To live is to be at war. Some liken the world to a vast wilderness, where dangers silently roam the forests and hills beyond the safe confines of civilization. This is false. The world is like an open ocean filled with creatures that exist solely to destroy one another. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee to escape the world of slaughter. All one can do to survive is kill as much as they can before they in turn meet their demise.
That is life for a hobgoblin. Everything is a threat. Every other living being wants to subjugate or enslave or kill you and if they say they aren’t they’re lying or too weak to survive.
Their warbands aren't merely tactical formations, but survival mechanisms in a reality where isolation means death. By combining strength, hobgoblins create islands of relative stability in an endless sea of enemies.
Though amenable to diplomacy when practicality demands, their fundamental worldview prevents true trust or alliance. The warband represents the only viable response to their existential condition: the means to survive amid the unceasing slaughter they believe defines all existence.
Mythic origins
Long ago, when the many heads of Idnach were at war with one another, the most vengeful bit off her right hand in an act of spite. From the red stump blood flowed profusely, and from each drop a hobgoblin was born.
Hobgoblins spawn in pools of blood where trace amounts of Idnach’s blood remain. The pools are fed with the blood of other creatures, which is consumed by the great demon's blood so that it may grow.
Locating and securing these blood pools is of utmost interest to hobgoblins. There are 39 active pools in the known lands, 22 controlled by the empire and the rest by rival legions. Many have been lost or destroyed; many due to inter-hobgoblin wars, and some from dwarven campaigns, which explains the bone-deep racial animus the hobgoblins have toward them.
The hobgoblin emperor currently plots to send an army to Idnach's domain and reopen her ancient wound so that fresh blood might flow once more.
Civilization
The basic unit of hobgoblin society is the warband. Smaller groups are nomadic and subsist mostly on raids and pillaging, Larger groups occupy castles or fortresses and slowly conquer the territory surrounding them. An orc horde might plunder a town and move on to the next, but hobgoblins have much more perspective. Captured villages are occupied and converted to closely monitored labor camps that fuel the hobgoblins' conquest.
Warbands rarely subsume one another. Instead, defeated warbands simply fall under the others command, keeping their name and iconography. The mightiest hobgoblin legions are made up of dozens if not hundreds of warbands.
The only other thing that can be said to shape hobgoblin society as much as the military is the bureaucracy, though in truth no clear distinction can be made. The bureaucracy is an atavistically convoluted, dizzying nightmare of overlapping authority and nonsensical priorities. Extreme compartmentalization between departments and incompatible coding systems, layers and layers of mandatory verification conducted by mutually hostile agencies, betrayal officers with the sole purpose of sabotaging incomplete processes, ranks within ranks where authority is both absolute and constantly undermined; no hobgoblin administration would be complete without all this and more.
The paradox is that despite—or because of—this brutal inefficiency, hobgoblin bureaucracies function staggeringly well. Hobgoblins simply operate on an alien logic; their reality bends and tumbles into a shape that lets their systems work, while they find human organizing structures as ghastly and we find theirs.
This bizarre logic extends to their design sensibility. Everything not covered in spikes is adorned with anguished gargoyles, severed limbs, vulgar blasphemies, barbed wire, and the like. Warband camps are like carnivals of horror and fortresses like disorienting cathedrals, every surface a riot of maddening ornamentation.
Hobgoblins & magic
Hobgoblins, like all children of Idnach, exist partially in the Weird. As other races must channel the etheric potencies of the Weird through precise ritual and craft, for hobgoblins it behaves like soft mud, where manipulating it is as straightforward as picking up a clod and molded it as one fancies. It can be said that hobgoblin warlocks have a “study” of magic as do magic-users of other races, but their practice is far more impressionistic, associated more with the honing of instinctive behaviors and bizarre compulsions than the application of formula.
Hobgoblin magic items typically involve subverting a tool's conventional purpose. A lantern that spews occluding smoke. A whetstone that leaves any blade it passes over as malleable as soft clay. A hammer that pulls apart structures, freeing nails and fasteners with every swing.
Warband generator
Roll 5d6. That's the number of basic grunts in the squad.
A quarter of the basic grunts will be mounted, riding... (1d6)
- Wolves
- Boars
- Axebeaks
- Giant spiders
- Giant bats
- Perytons
For every 8 basic grunts, the warband will be accompanied by a... (1d20)
- Ogre
- Troll
- Ettin
- Cyclops
- Manticore
- Hag
- Tirapheg
- Minotaur
- Evil treant carrying 1d4 hobgoblin sharpshooters in its branches
- Morningstar scorpion
- Otyugh
- Squad of 1d4+1 harpies carrying barbed nets and flaming oil
- Catoblepas
- Chimera
- Wyvern
- Squad of 1d6+1 bugbear shock troopers
- Flaywheel (like one of those circus wheel things covered in spikes and blades; moves 50'/round and anyone in its path must save vs. paralysis or takes 2d6 damage) piloted by 2 hobgoblin acrobats
- Giant crab w/ howdah carrying 1d4 hobgoblin grenadiers
- Rhagodessa
- Giant horned lizard
The warband will be led by a hobgoblin with 1d3+2 HD accompanied by 2 lieutenants with 1 fewer HD.
There is a 50% chance that 1d4 of the basic grunts are hobgoblin warlocks—3 HD magic-users capable of doing one of the following every other round (choose or roll randomly):
- Cause an object within 60' to break (if it's held or worn by someone they get a save to resist).
- Create a 30' radius cloud of thick, chocking smoke anywhere within 120'.
- Throw a fireball up to 90' away that deals 3d6 damage in a 15' radius (save vs. spells for half).
- Levitate up to 20' for the next turn.
- Create an illusion that causes supernatural fear in up to 8 Hit Dice of creatures of 4 HD or lower.
- Undo the last damage suffered by an ally within 30'.
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This post would be incomplete without the much-beloved Hayami Rasenjin hobgoblin, which I learned he submitted to a D&D monster drawing contest organized by the great Tony DiTerlizzi.
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| DiTerlizzi's own take on the hobgoblin, which he said was inspired by the Tolmekians from NausicaƤ of the Valley of the Wind. |
