Thoughts on Porting/Adapting/Fudging The Banner Saga to Tabletop

The Banner Saga, or Post-Apocalyptic Oregon Trail Viking Tactics DX as I like to call it, was the first video game I ever saw crowdfunded. Though I lacked the money to participate in or experience it until almost a decade after the trilogy started, it has lived in my head in some form or another ever since. I have certain gripes about the lack of interactivity with the ancestral banner that gives the series its namesake, and questions about the way some of the cumulative choices pan out across the series, but I enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay, story beats, and lavish artstyle throughout. Do recommend.

Often I wonder how I'd go about porting or adapting the game to a tabletop setting because for some reason I need the things I like to bleed into every other medium I like. But I never got around to trying before now because it feels like equal parts convoluted and "yeah, duh". But since I'm now the guy who spitballs Dragonlance x Talislanta mashups, it feels silly not to just go for it already.

Gameplay in TBS falls into three major categories that I will call combat, caravaning, and conversation.

Combat

Most of your time spent playing TBS is spent fighting or preparing to fight battles, in which individual characters take turns moving around a grid-based map and using abilities that reward planning and positioning. If you're familiar with the FinFan Tactics series or basically any Ogre Battle game besides The March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Calibur, you already know the basics.

Where TBS differs is the fact that every character has two separate "health" bars that have to be managed carefully, and a turn order system that encourages spreading the damage around, rather than defeating enemies one by one.

Because tactics video games and combat-heavy fantasy TTRPGs have so much shared DNA, I think that overall the TBS system can be ported to tabletop directly, with only minor adaptations to the turn and actions systems. The end result is something that feels quite different from combat systems where you roll dice for everything, but I think that's somewhat refreshing.

Stats

Every character in TBS, regardless of class, has the same stats in common. These are Strength, Armor, Willpower, Exertion, Break, Movement Range, and Attack Range:

• Strength (STR) is both attack power and health; you deal as much damage with attacks as you have STR, and once you reach 0 STR you're defeated.
• Armor (ARM) is a pool of damage reduction that decreases direct STR damage you suffer before being depleted. A 3 STR attack against someone with 2 ARM will remove the ARM first and only deal 1 STR damage.
• Willpower (WIL) is a pool of points you can spend on actions to improve them. 1 WIL = 1 extra tile of movement, 1 more point of STR or ARM damage, an enhanced version of an ability, etc.
• Exertion (EXE) is how many Willpower points you can dump into a given action. 2 EXE means you can spend up to 2 WIL on something at a time, etc.
• Break (BRK) is bonus damage that is always applied to attacks vs ARM, regardless of current STR level. 1 BRK means your attacks always deal 1 extra damage against enemy ARM.
• Movement Range is how many tiles you can move in a turn. Diagonal movement costs 2.
• Attack Range is how many tiles away you can attack from. 1 is most melee units, 2 is some spearmen and others with long reach, and 3 or more is most ranged units.

In addition, most characters have 0-1 Passive Abilities and 1-3 Active Abilities, depending on class and level.

Size is also a factor that comes into play, although I wouldn't call it a stat like the others. Size is usually either 1x1 tile for humans, or 2x2 tiles for big beefy Varl boys, with less common creatures taking up different configurations of space.

This facet of the game is very easy to port to tabletop. Most PCs and monsters should have pretty small, manageable stat blocks if you choose to stick with the level of individual mechanical complexity offered by in-game classes. A character could have something like this for most of their career:

Sindri Unnsbur, Human Spearman

STR 8, ARM 6, WIL 5, EXE 1, BRK 1

Move 5, Range 2, Size 1x1

Passive: Embolden - Each kill the Spearman makes encourages allies to fight harder, granting 1 Willpower to the Spearman and any adjacent allies.

Active: Impale - Skewer an adjacent enemy unit, doing normal Strength damage (100% chance to hit) before knocking it back. Impaled characters Bleed for 1 round, taking 1 Strength damage for each tile moved.

And that's it.

Talents

Alright it turns out I was lying when I said "and that's it" for character stats in this game. That's because in my first draft of this post I entirely forgot that Talents exist, and only got remound of them when I thought I was 90% done because I just so happened to scroll past a hyperlink to them on the wiki. (This is because I'm not only a bad writer but also a bad researcher.)

Introduced in the second entry in the series, Talents are secondary progression given as a reward after maxing out your stats. There are 2 Talents per Stat, but you can only select 1 to put any points in for each. That makes 10 Talents, each with 6 ranks that improve their passive benefits by some percentile value, usually +5/10% per rank. You buy the first 3 ranks with promotion points, and can find rare items that give a bonus of +1 to +3 to them in your travels.

Talents let you specialize your characters a little more, making them better at the existing combat systems without radically changing them:

• Hunker Down (ARM) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 ARM damage per hit.
• Tighten Straps (ARM) grants a 20-45% chance to regenerate 1 ARM per turn.
• Robust (STR) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 STR damage per hit.
• Artery Strike (STR) grants 10-35% added Critical Hit chance. (Double all STR damage, including WP expended on the attack. AoE attacks and attacks from passive traits can crit.)
• Defy (WP) grants a 30-80% chance to straight up ignore a killing blow but be reduced to 1 STR.
• Stubborn (WP) grants a 20% chance to regenerate 1-6 WP per turn.
• Dodge (EXE) grants a 5-30% chance to avoid STR attacks completely.
• Lucky Shot (EXE) grants 30-80% added hit chance.
• Exploit (BRK) grants a 10-35% chance to gain Puncture on an attack. (+1 STR damage per 2 ARM the target has lost that fight.)
• Divert (BRK) grants a 5-30% chance to entirely avoid an ARM attack.

The power creep provided by these Talents is mostly taken into account in the balancing of TBS, so even if your entire party hangs out unkillable at death's door with 1 STR for 80% of the battle, the battle layouts and AI are meant to remain challenging.

But porting TBS to tabletop messes with many of those finely balanced systems at least a little bit, which means that Talents could get extremely wonky late in the game. More Playtesting Is Needed to determine if you should fiddle with the values for some Talents, or just remove them entirely in favor of slightly deeper Class customization.

Class

Speaking of classes, those are the main way characters are differentiated from one another in TBS. They affect their starting stats, max stats, and abilities, and at a certain rank level (out of a max of 15) they can be promoted to one of two advanced class choices that grant them extra abilities. It's another extremely Tactics-esque part of the game, but not nearly as complex as most full-fledged examples of that genre.

There are several dozen classes in TBS, many of them unique to specific characters or party members, and many more available to NPCs only. You could port all of them directly over to tabletop without a hitch as long as you've sorted out combat (see below), but I think that would start to make combat very same'y-feeling when it's no longer just one person controlling the whole party, but a bunch of players in control of individual characters who can only use the same few moves over and over, and common enemy types become easy to identify and boring to deal with.

That's why I propose making classes slightly more complex.

At the very least, give players a few more abilities in their toolkit, and give them some freedom of choice in the matter. If you keep the trilogy's level cap of 15, consider giving them a choice between 2 new abilities every few ranks rather than just once, until they have 4 or 5 active abilities and may 2 passives by the end of their career. Lowering the level cap to something nice and even like 10 would correspondingly give you fewer abilities to pick or for the GM to design.

