Dying Hard Drives and Goblins 2.0

My computer died three days ago. It's finished. Bought the farm. Gave up the ghost. Kicked the bucket. Gone to that great IKEA computer desk in the sky.

I booted it up on Sunday, whereupon after showing the usual Windows XP loading screen it made some horrible clunky noises, muttered something about dumping data, then cut off. Next time I booted it up all I got was a blank screen saying "Error: Cannot load operating system." Now, I might not be much of a computer nut, but even I know that ain't good. I think somebody Power Word: Killed my laptop.

With it went pretty much everything I've written, created, and downloaded for four years. This includes two papers I was just about ready to submit to some legal journals, umpteen files for the various PBEM games I run, my PhD thesis outline, dozens of papers and documents for my PhD research, loads of photos and mp3s, and just about everything I've written for OzCthulu. Yes, I'm wallowing in self-pity. I normally hate reading other bloggers whinge about problems in their personal lives, and look, here I am doing exactly the same thing. So sue me: I WANT MY DATA BACK!!!!

But, enough of the self-indulgence! Let's talk about Goblins.

D&D Goblins pretty generally bore me. They're overdone. They appear in too many games, and their ubiquity has ruined them - they're like vanilla ice cream, corn flakes, Manchester United; they are the storm troopers and the Klingons of D&D. They badly need an image overhaul in my games.

I can see two ways of doing this:

1. Turn them into malignant fairies, like Bogles or Redcaps. Wild Scottish spirits of murder and mischief, who curdle the milk, poison the pig feed, knock slates off the roof and rattle the windows in the night. Who kidnap babies, torture lonely travelers with ventriloquism and legerdemain, eat captives alive, and murder people with clubs. I particularly like the idea of the Redcaps, who according to legend could never let the blood staining their hats dry out, lest they themselves die... Mad Celtic monsters in blood soaked tartan, squatting in dark ruined castles waiting for fresh meat.

2. Turn them into Night Goblins. The Warhammer designers had a kind of genius for making all their races interesting - even their Elves, Dwarves and Halflings seemed approximately ten times larger than life when stood next to their D&D equivalents. The Goblins were no exception - a race of suicidal lunatics who catapult themselves at their enemies, drink poisonous fungal brews to drive themselves berserk, ride squigs into battle like giant Space Hoppers, eat troll meat to give themselves regenerative powers, and capture giant spiders to do their fighting for them.

The best thing about Warhammer Goblins is the fact that the entire race seems aware of its own worthlessness. And rather than accept that fate, they choose to throw away their own lives in pursuit of success. This is why they're so happy to drink their Mad Cap Mushroom brew, and why they don't mind turning themselves into living catapults: if they have a fun death which kills lots of enemies, who cares if they die? The gonzo weirdness that permeated the Warhammer universe reached a kind of apogee in the Night Goblins.

Anyway, it's been a while since I last posted anything in the way of rules or much of practical value on this blog. So I think, in the spirit of the series of elf variants I put up a while back, over the next few days I'll bash out some Stuff To Spice Up Your Older D&D Goblins. I doubt any of it will match up to Ripper X's excellent post on Goblins early last month, but I'll see what I can come up with. You never know; I might even do an Aboriginal Australian one...