Guide to Goblins: The Violent
This post is part of my Guide to Goblins series. Click the link to check out the rest.
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Last week, we talked 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 the specific folklore around a particular theme we see with goblins: those that are more outwardly aggressive. We're delving into our most malevolent and violent goblin myths. 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?
Redcaps
Our first violent goblin is the redcap. D&D already does have the redcap as its own, independent monster, but in its folkloric roots, it is a type of goblin. Redcaps are most notable for their eponymous red caps, which are dyed in the blood of mortals.
Historical Context
The Redcap arises in folklore along the Anglo-Scottish border. According to A Dictionary of Fairies by Katharine Briggs, the Redcap "lived in old ruined peel towers [a fortified keep common along the Anglo-Scottish border] and castles where wicked deeds had been done, and delighted to re-dye his red cap in human blood."
It would take more than a single blog post to cover the entire history of English-Scottish relations. Many, many people have devoted entire long history books to the topic, and I do not have a Ph.D. in Scottish history. The very brief summary is: prior to the ascension of James I of England, who was also simultaneously King of Scotland, after the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, England and Scotland were in a sort of running, on-and-off border war. Even in times of official peace, minor skirmishes were common--lands would be burned, cattle stolen, and villages destroyed. With such a movable border, you might be English one day and Scottish the next.
This in turn led to a rise in a culture of reavers, or "reivers," a sort of culture of largely independent bandits who thrived in the lawless borderlands. Raiding any farm that grew too successful was an easier and less risky way of surviving, compared to trying to grow your own crops and raise your own livestock, which would only be stolen by some other band. Local nobles would raise peel towers–a small tower with a door only accessible by steps, with an outer perimeter wall; a peel tower was smaller than a full castle and meant to be a defensive guardpost–to try to defend against these reavers.
This is the historical context where redcaps spring up. It's easy to imagine lands destroyed by reavers or by more regular armies in times of official war sparking legends of hauntings. Plus, if you were constantly in fear of your farm being raided by reavers, I think it's a small leap to attribute a raid to a more supernatural enemy. The supernatural element can grow if the bandits were based out of somewhere that my neighbors said was haunted--like a burned-out shell of a peel castle. And oh look, redcaps!
Depiction in D&D
So, what are we working with so far from our D&D source material? How wrong or right are the authors of D&D's Volo's Guide to Monsters in their description?
The Volo's Guide redcap is defined as a fey creature, created when a creature in the Feywild acts on an "intense desire for bloodshed." From the moment that one of these creatures becomes fully grown--they spawn from mushrooms--it "desires only murder and carnage," and it acts without subtlety or trickery. Redcaps in Volo's Guide rarely work together or with other creatures.
It does get the folklore image of soaking its hat in blood right, though, even making it intrinsic to the redcap's survival. They must kill and resoak their cap every three days, or they will die.
In their actual stat block, redcaps have disadvantage on stealth checks but have an ability to rapidly close the final distance to get into melee range and deal some damage. Keith Ammann of the wonderful blog The Monsters Know What They're Doing notes in his entry on redcaps that they presumably charge into combat and then do their best to grapple an enemy into staying still and being hit with its sword. But that sort of clunky, unstealthy, "grab you and beat you to a pulp" sort of combat is not really in keeping with our core goblin tropes identified last week, where a "trickster" nature is an important part of the definition for goblin according to David Pickering's 1999 Dictionary of Folklore.
What about physical description? Volo's Guide describes redcaps as looking like "a wizened and undersized gnome with a hunched back and sinewy frame." Ok, so our goblin definition as a grotesque fits. And the redcap "has a pointed leather cap, pants of similar material, heavy iron boots, and a heavy bladed weapon." The iron boots themselves are part of the description that we're given in A Dictionary of Fairies, which describes a redcap as a "short thickset old man, with long prominent teeth, skinny fingers armed with talons like eagles, large eyes of a fiery-red colour, grisly hair streaming down his shoulders, iron boots, a pikestaff in his left hand, and a red cap on his head. Human strength can avail little against him."
