The Beast Fears Fire - Hobgoblins

(This is a little early for tomorrow)

Hobgoblins [Disaster 2]

Impulse – Build and Direct. Hobgoblins tend to be a little bigger than the goblins in their community and significantly smarter and steadier. Unlike normal goblins, hobgoblins seem capable of developing skills and making plans. Sadly, these plans usually require the labor of a whole lot of gleefully unskilled goblins that the hobs usually have to constantly monitor in order to make sure that they are doing something similar to what they're meant to do. In practice, the best laid plans of the hobgoblins never come quite to fruition, as most of their labor is spent on managing their labor force, and it leads to forgotten aspects of the plan, cut corners, and some group of goblins set to a task and then forgotten, and who knows what they've been doing all this time.

Hobgoblins aren't terribly patient, either. They can get entire cities built overnight, but they are cities, built overnight. They also aren't very high on the goblin social ladder, able to boss around the run-of-the-mill goblins to an extent, but definitely not able to enforce their plans on most of the other goblins with prefixes on their names.

Harm – variable [usually Injury 2, Gang]. An individual hobgoblin is probably a threat to a human who hasn't been in many fights, probably not so much to a hardened adventurer, even one who is not especially martial. Hobgoblins usually try to gang up with other goblins when they need to defend themselves, or they feel like hurting something.

Hobgoblins' most formidable recourse against humanity is the buildings they design and make their cousins build. Deathtrap is sort of slander against deathtraps, but it's not inaccurate. Hobgoblins do like sprinkling their towering, rickety constructions with actual deathtraps as well.

It's Only a Goblin City.
When you go into a goblin-made building, face Disaster.
On a Hit, you manage to navigate the place without part of it blowing up, blowing down, collapsing or catching on fire.
On a Hard Hit, you figure the ins and outs of the place and gain +1 Hit Forward on any moves you make inside the structure.
On a Miss, a likely memorable Hard Move.


We built this city, we built this city on...

Hobgoblins supply their cousins with most of their tools, clothes, housing, weapons, prepared food. Goblins are never careful with their possessions, they come up just about anywhere and move around a lot. If you are out in the field and you are looking for an item, any item, there's a good chance it was made by hobgoblins.

Hobgoblin made items are not great quality. Most of their work is rushed, most of their materials are shady and most of their attention is on other things. If you face want and get a Hit, you can choose that the thing you found was goblin-made. Goblin-made items will give you a D4 as gear, and the Moderator can take them any old time as a Soft Move.

Unless you were looking for food. Then things get interesting. Hobgoblins love preserves. They love brining and pickling and canning and experimenting with different recipes and methods. This is every bit as potentially terrifying as it sounds. Add to the usual dangers of canning and preserving as done by someone who is not good at it and probably didn't sterilize (or wash their hands), the possibility that the preserves contain something poisonous, inedible, or goblin fruit.

Still, I can almost guarantee that sometime, somewhere, you are going to get hungry. You will be out in the field, the food will be gone from your pouch, and there will be this jar of peaches, you think.

Smells alright to me.
When you eat goblin pickles or preserves, face Hardship
On a Hit, you ate something that might make your belly a little uncomfortable, but nothing worse.
On a Hard Hit, there was some goblin fruit in the batch that denatured in the process granting one of the following: refresh Strength to full, resolve a Peril, heal all Harm, get +1 Hit Forward on your next move.
On a Miss, take 3 Harm and a Moderator Hard Move.