Dragon Magazine #050.pdf - TheCrimsonPirate.com

June 1981 Dragon
the first event of the year at the vortex.
Each picture is intended to remind the
storyteller of a different event of the year.
The clans have hundreds of these skins,
representing centuries of time. Unfortunately,
it becomes impossible to sort out
legend from fact for periods of some five
hundred and more years in the past.”
Yet, even these legends must not be
discounted; the Prachar Goblins have a
story of a time when the gods made the
mountains:
Dark grew the sun over Zorn
The crag peaks reared
Heaven broke, roared
And poured out hot stars
Fire and smoke burled upwards
And shimmering heat touched the
Sky
The early legends say that Zorn contained
six tribes which lived in peace and
periodically met to discuss matters of
common interest. Gradually, as the Goblin
population increased and pastureland
and game grew scarce, rivalry led to
conflicts. New groupings appeared and
old ones dissolved, so that by the year
1000 the Goblin storytellers could name
eleven tribes — a number that has remained
unchanged to this day.
The poverty of the Nithmere has forced
the Goblins into raiding as a way of life. It
is not possible to migrate to better lands,
because the Goblins’ habits — particularly
their anthropophagy — have made
them the target of ire all over northern
Minaria. Yet, can their actions be said to
be truly evil, when Nature has enjoined
them to eat meat or die?
For centuries the Goblins raided their
human neighbors as they pleased. Catastrophes,
such as the invasion of
Kalruna-Sasir (ancient Muetar) by “abominations
of the land and horrors of the
air” made their work easier. But never
was there a chance for the disunited
tribes to make any permanent conquests
in the highly-populated south. Civilized
armies could overwhelm them with iron
weapons, sophisticated tactics and sheer
numbers, as happened at the Battle of
Tanglefoot, when Egalon, the Emperor
of Muetar, shattered a powerful sortie by
the Longmuir Goblins.
By the end of the twelfth century after
the Cataclysm, Vidarnan warrior bands
(“thargals”) were subduing the Conodras
tribes to the west of Zorn and coming
into conflict with Goblins in the foothills.
At the same time, the human barbarians
in the Wild Reaches and Blownover
were increasing in power and
impinging upon the flanks of the Nithmere.
When the Pirostars put an end to
the anarchy in Muetar, the Goblins were
encircled by foes that no individual tribe
could stand up to alone.
It was the border tribes, those with
more familiarity with non-Goblin ideas,
that took the first steps toward formulating
a native state which could match the
power of the enemy.
At the outset of the thirteenth century,
the Goblin Mengsmal assumed the chieftainship
of the Gakstetter tribe. He had
seen how trade had enriched his human
neighbors, and he desired the same for
his own tribe. But he realized no caravan
would enter the Nithmere as long as lawless
Goblins roamed the borders, robbing
— and sometimes devouring —
merchant travelers. Accordingly, he supressed
banditry among his own people
and drove the marauders from other
tribes out of his territory. Finally, he
opened the Nithmere to traders from
lmmer and Muetar.
Bold entrepreneurs took up Mengsmal’s
offer, and soon the Goblins were
eagerly exchanging vanamir-ivory, furs,
amber and musk for cloth, spices, beads
and — above all — rock salt. The latter
the Goblins called “jozon,” and it was
used as the standard currency of the
Nithmere. The wealth that flowed into
the Gakstetters’ hands allowed Mengsmat
to arm the tribe with iron weapons
and to bribe the allies of rival tribes. After
he had isolated his enemies, the Hliosurts
and the Glyfadrs, he conquered
them by force and imposed a tribute.
But trade did not develop as quickly as
An example of the pictorial goatskin worn by a Goblin clan’s
chief; this one tells of the unsuccessful raids on Muetar and the
famine that came afterward.
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