Ok, for the most part, those are in alignment. We've got a similar short humanoid appearance that we'll merge with our general goblin physical appearance (as we're trying to build goblin subcultures, not an independent monster). We've kept the iron boots, the red cap, and a weapon--though a pike is different from a sickle, and I am not sure why the designers of D&D opted for that weapon when a pike would have actually let the creature use its Outsize Strength feature more regularly, which is currently just doesn't have a need to (Ammann goes into more depth on how to use Outsize Strength).
Adaptation
Thinking of redcaps as a goblin subculture, the idea of a violent creature from a contested borderland would suggest to me a sort of scavenger culture. In fact, those reavers from history? They seem like a great model for our redcap goblins.
We're going to adapt our physical appearance to be more in line with a generic goblin--we'll move towards a sort of sallow-colored, flat-nosed, less-human-looking creature. Mechanically, we'll also give them the standard goblin traits that allow them to scurry around the battlefield.
Redcaps will keep their eponymous red caps, though this becomes a sort of cultural marker--a status symbol--rather than something biological. Perhaps it signifies adulthood? Or maybe it is a sort of caste or professional indicator? Red indicates warriors. Also from this region, we have stories of bluecaps, which are spirits rather than goblins, but fill a similar mining niche as the tommyknocker we discussed last week, so maybe we could steal that name as well and make our warrior caste into "red" and our laboring caste into "blue." D&D's existing goblins already have a pretty strict hierarchical system, so this sort of caste system has a D&D-goblin precedent. Clothing and social class have a long history of being linked, including European sumptuary laws, so I think this sort of social class-as-cap could definitely make sense and be historically appropriate. Plus, bluecap miner goblins lets us keep with the trope we see in D&D already about goblins being skillful miners and tunnelers (more on that next week).
Beyond that, we'll keep the sort of leather clothing, and we'll give our redcaps pikes rather than scythes. That fits a warrior class vibe, ties us better to the folklore, and lets us both keep and better utilize the Outsize Strength trait that we'll steal from the existing redcap stat block in Volo's Guide.
In terms of additional lore and context, I don't want to get too tied to a particular setting; I like when published supplements for D&D make an effort to be setting-neutral, as I mostly enjoy playing in my homebrew world and so want something I can plug in or make fit without having to strip an existing setting out first. Still, for a goblin subculture, you need some culture to be defined.
So I'm thinking redcap goblins are not native to the region where they're most commonly found. That region should be a borderland, somewhere plagued by persistent warfare. Goblins migrated into the region, either brought in as mercenaries at one point or simply as nomads who found their way into the contested zone. There, they found a profitable life as raiders--I'm borrowing from the historical role of reavers, here--and scavengers of battlefields scarred into the land by the armies of the warring kingdoms on either side. Now, the redcap goblins are hard to stamp out; they're fierce warriors, and one kingdom committing to sending troops to deal with the goblin issue would be seen as an act of aggression by the other.
To keep up the "goblins are tricksters" element, I think that these goblins play a much grander game of trickery than most others. Redcaps love to incite wars--after all, war gives them business and battlefields to loot. They'll slink over a border and kill some livestock, leaving behind flags and symbols that this was a raid by some other group, which creates a pretext for war. Have a king who thinks he's caught on, and not plunge his country into war over a redcap raid? Well, then he's just opened himself up to very real aggression from his neighboring king, who can now raid with impunity and call it the redcaps. Better just start that official war in case to not look weak.
More redcap details will get fleshed out in the final Guide to Goblins product, along with a revised redcap stat block or two--I'll build some variations--which will be available for purchase at some point. You'll need to pick it up to get the full write-up.
Pukwudgie
Our second violent goblin is the pukwudgie. This is a creature that isn't in official D&D material (and I could only find it on DMsGuild as a player race, and couldn't find it at all for D&D 5e on DriveThruRPG), which means that it is an exciting place for me to add options to the set of D&D monsters. The pukwudgie is not classically a goblin because it comes from Native American folklore rather than Europe; however, in a lot of its descriptions, you'll find that it meets a lot of our traits that we used to define goblins, from appearance to trickster nature.
