Guide to Goblins: The Miners
This post is part of my Guide to Goblins series. Click the link to check out the rest.
When kicking off this series, I wrote about the historical and mythological roots of the goblin. One of our key takeaways was that there were a lot of different varieties of goblins, which also means that some creatures that are identified as goblins in one source are called some other mythological creature (like an elf or a spirit) in another. We also have identified that goblins typically play some sort of trickster role; they're cunning, more than they are outwardly aggressive.
This week, we're going to focus on one particular reoccurring goblin trope that is present in goblin descriptions from D&D to Harry Potter, but which only appears in a few actual goblin mythologies: goblins who mine and have advanced tunneling skills. In the kick-off to the series, we discussed the tommyknocker, and two weeks ago, we raised the idea of turning Bluecaps (mining spirits) into part of a larger goblin society that also includes redcaps. We'll explore the tommyknocker with some more depth and also go beyond European folklore with another mining goblin, the muki. We'll adapt both of these into goblin subcultures for our TTRPGs, as well as suggest a couple of key points to hit for our bluecaps from two weeks ago. Our guiding questions are: what is the historical context of these stories? What are the key elements of these goblins? And then how can we adapt these goblins for our TTRPGs?
Knockers
Our first mining goblin is the tommyknocker or, simply, the knocker. We talked about the knockers two weeks ago. Knockers get their name from their most helpful action: they knock on mine walls to warn of impending collapse. They also sometimes lead miners to particularly rich veins.
Historical Context: Industrial Revolution and Mining
The tommyknocker arises in southwestern England around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Mining in the region was traditionally a family-run enterprise. Father teaches son how to mine, and the family owns a surface-level mine that they've explored over the years. As technology progressed during the start of the Industrial Age, deeper mines became possible thanks to steam-powered pumps (to pump out water from the mines). However, these machines were expensive, meaning that the average family would be unlikely to be able to afford to build a deeper mine. Instead of individual family ventures, corporate interests started to move into the region and the business because they had the resources to create more intensive mining operations. Rising demand for coal and other metals led to limitless potential profits, causing companies to try to capture the maximum amount of resources that they could.
This combination of rising corporatism, ruthless profit-seeking, and deeper-below-the-surface mining technology was enriching for the mine owners but frequently disastrous for the workers. In addition to coal dust, natural gas explosions, and a lack of fresh air that could poison miners, flooding was a perpetual danger in these deep mines. Deep mining would get below the water table of the surrounding land–meaning that the water level was above the mines. If water eroded its way through a mine wall or a miner picked their way through to a pocket of water while extracting ore, that water would gush out at high pressure, potentially washing away the wooden support beams of the mineshaft and trapping miners underground. Other mine collapses could be caused by small earthquakes, which could also shake loose supports and lead to cave-ins.
And commonly in the Industrial Revolution, workers were cheap. As medicine improved, the population boomed because birth rates had not yet fallen, which led to a surge in the labor force. If one miner died due to flooding, who cared? The company could simply replace them.
Stories of tommyknockers were then a sort of comfort to miners. Worried about flooding and mine collapse and the chance of a slow and painful death, miners could take solace in having a supernatural being present who could warn them of impending mine collapse. "Don't mine there" or "get out of the mine right now before it falls apart" would both be helpful warnings, and a belief that they would be warned of such risks would be a great comfort before trudging down into the mines to risk one's life.
Likely, these stories have some real origins. This academic paper about mine safety in the modern day suggests that the earth shifting--such as from an earthquake--does lead to an audible sound. Dynamite charges to open up new mineshafts, which could destabilize existing ones, would also have an audible sound coming from "behind" a wall of rock. If the wooden support beams were poised to rot away, they might creak or groan, the sound magnified through the shaft. Each of these could signal that the shaft you are in is in danger of collapsing. In a creepy underground area, it is probably more comforting to believe that you are being warned by a friendly, intelligent force than to think "oh it's just the dynamite in the shaft over," knowing that your employer is willing to use dynamite in that shaft and put you at risk for the sake of profits.
Tommyknockers are also described as tricksters--one of the essential goblinoid traits that we identified--and are liable to steal mining equipment. Again, in part, this may be because it's easier to blame the goblin in your walls than admit you have bad luck or made a costly error. But I also like to think that they are being used as an excuse, much like the apocryphal Captain Ludd. A tool went missing? Well, it couldn't be that you took it home with you; it must have been the tommyknockers.
