Furt Digs Into Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King

Despite my anxiety toward OSR RPGs and my recent tendency to wilt in the face of choices with meaningful consequences in video games, I am no stranger to the genre which is about as close as you can get to a midpoint between those two: roguelikes.

Sparse in visuals, slow in pace, and startlingly sudden in killing your characters, these semi-randomized permadeath dungeon crawlers have been around for over forty years now. There are plenty of variations on the formula by now, but they generally share a few things in common: you wander through procedurally-generated dungeons in search of an important something on the bottom floor, and when you die you lose nearly everything.

I'd become at least dimly aware of their existence in the early 2000s thanks to video game pop-cultural osmosis, but I stayed far away from them because it all felt too obtuse and cumbersome for me. Also, I might have been turned off by my completely mistaken impression that the original Rogue was a semi-hard science fiction game.

It wasn't until I was beginning high school that I became interested in giving one a shot. Somehow, I completely stumbled past Rogue, Angband, Nethack, ADOM, and pretty much every other big-name roguelike on the internet with little more than a glance, and wound up picking a fairly obscure title as my first foray into the genre.

The bane of my mid teen years. And my eyeballs.

Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King, released in 2007, is unique among roguelikes for how heavily it is inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. Of course most roguelikes ever since the first have been inspired by D&D and other high fantasy sources to some degree, but (to my knowledge) only Incursion rips mechanics right out of the d20 3rd Edition ruleset.

You pick a species and class combination, choose feats, distribute skill points, and rely upon a whole bunch of simulated die rolls which use the six classic ability scores, plus the addition of a seventh Luck stat. This makes the game a bit more complex than the average roguelike, and even gives you an illusion of control- if you can survive the early levels long enough, you can start to get your own personal character build online.

Since 90% of my experience with D&D has been through building characters to fit concepts, I find that last part very enticing.

The importance of building one's character can lead to the same wonky imbalance as in D&D 3E, of course. Mundane and half-casting classes begin with survivability or some neat tricks, but quickly fall behind with the exception of rogues, who can get by on magic items and backstabs alone. While the game does a surprising job of mitigating the power of wizards, druids are mighty on such a terrifying scale that some guy even wrote a guide on doing literally anything with them and soloing the game handily.

Once inside of the miniature megadungeon, you're faced with many of the classic challenges: monsters, traps, hunger, and your fellow sapient adventurers, who may be friendly, hostile, or completely indifferent to your presence. An unseen town above the dungeon offers you a bit of respite, including an inn to rest at and a store to buy equipment from. You can even choose to retire a character to it permanently, in case you ever decide "screw it" and quit while you're ahead.

The caves are pitch black, and characters without dark or infravision will need a whole lot of torches or other light sources to see what they're doing. Health doesn't regenerate naturally, and sleeping in the dungeon eats through your food while leaving you open to ambush. Stealthy or invisible enemies are common, and it isn't unusual for something out-of-depth to get the jump on you very early in a run. Other than a scattering of eight potions in the first room of the first floor--five healing and three short-range teleports--nothing is guaranteed for you, and anything can be taken away by a successful disarm or sunder check.

Combining these aspects together gives Incursion a surprisingly foreboding, oppressive atmosphere for a game made entirely out of ASCII visuals. When you enter that first room, a text box describes to you the bloody remains of your fellow adventurers strewn about the floor, and you can rest assured that you will join them before long.

But until that time comes, you have the damp, cold solitude of the dungeon halls in which to contemplate how you'll handle your next messy, hectic clash with the dungeon's denizens. Detailed descriptions pop up with each new chamber you discover, giving glimpses into what this ancient mega-structure was once used for.

As with a lot of roguelikes, the plot is pretty bare-bones: you are one of many adventurers who has come to an out-of-the-way cave complex after hearing about an army amassing deep below ground. Your job is to descend to the lowest level of the dungeon and kill the eponymous Goblin King.

No, not that one.

Incursion makes up for this by having the beginnings of rich setting lore. Most of it is front-loaded in the descriptions of races and deities during character creation. The entries can be pieced together to illustrate the fantasy world of Theyra, which has already seen a lot of trouble, but is on the cusp of yet another nasty prophesy coming true. I really like a couple of the snippets of lore provided this way.

One of the gods of Theyra is a being known as Kysul, the Watcher Beneath the Waves. It is an unfathomably vast, tentacled consciousness from a doomed world, capable of shattering sanity with a glimpse of its true form and spawning countless aberrations upon the material plane by mere incident of its existence.

It is unknowable. It is terrifying. It is Lawful Good.

Kysul is a being of limitless, if alien, compassion, and it wants to protect the world which it has adopted as its own. It knows that its appearance is dreadful, and so it conceals itself to mortals, even its own clandestine clergy, which operates with all the trappings of a stereotypical cult but puts the utmost emphasis on ethical conduct, both with regards to doing its work, and with initiating its new members into Kysul's mysteries.

All of the tropes of cosmic, eldritch horror are neatly subverted in this big, slimy teddy bear of a god that just wants to make sure its home world's fate isn't shared by others. Theyra's backstory references some mages starting a war when they made pacts with horrors from beyond the pale. Perhaps Kysul has known their ilk before.

It's still thoroughly alien to the natural order of the game world, however, and both angels and demons count Kysul among their enemies. Lizardfolk, who have their own alien mindset in this world, regard it with some measure of respect and have been known to work alongside Kysul. It also appears to be fond of speaking in antiquated, flowery language, if its cleric intro is anything to go by.

"Seek now thine antediluvian progenitors that in sunken cities for eons have lain."

Another neat couple of details are about the playable orcs, because of course I had to insert my agenda into this article somehow.

The orcs of Theyra are peoples who are just throwing off the yoke of generic, villainous minionhood. They've been bred as stupid, burly slaves for centuries by demons and unscrupulous humans. But they recently initiated a slave revolt in Mohandi, an empire whose lands included the entrance to the goblin caves. The orc rebels freed all of the slaves in Mohandi, "good" races included, and now play a large role in the economy and politics of the formerly expansionist empire from within a number of anarchist communes. They've also developed their own gunpowder weapons, which is an accomplishment not even the technologically advanced but extremely hidebound dwarves of the setting can boast of.

The patron goddess of the orcs is Khasrach, who is also venerated by goblinoids goblin-speaking peoples. She is the Goddess of the Blood, and for good reason. She is fiercely protective of her children, as well as violent and demanding of blood sacrifice. Centuries of her peoples' debasement has twisted her into a vengeful and sometimes savage goddess. The bark she gives at the beginning of the game when you choose to play as one of her faithful pretty well illustrates her general mood:

"Smite now your slave-chains with the primal fire of my wrath!"

Khasrach is basically what you'd get if every orcish mother goddess dumped their chauvinist husband and then decided to help her people seize the means of production.

Presumably after hiring a couple of babysitters.

She isn't locked into this savagery, however. Her profile leaves open the question of whether or not enough change in the outlook of her people could transform her and bring her back to the more levelheaded, spiritual state of being she enjoyed in ancient times.

Recreation of the goddess is one aspect of an orcish cultural movement which seeks to rediscover the primeval society and values of their people, pure and free of influence from fiends or other species. This neo-tribal movement is currently vying for political dominance with the more cosmopolitan city orcs and stereotypical/traditionalist marauding orc hordes, and only time will tell who winds up on top and what that means for their people.

Or, actually, time won't tell. The game is actually sort of dead.

Surprise! This was actually a Things I Wish They Did More With post this whole time!