It is also important to note that the depiction--and violence–of pukwudgies vary by tribe. For the purposes of this post, which is centered on violent goblins, we'll be drawing from Wampanoag folklore, which has some of the most violent pukwudgie depictions (according to Native Languages).
Historical Context
Finding anything resembling actual scholarship on the folklore of the pukwudgie was surprisingly difficult. Most of what I found was just cryptid-hunter blogs that reiterate the same few folktales over and over, without doing any investigation as to their roots.
The main source that I was able to find was William Scranton Simmons's Spirit of the New England tribes: Indian history and folklore, 1620-1984 (1986), which crucially informed me that "no seventeenth- or eighteenth-century sources" mention the pukwudgie, and traces their presence in Wampanoag folklore to Chief Red Shell, a twentieth-century leader.
Andrew Warburton, author of the new book New England Fairies (2024), in a 2023 blog post on the pukwudgies, notes that "pukwudgies function in Wampanoag stories as thinly veiled stand-ins for white people," which gives us the historic context that we need to use them intelligently in our games.
Like conflict over the Anglo-Scottish border, the history of European imperialism in the Americas is too lengthy to cover comprehensively. In very brief, the history of colonial New England tends to be a combination of disease severely weakening native tribes who might resist English settlers, broken treaties and promises, and forced assimilation into Christian traditions. The idea of broken promises from settlers to respect native boundaries is, I would argue, the crucial component for the derivation of the pukwudgie.
The general folktales surrounding the pukwudgie are that they were once friendly to humanity. However, the local humans favored Maushop, a giant and protector of the Wampanoag. The pukwudgie, jealous of humanity's favoritism towards Maushop, turned violent. Maushop, to protect humans from the goblins, scattered them across the American northeast, but the pukwudgies returned to the region today known as Cape Cod. Through trickery, the pukwudgies kill Maushop and his wife in retaliation for their own banishment.
While most of those cryptid-hunter blogs suggest that these stories are "ancient" and date back to prehistory, the more academic scholarship from Warburton and Simmons both say that is unlikely. I'm inclined to believe them, not just because of their historical credentials, but also because of how relevant the pukwudgie myth is to the real history of European colonial efforts. The idea of an early friendship (think Thanksgiving), followed by jealousy of a source for traditional spiritual protection (Christianity vs traditional religion), and then efforts to drive off the invaders, their eventual return, and destruction of the source of traditional culture in the form of Maushop; all of this sounds is a pretty direct parallel to the white invasion of the region. We'll use this in our adaptation.
Folklore Depictions
So, what powers are the pukwudgie supposed to have? What do they look like? What is their society?
Socially, according to Warburton, "pukwudgies in the Wampanoag stories were never described in isolation—always in bands." Ok, no problems there; our goblins are encountered en masse in D&D because they're relatively weak, first-level fodder.
What do pukwudgies look like? Warburton notes that the depiction of "tiny gray-skinned trolls with large black manes" is one that was not developed in consultation with any people of the Wampanoag tribe, and so while it dominates modern understandings, it's not one rooted in folklore.
A 1910 illustrated version of The Song of Hiawatha was also not developed with native input, but is "much closer in spirit to the depiction found in the older folklore." Those pukwudgies are shown "looking like little children." That image is what we should steer for, but if we want to connect these creatures to our larger goblin tradition, we should also try to implement some of our more typical goblin traits. We might even have to use the more dominating image, even if it's less accurate.
The pukwudgies are known for their magical talents. According to Native Languages, "in some traditions, they [pukwudgies] have a sweet smell and are associated with flowers. Pukwudgies have magical powers which vary from tribe to tribe but may include the ability to turn invisible, confuse people or make them forget things, shapeshift into... dangerous animals, or bring harm to people by staring at them." One of the more common folk abilities is that they lure people to cliffs and push them off--or possibly, influence their minds to convince them to jump.
