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theraphos wrote:

Damon Griffin wrote:

Now I've gotten myself really, really interested in what a non-evil goblin might be like, while still being a goblin.

When I've played non-evil goblins as PCs or NPCs, they're usually played more like wild tribal gnomes (for lack of better description). They maintain a certain level of violent mischievousness, short-term thinking, and naivete, but comparatively more behaved than the typical goblin. They're definitely still chaotic in alignment, and struggle to fit in with more "civilized" company.

This is more or less what I was thinking, yeah. I love inhuman characters to bits. Got any good stories?

The typical goblin must be considered insane and/or evil by human standards, but they presuambly have no genetic imperitive to burn, kill, steal, eat sentients and their babies, torture small animals as part of games, etc.

I would think it would be less genetic imperative and more...well, one thing that struck me while reading Goblins of Golarion is that they're a lot like children. Cruel, terrifying children. And a child's brain has literally not finished developing, compared to a human adult's, so some predisposition to distraction, foolishness, thoughtless destruction, inability to really think long-term and amoral "innocence" (the scary kind) might actually BE genetic, along with similar traits they display - I don't have time to go through the whole book again and do a really involved essay, although it could be interesting.

A goblin raised by good-aligned humans might still get caught giggling while pulling the wings off flies or setting things on fire (heck, that happens with human children) and will probably never grow up to be quite right or think/act like a little human in a goblin costume. But as with most children, goblins *are* still people and most could probably be raised to be better than what the goblin gods want them to be. If the adoptive parents had the patience of saints.

The goblin would just never really grow up/mature in the same way a human would, because that's not what a goblin brain *does*. Just like a Golarion orc is probably still going to have anger management problems no matter their upbringing. You run into this sort of stuff when you start talking about literally alien brains.

Now I've gotten myself really, really interested in what a non-evil goblin might be like, while still being a goblin.

EDIT: Oops, typo.

Well if you can wait a few weeks, Walkena will be statted out in next month's Undead Unleashed. There may be more info on his pseudo-faith there.

Oh, excellent! I'll have to keep an eye out for that.

Personally, I suspect he's at best coldly indifferent about non-human natives. He would tolerate their presence, but they lack the birthright of a true Mwangi.

"Indifferent" sounds about right until then, especially considering there *are* only 200 non-humans in the entire population. So even if those aren't prisoners and they're not capture-and-kill-on-sight it's still a primarily human city for a reason.

I can easily see it being a (probably mutual) "we'd still rather you be over there unless it's necessary" sort of thing.

I've been scribbling various ideas for stories about a character who lives in the Expanse, and one thing I noticed is that the writeup makes it very clear that Walkena hates non-Mwangi humans...but I can't find anything specific about non-humans living in the Expanse. (Essentially, does he hate humans who aren't Mwangi, or everyone who's not Mwangi humans?)

Would Ekujae elves, lizardfolk, halfling tribes, etc. fall into the category of People Who Should Stay Away From Mzali?

There's also that vague "200 other" of non-humans in the population writeup. I suppose they could be slaves or prisoners, like the "600 lizardfolk slaves" in the Jaha stats, but nothing is specified.