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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
My wife is so darned cute, and slightly nieve. She will be in my group when I run RotRL this summer and I'm going to enjoy watching her reaction. Now, I want my group's attitude about goblins to go from "awww, look at them, they're adorably stupid" to "raise the black flag and take no prisoners" rather quickly.
So, I'm going to
My question is, will I get more reaction if I describe the act (goblin jumps on kid, stabs it with dog slicer, etc) as occurring in the middle of the street or should I describe it as the screaming kid runs around a corner with a goblin in chase and the screaming comes abruptly to an end with a wet, sucking, thwack sound and then describe the goblin skipping back around the corner swinging its arms like it was paying on a playground?
I'm not worried about making my group squirm, I know they can handle the extreme.
The second option is actually a little more disturbing as then the players get to use their imagination a bit more, and no matter how hard you try, you can never be as bad as someone's imagination
I think that's a great idea, although I'd tweak it slightly:
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There is a line that you might cross there, especially if any of your gaming group are parents (or are trying to become parents), who can be unexpectedly squeamish about such things. To offer a counterpoint for the excellent suggestions offered above, the more PG13 version could be:
Have the group hear a little girl scream from around a corner and have the PCs discover a goblin holding the girl by her pony tail struggling to hold the squirming kid as it reaches for his sheathed dogslicer. That way the implication is clear and it gives the heroes something heroic to do.
A 4 on 1 goblin beat down and kid rescue wouldn't be a significant challenge and could be a good segue to the next real encounter as it would serve to move the group to a new street.
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Have a care: opinions over the little buggers can divide a group. My admittedly large group split right down the middle over whether talking to and attempting to civilize goblins was a frustrating waste of time or the best part of the story. Half of the players were just tired of screwing around and wanted them dead, and the other half began trying to persuade the goblins to pick up language, behave in public, etc.
Are goblins inherently evil? Can socialization change them to productive members of society? Some of my players will never know, because they got tired of the implicit alignment debate behind those questions and stopped having any fun.
My point being, it may not be worth your while to push too hard against preconceived notions of the goblins.
I think the question I'd ask myself is whether or not I'm ruining something my spouse enjoys from Paizo. If she thinks they're "D'aww" now and you make it child-chewingly obvious how awful and hate-worthy they are, will she enjoy joining in the crusade to against them out of righteous fury, or be unhappy that something she enjoyed is no longer fun?
Mind you, this is a question I would consider important of any player at the table.
As a caveat, part of the reason I'm asking the question is likely that I consider the goblins to be adorably foolish and endearingly manic. It's part of the enjoyment I get out of them that I would lose if they were so reprehensible I had to hate them. So take my words with a grain of salt, maybe. ;)
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The goblins then proceed to do the "happy kill dance", oblivious to the battle surrounding them, with goblin style high-fives, brofists, etc.
In my game the goblins did this to an elderly man, and the group as a whole went pretty much berserk.
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You all make me weep.
If we chased down and butchered either an old man or a child, I'm sure there was a very good reason for it. Also, we would never do that.
I'd like to take this opportunity to beseech staffers at Paizo to look at this hate-filled thread and ask themselves if that's the kind of sick, vile bigotry they'd like to be associated with. If not, I urge them to take a stand for equality and justice and join us Anklebiters in fighting for a new world where goblins and pinkskins can live in harmony.
Vive le Galt!
Creative Director
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Consider not killing a kid with the goblin... but killing a kid's puppy or kitty. And then have the goblin finish the fight with the puppy or kitty half in his mouth as he tries to chew it up!
That way, if that doesn't work, the goblin can STILL kill a kid, but hey, he'll do so with a mouthful of dead puppy!
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The way I ran the goblin attack at the Swallowtail Festival, I played the goblins as two parts gremlins that were fed after midnight from the '80s film Gremlins and one part Alex's gang of droogies from A Clockwork Orange.
When I ran the Swallowtail Festival, I played the goblins as irredeemably evil, yet still strangely hilarious. I wanted the players to underestimate them at first, but then be filled with fear, hatred, and disgust at them. Those are the feelings that the NPCs in Sandpoint have toward goblins, and I wanted my players to feel the same way.
At first, I had the goblins do darkly comic antics: a goblin had climbed a rain pipe up the side of a house, then tried to jump onto a PC from ten feet up. He yodeled like Tarzan, missed completely, and splatted on the cobblestones.
Later, two goblins were standing on a street vendor's food cart, eating, but taking swings at any passersby. When the party attacked, one continued to eat a roasted turkey leg while fighting with the other hand; the other attacked with the turkey leg!