For example, give that spearman above the passive ability later on to reposition after using Impale, or maybe allow them to pick up a single ability from a different martial class to reflect them dabbling in other fighting styles to diversify their options.

Species

I want to include a little subsection here for something that is mechanically present in TBS, but never explicit: character species. You can never create a character in the computer game, so you're never faced with a screen explaining the unique traits each group of humanoid peoples in the game world possess. But they do influence how you use the units in battle.

(Minor spoilers for the types of playable characters available in TBS 3, if you want to skip ahead. I really wish Blogger had clickable spoiler tags as a built-in tool so I didn't have to try to parse through the solid wall of text that it spits everything into in the HTML view.)

Humans are bog-standard with the most variety of classes, unsurprisingly. Varl always occupy 4 squares because of their size. Dredge usually have a passive "Shatter" trait where dealing ARM damage to them causes a chain reaction that damages nearby Dredge allies. Horseborn have the speed and size of a horse, often moving farther than other characters and taking up 2x1 squares like Large (Long) creatures from the original print of D&D 3E. Etc.

If you decide that species is baked into class, you don't have to concern yourself with the details. But if you want to allow for character creation and customization where species and class are separate choices, it's worth keeping in mind the traits you would or wouldn't want to emphasize in your game.

For example, I'd be likely to drop the negative passive trait Dredge have because it mostly exists to add a layer of tactical satisfaction when you're fighting Dredge enemies in the video game, and it would feel kind of pointed and targeted if a Dredge PC was saddled with that all campaign; they'd already be dealing with enough extra trouble, by my reckoning.

Character Creation

I've kind of been beating around the bush on this one for a few sections, haven't I?

Character creation isn't a thing in TBS, which is completely normal for the genre. But outside of introducing somebody to a new game, just handing a premade character to a player doesn't quite light the spark, in my entirely unqualified opinion. TTRPG characters thrive more on either randomization or player customization, or a bit of both.

So if everyone at the table is creating a custom character, either give them a set number of bonus points to distribute amongst their stats (excluding Movement Range and Attack Range), or have everyone roll a small die like d4 or d6 and distribute that many points, with a max of +2 to any single stat so balance doesn't go completely out the window.

Then, either roll on your favorite random table or come up with a background for each character to finish them off. Maybe provide them with an appropriate item for it. A veteran huscarl might start with a scarred shield they used when defending their jarl from an assassination attempt, and that shield might fill the "armor" slot and provide some small passive bonus. More on items down below.

Titles

Heroic Titles are unique upgrades granted to each character after they reach rank 11, introduced in TBS 3. They buff the character with the title in some way, and they have their own renown tracks that improve them over time just like ranking up in one's class. Only 1 character can hold a given title, so in TBS it was important to match characters with titles that complemented one another, even if they might not have made the most thematic sense.

But in tabletop where each player has more agency, I think titles should instead be tied to how a given character has been played over the course of a campaign. It doesn't make much sense for the chunky varl bulwark to pick up Shadow Walker after a campaign spent being big, up-front, and imposing for example.

Personally I believe a player should have input on what title their character gets, or in creating a new title alongside the GM that would be appropriate for them. But you could also run the game so that the consequences of the characters' actions and their fame or infamy in the game world dictate what title they are known by, as an organic response to player choice. In either case there is more room for narrative consideration here that would be a shame to ignore in favor of pure min-maxing.

Items

TBS dispenses with armor and weapon slots or other traditional loadouts. Everybody can equip a max of 1 item at a time that provides some kind of passive benefit, often gated by character rank. The characters are otherwise assumed to always have all the necessities of their class; archers always have their bows, shield-bangers their shields, etc. 

That kind of abstracted, 'don't worry about it' inventory works well for what is shaping up to be a relatively rules-lite tabletop system, but at the same time there is room to expand to add customizability. Maybe increase the number of item slots to 3 or 4, with categories like arms, armor, and trinkets or accessories. Existing items from TBS can be slotted into the above, mostly as trinkets, and a few weapons and clothing can be added to round things out wherever the GM finds there's a lack of support.

... Oh hey, this chapter was supposed to be about actual combat, wasn't it?

Turn Order

Battles in TBS have a somewhat unique tempo. Where other games might use a speed stat or some other initiative system to determine turn order, TBS just uses your assigned party order. But every other turn in between your party members is the enemy's, at least until the end of combat phase called Pillage.

This creates a fast-paced back-and-forth between the player and the computer that intensifies rather than winds down the more units on one side drop; the last two remaining units on one team are suddenly much more mobile and active than they were in the first round of combat because now they have their fallen allies' turn slots, and if you didn't take precautions to weaken them beforehand, they're in a position to tip the scales the other way. I've never played it to be sure, but it kinda looks like chess from the outside.

Once the second-to-last unit on one team drops, Pillage mode activates, and all the units in the numerically superior team go in order before the lone survivor gets their single turn, making mop-up faster and easier and preventing really drawn-out and annoying last stands by either side.

The system is great for automated gameplay, but making the table keep track of two separate but threaded-together initiative cycles that will change in size over the course of combat without some kind of VTT aid feels like it could be a bit much.

That's why I offer (but don't necessarily recommend) some alternatives:

1. Add a speed or initiative stat. The character sheet for this 'game' won't be very cluttered, so one more box isn't a big deal. That value is your set position in combat order with no dueling rotations, meaning allies or enemies can come immediately before or after you, depending. This makes combat much more traditional.
2. Use group initiative. Everybody on one side goes at once, with attacks and effects resolving in the order that the party has put itself in, in order to empower players to coordinate and find a way to make the person who goes last just as valuable as the one who goes first. Maybe the whole party can spend WP up to their lowest EXE value to add a bonus to this roll.

Bear in mind that both of the above would render Pillage mode unnecessary, as well as change the metagame somewhat by removing the biggest incentive for the practice of wounding a bunch of units but keeping them alive until the very end so they don't give their turn slots to healthier allies.

Action Economy

TBS lets you move, then take a single action. Actions include STR attack, ARM attack, and using abilities, among certain other context cues. You can also Rest at the start of your turn before moving, avoiding doing anything to regain 1 WIL.

I see no reason to mess with this simplicity, except to suggest that you let characters move before or after acting. It just seems reasonable.

No Rolls Necessary*

There's basically no random chance or uncertainty involved in any actions in combat. Only a handful of abilities have randomized outcomes, like which nearby tiles get affected by certain AoE attacks, and those could easily be simulated by stealing the rules for when ranged attacks or thrown weapons go awry from your preferred ruleset, or circumvented entirely by just giving control to the caster.

Attack rolls aren't a thing either, outside of the very specific situation where a unit tries to deal health damage to another unit whose Armor is higher than the attacker's Strength. In that case every point of ARM above the attacker's STR confers a -10% miss chance (up to a maximum -80% to hit), easily resolved with a d10 roll or the like.

Overall this is the easiest piece to port to tabletop, to the point that it almost feels too simple. It's not a dumbing-down of combat, though- it just gives more room for other parts of combat to be more tactical, and lets all sides operate and strategize with a sense of confidence uncommon to tabletop, I feel.

