The Beast Fears Fire - Goblins, Introduction

Goblins [Impulse – Cause Trouble]

According to the Savels, the Earth took second place in a competition between the elements to see which one would be entrusted with the care of the spirits of the dead as they awaited their rebirth. There are some stories that attribute Shadow's win to shenanigans, but in the end, the dead chose to rest in the dark. Wood grew over whatever it made to entice spirits, Water and Sky simply stopped having those places, but Earth was kind of stuck. Excepting that one time, Earth is not so good at changing, not quickly anyway, and the deep places were now full of galleries and halls for the dead.

The stories differ on how those passages came to be the richly appointed and terrifying Black Mansions Below; some folks hold that the Earth invited denizens in to fill its empty places and others say that the inhabitants came about based on Earth's slow imaginings of what it would have been like to house the afterworld. Whatever the case, the Mansions are no longer empty, they teem. Mostly, they teem with goblins.

Goblins are made along the human plan, mostly. They usually range a little smaller than people to kind of a lot smaller, except when they don't. Their features can be ugly, funny, striking, alluring, terrifying, bestial... Groups of goblins tend to resemble one another, and the more attractive ones tend to be a little more likely to be benign, except when they aren't.

It's usually wise to think of Goblins existing in four quadrants; one axis runs from harmless to wicked, the other ranges from competent to walking disaster. Goblins are equally distributed along the former axis, and trend disastrous on the other. Goblins are quite social, usually rather exuberant about, well, any damned thing. They group naturally, act based on consensus and generally cock up whatever they set out to do. In the west, they speak of the republican leanings of Murren and its former possessions as being run by goblins, and locally, you can usually find people who'd agree, without facing Want to do it.

There is nowhere you can be that is not close to an entrance to the Black Mansions, by design, it was meant to be a place you could get to quickly, no matter where you died. Some entrances are caves and caverns, fissures, the bottoms of wells. Some are behind doors that otherwise lead to spare bedrooms unless you knock three times, then two times, then three times again with the other hand. Goblins can show up anywhere. Crick society has some relationship with the more stable and less evil goblins, supporting a Goblin market or two in the larger communities, but the dangerous ones, whether deliberately or accidentally so, aren't that rare either. The law doesn't offer protection to goblins, but the ones who run the markets can usually count on witches for protection, since goblin markets are the primary source for most of your witchy needs.