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Happy Saturday! Today's prompt: "flower garden"
Asva the Snapdragon, LE
Asva always makes sure she's dressed according to the latest in human fashion, in high slit satin gowns that glimmer jet black against her curry-yellow scales. Standing at 3'1", she decorates her two pairs of curving, twisting horns with thistle flowers and mint leaves. Her voice is a slow, winding high-pitched purr, like a thin spiraling trail of smoke from a smoldering cinder. Asva darts across the charred rubble she calls home like a water strider, her motions graceful as a dancer's and yet sharp, guarded, unpredictable. When she casts a spell, her magic lifts her whole tiny body up into the air as if it's too big for her, suffusing her whole head in magical flames as she struggles to keep the almost-painful magic contained long enough to channel it outward at an enemy.
Exiled from the depths for sending her clan into a disastrous war with the duergar, the former court magician Asva has come to despise the rule of kings almost as much as she despises herself. Asva and her band of kobold bandits--assembled from the tattered remnants of a stripmining crew that collapsed due to druidic intervention--now claim the surface land surrounding an active volcano as their territory, extracting harsh tributes from the small human and halfling tribes and villages that lie "beneath our mountain's shadow".
Asva paints herself as a "champion" for her bandits, a "liberator" to the villagers. Indeed, she did manage to drive out a hobgoblin warband recently, at great personal cost--her mate was slain in the chaos. But now her mental state is more fragile than ever, and everyone knows it. In truth, Asva is plagued by a terror of her own faults and mistakes. She refuses to learn. If everything she held now was lost in a day, she might just flee a hundred miles west and start again, or sign on with the first adventuring crew she finds and aim to forget it all.
The only thing that Asva has left that's truly harmless is her flower garden, a little space she maintains next to her lair full of interesting plants her "subjects" bring her. Unfortunately, a recent acquisition of a shambling mound seedling threatens to turn even the garden into yet another tool for her self-destructive schemes.
Interests: Fashion, food, collecting things made of glass to decorate the garden
Likes: Vampires
Dislikes: Bad table manners, people's knees
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Happy Sunday! Today's prompt: "bells"
Brine, LN
Brine (brEEn, sharp EE, like a spider just tried to jump in your mouth) dresses in baggy, comfortable clothes she's salvaged, favoring for "special occasions" a bright red riding hood that likely once belonged to a human child. She thinks it looks very comely next to her dusty-blue scales. Her short, thick-set horns rise back from the sides of her head almost like ears, and her eyes have a natural glow to them. Around her neck rests a plain belled collar, perhaps pilfered from the remains of a ship's cat. Of course, all of this is assuming she is choosing to be visible, and she very rarely is. Her voice is high-pitched and breaks easily, but she rarely speaks, either.
Brine didn't actually do anything wrong. She'd tell everyone that, if anybody was around, and if she trusted anyone enough to bring up the thing she was accused of in the first place. She didn't strangle the kobold elder. She was just an easy scapegoat.
Brine was once a humble polisher*--the only polisher her clan had, in fact. That should have given her job security, but it was the whole problem. She was the only one, and unlike the one magician or the one Chief Trapper, her job wasn't nearly prestigious enough to guarantee her any special attention. She went to work alone. She came home alone. All this meant that the quiet, untrusting, eccentric polisher was the only one in the clan who didn't really have any friends who'd miss her. In a political coup, Brine became the perfect piece to discard. She barely escaped with her life.
Brine fled to the surface, a bright and cruel world where everything was out of order and everyone was a potential threat. Afraid and alone, she found an unusual refuge: an old abandoned lighthouse overlooking the roaring ocean waves. Brine made her nest in the top room and quickly covered the windows, fascinated but terrified by the views of the stars. She didn't kill the lighthouse keepers. They were already like this.
It clicked for her what the lighthouse was designed to do the second time she watched a ship dash itself to pieces against the cliffs below. Piecing together that she might get found out by the humans if the lighthouse didn't do its job, the clever kobold began to operate the lighthouse by herself.
She's been here for several months now. She likes the lighthouse well enough, but the supplies the humans left behind are beginning to run low. Sometimes she considers letting just one more ship crash--the disaster would bring her enough food to last for several months more, not to mention many new interesting things to decorate her nest with. But it just doesn't feel right. She's in the rhythm, now, and even if the humans would kill her if they found her here, Brine can't bring herself to fail at "her" new job. She's loyal like that.