Renown

Every enemy you deep six in TBS grants the character who dealt the killing blow 1 point of Renown toward increasing their Rank. It's essentially just combat XP and Level, but here all that matters is who deals the final point of Strength damage. In the video games this meant you have to carefully manage who struck the final blows how often, or else you could wind up with a handful of over-leveled kill-stealers and a bunch of massively under-leveled support characters.

That would be pretty annoying and cumbersome to coordinate with a whole party of live players, and unwittingly kill-stealing could disrupt the fun and maybe even cause some bleed-over, so it's best to drop that part of the mechanic for tabletop. Renown from combat encounters should be divided evenly, with unique rewards reserved for roleplaying, feats of exploration, out-of-the-box thinking, etc. and so on.

If you keep the upgrade track for characters' Heroic Titles, consider granting them 1 title Renown every time they act in accordance with that title.

Caravaning

The second biggest part of TBS (albeit a distant second as I look upon that wall of text up there) is the journey, heavily inspired by Oregon Trail and other lightly simulationist strategy games aimed at getting somewhere and managing your collection of rugged and/or hopelessly in-over-their-heads immigrants so you don't all die before you reach your destination.

I might've missed it in my playthrough a few years ago, but surprisingly I don't think TBS had any dysentery jokes.

Stats

Just like a party member, your whole caravan has stats that fluctuate during your adventure:

• Morale is the measure of your caravan's overall, well, morale. It represents your army and clansmen's mood and approval of your leadership, and it goes down from the drudgery of travel, up from resting, and up or down depending on your responses to special events. Morale gives you a willpower bonus or penalty in battle.
• Supplies are an abstract counter representing all the food, tools, weapons, and other resources your caravan burns through as it travels. Supplies are consumed each day of travel and every rest the caravan takes.
• Population is how many poor sods are following your banner at the moment. In-game they are divided up between clansmen, fighters, and varl. Fighters and varl contribute to mass combat encounters, while clansmen are the ordinary noncombatants caught up on all this mess and aren't often used directly as a resource by the game.

Let's break these down a little more separately than character stats before.

Morale

Morale reminds me of the sliding hope vs despair meters used in some LotR-inspired games, and it also mechanically incentivizes players to care about the caravan because their own self-interest and wellbeing are tied up in it.* Its 5-step scale can be kept as-is for tabletop, and whatever formulae are used to calculate it behind the scenes can be boiled down to moving ±1 along the track from major story beats.

• Poor Morale gives each character -2 WIL
• Weak gives -1 WIL
• Normal has no effect
• Good gives +1 WIL
• Great gives +2 WIL

Remember to take advantage of morale as a nonmechanical tool, too. At the end of the day it's not just a bonus or penalty to a combat stat, but a representation of the whole caravan's mood and wellbeing. Let it factor into roleplaying and the way the characters relate to the rest of the caravan in ways that couldn't be done outside of a TTRPG.

If morale is low, maybe the referee should consider the next random encounter to be an inciting incident for an argument between families, factions, or a challenge to existing leadership positions; if it's high, maybe an unexpected good outcome to an otherwise bad encounter would be merited as everyone pulls together and comes through. Use it to humanize the caravan into more than just a faceless mass waiting to die of dysentery.

Morale is a good mechanic overall, and fairly simple to adapt to tabletop. The other two, on the other hand...

Supplies & Population

The interaction between Supplies and Population greatly benefits from being automated by the game. Dividing the former by the latter with different weight multipliers added to each of the three types of caravan followers to get your running counter of remaining days worth of supplies would be a serious drag on a tabletop game, as well as very out-of-place in a ruleset that otherwise doesn't have much math.

So I instead propose going with a non-simulationist mechanic, like for example depletion dice.

Every unit of time of travel (whether it be days like in TBS, or something longer like weeks) and every extended rest to heal up or improve morale is a roll on the Supplies die, and a result of 1 reduces its size by 1 step. From a max size of say d8 or d10 it can dwindle down to a measly d4, and perhaps even further to a d2 coinflip before food runs out and people start deserting from your caravan or worse. Conversely, successfully leading a foraging party or finding a hidden trove of resources increases the die size by 1 step in turn.

Similarly, Population has a die that increases as new people join the caravan and decreases as they settle down, desert, or die in large numbers. An increase in the Population die may call for a Supplies check to see if it drops in size or not. Population doesn't require daily checks like Supplies do, being reserved for bigger events like helping to resettle a village or fighting in a War (more on that below).

The basic idea to stick to is you only need to worry about big, discrete events so you don't have to stop the game to factor in a lot of little minutia, like how many hours of passive berry picking the characters did and whether it matters or not.

Events

The meat of caravaning gameplay is dealing with the events that pop up along the way to your destination, either predetermined by the plot and your previous choices in events, or randomly drawn from a table of possible events with different triggers. Events typically have two or more branching choices to make, with the outcome being anything from an increase or decrease in Supplies or Population, to entering battle or finding items, to even losing party members if your luck is bad enough.

Like random backgrounds or optional initiative systems above, events can be largely taken from existing materials in the form of random encounter tables from your favorite supplement. You can also trawl the TBS trilogy itself and repurpose its events in tabletop form, making them more open-ended prompts without set dialogue branches to fit the new medium.

War

War is a special kind of event where your caravan encounters a large, hostile force. It is a large-scale battle between two opposing armies that you dictate the overall strategy for, which in turn determines how difficult a battle your party has to fight, which determines the final outcome of the war. In TBS there are 5 options for how to approach a war:

1. Charge! - The most aggressive battle plan that is, ironically, also the safest for your caravan. The party charges into the fray and fights off the main force, facing a tougher than average battle while caravan casualties remain low.
2. Formations! - A balanced battle plan with an easier fight for the player but heavier casualties for the caravan.
3. Hold them off! - A very easy battle for the player but pretty considerable casualties for the caravan.
4. Retreat! - No battle for the player whatsoever and some really severe casualties for the caravan.
5. Oversee! - No battle, but with an outcome that varies according to several factors like caravan strength, party strength, and any specific follow-up commands given. It's kind of like the Auto-Resolve button in the Total War series, and casualties are often close to equal to Formations! on average, at least according to the wiki.

In all of the options leading to a player battle, you have the option to stick around longer and fight multiple back-to-back fights as you draw the enemy's best away from your army as reinforcements to the current battle. You don't get to reposition or heal in between fights, but you earn increased rewards and renown, and your caravan suffers less for it.

Combat can be resolved as normal, while you can probably have the party come up with more nuanced commands than the above based on where and why a battle is being fought. Let them find creative uses for topography or feints, or anything else theater-of-the-mind'y.

At the conclusion of a War (which you might just want to rename "Mass Combat" or "Skirmish" or something because describing a single battle as a "war" feels a tiny bit silly to me even if it is etymologically justified within certain Germanic languages the mythologies of which the game takes a lot of its inspiration from) you roll your caravan's Population die a number of times determined by the referee, probably based on how nasty the enemy army is. The players can reduce the number of forced rolls and therefore make it less likely for the Population to deplete by fighting multiple battles in a row, and by giving smart orders on a macro level. Morale level may also play a role in this.