Development of Incursion slowed to a halt a few years after its first unfinished release, and it languished for a while until the creator finally admitted that they were doing other stuff and wouldn't be continuing the project. Fortunately they released the source code for the game, and someone else picked it up long enough in 2014 to patch some bugs up and convert the game to use libtcod instead of an outdated version of Allegro.

I have no idea what those last few words mean, but they feel important.

No one has stepped up to continue proper development of Incursion, though. The game's site has gone down and requires use of the Wayback Machine to access, the wiki is only partly filled out, and the Google Group used by its community hasn't seen any significant activity in the past two years as of this writing. The TVTropes page on the game, of all places, is the best source for information and download links today.

Incursion is effectively dead, and its envisioned full version, Return of the Forsaken, will likely never see realization.

Even so, I reinstalled the game a few days ago to take a couple of unsuccessful stabs at it. Being frozen in time with no end doesn't discourage me from playing as much as it would another game. It was a neat, odd idea that was executed with a lot of hiccups, and that's enough for me to appreciate. I can romp through and die every once in a while without too much worry.

I do wish the game could get a graphical tileset, though.

That little chump wrecked me, by the way.

Goblin Brain: Free Range, Dorito-Fed, Organic Gaming Experiences

As some of you may know from my Crypt Cities posts, I am a mild fan of Dark Souls.

I wasn't always one, though. I used to dislike the concept of them quite a bit.

I still might, actually.

Years ago when it was first released, Demons' Souls sailed right past me without my having a clue. A few years later, I heard or saw the name Dark Souls pop up here and there, mostly in relation to this fanboy flame war that I still can't wrap my head around, eight years later.

(Seriously, the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Dark Souls are such fundamentally different beasts that it seems like the only common ground on which to pit them against one another was that they were both some form of RPG and they both happened to come out in the year 2011. What was the beef?)

Anyway, I grew dimly aware that Dark Souls was some sort of brutally punishing game with a form of progress loss that was by no means as bad as roguelike permadeath, but still unforgiving. It seemed like the antithesis of fun to me at the time, and I gently avoided it.

A couple of conversations with a peer in community college on the eve of Dark Souls II's release in 2014 got my mildly curious as to what the big deal was since the game had done well enough to earn a sequel. I think I also saw a Game Grumps Steam Train series on DS2 at some point that involved a bunch of commenters getting angry at some ironic "MLG Pro" video thumbnails with swag-hats and Mountain Dew...

But again, it didn't go anywhere.

It wasn't until late in 2015 that I took a more active interest in figuring out what this series was, because the YouTube channel Extra Credits had just started up its new LP project called Side Quest, partly to look at animation and game design, and partly to die a whole bunch. I was familiar with and fond of at least one of the Dans of Extra Credits, and that was my means of bridging the gap now, even if it sounded weird not to hear him pitch-shifted- I thought we just had similar voices.

So I tagged along and witnessed the ruined land of Lordran for the first time. As I watched I grew more interested and wanted to find out what would happen next. But I grew impatient in waiting for episodes to release according to schedule, so I began to peer beyond that playthrough. I started to browse the game's wikis and click on the other DS-related videos I saw on my front page. I had no means to play the game and experiencing it first-hand, so I did so vicariously through others.

Eventually I found ways around my usual lack of resources and gave the first game a shot, first playing to keep up with the progress of the videos I watched using a similar character, but soon overtaking them and forging on ahead. Except I wasn't really forging anything. I was stuck in my newly formed habits, still consulting the wikis and going into each new zone or encounter with as much knowledge as I could reasonably obtain beforehand.

This trend continued into Dark Souls 2 when I tried out Scholar of the First Sin, and repeated again in Dark Souls 3 some years later. The number of hours that I played while unaided and in the dark could probably be counted on both hands. I was also entirely offline for all three experiences.

And in doing so, I think many fans of Dark Souls might feel that I ruined the essence of the game for myself.

A core part of the game to many fans, at least according to the impression I've gotten, is blundering through those experiences naturally, by yourself. To fall for the ambushes until you learn to anticipate them, and then falling for the second one in a row once you've felt an instant of hubris. To not find every treasure chest or hidden room until your second or third playthrough of the game. To either carefully piece together the lore, ignore it entirely, or give up and go watch a VaatiVidya playlist so that you can act like a know-it-all to your friends. Phantoms are free to come and go, but you need to experience the game without the middleman of guides or LPers.

But if I did that, I would die. And dying is an embarrassment to be avoided, at least according to the myriad of "git gud" memes out there. My logic was--still is--if I won't be able to do it perfectly the first time, mastering every challenge while still learning it, in order to impress or at least not coax boos out of a (completely imaginary) crowd of expert spectators, then there was no point to really trying at all. The games stopped being proper games for me, and became more like interactive checklists that I needed to satisfy in order to feel like I had done not-wrong.

When I encountered NPC quest lines in particular, I was faced with the same shattering feeling that I'd get when was faced with morality choices with consequences or quests with multiple endings in more traditional RPGs like Dragon Age- If I didn't get the 100% golden ending for everyone at once, I as a player, as a person, was failing them. I grew physically sick when I thought I had missed a Lucatiel or Siegward of Catarina encounter. It became a reflection of my real-life fears that by not doing perfectly, I was actively damaging the life experiences of everyone around me.

I couldn't just "hold that L" when I was already over max equip load with a Havel's suit of armor made out of other Ls.

But I still wanted to do the video game thing because the areas, spells, and gear were interesting and there were still some forms of positive feedback that I could enjoy and want to return to. So my every strategy was based around the idea of trivializing the challenge the game was designed for. I was shielded up with an over-leveled health bar whenever I wasn't spamming sorceries or using outright exploits to get past non-mundane enemies. I shot Manus almost to death with a longbow from outside his boss arena, and juked the Dragon Rider into falling off of his platform.

I dreaded ever boss battle, which I thought of as nothing but a roadblock, and a check on my enjoyment of the 'fun' parts of the game, which I can't even define adequately. Ornstein & Smough, the high point of Dark Souls I for countless fans, was an annoying and tedious mess that I quickly forgot all details and emotions of after I got past them on the 11th or 12th try. Meanwhile the almost universally panned Prowling Magus and his Congregation in DS2 was a-okay in my book because of how brief and inoffensive it was.

I never finished a Dark Souls game, not all the way through at least.

My armored lady-knight in DS1 was eventually abandoned after I had burned out on grinding tens of millions of souls from the Phalanx Hollows in the Painted World- I really wanted to have my Elite Knight set on while doing Dark Wood Grain Ring backflips, and that needed a lot of Endurance.

I technically killed the final boss of vanilla DS2 with my greying old lightning cleric, but that was only after I gave up on the DLC zones, so I never saw Aldia and the like. Also I was feeling guilty for enjoying DS2 because at the time the feeling that it was not as good as DS1 was in full swing on the internet.

In DS3 I got to the isolated walkway where I could literally see the room where the Soul of Cinder shows up, and I even circumvented it to enter the arguably harder Dreg Heap and have a shot at getting the fiery scimitar pyromancy catalyst thing that I wanted for my pyromancer. But it just never happened. I never reached any of the endings.

And yet, when I switched to other games in order to get a breather, the feelings carried over with me.

The Banner Saga, one of the first games I ever wanted to back the development of (but lacked the money to), had to be played with a walkthrough handy. I even tried to no avail for hours to get a glitch to work where you could recruit Ekkil while also saving Egil so that no party members had to die in this grim, icy world where people are expected to die.

