Expanding on We Be Goblins!
With Free RPG Day coming up this weekend, I thought I would comment on one of my favourite picks – Paizo’s We Be Goblins! adventures. As mentioned previously, I really enjoy these adventures and have had a great time running them for my friends. This year, I’ll be looking forward to picking up the We B4 Goblins adventure from Paizo. In these adventures, you play goblins called upon to perform great deeds of daring for your tribe (or new ones!), you prove your worthiness performing a series of games and then go off on your quest.
Although they are a lot of fun, over the years I’ve started expanding our goblin universe and one-shot goblin adventures into an area that this series hasn’t yet ventured into – human-hunting!
There is a lot of goblin fun in the adventures that isn’t fully explored, and I think it’s worth trying out for yourself. The goblin fluff throughout the adventures is that humans are their sworn enemies and they hate horses and dogs. And so, I put together adventures that put them up against all three of those.
The first excursion off the beaten path was to take the opening of the first We Be Goblins! adventure (sending the adventurers off on a quest), but in this case their quest leads them to the haunted mansion of the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, filled with human bandits, that they actually encountered – complete with added watch dogs and some horses outside. We even carried on to the ship off the coast, with the goblins sneaking on board and trying to steal the shipload of fireworks from the human smugglers.
My second expansion of the line was to take the goblin raid deep into human territory. A group of friends had gathered at a local gaming tavern and so I ran all 10 of them as goblins intent on stealing the goblin-killer blade from the local hero’s mansion deep in a nearby city. On their way in, they got into a fight with a rival group going to do the same thing, took out some guard dogs (see a theme?) and then managed to burn the whole mansion to the ground. Okay, that wasn’t the best example of a successful mission, but they all had a great time.
Finally, I created “You Be Food!”, a one-shot where our intrepid goblins find their tribe destroyed (based off the start of We Be Goblins Too!) but in this case learn it was some meddling adventurers who caused the devastation. The rest of the adventure was simply our goblins hunting the adventurers through the forest. Their first ambush went terribly wrong, so instead they were forced to chase down the hoomans on the road, leaping on their wagons and killing the horses on the run. Not quite as light-hearted as the other adventures, it was more of a desperate night of vengeance, but fun nevertheless.
We Be Goblins! started a great idea and there’s only more fun to be had playing at goblins – these are just a few ideas to get you thinking about your own goblin fun!
Be sure to check out We Be 4 Goblins! at your local gaming store on Free RPG Day!
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.