We Might Be Wrong About Goblins

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]A year and a half ago, I made a video asking if goblins were people. The response was mixed. Some people were adamant that goblins are inherently evil monsters.

[00:00:14]Some believed them to be unfairly villainized, and many were upset at me for even asking. I think we've all missed the point, though. And not just me, but the people of our fantasy worlds, too. Because goblins are provably sentient, sapient creatures with complex social organization, building, tactics, fur, and hides.

[00:00:41]Setting the whole murderous gremliness aside, every aspect of fantasy media's presentation of the goblin screams a society of people perhaps tribal, perhaps homicidal, perhaps evil, but with social order and generational history. The better question to ask than is a goblin a person, especially for the people of our fantasy world, is is how does goblin society exist at a point where all of these things are true?

[00:01:12]Because if they are truly unorganized agents of chaos with no plans, no crafts, and who are constantly stabbing each other, there wouldn't be goblin tribes. There wouldn't be anyone to tan hides, boil leather, or rear their young. What I'd like to do today is look at traditional representations of the goblin, especially from fantasy gaming.

[00:01:34]Little short-lived green psychos who decorate themselves with leather, furs, and bone, who scavenge and cobble together unsafe structures in dark caves while looking for shinies. And I want to investigate what their society might look like when they're not attacking or being attacked with a goal of explaining how goblins actually pass down crafts or maintain structures or participate in communal child rearing, especially considering their really quite tiny lifespans. Because civilizational progress isn't an Age of Empires tech tree. We can't judge the competency of a society by the tools that it chooses to use because otherwise we would have to call the Mayans a stone age civilization which would be clearly absurd. Not least because the Mayans were among their era's greatest astronomers. Our first hint that there's more going on under the surface of goblin society is their multi-generational success in producing warriors, builders, and other professional classes like shamans. There is a continuity of knowledge seen in goblins. Intergenerational learning and reproduction of skill that cannot happen without a method of knowledge transmission. But goblins live like like 20 years maximum in most of their presentations. They've not got time for the whole master apprentice relationship unless they're incredibly fast learners.

[00:03:04]Even if we rely on the oral tradition, we still encounter some some really big problems in giving elders time to actually compose their thoughts and pass down stories. Goblin society just moves too fast and it's too high churn to reliably use your aged experts to teach the next generation. This fact alone is likely to contribute to most civilized society's perceptions that goblins just don't do cultural history because the normal methods of of information transfer used by humans and in the extreme cases elves, they just aren't viable. Goblins are going to need a way to store generational knowledge, the knowledge of their elders on the fly in portable yet durable forms that can keep up with their rapid pace of life.

[00:03:56]They're also going to need this method to predate paper or parchment if they're going to be a historic civilization or indeed if they're going to be a civilization at all because realistically you're going to need to record the process of making paper in some way to make paper. But it's a good job that goblins are traditionally depicted as absolutely covered with bone trinkets. Bone is among the oldest art and ritual objects used by people. It is easier to carve than most stones. It is lighter than most stones. It's available naturally and it doesn't degrade very quickly at all. And when the perpetuation of knowledge relies on indirect generational communication, bone is about as good as it gets without some significant craft process in place.

[00:04:45]So a bone-based expertise, but then this implies some sort of writing system. Am I I mean really suggesting that goblins invent their own written language before they have any sense of social cohesion at the time? Well, no. It's likely with as with all people really that they would start with pictorial representations. But honestly, the greatest thing that goblin society could have is not a form of detailed written instructions, but a form of bonebased standardization. Standardization is far more useful for the short-lived goblins than it is for humans even. And most as most projects, they won't have time for proper documentation before they get started because that's just a waste of half a goblin's life. Most projects then won't have long planning phases or or one overseer to see the whole thing through. They'll need to take on from others work with some sense of a standardization of purpose and a clarity of overarching design. bone rulers, for example, a a master ruler made of bone for the single project or bones that have a specific hole board in them which is the size of the peg, the standardized peg that is to be used to hold up all of the structure or little bone models planning out structures that can be whittleled and carved in one evening passed on from overseer to overseer.

[00:06:12]Goblin crafts people are going to need these aids. there's not really enough time to develop your own system of doing your own type of work and becoming an expert in that type of work by the time you're dead. And it's far more sensible then to leave behind the specific tools that you've used, the backups of of of your nail sizes, peg sizes, plank lengths, or a little carving of a whole structure. In the fairly likely event that some accident or or war with civilized society takes the whole thing down and needs to be rebuilt. Goblin crafts would not trace their lineage through a series of masters, but by bone necklaces from projects past, and they'd be the custodians of a master bone, perhaps carved or whittleled by a master who never taught them anything. We can go further though. Perhaps as goblin society develops, they discover that bone carving can only be so detailed.

[00:07:18]This could lead them to develop more scrimshaw style arts or to try and find bigger creatures with bigger bones to hunt. Or perhaps they discover tattooing. If your skin is only really going to be suffering wear and tear for 15 to 30 years of your life, then it's not going to degrade and get sun damaged in quite the same way as old human skin.