She's also desperately, achingly lonely. Kobolds aren't meant to be alone. It does things to them. Touch-starved and frustrated, not to mention hungry, Brine turns to decorating and remodeling her home, making it look as much as she can like a kobold warren--but a kobold warren that has light and stars and pretty colored glass. For a while, she snared birds to trap them in the lighthouse with her, finding their screeching panic sort of reminiscent of the cacophony of a kobold mining crew. But then she realized that it just made her sad to see them missing their flocks. She eats what she catches now, and uses the bones and feathers as ornaments.
Honestly, she's kind of losing her mind in the quiet. And worse, she's not actually sure she is alone. She's been hearing things lately. Seeing things.
Brine is starting to wonder just what killed the old lighthouse operators.
Interests: Home decoration, surface world oddities, the sky, lighthouse maintenance
Likes: Praise
Dislikes: Silence, wide open spaces
It's not very prestigious work. Indeed, polisher teams tend to be fairly unpopular with other trapbuilding crews, often tasked with reporting on issues they'd spotted in others' handiwork to the Chief Trapper. Needing a polisher team to "fix" your team's trap is seen as a mark of shoddy work to begin with. Polishers are often a little isolated from other kobolds as a result, and stick to their own cliques.
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Happy Monday! Today's prompt: "ruin"
Ceo ("the Red Lion"), LE
Ceo dresses in expensive beaver and dire weasel furs that dwarf the little redscale, combining with his heavy specially-fitted steel dwarven boots to make him look significantly larger than he really is in silhouette. His tone is a frail drawl that drips with menace--he always sounds like he's implying a murderous innuendo even when he really is just talking about the weather. An ugly scar runs across his left eye, while his right squints around a wide monocle in a perpetual scowl. All around him hangs a thick perfume that smells of burning resin.
Ceo is always quick to remind people that he's the lesser evil as he blasts their homes into rubble.
Ceo has never missed once in his life missed a trick. His stripmining crew is infamous for the ease with which it claims areas--usually "abandoned" or "ruined" regions, but rarely truly ownerless--and, within a matter of days, extracts every speck of metal dust that can be found within ten miles, leaving the site a crumbling scar in the wilderness. Poisoned waters, barren soil and hollowed hills follow in Ceo's wake like trailing flower petals.
The scrappy kobold will gladly make deals where possible, of course. He prefers it, in fact. His ugly scar is a vestige of a fight he lost when he didn't take no for an answer, and he happily points to it and recounts the story of the druids who beat him to anyone who will listen. He doesn't even deny that he lost. He hates violence, and likes to follow the laws of the locals, because it's just so much trouble when the locals make trouble. Mind you, sometimes the legal owners of the site aren't the beings who actually live there. When that happens, sometimes Ceo will agree to cut a deal... but ultimately, his victims rarely see him coming. The stripminers almost never even have to emerge from the ground to exploit the lands they've acquired.
If the Red Lion didn't use the land, though, someone else would. A bigger kobold crew, or hobgoblins, or even other humans. Resources are there to be used. That's how he explains it, and the arrogant kobold probably believes it. However, for all his blustering shows of civility, Ceo carries a stubborn, spiteful, and murderous temper. When things go sour, without warning, he'll crush his enemy's foot with a stomp of his iron boot and trigger whatever ambush he had at the ready before fleeing. He's fine at being a good sport years after, even at admitting mistakes, but in the moment, Ceo hates losing more than anything.
He always concludes his stories of the druids with a bashful admission that, well, perhaps he took it too far in the end. That ugly business with the Archdruid's family, the lamprey pit... yes, that was very petty, certainly. Not something he's proud of. Not one bit.
And then the kobold glares at whoever he's talking to, hands them the pen, and waits for them to sign.
Interests: Zoology
Likes: Furs coats, his consort
Dislikes: Fish, rivers, anything to do with water that doesn't come in a cup
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Happy Tuesday! Today's prompt: "honeycomb"
Dekine the Green, LE
Dekine dresses in pale robes, which trail behind them almost like a wedding gown. Their movements and speech are extremely slow, gentle, and soft. Of late, their neck is heavily bandaged beneath the robes to hide an ugly scar--in part the source of their gingerness. Their scales are a pale duckweed-green, offset by glittering dark eyes, and the smell of peppermint hangs thick around their form.