If by some disaster the Population die drops from d2 to 0, it isn't necessarily a game over. Several chapters of TBS revolve around just a few lonesome characters, lost or otherwise bereft of their larger group, and that can offer a completely different flavor of game for a time.

The Banner

It's in the title, it's on every piece of cover art, you almost always see it flapping in the bitter breeze above your caravan. It has embroidered upon it the name of everyone who has ever lived and died in the clan, their deeds and struggles, and it will continue to grow until the end of the world. The banner is a central piece of the visual language and aesthetic of the series, but aside from a few scenes where someone is mending or adding to the end of the banner, or passing it down to their successor, the banner doesn't actually factor into the story much, and basically isn't present in the gameplay at all.

I feel like that's a missed opportunity for the series, but one you can rectify and take full advantage of in a tabletop setting.

First off, emphasize how important it is in-universe. It is a symbol of leadership in many ways, always being carried by the de facto leader(s) of the caravan, exchanging hands and passing from one generation to the next at various points as the plot demands. It's not a formal symbol of the chieftain, but an implicit recognition of an individual's guidance by the whole community. We don't see it happen in the video games, but losing or allowing the banner to be damaged could be a cultural faux pas so great that it's the grounds for removing someone from leadership; "if you can't keep our past safe, how can we trust you with our future?" and the like.

Second, think of ways to gamify that value. Maybe capturing the banner is an explicit goal of the enemy in many Wars that could cripple the caravan's morale until it's taken back. Maybe risking its safety to carry it aloft can have the opposite effect in a high-stakes event. Maybe the party can't cash in their renown to rank up or acquire heroic titles until the caravan has had time to rest in safety, long enough for the weavers to add this latest chapter of the community's story to the banner and cement their trials and achievements in cultural memory. You could make a whole event out of the subtleties of language and imagery that go into each weaving, and use several of those to bookend major arcs of the table's journey.

Conversation

Just roleplay, duh.

But seriously, the depth, tempo, and tone of storytelling and decision-making is entirely up to you and the table. It's both the easiest and the most challenging thing to port over because you can no longer rely upon the series' pretty solid writing, but that's okay; this whole exercise has been to give you the tools to tell your own Saga with, not to follow in the footsteps of Rook, Alette, Iver and co.

I hope this was a readable and enjoyable deep-dive, and that you can create something beautiful from these messy building blocks.

Assuming I don't cannibalize this to create my own FKR game like I have half a mind to now that I've read this whole post over, of course.

* I don't know why I give hypothetical players so little credit in my writing. My assumption that many of them will need to have a subsystem reminding them to care about the meeples is unfair upon further reflection, and also kinda stupid considering how many stories there are of parties latching onto the tiniest throwaway NPC the referee had no plans for. But I'll keep that part in for the edge cases.

Furt Digs Into: Against The Wicked City

Some years ago I came across Joseph Manola's post on why Central Asia is so good as an inspiration for a fantasy setting. Unsurprisingly I quite liked it, and even commented on it- I can't believe I was entertaining the notion of running a game back then. But then I promptly forgot all about it and the blog.

Fast forward to our calendar year of 48 (goblins are bad at maintaining institutional knowledge, don't ask) and I was Googling around for advice on the exact same subject. I'm a bit of a broken record like that. Fortunately I rediscovered that old post, and by extension the entirety of the Against the Wicked City campaign setting.

The blog bills itself as Romantic clockpunk fantasy gaming in a vaguely Central Asian setting, adding that it might also feature killer robots. That is a factually accurate description, but it only scratches the surface of what it offers, to the point that I think it undersells the whole project a bit.

For one, while the game's influences are ultimately mutable in the hands of anyone who chooses to use them, the word "vaguely" doesn't cut it. Or maybe I'm being a bit of a pedant. To me, being vaguely inspired by a historical era means it is chiefly an aesthetic inspiration, one which can (but doesn't necessarily always) run the risk of being superficial, misleading, or perpetuating harmful stereotypes.

The depth of research into Central Asian histories, cultures, and mythologies is evident here, however. There are several posts on spirits and shamanism (and a shaman class!), all written with a cautious awareness that they are engaging with a still-living continuum of peoples and religious traditions. There is thought given to the vastly different landscapes including steppe, desert, tundra, taiga, etc. and the societies and things one may find in each. There's a list of creatures from Central Asian myths and those of surrounding regions that made me realize how little I know (though I would personally supplement the hortlak with the chotgor that I am more partial to, and swap the shurale out for a playable almas race/class).

I use the awkward conjunction "race/class" because AtWC is designed with B/X D&D or similarly styled OSR games in mind (mixed with one or two 3rd & 4th editionisms like fort/ref/will saves and simple/martial weapon categories), which is the next part I want to talk about.

You all know by now that I turn into a wibbled little ball of stress when it comes to the prospect of character death or bringing the group down with my own personal lack of skill. But AtWC's deliberate merger of B/X systems with the violence-as-a-last-resort hopefulness of capital-r Romantic Fantasy both assuages some of that fear and leaves me feeling strangely compelled. I've touched on Romantic Fantasy here before, after all. It turns what I normally consider to be the engine of countless highly martial dungeon crawls into a vehicle for nonviolent, clever, or even compassionate problem-solving.

It was something I never thought about before, but now that I do it makes fairly plain sense. Why wouldn't you try diplomacy to misdirect or even find some possible common ground with the beleaguered bandits when you know that the narrative has probably supplied them with some names, scars, and humanity, and when you just know that their blunderbusses will evaporate all of your hit points and most of your torso at the onset of combat?

The eponymous Wicked City is an awful place. Founded by a truly evil monarch who may be dead or just abiding in his ominous tower, the city is choked by fear, conspiracy, and the palpable miasma of despair. The land itself is sick and gone Weird in places. Things and buildings move around when they think no one's looking. The city is the near-skeletal husk of a body suffering from the late stages of a metaphysical disease called authoritarianism. Most of its people's hopes were long ago ground down under the endlessly spinning gears of the city's clockwork machinery and the bootheels of the Wicked King's secret police- but only most hopes. The city, or at least the people trapped within it, can still be saved. And you'd be a fool to think its stagnant, systemic violence can be defeated with a liberal application of slightly different, more targeted violence on the part of the heroes. You have to put in the work and fix the broken people, not break them more.

The blog makes a direct reference to studio Ghibli protagonists as the ideal hero for this type of game at times, like Chihiro from Spirited Away. She confronts a strange and hostile new world and rescues her loved ones not by lashing out, but by being crafty, making friends, and practicing humility and compassion. Heroes standing against the Wicked City would ideally be just like that- albeit a bit older, and also equipped with flintlock guns and magical abilities as backups just in case. So maybe they're closer to Princess Mononoke than Spirited Away, but I'm splitting hairs at this point.

That refusal to bend to authority, as well as the refusal to stoop so low as to use authority's tools of force and cruelty, is what really puts the -punk in the clockpunk of this world, which I realize I haven't actually talked about until now.

Yes, there are indeed killer robots. Some of them are small and animal-like, operating on primitive programing not unlike the instincts of flesh-and-blood creatures. Others are more readily identifiable automatons, whether they be intelligent, willed, or servile. Others are truly massive and destructive war-hulks held in reserve like tactical nukes. Still others are brains in jars, or zombies puppeteered by clockwork brains- not even death will prevent the Wicked City from using and abusing its unfortunate denizens to their maximum utility, even if that utility goes toward more senseless misery and waste.

