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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6203213" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, it's really obvious that Pathfinder's intellectual property is more influential now than WoTC's intellectual property.  The Pathfinder goblin is on the verge of becoming iconic within D&D.Personally, I like the Pathfinder goblin.  There is a lot of The Hobbit going on in the Pathfinder goblin, and the goblins of The Hobbit are iconic.  And there is a lot of where the conception has been going in urban fantasy going on there as well.  But it's also taking the race too far I think in one direction toward a sterotype.  I consider the things that make the Pathfinder goblin so effective of a conception to be only part of what makes the race work as a race.  I've taken the D&D goblin if not in a completely different direction, then at least into different territory.One of the things that intrigued me early on about Goblins is that hobgoblins, bugbears, and goblins were all apparently ethnic or racial groups of the larger goblin-kind.  They had shared heritage, culture, and deities.  Ok, so how did they get so divergent?  My answer to this was, "Selective breeding."   Right off the bat this made goblins very unique.   They had deliberately created physical castes.   So what were they breeding stock goblins, the worker caste, to be like?  The answer was - cunning, devious, crafty, and stealthy.   They weren't cowardly - the race was lawful evil.   They were disciplined.   They just preferred feints, diversions, hit and run tactics and the like because that was what they had been bred to excel in.   They were perfectly capable of fighting with fanatic zeal if they had their back to a wall and no where to go.  This was the caste of miners, artisans, assassins, and spies.  Goblins of the ordinary sort made up the archers, raiders, sappers, grenadiers and skirmishers of the goblin-clans armies.  Light of build, they made excellent cavalry of the horse-archer mode.  They didn't ride wolves - they rode freaking pony sized wargs or horse sized dire wolves!  They were the most dangerous light cavalry in the known world.  Goblins frequently employed poisons on their arrows.  The little buggers were feared.  They had the same sort of humor as the Joker.  That they were laughing didn't make them less scary.  They weren't small because they were weak.  Being small made them more dangerous doing what they did.  And if they needed something big to come pound you down and bully you by brute force, well they had Bugbears and Ogres for that.Hobgoblins were their elite heavy infantry - the legionaries and hoplites at the center.  The overseer caste of Bugbears were shock troops, and also responsible for seeing that there were no desertions from the ranks.   No other race has so versatile of an armed forces.   In fact, only collectively can the other free peoples even match them - it's goblins versus the world and its not at all clear that the world will win.</blockquote>

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