Multiplayer games of any sort always gave me performance anxiety, but after seeing the way your shame can be immortalized in Dark Souls invasion fail compilations, I just can't. It's impossible to imagine co-op anything, let alone PvP where the options are to lose or ruin another person's fun.

I've been staring at an installed copy of Ashen on my desktop for a few weeks now, after hearing that it was a somewhat less intensive "Dark Souls for people who don't really like Dark Souls".

Maybe I'll get around to it without reading too far ahead? It's hard to say.

Arbor Day Deforestation Special.

Everyone knows that druids and forests go together like peanut butter and jelly, trial and tribulation, death and taxes, or college and regret. Forget their deep and murky history as elite members of Insular and Continental Celtic societies at odds with the imperialistic writers of early history- trees are where it's at! That's been their thing for well over forty years of tabletop-related fantasy, and for almost four centuries of suspect Romantic scholarship.

But what about when they're not?

What about when we delve into the realm of 3rd edition splatbooks or Pathfinder class archetypes, and search for an overarching logic behind the diverse yet isolated and independent groups of druids operating in different climes and biomes? You'd probably get a wealth of different arguments and answers from actual research, but for the purposes of this post we're going to pretend there's only one answer.

Nature and its method of selection tend to promote competition between organisms and species who occupy similar or adjacent niches. No living thing is exempt from this. Environments, able to shrink or grow, possessing good or poor health, and adapting by way of the sum of all of their evolving parts, are also living things in this grand competition.  Just as "classic" druids are advocates for and protectors of the forest and all its denizens, other ecosystems can (or even must) have their own sapient defenders to ensure that they grow in strength and size and are not encroached upon by other upstart habitats.

Which brings us to peat bogs.

Swamps and other wetlands tend to get a bad rap in fiction. They are nasty and unpleasant, if not depicted as actively evil and dangerous to all outside life. Monsters, witches, and worse things abode in them, and they are the ideal place to find an ancient, sunken temple which would have been pretty difficult to build on that site to begin with. There is some logic to this, since stories tend to be told by humans who in pre-modern times were fearful of or struggled to deal with the weather, diseases, and pests found in many wetlands.

More recently we've been able to realize that they are all tremendously important to the health and diversity of our planet. Peat bogs in particular are havens for unique species of plant and animal life, and the properties of all that ancient layered dead plant matter allow a bog to eat up massive amounts of harmful free carbon in the atmosphere. They are valued to the point that, in some circumstances, it is good for the environment to cut down a forest and then flood it.

Of course the magical wardens of the bogs wouldn't be thinking about the big picture when they cut down the eves of forests or wet the edges of prairies. Just like the forest druids planting saplings or murdering farmers and loggers, and the desert druids promoting rapid aridification of grasslands, they are another force of nature given thought and reason with which to be even more wholly committed to their cause- a moving part in a great big natural machine, kept in check by the other forces opposed to it. Out of this chaotic equilibrium, we get Bog Druids.

Bog druids are believed to be the most isolationist, misanthropic druids in the world because they live so far away from other humanoids in such inhospitable places. Bog druids would counter that they are isolated because other folk are too afraid or can't be bothered to adapt to life in a more neighborly area.The misanthropic part is a little harder to argue against, given their generally sullen demeanor. You'd have one too, if you woke up before dawn every day to chant over a stagnant pool and then spent the next sixteen hours wrangling serpents, chopping up felled wood, and walking around on stilts.

Their style of dress often sets them apart from other denizens or wanderers of bogs because of how specialized it is. Besides a fondness for bronze accessories given heavily to patina, bog druids are noted for their unorthodox skill in waterproofing. Generally, the more waterproofed their clothing is, the more outlandish it looks. Overcoats of near-transparent intestine glued together with rendered bone, rigid cloth painted in tree rubber, grass or leaves woven together and thickly oiled, or plain old animal furs tend to dominate their choices in fashion, with little uniformity between groups of bog druids, or even individual members.

The potent smell of all of that aforementioned clothing tends to be the second distinction to smack outsiders in the face.

Bog druids don't generally have a strict hierarchy. More experienced members have some measure of seniority, but because each commune tends to be so small, every member is expected to be able to make and carry out decisions on their own. Group decisions tend to regard large threats to the bog, interactions with outsiders, or grand discoveries and portents gleaned from the peat. Outsiders can come to them for a variety of reasons. Most often they come to lodge a complaint about some blight or plague of insects that they think was unleashed from the bog, but other times they come to trade, pay for flood information or access to water reservoirs, or to drop off one of their own who has gotten the peculiarly wild hair up their person to study and join the commune. Most don't last very long, but those who stick around long enough are eventually considered to be new peatkeepers.

Most of the druids don't know magic, and those few who keep animal companions or perform divination generally rely upon more mundane means for both. They do have access to such a tremendous wealth of rare reagents and ingredients that their chemistry often looks like magic, however. More than a few potion-makers have risked everything in order to gain access to such reserves, even going so far as to gamble away their precious apothecary alligators.

Every bog druid is handy with a hatchet, saw, and shovel. They use them to shore up or expand the edges of their homeland, as well as to defend themselves from anyone who might have a problem with that. Bloody skirmishes between rival ecosystems are commonplace, with the dead often left feeding new growth or moldering beneath the turf for ages.

The druids of the peat are above all enigmatic, keeping much lore to themselves in their sodden lands. Why would we name them something as geopolitically inappropriate as "druid", if we knew what they prefer to be called?

Some rumors about them may be true, or nonsense, or a bit of both.

20 Things That Might Be True About Bog Druids
1	They are lobbying to either outlaw or control the construction of turf houses in the entire region.
2	Most of them are actually symbiotic hosts to a sentient fungus.
3	The latest logging campaign is the escalation of a disagreement with the nearby forest druid grove over leaving written accounts and doctrines.
4	The group is a front for a highly erotic and comically phallic snake cult.
5	Peat can be necromantically raised to create miles-wide Turf Golems.
6	The druids occasionally hire their members out to oversee sacrifices or judicial procedure.
7	A high-ranking member of the order is actually just a very lost botanist.
8	The druids have a very strong tradition of poetry and music. Just don't mistake one for a bard or filí.
9	They have no idea where that myth about scimitars and wooden armor came from.
10	Will-o'-the-wisps are a bog druid conspiracy.
11	They hate being confused with the Pyromancers of the Great Swamp.
12	The order was formed by a mystic with severe wood allergies.
13	Each bog druid cuts off a finger upon initiation and wears it with a necklace of woven hair.
14	... There is no official rule that the finger and hair have to belong to the druid.
15	The self-styled environmentalists are actually just trying to corner the market on bog butter production.
16	... They've already done so with the extraction and forging of bog iron.
17	They are the original Soggy Bottom Boys.
18	Topographic peat hags formed by soil erosion regularly come to life as literal hags and witches.
19	Layers of peat are meticulously cut out and studied by peat archivists to offer a rich history of the area's vegetation, pollen, spores, and animals.
20	The druids are guided by a reanimated peat mummy, strangled and sacrificed to the bog in the name of a long-forgotten god centuries ago.

Goblin Watch, Episode 3: Mythology 2

 


Hello, and welcome back to Goblin Watch! The mini-series dedicated to the origins and iterations of everyone's favorite X and Y!

... Whoops, I didn't come up with variables for this intro.

Uh, let's see here... tricksters and knaves, no, I used that... critters and adventurer-fodder, no, that was from the time before last... This list really isn't going to last me as long as I had hoped unless I get creative. Maybe if I consult a thesaurus... Ah-hah!