But there's a good deal more tech than that.

There are also gyrocopters, airships, autowinders, repeater crossbows, submarines, calculators, computerized brain implants, and even pocket watches. Primitive steam engines power some of these devices, but not to any extent that the truth of the subgenre tag is threatened.

That all of these outlandish and occasionally very real gadgets exist alongside more-or-less medieval technologies elsewhere in the setting might seem like a case of generic fantasy schizo tech. But against the backdrop of vaguely Early Modern Central Asia, it actually feels like a good bit of historical verisimilitude to me- assuming I'm even using that word correctly.

Central Asia has historically been a crossroads for cultures, which means it has always been an unironic land of contrasts. These contrasts can be social, religious, and political, but they are also material. The Silk Road once spread some of the most state-of-the-art technology throughout the continent and fostered diffusion between the massive states that tried to dominate it. But just a few hundred miles off those trade routes were tribes who lived much like their ancestors did hundreds of years earlier. Russian Cossacks invaded Siberia with muskets and cannons, and Siberia put up stiff resistance with swords and bows; just so, the Wicked King's legions of clockwork mechs must contend with the heroes' grit, pluck, dinky little 1d6 damage weapons, and occasionally a talking bear.

AtWC got some actual play back in the days before the end of Google+, but I haven't found much usage of the setting in the 2020s. Joseph apparently transitioned into working on a similar but distinct sci-fantasy setting called the City of Spires after he realized that, in addition to a number of logistical issues, some of his new gaming group's players had already read all of AtWC and learned secrets they shouldn't have. (Guess I kinda spoiled myself as a player by doing all of this, didn't I?)

I might not ever run a game, but I will probably find AtWC inspiring my own material in the future. It's too good not to let seep in.

There's another reason why I've latched onto the setting like this, if you'll allow me to be a little too real for a moment.

I just really want the setting's optimism to be true.

Central and Inner Asia are in a bad way right now- both the land and the people who live there. The heads of state in Post-Soviet republics fight to maintain or expand their autocratic powers at the expense of their citizens, confident that the only real limit to their behavior is whatever the looming Russian Federation finds inconvenient for its own ambitions. The Aral Sea has shrunk from the fourth-largest lake in the world to a brackish puddle whose main exports are rust and poverty. Deserts are expanding everywhere along the steppe belt. Afghanistan and Iran languish under oppressive regimes inflamed by my own country's equally backwards foreign policy. Lake Baikal, home to the deepest and purest fresh water on Earth, grows increasingly polluted by industry. The ostensibly communist ruling party of the People's Republic of China wields state capitalism like a cudgel to pacify the outside world while it researches new and inventive ways to dominate its own citizens and annihilate the Uyghur people. Mongolia is facing the worst dzuds in decades because of climate change. And most of the international community either doesn't care, or doesn't have a goddamn clue.

I wish some plucky kids would come along and Studio Ghibli things better. We already need a miracle.

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.

The Gutted Belly & Her Crew.

By now it is somewhat of an open secret that far below the surface of each adventurer-friendly world and all of its drama lies a lightless world of cruelty, brutality, and harsh wonder. Less well known is that this dim land possesses its own seas of unknown breadth and depth, and lesser-known still is that those seas are "sailed" by those who have been rejected even by the alien cultures of that dark below.

Of course it isn't always ruthlessness or dire prophecy that leads to these outcasts taking to the sea. Just as often it is bad luck, or some quirk of the individual. And like moths to an exceptionally dim flame, these freaks band together and find some semblance of fellowship upon the abyssal waves. Because together, they just might find fame, wealth, or glory upon the undersea.

Of course most find a watery grave beneath it, sooner or later. This bunch is probably no exception.

The Gutted Belly

The origins of this ship are as mysterious as the ship herself is ugly, but it is abundantly clear that it is not a normal vessel. While generally shaped like other ships of the Underdark, it is constructed in a manner completely unlike any other. It possesses many organic or non-euclidean elements to its geometry, and rather than being made of wood, its hull has an unsettling resemblance to flesh- though what creature all of that grey-green hide could have been taken from is unknown. And given that the ship's hull is one contiguous piece of material almost 20 fathoms in length, it is something best not thought about for long.

Also unusual for the subterranean world is that it possesses sails.

There is not a lot of weather to be had so far underground, except for faint, constant currents of water or air in or out of the vaults which keep them (relatively) livable. These currents are enough to stir a breeze or set the waves in motion to carry things adrift, but rarely can they be harnessed to move a vessel with purpose. Therefore most ships rely upon manual labor, primitive engines, or magic for propulsion. But, somehow, The Gutted Belly has sailed into port countless times over the years, her membranous airfoils turgid with a strong wind that is only ever felt in the ship's wake.

Notable personalities include...

Istoyn Maerret- Drow, Captain.

"Welcome aboard, lads! We'll be running through a known kraken haunt today, so I hope you've all got your wits about you. We need lively bait! What? No. I said 'bayt'. That's short for "bay technicians".We'll need you down in the cargo bay. Yes, that's what I meant. Hahah. Anyway, welcome aboard!"

The exuberant shepherd of deranged sea-gits himself, Captain Maerret is a living reminder that even the truly hopeless can survive and thrive on the Undersea- for good and ill.

Born to some insignificant piss-ant hill of a non-noble drow family in one of the many dark elf cities dotting the underground, Istoyn Maerret was a sickly child. When debt collectors and Lolth religious hardliners both came down hard upon the clan one day, he was one of several superfluous children given over as sacrifice or sold into slavery. Istoryn found himself on a galley rowing the breadth of the Undersea before long, and remained in that state well into his adulthood. At some point in his past that ship was destroyed in a freak accident, and the dark elf washed ashore alone. Another gulf of mysterious, unaddressed years passed by then, and suddenly the drow was hiring a skeleton crew in a coastal city to bring a ship to port from an undisclosed location. Hours later, the somewhat rattled sailors disembarked from the bizarre Gutted Belly, captained by the cockily grinning former galley slave.

It is no secret or scathing defamation to say that the ship and the crew it has attracted survives on luck. Almost immediately after becoming seaworthy, Captain Maerret and his crew began to pursue high risk, high reward objectives that ranged from legal trading ventures, to piracy and smuggling, to the most heinous of all professions: adventuring. Life is cheap, short, and utterly thrilling to most who sign onto the crew, making the captain's more unique derangements stand out less.

One doesn't live long in the Underdark without cracking a bit, and in Istoyn's case he seems to have developed a very efficient form of mental compartmentalization in order to cope with a myriad of stressors. He exhibits (or mimics) certain symptoms of personality disorders during downtime which make him unpredictable, and just a little uncomfortable to be around. Yet his penchant for brutal, calculated violence reminds everyone that he can be perfectly, horribly sane when needed. He consistently shows competence on the job, leads his crew from the front in times of danger, and cultivates an atmosphere of egalitarianism among his peers that is difficult to find elsewhere in the Underdark. The instances where he has saved a crew member's life, executed a stunning flourish to secure victory, or austerely foregone his own share of booty in order to keep things literally shipshape seem in general to balance out the occasions where he has expended considerable resources to sate his (mediocre) alchemical curiosity, or thrown an unpopular cabin boy to that week's newest beasty "because it seemed like an easy and amusing solution".