Then, three goblins ran out of Verah's Fine Clothing-- all of them wearing expensive women's undergarments and fancy hats with feathers-- and each of them with a freshly-severed bloody human hand on a thong around their necks. (After the battle, the party found that one customer was dead in the shop and missing both hands, and one store clerk was still alive, but missing her left hand.)
All of my players are cat-lovers (as am I), so before the goblin attack, I introduced a very friendly and handsome orange tabby cat that was sitting in a sunbeam, enjoying the attention of the festival. Later, during the attack, I told the party that they saw that a goblin was holding the struggling cat by its tail, as another seemed to be pouring liquid on it. It then touched the cat with a lit torch, as the first goblin dropped it. The cat burst into flame, and ran into a house, setting the house on fire. The goblins both laughed so hard, they fell over. The party had no qualms killing those two.
Another pair of goblins knocked over a woman carrying a baby by whacking her on the backs of her knees with clubs. While they both laughed uproariously, one goblin clubbed her hard across the face, and the other grabbed the baby by the legs and started waving it over his head. As the baby and mother both screamed, the first goblin started taking wild swings at the baby with its club. The party was able to rescue both mother and child.
So-- it's possible to be really disturbing without overtly killing anyone on-camera, while giving the party a chance to be heroic.
[Or maybe I just have a very twisted imagination...]
Good luck-- My players loved Burnt Offerings from the get-go!
[Edit: changed the first paragraph to add references.]
Consider not killing a kid with the goblin... but killing a kid's puppy or kitty. And then have the goblin finish the fight with the puppy or kitty half in his mouth as he tries to chew it up!
That way, if that doesn't work, the goblin can STILL kill a kid, but hey, he'll do so with a mouthful of dead puppy!
And that's why you're the creative director
Even if you don't do much to give them the impression how horrible the goblins are during the raid itself, the follow-up encounter "Monster in the Closet" can certainly give that impression, particularly if the PCs have met the Baretts and their dog Petal before.
Consider not killing a kid with the goblin... but killing a kid's puppy or kitty. And then have the goblin finish the fight with the puppy or kitty half in his mouth as he tries to chew it up!
That way, if that doesn't work, the goblin can STILL kill a kid, but hey, he'll do so with a mouthful of dead puppy!
That's brilliant! I wish I'd thought of that!
[Continues weeping for a lost generation]
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Thanks for all of the exciting ideas everyone! Definitely many options available to get the message across.
@Drakli: my wife saw a picture of the pre-painted goblin minis and thought they were cute. She hasn't played in a Golarion campaign yet, so she is unaware of the manic depravity that lies beneath that adorable exterior.
Thanks for all of the exciting ideas everyone! Definitely many options available to get the message across.
@Drakli: my wife saw a picture of the pre-painted goblin minis and thought they were cute. She hasn't played in a Golarion campaign yet, so she is unaware of the manic depravity that lies beneath that adorable exterior.
just give her a copy of Goblins of Golarion to read that will clear up any misperception (and its a super awesome book to boot so win-win:)
I like the post-trauma, "Isn't that cute? Oh, wait!" approach:
Her character comes across a goblin clutching a beat-up little dolly. "Awwww... isn't that cute?"
Then the goblin shimmies away, and you see the femur and remaining foot of the little girl whose dolly it was...
Or, you just take my paladin's approach to goblins:
*SMITE EVIL*
Goblin dies = Oh, that was a "good" goblin
Goblin is reduced to ashy paste-o-holy-burnedom = That was a "bad" goblin.
Consider not killing a kid with the goblin... but killing a kid's puppy or kitty. And then have the goblin finish the fight with the puppy or kitty half in his mouth as he tries to chew it up!
That way, if that doesn't work, the goblin can STILL kill a kid, but hey, he'll do so with a mouthful of dead puppy!
I can't favorite this more then once, or I would, so I'm quoting it and it MADE MY DAY.
There's always this approach to finding the good goblins of the world.
Goblins are cute when they're riding a man's back and stabbing him to make him go faster.
They're cute when they're arguing over who gets to eat a kid and settle it by everyone grabbing a limb of the very much alive child and pulling until the limbs come off.
They're cute when they throw torches at a horse hitched to a hay wagon to set the horse's tail on fire. They're even cuter when they miss and the whole wagon is in flames, sending the horse screaming through town with a wagon full of burning and a tail on fire.
But they're still cutest when they sing.
I'm really eager to run this AP when it comes out in hardcover - some great ideas in here!
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Yea my Wife finds the goblins adorable also, especially after the group captured the Druid and he started crying.
It cause some conflict with the Elf Magus who saw goblins as no better than animals but in the end everyone helped kill any goblin that attacked them and didn't surrender. They killed all the goblins (minus the Druid who escaped).