Adaptation
When adapting pukwudgies to be a goblin subculture, we should be careful that these are from a folkloric tradition that has long been whitewashed. Cryptid hunters in New England telling scary stories of running into isolated little grey people are telling ghost tales, not relating authentically to traditional folklore around the pukwudgies. J.K. Rowling, in using the pukwudgie as one of her North American monsters/houses is also not engaging deeply with Native American folklore. To quote Warburton: "What can we conclude about the role of pukwudgies in contemporary popular culture? Rather than showing an interest in Wampanoag folklore and its specific cultural meanings, people today tend to learn about pukwudgies from those who’ve taken an Algonquian word and used it in a way that reflects a lack of familiarity with its original context."
That said, pukwudgies are not a critical element of Wampanoag folklore. Maushop certainly is, but even among the Wampanoag today, many are not familiar with "Wampanoag stories about pukwudgies and instead emphasize the importance of Maushop to the tribe’s identity." So, while we want to better adapt the pukwudgie, actually engaging with Wampanoag folklore about them, we can have some creative liberty to adapt the stories, as it is not like we'd be violating a cornerstone cultural element by making some changes. Adaptation, not just recreation, makes better stories, as I discussed back in May.
So, when thinking of pukwudgies as a goblin subculture, we want to use the historical context. Pukwudgies are invaders--that is what they stood for historically, as the European invaders of the Americas. I tend to think of my goblins as nomadic, perhaps because of their Tolkien-inspired consideration as a strong riding culture. Stories of nomadic invaders are constant throughout history, from the tribes that precipitated the fall of Rome, to the Mongols and Ottomans in medieval and Renaissance Europe, to the role that the Comanche played against the previous Ute inhabitants of the American southwest.
As far as what our pukwudgies will look like: we want these to look like our typical goblins for this project. That means flat-nosed and fanged teeth. We'll borrow from the non-folkloric, common depiction of pukwudgies for their coloration, opting for grey rather than a more yellow, sallow look. Other than that, however, we'll respect the Wampanoag traditional depictions and make them otherwise human-looking, even child-looking. That means rounder faces. The pukwudgies will keep some goblin traits, but they should be closer to humans than, say, the Redcaps. Mechanically, we'll also give them the standard goblin traits that allow them to scurry around the battlefield, just to unite them with our other goblins.
We also want to reflect the pukwudgies' abilities. I think I'll drop the shapeshifting, for the most part, as I think that unlocks a larger can of worms in figuring out tactics. But invisibility and messing with peoples' minds? That's great. They can lure people into danger. They can get in your head. Those things--a loss of control--can be great to create a sense of powerlessness that is very valuable to doing horror. We can also keep the floral scent, as a way for players to learn that there is a pukwudgie about even if invisible.
For culture, we have a sort of pukwudgie-as-invader trope. I also want to respect the traditional folklore about pukwudgies as once-friendly creatures. Again, for the purposes of not getting too specific with my alternate setting, I'm going to leave some aspects as intentionally generic. Pukwudgies can have entered the region of choice as friends, promising new advances--perhaps they have superior horses or some other resource, or perhaps they promise to teach a new type of magic. For whatever reason, they enter a province promising lots, and for a short while, there is friendship and peace. However, the pukwudgies then begin to turn violent and capricious--playing into our "goblin as trickster" trope--and betray those they had once befriended. Perhaps this is mere cultural misunderstanding in its roots; to play into the idea of "thievery" discussed last week, maybe it is that the goblins simply took something that did not belong to them, but which they had seen as entering into communal property. In the ensuing conflict, the pukwudgies failed to overwhelm the local leadership, but they have become endemic to a region and delight in picking off any locals who wander into the wilderness.
More pukwudgie details will get fleshed out in the final Guide to Goblins product, along with original stat blocks for this subculture; probably, we'll be playing with magical traits for the pukwudgies especially. The release date for Guide to Goblins is still TBD, but you'll need to pick it up to get the full pukwudgie write-up.
Conclusion
These are just two of the goblin subtypes I plan on 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.