Depiction and Traditions
Knockers have a wide variety of stories about them. Some emphasize their trickery, while others focus on their helpfulness in offering warnings.
One of the more problematic (to say the least) stories comes from the 1851 novel Yeast, which was a Christian socialist text attacking the inequality of the social system of Industrial Britain. Yeast says that the knockers are the spirits of dead Jewish people, exiled to England to work in the mines as punishment for killing Jesus. We're going to completely ignore this version of the knockers for obvious reasons–we aren't here to replicate antisemitism in our games.
More fun and interesting is the way that one would bribe the knockers to be more friendly than trickster-y: Cornish pasties, a local meat pie. You would throw some of this traditional local food into the mine before or after a shift as a treat for the knockers, to appease them and thank them for your safety. In exchange, they'd keep you safe, and even sometimes lead you to a particularly promising vein to mine.
In terms of physical characteristics, tommyknockers were said to be about two feet tall and wear traditional mining clothes. They have white whiskers. They have abnormally long arms and wrinkled skin. Long arms are something that has, strangely, come up over and over with our descriptive text for goblins, as I described in the kickoff to the series, and wrinkled skin fits with our general goblinoid "grotesque" image. So, add whiskers to our standard D&D goblin and dress him in a little miner's outfit, and we're good to go appearance-wise.
Adaptation
Thinking of tommyknockers as a goblin subculture, we're definitely going to be skipping the "ghost spirit of dead Jewish exiles" concept. We can just keep them as standard goblins in a lot of ways: these goblins are going to be native to whatever mining region that our campaign is set in. They have lots of experience mining, which gives them their ability to predict cave-ins.
This goblin culture coexists pretty much peacefully with local humans/elves/halflings/dwarves/etc. The goblins struggle with growing food in their underground caverns. However, a trade relationship has arisen with the surface dwellers: surface food in exchange for goblin mining products/assistance (particularly meat pies).
The challenge that I encounter is how to keep the knockers as mysterious, wall-dwelling creatures and to keep up their distinctive knocking, while also making them equal to the surface dwellers in some ways (or at least, not weirdly exploited). I think my answer here is that the goblins are highly photosensitive, and so avoid even the torchlit mines of the surface dwellers. They have their own mining systems, yes--completely pitch-black tunnels. They often have different priorities for what they're looking for, as things like gold and gems are mostly prized for their luster, which would not be valuable in the complete dark. This also encourages the sort of mutually beneficial relationship between the knockers and surface dwellers, as the knockers will gladly guide surface miners to a rich vein of gold in exchange for food supplies; they're not competing for the same ores.
At first, I thought that they would prize glowing stones, but I think that ruins some of the challenge if the party were to venture into a knocker tunnel as part of an adventure. Having a completely pitch-black area, where any light might frighten off a potentially helpful ally, creates a more interesting tactical decision in my book.
So, in summary, these goblins have their own parallel mining structures that are completely dark because the knockers cannot deal with any light. They'll help surface dweller miners by warning them of impending cave-ins and flooding, and even help guide them to lucrative gold veins as the knockers do not prioritize that in their own mining. Instead, the knockers prefer mining high-sulfur rocks, which they dissolve in acidic pools to create a nutrient-rich environment for things to grow in a sort of foreign agricultural process (I'm mimicking deep sea chemosynthesis here, with a healthy fantasy dose of "this almost certainly would not work in practice the way I'm pretending it will"). For knockers, mining is a means of agriculture, which means helping surface dwellers mine better in exchange for food is a double boon; less work (letting the surface dwellers mine instead of having to do it yourself), same reward (food).
Keeping up the ideas of goblins as "tricksters" and trying to complicate the reputation of goblins as "thieves," connects us back to the knockers' payment around food. If a knocker believes that they are owed--maybe they guided you away from an unstable mineshaft, saving your life, even if they didn't inform you of the danger you were nearly in--they'll find a way to take their payment. That might mean food simply disappears from your ration box if it is left unattended in darkness, or during a moonless, cloudy, dark night they'll steal food from your home. To them, it is fair compensation that they have been deprived; to surface dwellers, it can come across as thievery. This connects us with the broader historical context of the Industrial Revolution where knockers arise; the knockers are a sort of anti-boss force, as they'll always take what they're owed. No wage theft here.