Everyone's favorite sneaks and house-helpers! Yes, let's go with that.

Last episode, all the way back in the tumultuous year of 2018, we took a look at the earliest of the proto-goblins found in Classical Mythology- kobaloi, kabeiroi, kerkopes, ketcetera.

Today, we'll be moving forward by an indeterminate amount of time, and a few hundred kilomiles north to the interior of Central and Northern Europe, where the ancestors of the Germanic peoples settled during the later stages of the Indo-European migrations thousands of years ago. These peoples had a diverse set of religious beliefs and practices which fall under our umbrella of "Germanic mythology" today. Deities such as Odin/Wōtan, Thor/Donar, and Frigg/Frija figured prominently in those belief systems, and were venerated well into the Common Era before a shift toward newer religions caused a break in continuity. But other, smaller beings such as Heinzelmann,  Hödekin, and King Goldemar persisted or even came into existence as syncretized pagan outcroppings in a predominantly Christian context. What these three men have in common in modern German(ic) folklore is that they are all kobolds.

A kobold is a secretive spirit of a more domestic or artificial (in the sense of craft and artifice) persuasion than the wild or primal kobalos. They dwell in homes or the walls of mine shafts, assisting those who honor them (or at least staying out of their way), and causing a wide variety of mischief for those who anger them. They weren't just tricksters to encounter rarely in the wild or in the entourage of some greater god- in fact they seemed to factor significantly into the daily lives of mortals, albeit in an almost invisible way.

As mentioned in previous episodes, "kobold" seems to be etymologically descended from "kobalos", meaning a mischievous spirit or rogue. This etymology comes down to us from Jacob Grimm, a German mythologist as well as the elder of the famous Brothers Grimm. But that is not the only explanation for the origin of the word. Other competing etymologies look for a native Germanic origin.These include kuba-walda ("one who rules the house"), kofewalt (a cognate to Old Saxon cofgoda or "room-god"), and the contraction of the words koben and hold ("pigsty" and "stall spirit" respectively).

Interestingly, while these home, hearth, or room-related etymologies all distance the kobold from the kobaloi or kerkopes of ancient Greek and Anatolian religion, they also cause cause the kobold to resemble in function the di penates or domestic Lares of ancient Roman religion- spirits in effigy who also presided over and protected specific locations to which they were limited. There are, broadly speaking, three types of kobolds, and the above characterization fits best with the first.

House kobolds dwell in a family's home and act as house spirits--helping with chores, offering good luck, making it wealthy in gold or grain, etc-- though they are not bound to the existence of that house, nor do they originate from it. The home and the kobold seem to have completely independent ontologies. Many stories deal with how kobolds first come to live in a house of their choosing, often by announcing their presence through some ominous event and then reacting according to how the owners of the household respond. If a small, miserable creature appears at the door during a stormy night and the residents decide to take pity upon it and welcome it in, the kobold takes up residence in order to repay the favor. Or, if wood chips and cow manure are suddenly found tracked around the house and inside of the milk containers, a family who is tolerant of it will gain a kobold for being good sports. Other times a kobold has to be deliberately attracted to the home through a very specific set of events, such as bagging and speaking magic words to a bird standing on an anthill in the woods between the hours of noon and one o'clock on Saint John's Day.

I feel like that much work and planning could have more easily gone toward hiring a normal servant.

After a house acquired a kobold, it dwelt somewhere in the building, often in or around the central hearth. The occupants were expected to care for their new house spirit by leaving offerings out at night. These often took the form of food or drink, particularly beer for the subtype of house kobold called a bieresal, known to dwell in inn cellars. It appears that mortals did not generally interact with their kobolds directly. If all was as it should be, a kobold was not visible in the flesh (or whatever other form it took). Rather, they'd be represented by small effigies and statues, made in their ugly or exaggerated image and placed around the home by its owners. Kobold idols were being carved from boxwood at least as late as the 13th century, as recounted by the German poet Konrad von Würzburg, though Konrad describes the practice as mostly being "for fun" by that point in time, rather than as part of a serious ritual practice.

Heinzelmann,  Hödekin, and King Goldemar were each house kobolds, and each brought varying degrees of good fortune to their patrons. Goldemar was a great kobold in particular, being a king among kobolds with his own queen, nobles, and court in service of the human king Neveling von Hardenberg. His retribution was as terrible as his gifts were great, however. As with many kobold tales, a servant eventually tried to catch a glimpse of his invisible form by deception, and in response Goldemar killed him, chopped him up, roasted his meat, and left Castle Hardenstein after placing a curse of bad luck upon it. In fact, most of the high-profile, named kobolds in myths seem to rack up quite a body count from being angered so easily, invariably slaughtering and cannibalizing other people. Heinzelmann seems to be an exception to this, giving fair warning of his bad luck and generally acting more gentle.

Just don't ever ask him what's in the trunk of his car.

The next type is the mine kobold. These industrious workers were expert miners and metalworkers native to the shafts and tunnels of mines throughout early Renaissance-era Germany. Or rather, they lived in the stone of the shafts and tunnels. Some legends surrounding mine kobolds claim that they can actually move through solid earth the same way a human can move through open air. They seem to be more immediately malevolent toward humans than house kobolds are, with the bulk of tales about them showing them in a negative light. The sounds of kobolds working could be heard throughout otherwise quiet tunnels, and if one followed after the sounds of their drilling, shoveling, or knocking, one was liable to end up collapsing their tunnel, flooding it, or filling it with noxious fumes. Mine kobolds were also blamed for the disappearance of tools or food, or the breaking of machinery in and around the mine. But the most famous type of mine kobold trick takes a far more physical form.

They would deceive miners into prospecting what looks like rich veins of copper or silver and then mining all of the ore out, only for the miners to realize later on that the ore was worthless, devoid of precious metals, prone to causing skin irritation on contact, and sometimes possessed of a toxic gas which was released during the smelting process. These veins of junk were named after the kobolds who put them there and wisely avoided until the 18th century, when a Swedish chemist named Georg Brandt isolated a substance from it that was hitherto unknown to mineralogy. Later on in 1780, this metal was discovered to be an all new chemical element. Cobalt still bears the name of its ill-disposed creators.

Less frequently, mine kobolds were known to be benevolent, and to operate under the same system of respectful conduct and reciprocal favors as house kobolds. They were fond of such appeasements as silver and gold. In such instances, their tunnel-knocking could be interpreted as being a warning not to dig toward danger, or alternatively to dig toward hidden veins of metal. Or they could give them more poisonous cobalt. It was pretty tricky business.

This is the part where I make an aside to address the tiny, scaly elephant in the room. I believe that the classic mine kobold--a nasty interpretation of it in particular--was a partial inspiration for kobolds when they became monsters in the original release of Dungeons & Dragons. Territorial, fond of mining and traps, and antagonistic toward the subterranean creatures they lived close to (including the dwarves and gnomes whom traditional kobolds are often conflated with), these little para-goblins would go on to become an endearing and colorful part of fantasy pop-culture. I will leave the bulk of that discussion for its own episode someday, but there is one point I'd like to touch on. Oftentimes older tabletop gamers will remark at how strange it was for 3rd Edition to remake of kobolds as reptilian dragon-sycophants, but in researching for this project, I've come to wonder what inspired the "original" form of kobolds-as-adventurer-fodder to begin with. After centuries of approximately human or dwarf-like appearance, 1974 marked the date when kobolds became dog-faced goblins with scales and forehead-horns.