A former scout for their forest-dwelling clan, Dekine managed to secure a more important place for themself through their studious affinity for the natural world--and in particular, for a particular hive of honeybees. Now, Dekine serves as the Chief Apiarist for their clan, maintaining multiple thriving hives and ensuring the steady production of honey and beeswax. It suits them well; they don't even need to wear the beaklike mask anymore, since their scales shield them easily from the occasional sting. Dekine has grown quite fond of their bees and takes great pride in the hives' maintenance, to the point that when their oafish prince approached them seeking one of the hives for use in a trap, they started an argument that grew vicious--then nearly deadly.
A few months later, Dekine is still healing. They and their team have grown increasingly insular, rarely leaving the Apiary and picking their mates from their own number. Morale is low, but they remain loyal to the clan and continue to do their duty. The prince and his family, though... Dekine has considered poisoning the honey they deliver to the Royal Dens on multiple occasions.
If some adventurers were to come along promising to eliminate the prince and impose a ruler who will show the Apiarist Team more respect, Dekine might go either way on it.
Interests: Bee lore, nature sketching
Likes: Summertime, cigars
Dislikes: Being challenged on what they know
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Happy Wednesday! Today's prompt: "bone"
Ecta Bonescale, NE
Ecta's pale cream-colored scales match the large old goat skull she wears atop her head to cover her own nub-like horns. She speaks with a raspy, shrieking voice and often claps her hands together rapidly when especially agitated. Her spear has several holes notched in the blade for small colored glass baubles and ornaments to be strung through.
One of a few remnants of a destroyed clan of bone-collecters that dwelt especially far into the depths, Ecta has joined up with a clan much closer to the surface as an especially experienced warrior. She continues to bear the name of her old clan, however, and is considered by most in her new clan to be arrogant, misanthropic and perhaps even unstable. She shows little interest in spending time with her team, and, indeed, often spends time alone counting her collections of bones.
In truth, Ecta is arrogant and unstable--but she is also badly affected by the loss of her old clan, which took place under ugly circumstances and suspicions of treachery from within the clan itself. The experience has made her bitter and unfriendly, and she wasn't especially socially adept to begin with. Ecta no longer fully believes that any community can hold value or meaning, and is only looking out for herself. Her new clan's mistrust of her only contributes to this feedback loop.
Interests: Bonecarving, dice games
Likes: Areas with heavy acoustics
Dislikes: Drow, team-building activities
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Happy Thursday! Today's prompt: "ivy"
Fennelweb, LE
Fennelweb likes to drape himself in tattered dark green rags, allowing the bronzescale to blend in more easily with the riparian woodlands he keeps to--or to drift through the river itself, as still as a log, and be mistaken for a mass of dislodged algae. He has a sweet voice and tends to decorate it with very large words or words taken from other languages. In battle, he stays at the fringes and tries to look inconspicuous, only taking the cheapest of shots.
Fennelweb serves as a scout for his clan, keeping an eye on the surface and identifying potential threats, or prey, as they travel by the rivers above. He has a heavy appreciation for the natural world, and is much more adept than his superiors fully realize at navigating it--even going out of his way to negotiate careful agreements with local ettercap nests and druid sects to ensure he and his fellow scouts aren't picked off. Kobolds taste terrible, luckily.
Fennelweb has been scouting for a very long time, and has outlived multiple higher-ups at this point. While he's deeply loyal to the clan and to his scouting team, he also tends to act much more unilaterally than is customary for a kobold of his rank. He's old enough that nobody really wants to question him. He never really goes off alone, of course. Fennelweb never feels truly alone by the rivers.
Fennelweb is obsessed with ettercaps, and not only incorporates their designs into his trapbuilding, but collects ettercap paraphernalia--including webbing--to decorate his team's den. Everyone puts up with it, in part because he's the only one who knows how to remove--or arm--all the ettercap spear traps he's set up by the cave entrances.