As far as trickery goes, it all ties back to the idea of just payment. It might mean that they'll try to blow out your candlelight, putting you in the darkness, in order to be able to move around freely--either with ranged weapons or magic to snuff out light. Maybe I'll give them all access to the Darkness spell. If they're unable to get food for their payment, they'll sometimes take their reward in mining equipment. Still, they do not steal more than they believe that they are owed; a wise surface dweller who notices their pickaxe has gone missing knows that it means that a knocker saved them from death without it being noticed. Some have taken to just delivering extra food in rewards as a precaution; better to over-reward that which you pick than to have something more inconvenient simply go missing because you missed a payment.
In terms of appearance, we'll keep the standard goblin appearance: sallow and wrinkly skin, pointy ears, and sharp teeth. I don't think that these goblins are blind; I just think that they have exceptional eyesight to allow them to operate in pretty much zero-light settings. Their eyes are probably larger than is proportional to maximize their ability to see. They have white whiskers, pretty much universally, which I think are cat-like, allowing them to pick up small vibrations that might indicate a cave-in. They tend to wear dirty smocks as mining clothes.
Mechanically, we'll give them Darkness as an innate spell, but for the most part, these will not be a particularly abnormal creature. They'll thrive on ambush, using the darkness to their advantage. For more and for the full stat block variations, you'll have to pick up Guide to Goblins when it is released.
Muki
Our second mining goblin comes from the Andes mountains, or modern-day Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. The Muki, or Muqui, comes from the Quechua word murik, meaning "to asphyxiate" or "to strangle," so you already know what these things are about. They're far less friendly than the knockers.
Historical Context
Getting at the history behind the muki is difficult, and I have struggled to find academic scholarship about it that is not in Spanish (sorry, I'm absolutely terrible with languages). My main reliable source on the muki is a 2016 ethnographical study (link here) about Andean cultural practices as they relate to mining. In this study, Carreño--the author--writes about how mountains were traditionally seen as living beings. To harvest the innards of a mountain, then, one must make an offering, typically food, thanks to the social role that sharing food played in pre-Colombian Quechua culture. Carreño writes: "Where Andean peoples became involved in underground mining they performed practices of food-giving to the earth-beings from whom the minerals were being extracted."
These earth-beings are, in Peru, the Muki--"a devil-like man with horns [and] red eyes... who is regarded as the owner of the metals." The problem is that these earth-beings would see mining as an effort to steal its metals, and so only by fairly compensating the "owner" could mining take place without the muki causing danger.
This does not really provide a ton of historical context for us, however. Some non-academic caliber sources say that the 'devil-like' part here is key, as the muki is a product of a fusing of Quechua and Christian beliefs. Take that with a grain of salt as I'm naturally less trusting of less-than-academic sources that don't have links or references back to any scholarship. If that's true, however, I think lots of other (also non-academic) stories about the muki make a lot of sense. So we'll proceed as if that's true.
According to an article by the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM), the muki is often seen as a predatory goblin searching for unsuspecting children or isolated miners to attack. Wikipedia (annoyingly not crediting its sources) says that their main victims were unbaptized children, stolen away to be corrupted into more goblins. CIM also notes that "one common theme in Muki lore is the tendency for the creature to make deals with miners," which echoes European folklore around making deals with the devil.
I don't think it is too big of a logical leap, then, to say that the muki probably arose in their most common folkloric expression as a result of European colonial enterprises in the Andes, such as with the fall of the Inca. If you're a folklore scholar specializing in Andean ethnography and I'm wrong, please correct me. The similarities with the Christian devil seem pretty direct, and if they are stealing unbaptized children, they could be an expression of the fear that Europeans would come steal to your children away and Christianize them. This guess also is reflected in the description that CIM gives us of the Muki: "[a muki's] skin is described as ghostly pale, with long blond hair framing dazzling eyes that reflect the light." The paleness and blondness, both of which would not be native to the indigenous people of the region, make me think that these are likely a stand-in for Europeans, just like the pukwudgie of North America that we discussed two weeks ago.
Depictions and Powers
Unlike with the pukwudgies, however, there's no folklore that I came across that suggests that the muki are invaders in stories about them. Instead, they are more like predators. They'll stalk and find isolated children and spirit them away. They'll cause death and chaos by intentionally destroying mine supports, acting as a sort of vengeful spirit fighting on behalf of the mountain. They'll steal mining equipment to slow down mining progress.
When the muki act more friendly towards miners, CIM notes that they will "trade valuable mining knowledge or help in exchange for luxuries such as alcohol or coca." However, the muki–like the devil--is a trickster, and these deals are typically impossible to properly fulfill, leading to greedy miners ultimately being killed for failing to pay their side of the bargain.