[00:07:46]It's still going to be fairly legible even on the moment of your death. The greatest and most complex of inventions, the ones that need the most explanation, are probably going to end up tattooed on the skin of their creator, perhaps even by their creator in some some really like metal sense. Maybe this is some some great ritual setting where if goblins decide that your work is worthy, then you will tattoo yourself with it while they hold you down and give you painkillers or whatever. In this way, the strongest, smartest, and scariest goblins become those who have the biggest bone necklaces and the most tattoos on their body. They're not just the dangerous warriors, they're the innovators, they're the crafts people.

[00:08:30]They are the absolute goblin experts.

[00:08:34]And some lesser goblins may well be willing to to die in the fight just to ensure that they can recover that expert's body. This may lead to the perception that goblins are are crazy and murderous because they will fly into battle even just to collect a specific corpse. But to them, that corpse is an ark. It is the future of their civilization. They are cultural resources after all. We've already established that goblins do work with hide and leather. A fully setup goblin library may well be a collection of the the tanned and skinned hides of past goblin engineers. Morbid, yes.

[00:09:18]Effective, also, yes. Okay, so we've looked in detail at goblinoid cultural transmission through trinkets and tattoos, but how does this translate to a complex society, more complex than we might be assuming? as just looking at from outside in. After all, goblin warren are dingy, noisy, unsafe environments as a rule, filled with ramshackle creaking structures prone to collapse, fire, and breakage by invading adventurers. Just like with the bones that they decorate themselves with and the hides that they wear and preserve, this doesn't feel civilized. But let's examine the social needs of goblin society. Traditionally, goblins are aggressive raiders, inviting retaliation and also hemorrhaging capable warriors in that process. A particularly good raid means you need to build some extra storage facility fast for all the stuff you've taken. A particularly bad one means you've got fewer workers and you actually need to take up less space. And if your raid targets choose to retaliate, unfortunately, that means your structures are gone and your people are scattered. This is why portable knowledge stores like our bow and trinkets and tattoos are so useful because they let you rebuild quickly while maintaining the expertise that could be lost generation to generation if you're on the run for 10 years. It's also exactly why standardization is such a massive deal. If all your bolts, nails, and and planks are held to an artisan standard based on the scale markers placed on the deer's jawbone, for example, then a community of goblins can creatively build using these same techniques into a brand new cave, a new offshoot, or even a new society of exiles. And these buildings, despite perhaps a lack of expertise, can be guaranteed to hold up to a set of goblin safety standards. But another significant goblin trope is a good old collapsing walkway. But let's be clear, whenever we see these collapses happening, it's while goblins are facing off against foes. Now, you could argue that goblin architecture is intentionally brittle, engineered for goblin weights, not the weights of armored and and well-laden humanoid warriors. I think that's fair, but but I think it's a simpler reason to be honest. Goblins build semi-mporary structures when you're going to get displaced every couple of generations or at least hunted down and invaded. When your population swings wildly in in good and bad times, you want the ability to take down your structures and use your standardized fixings to construct a crash or some new housing or a new secondary den or a barricade where we humans tend to build our homes and bridges to withstand multiples of their expected weights or forces. Goblins are more likely to build their structures to tolerance and leave it to someone else to build another support if that is ends up needed down the line. Imagine that they're tiny scaffolders basically. Okay, so that's their sort of flimsy structures dealt with. But how are we going to turn their griiness, poor hygiene, obsession with shiny things, and and kind of gory decorations into civilizational choices that are considered with benefits to Goblin Kind? Cuz it's all well and good suggesting that there's actually a complex history of recordkeeping, standardization of tools, and and inbuilt responses to populations dramatically shifting. But it's quite hard to argue that apparent squalor is anything but squalor. You could maybe suggest it's a religious thing or perhaps a result of of the the fecklessness that comes with their busy short lives. My favorite suggestion though is that the interior goblins environment is a defensive measure.

[00:13:27]Goblin warrants are dark, cramped, and dimly lit. There are piles of crunchy bones on the floor and strategically positioned bone mobiles dangling from from roofs around corners. These are excellent alarms.

[00:13:43]And the shinies that they're so fond of collecting may actually look haphazardly positioned or or dangle in weird ways from uh bone mobiles or or tucked in corners. But it's very possible that these could be set up as an elaborate system of mirrors reflecting torch light which the goblins don't tend to use that could give early warning signs of even the most subtle of adventurers or raiders. All of these are deterrence for civilized folk alongside goblins carefully crafted reputation for barbarism and flimsy building. But the greatest tool that goblins have to deter invasion is probably biological warfare.

[00:14:27]One of the most brutal tactics in in historical warfare is the use of contaminated projectiles. If goblins are somewhat disease resistant from living amongst a great squalor of disease, or if their short lifespans give them sort of fast metabolisms or less time to develop the long-term conditions that can kill us, then it may well be an effective strategy to inculcate diseases among their supplies and populations.