Interests: Birdwatching, bird snaring
Likes: Ettercaps, aranea, and the idea of spider-like kobolds. If he were human, he'd be obsessed with Muffet from Undertale.
Dislikes: Paddleboats, loggers, beavers
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Eep! Six minutes away from being late, late, late!
Happy Friday! Today's prompt: "fiddle"
Grick Copperhead, LN
This green-cloaked kobold nurse* is rarely seen without his fiddle and bow, a masterwork instrument of svirfneblin make bearing a prominent grick motif etched into the bone. The scales of his head have a brilliant coppery sheen, but past his upper neck, his scales are stained a striking greenish patina that seems almost unnatural. Grick is fully Deaf, and prefers to communicate himself through emphatic fiddling--only deigning to use sign language if absolutely forced to. He's a good visual reader, but expects adults to know how to sign to him, kobold or no. Like most kobold nurses, Grick smells strongly of lavender to help ward off certain egg parasites.
Grick has been through so many clans that supposedly fell apart, he's given up trying to explain which clan he came from last, and just accepts whatever titles or surnames he's given nowadays.
Grick won't talk about how he got his injuries, not even to the hatchlings he dotes on or to his fellow Nursery Crewmates. When pressed, he signs that it was something related to a deal with an aboleth that went too far. This is the same answer he gives regarding how he got his fiddle, though, so some have speculated it's some sort of metaphor. It seems to be a sore and sometimes even sad subject for the normally cheery bard.
If not for his being Deaf and illiterate, a bard of Grick's abilities would normally be expected to join to the Cardinal Scribes, but he seems to prefer to make himself useful defending the nurseries and keeping the hatchlings entertained. Grick won't tolerate cruelty to children of any species, and this, it is rumored, is the real reason he has to change clans so often--he has no stomach for standing by while even svirfneblin or drow children are mistreated.
Interests: Acoustics, algae gardening, fishing
Likes: Nesting duties (Grick likes to play the fiddle for the eggs to pass the time while he sits), gnomish music
Dislikes: Aboleths, the color blue
The Nursery Crew tends to be one of the most powerful factions in a clan, right next to the Chief Trapper and the actual clan leader/s. Every kobold hatched in the clan, after all, was once raised by the Nursery Crew. Picking a fight with them is a good way to make yourself very, very unpopular with other kobolds. The Nursery Crew also tend to ensure they have a lot of job security, sometimes even installing their own security systems in the nursery outside of the Trapbuilding Crew's network.
"Nesting duty", sometimes called eggsitting, tends to be a dreaded chore for the eggturner's teams to draw straws over. It involves simply lying next to or on top of certain less healthy eggs and helping them to keep warm. It's quite tedious and results in very sore muscles.
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Happy Saturday! Today's prompt: "mushroom"
Henac the Pig, LN
A dark brown hooded cape and some discrete bandages are generally all Henac wears unless she's expecting company. The whitescale doesn't really notice the cold, anyways. Her cape has several enchanted pockets, and she puts everything she finds in them to examine later--after cleaning any muck or mud off first, of course. The strange kobold usually just licks her finds clean. The smell of rot and decay hangs around Henac at all times, a consequence of spending a good 40% of her time submerged in the bog digging for little treasures. Her voice is a raspy croak.
Trufflehunter and scavenger Henac knows the bogs better than any other, it is said, which is unfortunate, because nobody really likes dealing with her. It's not that she's untrustworthy, or even that she's especially ill-tempered. She's just... odd. Living alone, Henac the Pig has mostly stopped caring about her appearance to others, or about doing what's socially expected of her. Despite her almost animalistic behavior, though, Henac is no fool. That's why she fled the depths before the duergar showed up to wipe her whole clan out.
Henac sort of misses having other kobolds around. She doesn't live alone, of course--she keeps many pet frogs, toads and newts, and despite her strange mannerisms, Henac is always happy to deal with neighboring towns provided she's reimbursed well. She trades mushrooms and oddities she finds in the muck, a muck she has come to suspect submerges a battle fought very long ago. She guides travelers through the swamps for a very reasonable fee, though never the haunted areas, which she deeply fears and refuses to tread into. She prides herself on always keeping her word. She never promises much, but she does what she says she'll do.