If you sign your contract with an honest name and do right by your crew, the captain can be counted on to lead you to the wealth or the exciting end you seek.

... So long as you don't make the mistake of calling his cutlass a scimitar. If you do, he'll simply have to demonstrate their myriad differences to you- at length, and in torturous detail.

Shursh- Quaggoth, Boatswain, 1st & 3rd Mates.

"It is the compact-given right of every last one of you to air your grievances on matters of ship governance. Just as it is my hammer's right to reply."

Most quaggoths exist in a state that one could be forgiven for calling "savage". The ash-furred bear people are necessarily brutal to survive in their environment, xenophobic toward all outsiders thanks to a drow penchant for enslaving them, and occasionally more hateful of any and all technology than even the most misinformed Luddites.

But as evidenced by one quaggoth named Shursh, they can clean up nicely.

Another former oar-slave, Shursh had been the prized catch of one dark elf reaver until he realized one day that the menacing crew actually feared his prodigious strength. He walked off of the boat at port with several torn-out spinal columns thrown over his shoulder that same day, and soon learned how to use his strength to turn a profit. Eventually this landed Shursh in the crew of the Belly, where his resilience and cool head under attack ensured that he began to outlive more and more of his superiors. Captain Maerret, strapped for able bodies, proceeded to pile ranks upon the quaggoth, who seemed not to complain- though he did later split the role of 2nd Mate up into dedicated Navigator and Medical Officer roles, delegating them to others because he simply didn't want to be bothered with that type of work.

Now Shursh is one of the most visible members of the crew, standing heads taller than most and representing the captain when he is away or indisposed of. He also holds the respect of much of the crew, though the fact that he often walks around with a massive carpenter's maul resting on his shoulder might contribute to that.

Letil Idki- Svirfneblin, Navigator.

"Attention crew, we are now approaching a known shipwreck reef site. We will be slowing wind propulsion by five knots in preparation for scavenging. Anchor is on standby for deployment. Shark status is currently unperturbed. And your weather forecast for this evening is whatever the hell I decide it will be."

One would be understandably curious as to how and why a deep gnome came to be part of a pirate crew. One would also be understandably hesitant to ask Letil after she electrocutes someone else for raising that very question.

Deep gnomes are a famously earthy people, if anything can be called "famous" about such a reclusive group. They were born from the earth, live in it, and shape it around themselves. They also tend toward pleasant dispositions, or at least avoid mucking around in other people's lives for the worse. But this society produces weirdos and imperfect fits like any other, and like any other it can do a plain awful job accommodating them.

Letil seems to be a druid, after some fashion. Inborn, intimately tied to aspects of nature, utterly powerless to ignore that power. And it just so happens that her power manifests in the fury of biting winds and churning waves, quite out of place in the tunnels of the Underdark. She was exiled early in life, and ironically became more 'earthy' only after the experience hardened her to be stone-like, body and soul. She never found her way up to the surface world, but she found an acceptable surrogate in the subterranean seas.

Now, Letil Idki is the navigator of the Gutted Belly. She conjured its earth elemental anchor up and bound it with hate and chains in equal measure, and now aids the corsair vessel in propelling itself without need for rowers. Hers is the enchantment which keeps the ship's sails turgid and bloated with conjured winds, and which allows its prow to cut so smoothly through the undersea waves.

Needle Threader- Grimlock, Medical Officer.

"Shh, child. I cannot hear your lacerations with you whimpering like that."

Needle Threader is perhaps the gentlest soul on board the Gutted Belly, not that that's saying much. Surprisingly open about her past, the grimlock explains that she was once a warren-matron for her clan of sightless subterranean humanoids. Children were raised communally, she explains, and it is with bitter fondness that she remarks she was once mother of dozens, despite never producing any of her own.

She doesn't like to recount what happened when routine tunnel renovations disturbed a particularly large nest of gricks. Somehow though, Needle Threader blindly groped her way through the Underdark until she came upon a port city which was cosmopolitan enough not to kill her on sight. Captain Maerret took her aboard as another one of his frivolous "acquisitions", only for her to prove useful after the fact.

The eyeless trogloxene now serves aboard the Belly as an exceptionally hands-on surgeon and medical officer, well known to the crew for her tendency to emit a constant, low humming during examinations or operations while rolling her head from side to side in what looks to an outside observer like a trance-like state. According to Needle Threader, it allows her to 'see' in finer detail, even when she's rooting around in a patient's guts. Surprising recovery rates attest to her competence, but her first-time patients are rarely comfortable around her, nor her vast array of knapped stone tools.

Doolploobdulilb- Kuo-toa, Chaplain.

"Le'suor'bren'sehan'aul'tel’lahr'ath'Blibdoolpoolp!*"
* "I bless this voyage in the name of Blibdoolpoolp!"

It's a common saying aboard the Belly that Letil keeps the wind in check, while Doolploobdulilb manages the waves- best not to piss either one of them off. And there is a considerable amount of truth to this. But while the svirfneblin is a very public and approachable fixture on the crew, the kuo-toa whose name is typically shortened to just "Doolp" for everyone else's sake is rarely so approachable.

Of uncertain age and identity but of absolute conviction in their goddess, this kuo-toa cleric or "whip" is a devotee of The Sea Mother, The Drowning Goddess, The Mistress of the Black Pearl, and Uncomfortably Buxom Lobster-Lady, Blibdoolpoolp. Though vocally hateful toward any and all surface-dwelling species--as well as most other species besides kuo-toa in general--Doolp's actions on board the Belly speak to a milder nature. As the ship's chaplain, the cleric's ministrations are directed at proper observance of ceremonies meant to placate and appease sea deities (such as their own). This keeps the ship from falling prey to the worst of dangers out on the undersea, and allows for the occasional seafood feast in honor of this, that, or the other thing.

Ostensibly Doolp is also tasked with seeing to the spiritual health of each crew member, but the reality is that everyone will say they are just fine and dandy in order to avoid the flabby fishnet-wearer coming around to their bunks one day and asking them if they have a moment of their time to spare for the Drowner of Lands and the Scourge of Sekolah.

Understandably, Doolp is the most vocal opponent of the continued practice of keeping and feeding the frenzy of sahaugin below the ship, but they haven't yet gathered enough votes to do anything about it.

Ulwiss Coaleyes- Duergar, Quartermaster & Accountant.

"Togrysh has not come to collect his bonus for volunteering to lead the boarding party three days ago. What is that? He died in the attack? Well, death is no excuse for tardiness. Tell the kuo-toa to raise him, and then remind him of that. The bonus will go toward his debt for the spell components."

Dwarves often get a bad rap. It seems that wherever one goes, one can always find the same stereotypes in place- that they fill whatever time isn't spent being workaholics with time spent as alcoholics, that they hate elves almost as much as they do goblinoids goblin-speaking peoples, and that every last one of them is given a beard and an axe at birth. And, most regrettably of all, there are just enough individuals who conform to those ideas to perpetuate the hate. Grey dwarves are treated much the same, with the addition of a healthy dose of vitamin D deficiency and totalitarian callousness.