In terms of physical description, we've already covered a lot of ground. A muki is ghostly pale with long blond hair. They have horns and red eyes, according to Carreño. Most of the muki art that I looked at has a head that is attached directly to the body with no neck. While I think the horns take us a bit too far from "standard goblin," I think all the other elements totally work--a weird, pale white instead of sallow, blonde, red-eyed goblin. They are traditionally dressed in mining gear, whatever is current (so, historically a poncho and a lantern; now, a hardhat and a miner's headlamp) and are under 2 feet tall. The image I used in this article is one of relatively few I could find, though it does not have many of the specific descriptors (pale, blond, red eyes) that are in our texts.
To the players in my home campaign, you've successfully found where I got my weird underground, ghastly pale goblin inspiration from.
Lastly, in terms of power, the muki are usually thought to be fairly powerful supernatural beings, in keeping with their role as protectors of the mountains. They are often more solitary than some of the other goblins that we've discussed. They can harden or soften rock, restore or rust metal, and are exceptionally strong. The muki will make somewhat cursed deals, but if the deal is broken, will be able to kill the dealbreaker even at a distance–which sounds sort of like D&D's Geas to me.
Adaptation
There are two key cultural elements that I want to engage with in my adaptation of the muki as a goblin subculture. The first is the idea that these goblins are the owners of the land and the metals in the mountains that they inhabit. I talked in the kickoff article of this series about one way to play with the idea of goblins as thieves is to have that be a result of cultural miscommunication, by having goblins simply be a culture that holds everything in common. So the metals, to the muki, belong to all muki, and to mine as an outsider is to take precious metals from all of them. That is not to say that the muki will never accept a fair bargain for mining access; like the knockers, I think that the muki are often going to be willing to trade metals for food, which would be hard to grow in a subterranean environment and engages with the traditional Andean practices of giving food offerings. However, where the knockers are willing to help miners avoid danger generally, the muki are more directly mercenary—X gold for Y food. No more, no less. You can never trade for permanent mining rights to a particular mountain; you can only pay for a certain amount to extract.
The other idea that I want to engage with is the European colonial component and the stealing of unbaptized children. I’m assuming that this is a stand-in for Catholic missionaries taking and forcibly baptizing indigenous children. For that reason, I want the muki to have some sort of religious, perhaps cultish element. I think that they are governed by a theocracy. I think "stealing babies for sacrifice" is overused as a trope, and it is particularly problematic due to the often antisemitic depiction of goblins (which we discussed in the kickoff article) and the long-standing antisemitic trope of blood libel. That said, I do want to keep that core folklore trait of the muki as kidnappers because I think it is an important part of their anti-colonial roots. Maybe they are used as child soldiers? I think this is worth thinking more about for the full write-up of the muki in Guide to Goblins.
Mechanically, the muki are mostly just going to be fairly typical goblins, but with a natural spellcasting component. They should be able to manipulate stone as well as cast spells like Geas. They're extremely strong, making them more strength-based than the typical goblin. But we're not looking at a bunch of more out-there superpowers; these are mostly standard goblins with spells. Full stats to come in Guide to Goblins once I release it.
Lastly, in terms of description and art, I want to keep the abnormal depiction of the muki: ghostly pale with long blond hair. They have no neck. They have red eyes, though I'm skipping out on major horns.
Bluecap Notes
Just to connect briefly these stories to our bluecaps, the cousins of our redcaps from two weeks ago, I want to make sure bluecaps are distinct from the knockers that they are similar to in a lot of folklore. First, I think that bluecaps will be fairly rarely encountered--they are not friendly and helpful like knockers, but they also do not lead their own battles as the muki do, instead relying on redcaps.
Our redcaps were imagined as borderland reavers, which makes me think that the bluecaps are largely iron miners, producing weapons for the reavers. We'll preserve the core idea of the "food for ore" relationship that we see with both knockers and muki. The focus for bluecaps is that they will provide ore to other goblins--the redcaps--in exchange for the produce that the redcaps are able to pillage. That makes them different from our existing mining goblins, as they're less focused on the surface dwellers, while still connecting to the key mining-goblin trope of food for ore.
Conclusion
These are just two of the goblin subtypes I will be covering as part of the Guide to Goblins series. Be sure to subscribe to the blog to have future posts delivered to your inbox so that you make sure that you do not miss any! I hope you are all enjoying this series. I'm having a lot of fun writing it and really exploring the folklore. And stay tuned for news of when I'll release the full and polished product!