The Bugbears of Portown: Rumor and Ecology

Those are not his friends

The boys were cornered and grossed out. When they encountered the tall pumpkin-headed humanoid n the cave they had sought to avoid it. It behaved strangely gurgling and writhing. Then it began to retch.

The creatures jaw must have unhinged and the top of its head folded back. Mucus sputtered out from its esophagus into the air. A hand reached out from its mouth, covered in what was probably bile, clawing at the air.

After an interminable moment a goblin pulled itself out of the large creatures mouth and ran towards us, slipping on its own mucus (or was it bile) trail.

The boys beat it to death and then slew the larger thing while it was in the process of spawning another goblin. They defeated the creatures but we could not unsee what we so desperately wanted to unsee. So, in a way, the bugbear won.

            -Fan Fiction of the Thaumaturgist.

The bugbear was probably once a normal goblin. As far as the scholars know some goblins become cannibalistic and begin eating other goblins. However goblins do not possess the normal need that most other creatures have, being sustained by the chaos that flows through them. The best guess that anyone has is that the chaos somehow melds and mutates the devourer and the devoured together. It is unknown if the bugbear is regurgitating the goblins it has eaten or if new goblins are being formed and spat out when it is agitated.

Set This Goblin on Fire and Call it by its Name

“I seen it... But I don’t know what I seen. It was a burning beast and it brought hell upon us. My chickens is dead and my field is taaaaaaaaaantacles!”

            Some sicko on google plus asked me to expand my ideas on level limits, elves and the chaos alignment language to account for nilbogs. It is entirely possible that he was joking.Nilbogs are kind of a joke. I have never liked nilbogs. First of all the Nilbog doesn’t even get a picture in the Fiend Folio. That is maybe the worst part of the Nilbog. The second worst part of the entry is the last paragraph:

For obvious reasons, encounters with these strange creatures are dreaded and, as a result normal goblins tend to be treated with extreme caution lest they turn ot(sic) to be nilbogs. There appear to be no way of distinguishing between the two apart from the use of such spells as commune or by trial and error.  Fiend Folio, editor Turnbull, Don, p. 68 (TSR Hobbies, Inc. 1981).

The book pretty explicitly tells you that nilbogs exist just to mess with players. Nilbogs are a trap that is very “gamey.” They look completely ordinary but have special mechanics (weapons heal, healing spells hurt, you do the opposite of what you want to do (no save)). They do not feel like pulpy. They are a product of dungeons and dragons fucking itself.

They could be pulpy and evocative if they did not behave or look like regular goblins. Here is one of the best parts of the nilbog entry:  

Nilbogism (the name given to this strange disorder) appears to occur when overly heavy use of magic strains the fabric of the space-time continuum and lead to some very strange events. Ibid.

It’s not even that great; but, it does try to place nilbogs somewhere into the world’s logic. If we take my idea that goblins are elves that grew too powerful and were seduced and debased by chaos, then we can say that nilbogism is caused by chaos breaking down the spells that resided in the elf when he succumbed to chaos. It looks something like this:

Nilbog

No. Appearing 1

% In lair 0

Treasure: none

Alignment: chaos

All other stats: the same/ whatever you want

Any nilbog would love to die but cannot figure out how. If a nilbog could speak intelligibly it would ask you to kill it. Nilbogs scream. You can hear them for miles. They wander on tirelessly but exhausted until they finally dissipate into a pile of entropy.

Nilbogs are the final form for all goblins that formed from an elf that had spells memorized. Eventually the chaos that forms and poisons them will begin to work on those memorized spells, releasing the spell energy in a chaotic but predictable way. The energy completely overwhelms what faculties the goblin had left and pours out into his surroundings, damaging causality and warping physical laws. You know, typical nilbog effects (the range of these effects vary from nilbog to nilbog).

Nilbogs are surrounded by fluctuations in reality that create dramatic visual effects, warping, flames, and distortion. In the center is what appears at times to be a normal goblin and at times more demonic and at other times more elfin.

Nilbogs can be encountered anywhere and are easy to track. They leave a trail of blighted and deformed land. Stone is warped or changed into other substances, plants are killed or mutated, animals are born deformed and dead.

Most spells heal the nilbog, giving more fuel for the chaos to burn. Cleric spells may work; healing is thought to damage the nilbog. 

Almost Everyone Hates Racial Level Limits: My Approach to Level Limits and Elves.

Part 1: A Brief Survey of Approaches

I never liked them very much either. I also have grown to dislike demihumans as PCs (or even at all really). But someone almost always wants to be an elf in my games. So, I was faced with a dilemma I needed to make elves fit into my world in a way that I enjoyed. I run what is essential OD&D using the Holmes basic rulebook for the early levels so I asked the Holmes Google Plus Group:

When you guys are playing Holmes basic and extending it, do you use racial level limits? I know this question has probably been asked before. Right? Is there a current consensus?

I got good responses. I was afraid that this topic had been done to death and no one would respond. Turns out this is one of those topics that never gets old.

Michael Thomas, the man behind BLUEHOLME, said that he did not consider level limits to be particularly Holmesian. That’s fairly authoritative so don’t feel bad if you don’t use racial level limits in your campaign (Grognardia also approves).

Two people did admit to using racial level limits in their campaign. The first, William Dowie, hews pretty close to the traditional in-universe rationale:

I just say that they are elder races, past their prime, now is the age of man

Beautiful. Leave it at that. The second person took a modified approach to racial level limits. It’s Good; you should use this rule:

  

I take racial level limits as a status of the races' current achievements. If a PC hits that top level he can keep gaining XP. Each new level costs twice it normally would (extending charts at normal progression). Once a new level is reached the whole race's level limit is now the same. So anyone coming after can get that same level at normal cost. I then give that level title the name of the character who earned it for their race. This gives some PCs glory.

It does have some implications though, it suggests that humans have achieved more prior to the start of a campaign. Does this mean that demihumans are not “elder races” but the newer races that will eventually catch up with and replace humans? That could be an interesting source of tension, as the campaign world gradually starts to see more and more powerful demihumans. This world is the opposite of the traditional “Dowie” approach. This “Strange” approach has the potential to create a world where humans are the twilight race.

Part 2:  My Proposal for Elves, Power Corrupts

My approach is this: high-level elves risk becoming goblins and elves that advance beyond their level limit definitely become goblins. The in-universe explanation is that elves that become to worldly are vulnerable to corruption (The basis of this idea is related to one of Tolkien’s Explanations for the origin of orcs.) If your campaign like mine lacks any sort of afterlife or magic land over the ocean for elves then the fate of every elf since the beginning of elves is either death or goblinhood.

The in-universe mechanism for this is the chaos alignment language. Alignment languages are another area of dnd that gets glossed over. The chaos language as I use it is a language without fixed syntax or meaning. It is vocalized id. When an elf gets to his level cap he starts to here the chaos language in his subconscious. If he retires and joins the other elves in happy elf land he can delay his transformation. If he keeps adventuring he hears the syllables and whispers growing louder, bubbling up from the subconscious. Slowly it seduces and corrupts blocking the thoughts and taking over the mind of the elf.  No longer able to think over the babble of chaos, the elf becomes a goblin. This is where goblins come from; they do not reproduce.

This approach also has far reaching implications. It either means that your world has very few goblins or that your world is old enough that there have been massive amounts of elves turned into goblins. Your world may be infinitely old. Or, there may have been a massive corrupting event in the history of your world. It also means that goblins are probably insane. It also means that locked away somewhere in a goblins brain there may be high level spells, still memorized waiting to come out.