And let's not even get started on the Vulcan ears.

Carrying on the spirit of odd ones out, we come to the third and final major type of kobold.

The Klabautermann is the kobold of a ship, protector of sailors and giver of good fortune to fishermen of the Baltic and North Seas. Sometimes, it will even rescue people washed overboard. It takes a fairly modern appearance, seeming to be a little man with a yellow sailor's hat or coat, and smoking a pipe filled with tobacco. Rather than having figurines or effigies of the ship's kobold, its image is often carved into the mast of the ship directly. Unlike house kobolds who come and go as they please, a Klabautermann seems more strongly associated with a particular ship. For instance, they come to protect a ship by having lived in a tree used for wood in the construction of the vessel, so the ship becomes an extension of its home. A Klabautermann is also known to carry around a caulking hammer for ship repairs, lending some credence to one etymology for Klabautermann which derives from the Low German verb kalfatern, or "to caulk". But in keeping with the theme of dualism among kobolds, Klabautermann can also be responsible for accidents and pranks aboard a ship far out at sea. And rather than being punished for trying to see the kobold's physical form, he willingly reveals himself to the crew of a ship so that they know that they are doomed by a storm or some other impending terrible event. The sea-kobold even goes down with the ship in such instances.

Similar in name and shape but different in nature is the Dutch Kabouter. A Kabouter is a small creature who commonly lives in a hill, or in modern popular culture, a large mushroom house. They are more shy of humans than dedicated house spirit kobolds, but will occasionally teach a nice young Dutchman how to make wooden shoes or deep building foundations. Kabouter men typically wear long, full beards and pointed red hats. If you're noticing how similar this appearance sounds to a certain other fictional creature, you are correct: Kabouters were famously written about and richly illustrated by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet in their 1976 book series, Leven en werken van de Kabouter. In English this translates to "Life and works of the Kabouter", but when the book was translated for sale in English-speaking countries, "Kabouter" was replaced with the word "Gnome". Eight years later the Spanish animated television series David, el Gnomo was released, and the following year David the Gnome hit American audiences.

And he kept on swinging.

So here we have another example of syncretism between a member of the goblin family and something quite different. This conflation with other sprites and beings is as common for kobolds, up to and including King Goldemar whom I referenced above. In the cycle of legends surrounding Theoderic the Great (taking the mythical form of Dietrich von Bern), Goldemar is described not as a kobold but as a dwarf. This might be a case of the terms for such creatures being vague, overlapping, or even synonymous during the times they were first used, and then that convention carrying on into modern times. I believe that this is supported by the fact that his brother Elbegast was described as an Elf-king while hanging out and robbing people with Charlemagne in a Middle Dutch poem. Their other brother, the dwarf Alberich, appears in the Nibelungenlied and serves as a treasure guardian for the protagonist Siegfried. They were a pretty popular bunch.

Despite the long and storied histories of German and Dutch communities in the land that would eventually become part of the United States, I was surprised to find almost nothing in the way of kobold myths or traditions in modern North America. Perhaps because they were so often tied to certain houses, or particular families, or to the earth itself, the kobolds were largely left behind in the Old Country by emigrants. Of course, just because there's no popular tradition centered on them doesn't mean that they aren't here. A handful of kobolds have made their way to this "New World" over the ages, always keeping just out of human notice or the eyes of history in these strange new lands. When the Dutch privateer Jan Janszoon van Haarlem was captured by Barbary Pirates in 1618, you can be sure that his fleet's water-kobolds came in tow. When he became Murat Reis the Younger, Grand Admiral and Governor of the Republic of Salé, they hunkered down in those balmy ports and made an uneasy alliance with the Djinn of Morocco. And when his son Anthony Janszoon van Salee moved to the New Netherlands and became the first and largest grantee of land on Coney Island, they were right behind him, pleased to find a semblance of home at last. Certainly, Janszoon's descendants have enjoyed considerable good fortune for the past few centuries, being the Vanderbilt Dynasty and all.

Coincidence?



Next episode, we'll be moving further west, to the shores of France as well as the British Isles and Ireland, where we will finally touch upon the linguistically modern goblin and its Insular Celtic neighbors.

I want to give a special thanks to all of my donors and supporters, as well as to one Goody Mooncup. Without her letter to the editor and advice column, I wouldn't have completed my research for this episode nearly as "quickly".

I am the Furtive Goblin, this was Goblin Watch, and I thank you for listening!




Dowden, Ken. European Paganism. Taylor & Francis, 2002.

Grimm, Jacob.Teutonic Mythology, Part 2. Kessinger Publishing, 2003 [1883].

Rose, Carol. Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1996.

Qut.

Now that I'm inching back into activity here on the blog (I honestly thought I'd be gone longer), I realize it's time for another one of my posts that can't decide between history and mythology. And what better topic to address in that mindset than the millennia-old concept of sacral kingship, in order to quell the need to go back and edit my college research project?

Sacred kings, past and present, are broadly defined as monarchs (male or female) whose temporal rule holds religious significance. They may hold religious authority, in which case they may hold some similarities to an outright theocrat, or they may simply be an otherwise earthly ruler reigning with the legitimacy conferred on them by a sacred figure or institution. Sacred kingship took a huge variety of forms around the world throughout history, arguably being present on every single continent with the exception of Antarctica.¹ The divine right of kings and mandate of heaven were enormously significant in the western and eastern halves of Eurasia respectively, but I want to look into a form of divine legitimacy that was carried by rulers of states which often straddled Europe and Asia- nomadic pastoralist empires.

The khan named Temüjin consolidated the disparate Mongolic tribes and officially formed the Mongol Empire in 1206 CE. After this date he became known as Chinggis Khan. He, like so many other khans of the Mongol people(s), had previously been invested with his power by a böö, or shaman, at the feet of the mountain named Burkhan Khaldun, located in modern day Khentii Province. This was a sacred mountain for the Mongols, and according to the account of his life, Temüjin once escaped certain death after a lost battle by taking refuge at the mountain. Burkhan Khaldun is traditionally believed to be a sort of axis mundi connected to heaven and the sky-god Tengri. By propagandizing the unlikely victories, narrow escapes, and seemingly miraculous events of Temüjin's life, it was easy to demonstrate to the Inner Asian world that he was a legitimate authority figure, surely under the guidance and protection of Eternal Heaven.²

But Burkhan Khaldun wasn't the only source of sacral kingship that Chinggis Khan benefited from. Humans live between heaven and earth, after all. And that is why he chose to place the capital of his nomadic empire at the literal and figurative center of the nomad's world, in a place called Ötüken.

Ötüken, often referred to as Ötüken-yish or Ötüken-jer, meaning "forest" or "land" of Ötüken, respectively, is an area of land that is difficult to pin down today. One theory put forth by Mongolist Thomas T. Allsen is that it stretched from the Khangai Mountains of central Mongolia to the Sayan Mountains of nearby Tuva³, though this doesn't quite match up when you try to place its most central landmark, the Orkhon River Valley, at its center. This is further muddled by the frequent claim that Ötüken is also a single mountain at the center. Though to be fair, spiritual geography can be very vague or flexible based on the needs of the time.

