Kobold Community I'm Making


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


Working on a kobold community; here's a rough draft.

History: (Clan-name) was a relatively typical clan of kobolds living in nar-voth (relative location undecided). Unfortunately for them, the local drow, and the demons they'd called, started attacking them frequently and the clan was steadily losing. In desperation they called upon Erastil for help who agreed, provided they made several changes to their community and followed his rules of war. (Including, but not limited to, pushing the drow back hard enough that they ceased attacking but not so hard that the drow found themselves threatened into a war of survival).

Naturally, this was a fairly harsh transition and many traditions are applied very differently than with surface-world humans. Amongst these differences is that children are still primarily communally raised even if they have monogamous parents they can always turn to, some animal other than the elk is particularly important to them, and they need to use large quantities of permanent flames and lots of nature magic to grow most of their crops. The entire "season" and "month" thing is naturally almost entirely irrelevant to the kobolds as they rarely walk on the surface at all. Due to a kobold's muscular weakness they rarely, if ever, make use of bows instead of crossbows.

Life expectancy in the clan has skyrocketed due to the massive increase in divine magic and mandated changes, including preventing cannibalism of the "weaker" kobolds by the "stronger" ones. Teamwork is heavily encouraged, primarily because kobolds are already fairly well-inclined to do so already and doing so encourages positive social bonds which they dearly need. Overall, the clan is lawful good with a significant number of lawful neutral kobolds. Other alignments are much rarer, especially chaotic ones.

Combatants are very frequently crossbow-style rangers with animal companions to keep enemies far away from them (favoured enemies generally huamnoids (elves) and outsiders (evil)), with hunters and shamans being frequent backup. Combatants generally have the shoulder to shoulder racial trait.

Any questions/comments/etc?


I just want to add in Nordic Mythology Nidhogg is a dragon that patiently waits and spends every minute of his time gnawing on a root of the tree of life, and attempts to destroy everything. Just in case you'd want to use that as a name.

Sounds cool! They would probably have a workload struggle with less slaves, so that could probably be an economic weakness. (Like in mining. If I recall they send slaves to test bombs.)


I'm glad you like! As for the name, it's certainly worthy of consideration, but it either has no basis in-universe or is a reference to Rovagug or something like him. Even if that had been their name it'd probably change with time.

Regarding slaves: with kobold work ethic and lower living space/dietary requirements to other species, replacing slaves of other species with more kobolds is generally superior to maintaining and using them. Though I'm fairly sure that Golarion kobolds generally just sell their slaves to other darklands residents rather than use them themselves. What you're referencing seems to be the methods that kobold tribes use to cull "inferior" members of the tribe. Naturally, all of this is completely forbidden to the followers of Erastil.


I'm thinking that there were three major factors that turned the tide in the war.

First, archon-graced champions who are, by RAW, about as dangerous as two of the templated creature on top of having a bunch of abilities that are of exceptional utility.

Second, archon reinforcements are pretty darn powerful and have knowledge about how to fight such forces properly. (Cold-iron and good-aligned weapons are very good against fiends, for instance)

Third, trade route to Heaven including lots of supplies and knowledge to give an immediate and long-lasting boost to the tribe's capabilities.

All-in-all, this was enough to make the drow think over their goal and the methodology they were going about to attain it and eventually convinced them to do something else. Further work against the drow is certainly possible, especially if the kobolds align with somebody else and make mutual protection pacts, but until such a day the kobolds are focusing on building up their own infrastructure and society. (And working out how to deal with the population explosion they're experiencing; luckily they can sell mined stone to Heaven to create free space far more readily than they could have normally)

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