These close cousins of Unseelie nockers are often mistaken for them, but they hide their more artistic talents. While nockers create chimerical devices or personalities, goblins delight in building physical machinery. Nockers are pleased by creation, but goblins are masters of destruction. They are commensurate scavengers when they start to scrounge for materials, and are known for their twisted applications of their skill at artifice. To them, manufacturing mayhem is an art form.
Weaponsmithing is one of their specialties, although goblins will usually have a “fashion” for a current season, just as clothing designers do. One season, the fashion will be destructive toys that capture the hearts of their owners before wounding them; the next, “hardware as weaponry” will be all the rage.
As is the case with most Thallain, Seelie have difficulty distinguishing them from their Unseelie Kithain cousins. Goblins are deeply offended by this, as they consider themselves artistes. Unseelie nockers don’t really care, as they usually pass off their Thallain cousins as incompetent assistants. Still, goblins take pride in their work, and once one of the grump goblins announce the fashion for the current season in a particular season, they are eager to prove their (obviously misunderstood) brilliance, even if it means destroying part of the local freehold in the process.
Appearance[]
In human mien, many goblins resemble science nerds or geeky, collegiate types. They tend to be shorter than is normal for most humans. In faerie mien, they are rarely over three-feet tall, with greenish or brownish skin and pointy ears. Don’t trust them.
Birthrights & Frailty[]
Birthrights[]
Affinity: Prop
Mayhem — At the beginning of each story, a goblin can construct a physical device capable of unleashing mayhem. The Dreaming will mask it as a somewhat improbable device (“What the hell is that?”), but it will actually inflict real injury if wielded properly. Before the adventure is over, it will break down catastrophically, hopefully injuring the right people. Additional devices constructed during the chapter will inflict less than three dice of damage. Creating a goblin device requires a roll of Intelligence + Crafts, with a variable difficulty. Jury-rigging or crafting a weapon that does 3 dice of damage has a difficulty of 6; increase the difficulty by one for each extra damage die the device is supposed to inflict. A number of goblins can pool their dice and use extended rolls to build larger and nastier devices — as long as no one makes a mistake. (Any group of goblin apprentices worth their salt can change the average Ford Pinto into a war machine.) When the device eventually breaks down, the number of successes on that first roll also reveals the number of additional damage dice that the device will inflict.
Gremlin Urge — While nockers have the ability to fix things, goblins have no such talent. Building insane contraptions from scratch is easy; fixing human inventions is difficult. They are sometimes mistakenly referred to as “gremlins.” By spending a point of Glamour a goblin can cause any mechanical device to malfunction, usually in the most dangerous manner possible. The goblin need only touch the device to successfully use this ability.
Frailty[]
Destructive Flaw — Just as anything a nocker creates will have a flaw, so will the creations of a goblin. However, this flaw almost always has violent and destructive results. Fools consider this to be typical nocker incompetence, while wise fae mistrust all Unseelie nockers to begin with. Goblins have been known to make toys that maim and kill, furniture that injures its owner (“Have a seat, Duke”), and explosives of such cunning and deviance that their victims are stunned more by their ingenuity than by their ability to inflict injury.
Other[]
Quote:You will note that the harsh lines and structural rigidity of the explosive chamber is contrasted by the more rococo elements in the wiring of the detonation device. What do you think, apprentice? Heh, heh, heh, heh! Yeah! Yeah! Boom!
Quote Kithbook Nooker:
These little psychos make us look staid and steady, and they're everywhere lately. They get into the works and like to play games with real-world stuffs in ways that not even we do. They're more destructive than creative, and have a way of screwing up any delicate experiments you're working on. Oh, yeah, and they have absolutely no social skills.
Still, we're family - I guess that's supposed to count for something. They make great enforcers for the Bes Din, and are invaluable when putting the kibosh on those oily little boggart tech-thieves. Just introduce them as your dumb cousins from out of town, and hope they don't embarrass you too much. Besides, when it comes to destruction, they have some interesting insights you can steal, and what's family for?