The Orkhon Valley, located at the tentative heart of Ötüken as well as about 320 kilometers west of the modern capital city of Ulaanbaatar, was where Chinggis Khan founded his first imperial city of Karakorum. But it had also once been the site of the city of Ordu-Baliq, seat of the Uyghur Khaganate almost four hundred years prior. Yet the Uyghurs had come there centuries after the fractious Göktürks had done the same twice over, and before them had come the Rourans, and even before them it is possible that the Xianbei and Xiongnu confederations had centered their states on the river valley. By the lifetime of Chinggis Khan it was the site of over a thousand years of cultural continuity and habitation by prestigious nomads whether they be Mongols, Turks, proto-Mongols, or other poly-ethnic or uncertain groups. Chinggis Khan's decision to place the seat of his new empire there was as natural as it was calculated.

And with good reason: thanks to a local microclimate, some of the greatest grazing lands in the Mongolian Steppe are located here, in addition to a breathtaking array of forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes. I believe it was as close to a paradise as the harsh steppe landscape could have offered to ancient nomads.

But it wasn't just a beautiful landscape with practical or tactical value and a long history.

Orkhon Valley is the place from which qut emanates.

Qut is a divine power which originates in Ötüken and spreads outward, granting the local ruler the divine right to unite and rule all of the tribes of the land. It was an extension of the favor of the spirits of the land, or yer-sub, whose mood and disposition toward humanity was said to be seen reflected in the weather and bounty of nature, in particular the fruit trees of Orkhon. The valley was recognized in writing as being vital to imperial power as far back as the early 8th century CE, when one of the rulers of the Göktürks, Bilge Khagan, inscribed on a stele at the site that "If you stay in the land of the Ötüken, and send caravans from there, you will have no trouble. If you stay at the Ötüken Mountains, you will live forever dominating the tribes!"⁴

It is also no coincidence that Ötüken is one of many names given to the earth-goddess of Turko-Mongol mythology, commonly seen as second in power only to Tengri, who was often presented as being her husband or relative. By controlling both Ötüken and Burkhan Khaldun, Chinggis Khan had the exceptional ability to say that the two greatest divinities of the world were on his side.

I see qut as sort of a hybrid sacral kingship model, which combines the elements of a few others. It comes from a physical location which must be seized and controlled in order to harness it, yet it takes the form of an empowering supernatural energy that is non-exclusive with, similar to, and distinct from the general favor or protection of the chief deity. I'd dare to say it resembles the power of barakah conferred upon people, objects, and places by God in Islam, though on a comparatively very limited scale, and with very specific stipulations attached.

Today we don't have a lot of world leaders claiming that they are empowered by magical leyline energy, which is probably for the best. But the beauty and history of the Orkhon Valley are preserved by a UNESCO heritage site designation.



¹ Though to be fair, we aren't sure about how the Elder Things governed themselves.

² Franke, Herbert. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Page 347.

³ Allsen, Thomas T. "Spiritual geography and political legitimacy in the eastern steppe." Ideology and the Formation of Early States. Brill Academic Publishers, 1996. Pages 124-125.

⁴ Drompp, Michael R. "Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A. D. 840." Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 3. American Oriental Society, 1999. Page 391.

Still alive, but hibernating.

Hello, dear Burrowers.

I haven't been treating you very dearly lately, have I? Falling behind on any kind of schedule I set as soon as I can, avoiding transparency, and doing nothing with the money a charitable few of you have given me through ko-fi or Patreon. I'm going to attempt to explain myself, as much for my own sake as for anyone's curiosity.

I don't think I especially enjoy writing.

I like the idea of writing, and the ideas I write about, but the act of writing itself has become as arduous as any of my other remaining pass-times. The shift from fun to work happened right around the time I started the blog, and it grew steadily worse from there. At the time of this writing, I've posted nothing in over a month, and I've dropped out of all of the play-by-post games I was a part of. A couple times I sat here trying to delete my blog and associated pages, but (un)fortunately I've chickened out of that so far.

I've done these things, or come close to doing them, because I hate the things I make. Evidently I've had this problem ever since I was a child and it's a little less normal for people to feel than I previously believed. I feel a deep, sometimes painful need to destroy the things I create, because the fact that I was the one who made them means that they are inadequate and inferior to the creative things that other people have made or will make. This is doubly frustrating when a part of me also wants my things to be seen and enjoyed by others. That's why I started up the Burrow to begin with, after all. Had I been able to satisfy myself with just a folder of stories in my desk or on my desktop, I would have quietly continued to add to them, or burned or deleted them months ago by now.

Another reason why I started the Burrow was because I wanted some money.

Being unemployed all my life and afraid to leave my house on most occasions, let alone find a job or real social life with humans, I felt the need to save my change for years but only recently got into the habit of mindlessly completing surveys for PayPal payments and Visa gift cards. Owning a successful and monetized site was my pipe-dream, and after I rightly destroyed an abortive YouTube gaming channel attempt years ago, I eventually came to wishfully thinking that my writing could accomplish what choppy, low-fi videos could not.

Since my dislike for my own material sort of forbids me from advertising it anywhere for any reason, you can see how my blog has remained obscure outside of the posts which a fan aggressively promoted for my sake. I can't even share posts with my significant other for fear of seeming silly, desperate, improperly distracted, or whorish. And when I saw the new blogs of recent acquaintances reaching 1,000 or 10,000 page views in a fraction of the time it had taken me to hit the same milestones, I began to seriously think "why bother?" With hopelessness about my blog's future mounting on one side and resentment about its content on the other, I finally petered out last month.

I don't particularly want to get back into writing at the moment, though it would be useful to keep the empty hours a little less so. I want something to be done with the ideas that I have, especially since (in my ignorant little bubble where I read virtually nothing that other people are working on) they seem to be unique. But I don't think I'm in the head space to be able to do it comfortably. Maybe I'll come back for the new year, especially if some kind of job finds me and takes the unrealistic financial pressure off of this hobby. And, maybe once Google+ is shut down for good in April, I'll have the incentive to start sharing on places like reddit communities, since there will be literally no other option for me but to try different avenues.

So, consider this a hiatus of sorts, and forgive me if you were looking forward to new updates on Litte's road trip, or explanations of what the hell the aurikhs and Fokari are.

The Esuvee: An Ecology of a Majestic Mechanical Beast.

((Hey, burrowers. Does anyone here remember the year 2005? How about the lawsuit which alleged that Ford Motor Company's marketing misled drivers on how to drive and maintain their Explorer S.U.V.s? I had no idea about any of that controversy, or the tragic and preventable loss of life that spurred it, but my life was impacted by it in some way regardless.

I watched the commercial that they made as part of the year-long, $27 million USD advertising campaign for S.U.V. safety which followed. And to little twelve year-old Furt, it was pretty glorious:

This strange, lumbering beast phonetically named an Esuvee fascinated me, and I honestly wish I could have owned some kind of paraphernalia as a kid, like a plush toy version. Most other people I've spoken to about them seem to think that they're kind of creepy, and I admit their CG has not aged well, but I find the giant esuvee weirdly cute and endearing. And since I have a place in which to make my rambling ideas concrete these days, I thought why not go all the way with them and write a post? Consider this my first attempt at writing homebrew for an Ultraviolet Grasslands game.))



"Whoa, girl. Easy! Easy now! It was only a startled chrome-fox."
 -- Lonzo the Game Warden, to his startled mount, Stampies.

"Don't stand behind them for an hour or two after they've had their headlights on. The smell of their exhaust will make ya either pass out, or vomit somethin' fierce."
 -- Malgoret "Mags" Persidy, senior convoy leader to a group of children.


Far to the west, beyond the battery acid swamps and Rust-Storm Alley, there stretches a vast swath of even more untamed wilderness. Ruined hulks of technology and deposits of rare and jumbled ores break the rolling plains of jagged, saw-toothed grass. Lightning spontaneously crackles and spiderwebs through the sky even on the clearest of days. The earth itself buzzes or throbs with an almost undetectable energy that unnerves but compels human and canine alike. It's a place that no one would have any interest in, were it not located in between every other place of interest to be found in the Teal Wastes.

