the middle. Goblins have a natural gift for stealth and sneaking, and tend to get nervous when not exercising it.
Stealth, cunning, theft and misdirection are much admired among goblins. A goblin who is cunning and stealthy is as much admired as a human who is bluff, honest and straighforward. Theft is endemic, but stealing by brute force or strength is much less admired than stealing by cunning, and a goblin with a reputation for relying on direct means will generally be despised.
Goblins are naturally extremely gregarious. Even though they constantly squabble and fight and not infrequently murder one another, goblins feel far safer in large numbers than they do alone. If you are confronted by a lone goblin, be aware that there are probably others you cannot see lurking around.
Local Tribes
I know of seven tribes of goblins in the fens near to Grantabrugge: my own Great Willow tribe, and the Brown Bank, Big River, Kestrelwood, Spearchucker, Black Oak and Nightrunner.
The Great Willow are the tribe I know most about, obviously. They weathered the arcanophage plague better than most, and as I write are flourishing. Most of them have been converted to a watered-down version of the worship of St John in name, but in how many the conversion is more than skin-deep remains to be seen. However, at least some have definitely taken my teachings to heart. They are a fairly stereotypical tribe in most other respects, although due to living in a drier, more forested area than many they number somewhat more alchemists and hunters, and fewer fishers, than most tribes.
The Big River tribe live on the river to the South of the city, and their life revolves around it. They're the only goblins I know to regularly build boats, although some of the other tribes occasionally steal them. They have some ties with the Great Willow; we occasionally trade meat for fish with them.
The Brown Bank live on the river to the north. Culturally, they appear to be very similar to the Big River (I hypothesise that the two tribes may originally have been one, split by the growth of the city, and some of their folk tales support this). I know little about them, but I believe that they are currently going through a bloody period of post-king feuding.
The Kestrelwood live in the Forest of Kestrels. Until recently this area was haunted. The Kestrelwood keep very much to themselves; other goblins regard them as mystics, and criticise them as having “gone dry” and abandoned their connections with the river and swamp and the element of water. I'm fairly sure that none of them are priests, but I believe alchemy may have surplanted magic as the core of their culture.
The Spearchuckers are the most violent tribe around Grantabrugge, and also one of the largest. They are lead by chief Hariak Greatspear, a deeply unpleasant woman by all accounts. They have more troll minions than any other tribe, and make good use of them.They regularly raid the other local goblin and kobold tribes, human farmsteads when they can, and Hariak preaches that they day is coming when they will destroy Grantabrugge itself. However, since they number under 200 (probably much less), I do not regard this as a serious risk. Still, if you encounter Spearchucker goblins (most of them dwell to the East of the city) you will be lucky to escape without a fight.
The Black Oak tribe are another fairly typical tribe, I believe. They live in the deep swamps, and are probably not that numerous. I don't know anything interesting about them, to be honest.
The Nightrunner are an offshoot of the Spearchucker. They were originally lead by Hariak's younger sister, but after her death in a Spearchucker raid no-one has dared take her place. The Nightrunner are nearly as violent as the Spearchucker , but much less numerous and organised – there are probably not that many of them left by now, but they have been driven so far into hiding that it is hard to tell. The other goblin tribes respect them for their demonstrated mastery of stealth, but don't expect them to last much longer.
Goblins and other species
The primary enemies of goblins – at least as goblins see it – are kobolds. Kobolds are lesser fire-Uruks, in many ways similar to goblins, but while goblins are less organised than a sackful of cats, kobold culture – from what I've see of it – seems to be much more focussed. All kobolds (or at least, all those I know of) worship Kakatal, the elemental lord of fire, and for them wiping out goblins appears to be a religious duty. They regularly launch genocidal raids against goblin communities, and avoiding these is a major facet of goblin life. While there are at least as many goblins as kobolds, the fact that kobolds appear to cooperate naturally makes them a dangerous enemy.
Kender are regarded by goblins as a delicacy, a fact that has naturally lead to a great deal of hostility between the two species.
Many goblin tribes have links with the local trolls. In some versions of the goblin origin myth troll are fellow descendants of Glab, and while the goblins lost their size and strength but stayed cunning, the trolls lost their minds but stayed big and strong. Many goblin tribes use trolls as something between slave labourers and beasts of burden – often raising them from young ages. Interestingly, given how rare affection between goblins is, goblins often display considerable affection for their trolls, although this doesn't stop them sending them into battle or similar.
Orcs are medium Dark uruk, not water uruk. Will have to think more about some of the stuff which is new in this, but othwerwise no major fact errors spotted on a first reading... --ChessyPig
On some previous uptime occasions I believe we have seen goblins who have enslaved kobolds, and use them as expendable minions. --Zebbie
Memo to self: there's a page on Grob at http://www.srcf.ucam.org/tt/wiki.pl?Library/TheAscensionOfGoblinGrob that needs to be incorporated, probably in the Folk Tales section, which probably means changing the title of that section.