Temperate, impassive, pacifist, and almost clean-shaven, Ulwiss Coaleyes avoids checking off nearly all of those dubious boxes. Unfortunately for Ulwiss the last box on the list was checked, first in pencil, then in charcoal, then signed in red ink, then sealed with wax, branded, circled and underlined a thousand times until the paper tore away and there were scratches on the desk, and then rewritten and copied in triplicate.

Ulwiss in the one who keeps the Gutted Belly financially solvent and ensures a well-ordered list of supplies and individual accounts, but he doesn't appear on any of his own payroll reports. This is because he doesn't accept payment for his work- his payment is the work. The work--or as he would write it, the Work--is an end in and of itself, giving a single all-unifying purpose to the sack of meat he occupies, and to the universe around it. Numbers, ledgers, tables, ink pens, and the hands that use them are all vectors through which Work may flow into something which is for the moment Unworked.

When Captain Maerret and his crew boarded the ship the duergar was on and slaughtered the rest of the crew, Ulwiss Coaleyes hardly looked up from his writing desk. Only the drow's cutlass prodding at his chin lifted his head, and only long enough for him to negotiate a contract with the captain, who was in good spirits after a battle ruthlessly won, so he humored the strange dwarf. No one really doubts that he'd do it again if the Belly is ever overtaken, but then again if the Belly were boarded, no one would really care what the book-balancer was doing.

Tongueless Tizzkar- Derro, Chief Cook.

"Unnyoy!*"
* "Enjoy!"

It's a strange, happy bit of luck that the crazed ramblings of the hereditarily insane derro people sound quite a lot like the humming or muttering of a top chef hard at work.This helps cement the idea that Tongueless Tizzkar knows what he is doing in the galley of the Gutted Belly. Unfortunately this illusion of competence normally dissipates as soon as one gets a taste of the food he prepares back there.

The title of "Tongueless" is not a literal naming- aside from a few teeth or finger joints, Tizzkar is quite physically whole. The nickname comes from his enormously thick accent, coupled with a speech impediment, which makes him sound like what most people might assume a tongueless person to sound like- though most have never actually met one in their lives to be able to make that assumption with any accuracy. It's rather mean, really.

Tizzkar is also tongueless in the sense that there is no way on or below earth that he is able to taste the things he prepares for the crew, or else they'd never leave the kitchen out of culinary shame. But his rates are low, his products and workplace are shockingly hygienic, and it brings a tickle of laughter to even the most dour brute's heart to see the manic little figure running to and fro, grey hair thrusting out in all directions like porcupine spikes from beneath a saggy, ill-fitting chef's hat.

Vashen Skitter- Chitine, Lookout & Sailmaker.

"Land ho, port side! Wait... wait, no. It's just a floater of chuul eggs... Breakfast ho!"

The loudest and most vulgar of the ship's crew is, appropriately enough, its lookout. Hyperactive, neurotic, and always inexplicably greasy, the man-spider makes good of his namesake all day every day, skittering up and down along the ship's masts. Less commonly he can be seen spinning strands of his own resilient web to mend damage in the sails. Most rare and begrudging of all are the times down below deck when he can be spied mending clothing with a needle or four in his dexterous, chitinous claws.

Despite a famous dislike for saltwater, Vashen is one of the few senior crew members with prior experience at sea. Much like Ulwiss, he originated from an opposing vessel, but unlike the work-addicted number-cruncher, Vashen willingly, even eagerly defected from the slaving ship dominated by Lolth faithful. One might think that a religion so centered on spiders and their various permutations would afford a measure of egalitarianism among arthropods. Instead, Vashen Skitter found himself firmly set among the bottom rungs of a strict, pseudo-theological racial hierarchy with nothing but ettercaps beneath him- and only because everyone hates ettercaps, including other ettercaps, he is quick to emphasize.

Scrubs- Scrag, Chief Beakhead Officer & Barnacle Remover.

"Scrubs iz done cleanin' hull, cap'n! Scrubs did a good job today. Scrubs took off twenny-eight new barnies! Twelve on port side 'n' sixteen on, uhm... not port side. Scrubs wuz wundrin', though. Duz cap'n fink if the seasonal meltwater from above ground is lowerin' water salinity to lethal-enough levels to kill off barnie larva, it could be damagin' fish health 'n' reducin' their nutritional value enough to impact crew productivity? Wut'z that? Get back t' work? Yessir!"

One day while coasting along during prescribed bedtime hours, the Gutted Belly struck something that made the crew fear that they had hit a reef or been attacked by some leviathan. But when the alarms and lights were raised, they only found a very stocky, mostly-dead scrag drifting in their wake. Out of curiosity and a desire to harvest some troll blood and/or fat for alchemical experiments, the captain ordered the crew to hoist the troll's body up on board. There they found that the prow of the ship had split its head almost in two, but also that the troll's regeneration was slowly knitting things back together. Fancy struck the captain, as it often does, and he cauterized a seemingly random portion of the aquatic troll's brain before the hole closed up.

When the creature awakened in chains shortly thereafter, it was docile to the point that it resembled a (poorly handled) lobotomy patient. It responded surprisingly well to basic commands given in Undercommon, and hardly tried to eat anyone after a week of impressive labor. Once Needle Threader gave it a clean bill of health (and determined that it was a he), the troll was given a tentative place in the crew as a heavy-lifter, beakhead toilet cleaner, and most famously, barnacle remover. And so he came to be known as Scrubs.

But Scrubs did not remain quite so placid. His job performance and amiability have remained constant throughout, yet his mind seems to have pieced itself together over the years. He reacquired language and complex problem-solving some time ago, and now seems to be working on abstract, conceptual thinking with the enthusiasm of a wide-eyed child who's walked into a library desperately wanting to understand all of the big words around them.

Grakk'ha- Goblin Lacedon, Figurehead.

"Who's that, pretty? Give ol' Grakk'ha a kiss~"

No one in the crew entirely remembers how they ended up with Grakk'ha. She's just always sort of been there. In a rather literal sense, she has become part of the ship. Specifically, she is the prow ornament of the Gutted Belly, lashed in place with just her arms and head free. She doesn't complain overmuch about this, and somewhat enjoys being the unofficial mascot of the crew. She'll even make a show of waving and shouting greetings when they finally sail to port- so long as they continue to feed her.

The small, gangling goblin woman was turned into a lacedon--an aquatic ghoul--long ago, and needs at least a semi-regular diet of carrion to stay what passes for healthy for an undead body. This, the ship's crew is able to supply her with regularly. But it's the rarer treat of live, humanoid flesh which she truly enjoys. As such, "a kissing session with Grakk'ha" has become the final destination for any mutineers or sufficient screw-ups who don't meet their end thrown overboard or at the hands of Istoyn and his unnerving powers.

K'shevash- Sahuagin, Honorary Disposal Officer.

"There is no friend or foe to the frenzy of K'shevash. There are only warmbloods who will or will not be dining with it tonight."