The grasslands are home to many bizarre animals, but none are so immediately identifiable as the esuvees- also known as lamp-heads, grill-brows, or simply iron beasts. These shaggy creatures, typically between three and four thousand pounds and eight and twelve feet tall at the hump, are the undisputed masters of their environment. Despite this, they are almost total herbivores who roam in great, placid herds known as convoys. They graze through the sharp foliage for the choices knives of grass, and break off mineral deposits with their surprisingly powerful jaws in order to gum them like a cow tonguing a salt-lick.

But they are more than simply adapted to their environment. They reflect its very nature, being an awkward fusion of organic and inorganic.

The most striking feature of an esuvee, besides its size, is its face. Its wide, flat countenance sports a pair of massive pseudo-crystalline bulbs spaced far apart, each one capable of projecting a beam of light stronger than 65 watt lamps and moving with partial independence from the other. Their eyes are connected to an intricate system of specialized nerve endings which incorporate copper particles like filaments, and which run all the way from the head down into the fifth and sixth stomachs. These stomachs are specialized less for digestion and more for fermentation, brewing up an ethanol fuel from the truly nightmarish volume of plant matter which the average esuvee consumes every day. That fuel is in turn compressed into adjacent bladders and burned, powering the esuvee's lights as well as short bursts of extreme energy, such as in fighting off or fleeing the bands of small ambush predators who have to separate an esuvee from its convoy and then harry it for several miles in order to bring it down.

Not as well known to strangers of the plains is the pair of smaller, much less luminous lights which an esuvee sports upon its rear. Studding the back of each hind leg's "knee" (actually a digitigrade ankle) is a dull, reddish bulb which consumes far less energy than those up front. These are useful to members of a convoy traveling at night, in which the bulk of the herd is able to power its night vision down to a soft glow, simply following the lights of the esuvees in front of them who lead the way with lamps at full power. And when the forerunners tire, they can simply slow down to be enveloped by the group as fresher esuvees move ahead to take their places. These rear lights do not seem to be eyes in any way however, leading experts to wonder how an esuvee's body distinguishes wire-filaments from actual optical nerves.

Between the luminous eyes is situated a large, flat space where a nose might be expected. There are in fact nostrils somewhere in there, but they're a bit difficult to find in between the thick rows of wrought metal which form a sort of protective face-plate. These "grills" fuse seamlessly to the skull bones from which they grow, almost like metal mimicry of smaller animals' horns. The grills of male esuvees tend to be larger and more pronounced than those of females, which aids them in their headbutting displays during the highly competitive annual mating period.

This time, colloquially known as "rocking season", is what causes esuvees to get such a negative reputation for aggression and single-mindedness in the wider world. This isn't helped by the fact that seeing a mated pair of esuvees a-rockin' can be quite a... scarring experience for more impressionable eyes.

I'm only partly sorry.

Regardless, the first pioneers into this land were quick to notice how the esuvee thrived, and quicker to stake their own claims in them. They followed the convoys, learning the quickest routes in between potable water sources while also hunting the beasts. Over time they learned to tame them, and a herding industry flourished among the pioneers which survives in their descendants to this day.

 

Even a juvenile esuvee has enough iron-rich meat on it to last a family several days, though a person with already adequate iron levels has to be careful to thoroughly drain it of blood and hemoglobin before consumption to reduce the risk of iron poisoning. Its bones are dense and heavy, owing to the rich deposits of metals intermingled with the calcium throughout. A skilled smith can purify trace amounts of several metals from every bone, slowly but reliably adding up to workable amounts in a landscape where staying in one place long enough to properly mine an ore outcropping can be dangerous business attracting of much unwanted attention from the other local fauna. The face-plate is a far more accessible piece of metal of course, and grill-metal tools or weapons have been renowned for their durability in the past. Unfortunately this has given rise to the practice of poaching esuvees solely for their grills while leaving the rest of the animal to rust and rot- a truly disgusting waste of life and resources that convoy-keepers have taken great pains to crack down upon in recent years. Their fur, though reputed to be very musky, can be perfectly clean and serviceable for clothing and shelters alike with proper treatment. Because it can be sheered from the esuvee's hide with no harm to the animal, it has become so widely available in many markets that even rabbit's fur has become a rare "luxury" by comparison. Even the animal's eyes, if extracted with their roots undamaged, can be made into lanterns when coupled with a crude electrolytic battery.

An esuvee is just as valuable alive as it is for its parts, however. When trained and cared for properly they are some of the most prolific beasts of burden known to man and several other sapient cultures. Just one harnessed cow can tow two to three thousand pounds for long distances, which has allowed the convoy-keepers to become some of the least light-traveling nomads around.

The average chieftain can carry around a solar tent, three water tanks, and a hot tub.

Less well known, but no less unusual than the esuvee's grill and headlights, are its soles. Each four-toed foot has a treaded texture somewhere in between rubber and old leather, as well as a series of tiny bladders located several inches below the surface, which travel all of the way up into the elbow. Through a hydraulic mechanism that isn't perfectly understood at this time, these bladders can engorge with air to give the lower joints of an esuvee a cushioned, almost balloon-like quality.

Their properties could revolutionize airtight technologies, if only they didn't smell so footy.

This strange adaptation helps the truly massive and heavy esuvee from damaging itself with its own weight while running at high speeds, which can be in excess of forty miles an hour when the beast is well and started up.

Strong harness-belts and a stronger neck are needed to ride at full bounce.

The air-cushioning adaptation also reduces the risk of an esuvee being injured when rolling over onto its side. Esuvees roll over with startling regularity, little-known fact. This is usually to no injury of their own, but often to the detriment of anyone unskilled in riding them. Much effort has been put into educating people beyond the Teal Wastes in the proper use of an esuvee, particularly when it comes to wealthy young men who have one imported as a way of showing off their money and virility. Top-heavy esuvees are often the first (and last) mistake those riders make.

You don't want to know where the rider ended up.

Despite all of these dangers, the esuvee is a reliable and valuable beast, known for its surprising degree of compassion and empathy with humans. It has captured the imaginations of people for generations, as centuries of folklore and oral traditions exemplify. Even as new technologies are developed or old ones rediscovered from the ancient wrecks of the Long Ago time, the convoy-keepers and their faithful esuvees seem like they won't be going anywhere anytime soon, except for everywhere they choose to.

The closest I could find to an old-school monster manual sketch.
ESUVEE by theblitz

Updates, and More Excerpts from Hraela's Homework.

((Hello, Burrowers! I'm still alive, and I'll add some length to this smallish post by tacking a few things on here. Yes I've had a super slow month this month, but this month my slow month is somewhat more understandable than other months. Month month month.

... Anyway, I managed to graduate from my college earlier. As in, officially did the walk and received the piece of paper covered in Latin that I wouldn't think to be a degree except for the fact that it has my name on it and I sort of recognize the word "Baccalavrei".

In addition to freeing my mind from a lot of mental and emotional tethers, this changes how I'll be able to approach my blog for the foreseeable future. I won't be pumping out the level of content I did last year when I started the blog up in the dead of summer, since I'll actually be working this time around, but I will feel comfortable enough to do more, and hopefully do it better.

Additionally, I'm inching out of my electronic isolation by interacting with other blog-smiths.