[00:14:54]Partly to immunize themselves early and also potentially to weed out some of their constitutionally weaker members.

[00:15:01]This would both help keep invaders away and make goblin bodies and trinkets more likely to be cast out and abandoned after a battle. They're less likely to be captured and taken into the walls of a city because they're just so unhygienic. This therefore makes the bone trinkets and the tattooed skin far more recoverable. It also lets goblins use disease as as weapons. In part as spreading diseased muck on top of their spears and arrow tips, and in part using refuge tips and the bloated corpses of goblins that have succumbed to some bubonic disease as deterrence to perhaps funnel invaders away from the sensitive areas like child rearing spaces.

[00:15:45]Speaking of goblin kids, this is where I feel our surprisingly civilized civilization comes together as a concept. We already know that for goblins, the storing and transmission of masterly experience is really important for generational success. And it's their kids who need to be ready to inherit the bones, art, and records left behind.

[00:16:08]Often times, goblins are presented in fantasy as keeping their broods deep within their warren, keeping them safe, and letting them be sheltered by the adults who are out there doing the fighting. This is quite caring behavior, often uncharacteristic of the the the greedy, selfish creatures that goers are so often depicted as. It is, of course, also quite practical. When you only live a couple dozen years, you basically get to train up just one or two generations of youths as a community. There are a few consequences of this. First, goblin youth activity is very likely work adjacent from the off. Aggressive or scrappy kids will be earmarked as warriors from the very start. Whereas any goblin child who shows even the remotest remotest proclivity for creativity, craft or intellect will find themselves on the fast track to a craftsman's career. They will learn then to read the bones. initial aptitude and snap judgments will therefore affect the future of goblin children quite heavily.

[00:17:13]Probably leading to a society that's quite reluctant to try for any sort of long shots or in training up anyone whose aptitudes don't align with a sort of narrow view from authority as to what traits are appropriate in certain jobs and professions. I think this would likely lead to a society that doesn't necessarily foster innovation, at least while goblin society is stable, but it's another rebuilding mechanism after a disaster. Goblin elders and their kind of rigid world views are unlikely to survive an invasion. They're possibly expected to be on the front lines and die for their people while the rest escape, maybe even with the kids. the elders who create this sort of early segregation system, the judgment of what is important for goblin society and what rigid roles goblins need to fall into from the moment they're born. They're probably the first to go when raided or invaded or or when goblin societies are attempted to be stamped out. So post disaster generations of goblins are going to be more likely to synthesize new ideas from sharing tasks and sharing knowledge and looking through the broad records that are still available to them together. As I mentioned earlier with goblin bow warfare, it's very likely that their nurseries are going to be kept hidden and secured behind or even within pools of of great horror and disease. In part to inoculate their kids, and in part to ensure the survival of the next generation, even if the whole settlement gets wiped out, goblin bone trinkets and and tattooed goblin skin, they're not going to be a a prize to those who slay them. And so those things are going to get left behind.

[00:19:00]They're not worth looting and taking.

[00:19:03]Instructions on how to rebuild, just left on the corpses for the new batch of goblins. More creative than the last, yet guided quickly by expertise, by standardized measures, building techniques, and craft recipes stored in seemingly worthless trinkets. Each time they're wiped out, then the goblin rebuilding generation tries again.

[00:19:28]Perhaps without adopting some of those stagnant selection processes, received elders wisdom, or perhaps without adopting the aggressive militarism that doomed their forebears.

[00:19:40]You will note, I hope, that I've changed next to nothing about how goblins traditionally operate in fantasy media.

[00:19:49]There's still dimminionative, aggressive, greedy, grimy raiders who live in ramshackle structures and caves.

[00:19:55]But this is a civilization with active mechanisms for recovery, changing social policy, and generational insights and crafts. They are possibly the civilization who earliest developed a sort of braille analog by carving uh relief carvings into bones that can be held and learned from even in the dark.

[00:20:17]They're perhaps the first civilization to develop complex and detailed tattooing and perhaps the first society to go allin on standardized building materials to solve their intergenerational craft problems as well. Outwardly, these are goblins, but to them, they're persecuted creatures relying on the knowledge of ancestors lost to time to rebuild better and stronger each time, and increase their stores of carved bone, tanned and fllayed skin, and jingly, jangly shinies. All of which are their greatest cultural products. Goblins aren't necessarily savages. These savage elements, as I've hopefully proven, aren't just how their culture presents itself to them. It's practical for them to hoard bones and use them everywhere.

[00:21:12]Partly as camouflage for the bones that are actually important. That's their society. That is the value system of their culture. And that's why the people of your worlds, your fantasy worlds, and our worlds might well be very wrong indeed about goblins. I hope you enjoyed. Leave me your thoughts in the comments. This, I think, should be an interesting one to to read through and engage with. I I I'm I'm excited for people's take on this idea um because I think it's really important to reexamine our biases from a sort of holistic standpoint. But with all that said, I've been Tom, otherwise known as the Grungeon Master. Thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you in the next