The sahuagin with a name almost as difficult to pronounce as the Chaplain's is not an actual member of the crew. In fact, they would probably eat any member of the crew who tried to parley with them or their tribe at closer than arm's length. (Though, to be fair, a number of proper crew members would also eat their fellows if push came to shove.)

Rather, K'shevash and its band are a bunch of exiles from the depths of one of the surface seas. How they found their way into the undersea, or why they've just sort of latched onto the Gutted Belly for so long, is unknown. But their presence is somewhat of a boon to the corsairs, for several reasons. They provide security from the other, lesser known threats of the deep which might otherwise try to attack the ship. They also eat much of the refuse from the ship's kitchens, in particular any meat scraps and offal to be had. And, as stated earlier, they have no qualms about eating any humanoids who find their way down into the wake of the Belly, with the seemingly sole exception of Scrubs- a compact was established after he ate several of them for making fun of his thoughts on causality one day.

In addition to providing a quick and easy method of disposal for the dead, the "Sharks" as they are affectionately referred to are also quite the deterrent from mutiny. Walking the plank takes on an even more grim character when you know that in addition to drowning, you'll be eaten in a creative fashion, over a period of time. And woe betide anyone who earns a keelhauling.

Anchor- Earth Elemental, Literal Anchor.

"Mmmmmmrrrrrdh...*"
* "A little to the left, Scrubs. There has been a mussel wedged under my shoulder for days now. Ahh, that's it..."

Anchor is, well... the ship's anchor. Summoned and bound in magical chain years ago by Letil, this elemental grabs a hold of features of the sea floor and keeps The Gutted Belly from drifting while at rest. It also acts as a lookout for dangers below the waterline, relying basic information to its mistress through a telepathic link when needed. It otherwise leads a rather solitary existence, content to lay on the seabed or drag along beside the ship's hull, doing little of note while the sahuagin swim past it, mildly annoyed that it isn't more edible. It is known to have an occasional, mostly one-sided conversation with Scrubs while the latter is removing built-up detritus from its craggy form, however.



Lesser-known personalities include...


Admiral Scratch- "Cat", Informant.

"Miaaaooo. Miao, mao, mao- HLGHKSHAULGH! ... Miao."

Whatever this thing is, it isn't a cat, and it does a rather poor job of imitating one. Members of the ship's crew still refer to it as one, however. They ignore the way its body shifts and morphs as it walks around on what might not always add up to four legs. They pretend not to notice when a tendril snakes out from beneath one of its unblinking eyelids. They just try to brush it off when some of its barbed hairs get stuck to a surface and cause mild damage to it as if from acid etching. They smile, call it Admiral Scratch, and make sure to leave treats out for it.

It does possess a rather catlike fondness for hunting rats, however. Perhaps a little too fond.

Admiral Scratch is ostensibly the obese calico longhair belonging to Captain Maerret. While he is the one person the animal spends the most time with, they clearly do not bond like a master and pet. More often, the Admiral leaps up onto his shoulder, sitting weightlessly as he stares unblinking at the dark elf. In turn Captain Maerret cocks his head and gives the cat an ear, at which point it proceeds to whisper to him. At least, it seems like whispering. No purr should sound that lilting, disjointed, or vaguely conspiratorial. Once he's spoken his piece, Scratch leaps back down to the deck and resumes his rodent vigil. Some believe that he is the real brains behind the captain, using him like a puppet. Others think that the Captain uses him as a spy on his own crew. Neither rumor has been substantiated, though the latter has slightly more credence in light of the list of would-be mutineers who have met sudden and messy ends aboard the Belly.

Hilivonsuul- Decapitated Illithilich, "Head" Adviser.

"..."

Anyone who's ever seen the inside of the captain's cabin will have noticed the grizzly trophy mounted on the wall behind his desk: a large, discolored illithid head, mummified into leather with its face tendrils braided together and then pinned together by bronze nails. There is no general consensus as to whether its eyes are milky and lacking pupils, or if it has pupils like an angry cuttlefish.

Captain Maerret is always happy to tell the tale of how he came across it, however.

Supposedly (and that word cannot be emphasized enough when dealing with one of Istoyn's tales), he slew the illithid with his very own hands and cutlass. One day early on in the drow's career of piracy while prowling the shore of one of the more treacherous vault walls, the Belly's crew caught sight of a battle unfolding. It was a chaotic three-way between githyanki, githzerai, and a small cell of mind-flayers trapped in the middle. Doing the only sensible thing, Istoyn ordered the ship to fire upon the melee on the rocks, scattering all parties and allowing for a landing party to loot the battlefield briefly.

Istoyn found a particularly withered-looking brain-eater, certainly not dead but not entirely alive either. He hacked its head off before it could utter a spell or make anyone's head explode, and carried the grizzly trophy back to the ship where he had it embalmed.

The part he leaves out of that story is that the head still isn't entirely dead.

Ensorcelled by dominating magic and kept in a docile state by a little-known source of psionic echoes which interfere with its ability to regenerate, there is little left of the desiccated head once known as Hilivonsuul, former acolyte of a coven of illithids who dabbled in arcane and necromantic magic. All that it can do is obey the will of its new master, who feeds it the names and thoughts of every soul upon the ship, living or dead. Hilivonsuul had known a thing or two about True Names back when its mind belonged to itself- after centuries of feasting on brains, one begins to hone their palette to pick out truly subtle flavors.

Much can be done with a Name like that. From subtly encouraging compliance with a captain in the pliable, to encouraging the sudden, explosive rupture of a dissident's head.


The Gutted Belly Herself- Taxidermied Aboleth Carcass, Marine Vessel.

"The sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea..."

Istoyn definitely couldn't have killed this one. But since he claims to have built the ship himself, it is implied that he knew the creature, or at least its corpse. "Gutted belly" was quite an apt description for the state of the eviscerated aboleth when the dark elf equipped with a hammer, saw, and oscillating sanity ran across it. As distasteful as that is, the story only grows worse the deeper one goes. The Gutted Belly is not the largest ship on the undersea, but it is absolutely massive for an aboleth body, even taking into account the likelihood that all of that loose, flabby skin was stretched and smoothed out as far as it would go during construction. Aboleths never stop growing during their exceedingly long lifespans, so the specimen which became the Gutted Belly must have been old indeed. An aboleth's power also grows with age, raising the eerie question of exactly what could have killed such a being, only to leave it to rot on a scintillating beach somewhere.

The carcass still possessed some of that power when the marooned slave found it, in the form of powerful psionic emanations. They warded off virtually all other denizens of the deep, save for the drow who'd heard them throbbing in his skull ever since the wreck. They were the reverberating echoes leftover from a dying mind laid low and regressing, playing over themselves over and over again like the fever dream of a frightened child.

The sea.

The sea.

Where is the sea?

It wants to swim.

Swim away into the sea.

The sea.

Where is the sea?

The echoes have died down considerably since those lightless days. Only the most sensitive could still detect them, though their influence runs deeper than most might know. Such interference could be enough to prevent a certain head from regenerating, or perhaps stimulate the mental growth of a lumbering, formerly blank slate always clinging to the hull. It could even resemble blind, dumb luck at times, as The Gutted Belly herself strives to "survive" yet more perils in order to enjoy just one more swim across that vast, abyssal sea.

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.