Head on over to Unlawful Games to check out some cool new content created by TheLawfulNeutral, whom you might recognize from a few of the comment strings down here in the Burrow. Or literally any of the free advertising he's giving me on the larger internet. He recently decided to start up his own more OSR-oriented blog to house his menagerie of terrifying and creatively visceral ideas.

He doesn't have a huge library of posts yet, but that means you don't need to fear archive binge. If you still don't know where to start though, maybe try his monster conversion of the Longfolk from beyond my very own Axebitten Woods.

Now, let's see how our sneaky little giant fencing student is handling this whole ordination fiasco.))

Rough Draft Page 8

Useless.

Completely unintelligible, impenetrably obtuse(sp?), poorly-written garbage.

I've watched Litte scribbling like mad since before we departed on this journey. Is this all that he has produced since then?

I have reproduced an excerpt from his "writings" as well as I can above, and I write that meaning that I've done a fairly accurate job of repl. This is not the script of Ersuut, or any other language in the world that I've ever seen or heard of. And there are dozens of pages of this. Hundreds and hundreds of lines scrawled front-and-back across sheaves identical to but completely different from the above.

I honestly cannot believe that this is anything of substance. I begin to suspect that this man is actually deeply mentally unhinged, and the University was simply getting him out of their hair for a time while mercifully humoring his illusions of grandeur and countless other exen ecsen eccentricities. Fools that we are, we agreed to join him on his romp through his own imagination. I wonder if he even told the truth about there being a delegation waiting for us at our destination in the mountains.

But despite the fact that these pages are worthless for my original plan to practice field ordination, I believe I should continue to curate them, and copy them. There is just enough reuse and regularity between tortured curves and line segment snarls to give some vague sense of anti-logic to Litte's writing. Even the manner in which some characters transcend their lines of text to join with others seems somehow preder predetermined and deliberate. I can't say what the reversal of brush stroke direction in the last line means. Maybe he just adjusted the angle of the quill in his hand. This all leads me to admit that there is a (very) small chance that what is written here might actually say something to anyone else but he. It could be a code or a cipher, and if he is trying to hide something then my mission is even more important than I could have imagined. I must make a breakthrough on this before he does or says anything to damage or embarrass the University, or worse.

From the sounds of drunken rioting across the drinking hall from where I've hidden myself, I don't have a lot of time.

Goblin Watch, Episode 01.

((Welp. I tried to start a YouTube series. I tried to create a simple but practical and charming visual aesthetic to go along with my (hopefully) edutaining solo rambling. I tried to develop long-term designs to get in on that sweet AdSense gravy-train in a way that wouldn't pepper my blog with awkward, unrelated advertisements for low home refinancing rates or highly specific dating websites.

Operative word being "tried".

In the end, I just don't have the skill, patience, or computer processing power to be able to build a video series from scratch.

So instead, I've decided to throw the audio up onto Soundcloud!

Come listen to the first episode of Goblin Watch here.

In this new format, I'll be approaching the history of the "goblin" in a rambling solo-cast style, but also providing each episode's script as a textual post of its very own, in case anxious, high-pitched voices aren't quite your cup of tea. So feel free to click above or scroll down, or both if you're feeling generous, and enjoy.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for how I can improve this (besides getting a better mic, of course. I am a bit limited on funds for now), and let me know if you would prefer future episodes to be shortish like this (5-15 minutes total), or if they should be beefier (20-30 minutes or more).

Additionally, if you would like me to dedicate a Ko-Fi post to audio, let me know in advance! I am still eagerly awaiting CuPost material.))





Goblin Watch, Episode 01.

Hello, and welcome to Goblin Watch! The mini-series dedicated to the origins and iterations of everyone's favorite folkloric critters and adventurer fodder.

Have you ever wondered where goblins come from? Well, when a mother goblin and a father goblin love each other...

Wait, wrong episode.

Ahem!

But seriously, have you ever wondered where the idea of a goblin comes from? Who invented it, and in how many different parts of the world? What makes a goblin different from or similar to other mythical creatures like elves, or dwarves? In what state was the idea of the goblin when that Tolkien git came along and got his hands on the word, and what has it been like ever since he left his indelible mark on it and in part wedded it to the revolutionary new idea of orcs?

These and many other questions will be raised, and hopefully we'll be able to find some good answers to them.

I am, appropriately enough, the Furtive Goblin, and I will help lead the way.

Over the next few weeks, or months, or however long this lasts, we will be delving into the history of the concept of the goblin, and how people have used that idea over the centuries.

This exploration will take us through vast stretches of mythology, literature, cinema, video gaming, and even pop culture, though not in any particular order.

It will also be a journey of self-discovery for me, as I come to grips with my identity.

Without any further ado, let's begin with the first step taken in any ambitious series: A soul-crushing lesson in etymology and dead languages!

Just a head's up, I am not a linguist, and my ability to pronounce words in other languages, even Romance languages, is pretty abysmal, so my apologies for getting many things wrong.

The Modern English word g-o-b-l-i-n “goblin” is the current most common version of the word, with several other spellings having been around and attested to for a while before most writers decided on the simplest one. So, the vast majority of goblins we'll come across from here on out will be just goblins. Goblyn with a 'y' is something we are going to come back to in a couple of chapters once we hit tabletop role-playing games, however.

English goblin first appeared in the 14th century CE, deriving from the earlier Anglo-Norman word gobelin, which itself derives from an Old French word of the same spelling.

(Little known fact, a contingent of 200 goblin cavalrygobs was instrumental in the victory at the Battle of Hastings. They rode on William the Conqueror's hunting dogs.)

This French word in turn deviated in around the 12th century CE from the Medieval Latin word cabalus or possible gobalus. We aren't quite sure which, because of the different ways Latin handled /g/, /c/, and /k/ sounds in written script.

Finally, our old Latin friends seemed to have ripped the idea from the Greeks, who used the word kobalos, plural kobaloi. In addition to being a rude name you'd call someone you might deem a rogue, knave, or thieving jerk, the kobalos is a class of spirits or other minor divinities in Greek Mythology- again, material we'll be sure to touch upon in a later episode.

And that's pretty much all there is. I was somewhat disappointed to find that there isn't a strong suggestion anywhere of what the Greek word might come from, or if there was a single Proto-Indo-European word from which all of this descends.

But that's only the more popular etymology for goblin in modern discourse.

Another theory which I'm personally more skeptical of is that goblin is ultimately a diminutive sort of pet-version of the proper name Gobel/Gobeau, possibly of Germanic or French origin.

A third theory is that goblin derives from the name for the continental Germanic kobold, but given that kobold shares Greek kobalos as the same etymological root, this theory sort of turns around into the first etymology.

(Side note, this also gives an etymological precedent for kobolds being so similar in behavior and physical appearance to goblins in the first few iterations of Dungeons & Dragons, despite my personal preference for those of a more recent, scalier persuasion.)

Goblin itself is the origin for the Welsh creature called a coblyn, showing that we are not dealing with a linguistic dead-end, and giving an inkling of where the word might go in the coming centuries as language changes and interacts. The coblyn is classified as a type of Knocker- a more brownie- or leperchaun-esque being which I've only heard about for the first time in researching this video. It's an interesting point for later exploration, but for now we've got to stay on topic.

Now that we've got an idea of the word, let's take a look at its earliest uses. Tune in next [insert time frame here] for a look at the nature and actions of goblins and their ancestors in myths, as well as folklore- that last great bastion for all half-discarded things which have fallen out of the favor of dominant mythologies and belief systems.