Privately, Henac is haunted by the loss of her clan. Living the way she does is almost an escape for her, an excuse to not think about the choices she made and the clanmates she left behind.
Interests: Sleeping, eating, digging
Likes: Pan-fried banana slug, spices if she can get them, finding things she doesn't understand, unraveling the history of the bogs
Dislikes: Being responsible for others, heavy clothing, dwarves, colored lights (which remind her of home)
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Happy Sunday!
Guest Daily Kobold
Today's Prompt: 'purple'
'Captain' Ikilwa Underfoot, NG
Shiny mithril and blue epaulets mark this multi-colored (but mostly purple-scaled) kobold as a proud member of a freedom loving order, and they make great efforts to keep themselves clean and presentable.
Ikilwa hatched in a smaller snarl found in the hinterlands of a democratic nation. The kobolds had found a nice human-made house and had begun repurposing the farm into something that aboveground truebloods could use for both a base of operations and to grow rare 'not-cave' food.
Ikilwa had the horrible habit of questioning nearly everything, and was sent away from the Nursery on the fateful day that adventurers showed up to 'get a kobold's worth of firewood' by irritated nurses.
When they returned, everyone that Ikilwa knew was dead, but the stupid humans had left clues that they'd been part of an adventuring society in a major population center. Despite being small and largely defenseless, they made their way to that human city, and eventually lucked out on finding a kobold snarl in the sewers of that city.
They were lonely, and then shocked when the sewer snarl sent them to 'act as a representative' to the very adventuring society that had killed everyone that was around when they were on an errand. Plotting schemes to possibly make the adventurers pay was not really their cup of tea, but infiltrating to look for a good point to take down the society was a worthwhile idea -- and it meant not getting stuck on otyugh feeding duty for the dozenth time.
It was only after some time working with the adventuring society that they discovered that the society was just like kobold society -- if a bit on the ignorant side of how to work together. They have advanced to a respectable rank in the society, and have managed to prevent two slaughters of kobold snarls due to being in the society.
"Explode, Retreat, Coordinate!"
Interests: Exploring, Trap Artistry, Reading
Likes: Trying new things, helping others, staying up all night (humans just don't get it)
Dislikes: Undead (especially ghouls), being viewed as a 'burden', people who deface art
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Happy Monday! Today's prompt: "bridge"
Jalgae the Bridge Troll, LE
Jalgae is small, even by kobold standards, and has a crackly sibilant voice like burning pines. They keep their spellbook strapped to their back, causing them to hunch slightly. When irritated, their left hand slips down to their belt, where a hidden knife, slathered in drider venom, rests at the ready. The greenscale's whole form seems to stretch and warp when they bring their magic to bear.
Jalgae serves as the monarch of their kobold clan, though they have no interest in titles. They hated their family, and when they were young they preferred to spend their time in the nursery with the other young kobolds. They seem to have little respect for the concept of a royal line, a fact which concerns the Chief Trapper and Chief Nurse immensely--the clan has very few elders who would be suitable to form a council if Jalgae were to die abruptly.
Jalgae has a bad reputation in the depths. A few years ago, after the untimely deaths of their parents, uncle, and older brothers, they took control of the clan and promptly led an unprovoked assault on a vast and critical bridge formerly maintained by an independent duergar corporation. Casualties should have been immense on both sides, but Jalgae's clan was powerful, and Jalgae was cunning. The duergar were forced to surrender, signing onerous agreements in exchange for a safe departure, and the clan assumed control of the bridge.
Jalgae has since made many enemies. Drow, duergar, svirfneblin, derro--any who wish to cross the bridge must deal with Jalgae the Bridge Troll. The bridge is so heinously trapped at this point, it would be entirely impassable for years even if the kobolds were to disappear from existence tomorrow. The bridge is run smoothly, but the tolls are harsh indeed--Jalgae demands not gold, as the duergar did, but magical resources. Nothing goes on around the bridge without Jalgae knowing about it.
Jalgae has come to see themself and their clan as the sort of local rulers of the depths--lords of the chasm who must be paid tribute and treated with respect even by the most hateful underworld denizens. In truth, Jalgae personally just likes collecting interesting things.
Interests: Magical lore
Likes: Underdogs, fiddle music
Dislikes: Heights, aboleths, parents
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