GreenTengu
Adventurer
I think it is worth remembering though....
Hobgoblin tribes or clans or nations if you like... they are really spread quite far apart. As a people they don't all occupy a single terrain anyway. Volo's statements are a subjective view of one or maybe the collective impression of a view hobgoblin societies he encountered and learned enough to report.
These societies, they tend not to get along with each other so well. Each one has its own little adaptations and rituals and traditions and quirks and they are all, as a collective at least, fiercely proud of their own unique little traits and accomplishments-- no doubt feeling their way best prepares them for the great war of the afterlife.
So nothing stated in the book, no matter how definitive, ought to be taken as a universal truth about the species. Likely there are few things that are actually universal about hobgoblin societies.
So if you say "I think Hobgoblins would be/should be this way" then, so long as you don't insist on this being an absolute universal truth but rather keep your scope on a single soceity or set of societies... by no means are you wrong. But when someone else says they believe they should be in a way that seems to have little cultural in common, so long as they do are talking about some other society or set of societies of the species in some other region... they are also entirely correct.
There is no reason to think that any sentient species society is going to be any less diverse than the others that occupy that world. And even within the same society you are inevitably going to have permutations-- counter-culture movements, stark traditionalists, revolutionaries, those driven by the will of nature or spirits or god, others driven by purely ration and logic and their direct observations....
The only time you are ever going to be wrong is when you try to define what a Hobgoblin is not. There are only a few things that would make a concept stop being a hobgoblin, and they are primarily physiological rather than cultural.
Hobgoblin tribes or clans or nations if you like... they are really spread quite far apart. As a people they don't all occupy a single terrain anyway. Volo's statements are a subjective view of one or maybe the collective impression of a view hobgoblin societies he encountered and learned enough to report.
These societies, they tend not to get along with each other so well. Each one has its own little adaptations and rituals and traditions and quirks and they are all, as a collective at least, fiercely proud of their own unique little traits and accomplishments-- no doubt feeling their way best prepares them for the great war of the afterlife.
So nothing stated in the book, no matter how definitive, ought to be taken as a universal truth about the species. Likely there are few things that are actually universal about hobgoblin societies.
So if you say "I think Hobgoblins would be/should be this way" then, so long as you don't insist on this being an absolute universal truth but rather keep your scope on a single soceity or set of societies... by no means are you wrong. But when someone else says they believe they should be in a way that seems to have little cultural in common, so long as they do are talking about some other society or set of societies of the species in some other region... they are also entirely correct.
There is no reason to think that any sentient species society is going to be any less diverse than the others that occupy that world. And even within the same society you are inevitably going to have permutations-- counter-culture movements, stark traditionalists, revolutionaries, those driven by the will of nature or spirits or god, others driven by purely ration and logic and their direct observations....
The only time you are ever going to be wrong is when you try to define what a Hobgoblin is not. There are only a few things that would make a concept stop being a hobgoblin, and they are primarily physiological rather than cultural.
