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[Meph]

That sounds like they have more slaves than citizens. If you check legends mode, you will see that goblins by far outnumber their snatched victims...

[than402]

actually, due to how kidnappings and wars work, there are barely any slaves in a typical worldgen...

[Emperor]

I'd rather say that goblins do slave raids more for fun/profit than for workforce. Capturing villagers and torturing them is a very...gobliny way of de-stressing after a hard working day in the depths of a dark fortress.

[fasquardon]

Attempts to introduce slavery have been such a big thing in other race expansions, so while slavery works with Goblins, it also makes them more "just another new Masterwork race, like all the other Masterwork races".  If it were possible, what would be really fun is for Goblins to be able to have multi-ethnic fortresses or for Goblins themselves to be a multi-ethnic melting pot race.

And let me know if you'd like to see any of the notes from my own attempts to make a goblin module Meph.

fasquardon

[Meph]

I personally wouldnt want slavery to be a large part of goblins, because Orcs already have their labor cells, warlocks their prisoners and succubi their corruption.

[LMeire]

What about a temporary enslavement thing where where workers spend a few years working in exchange for food and housing? Like how the Classical world did things, select a full citizen of goblin blood or otherwise and have them transform into a slave caste for a year before they automatically transform back. Slaves would perform labor faster and gain more experience than free workers but if their needs go unmet then they can and will get violent; which can be a little bad if the player was depending on their craftsgoblinship for trade and now has to start over with training up a new craftsgoblin, or very bad if the player is using the accelerated learning perk to raise an army quickly and now has to mobilize against their own fortress guard. So it's not really a "capture invaders and force them to work" race-thing so much as it's a "get cheap, quick labor at the expense of having to purge a riot every now and then" race-thing.

Edit: To further make keeping a small slave population attractive, free goblin/others could value relaxation and merrymaking more than slaves do, which IIRC should result in the free population taking more breaks instead of working and enjoying their breaks more than slaves do. So a well run fort would have a small population of incredibly tense slaves working as much as possible to earn their freedom faster, and a much larger population of calmer (but still easily angered) free-goblins with a lot of skill in what they do, that work fantastically when they feel like it but otherwise drain society with their egoism.

[IndigoFenix]

The question is, what should the 'feel' of a goblin fortress be?  Probably not anything really coordinated would be my guess.  Goblins should take the chaos typical in poorly managed fortresses and turn it up to eleven.  In short, goblins should be their own worst enemy.  I think it would fit if they regularly had to deal with tantrum spirals, but had a way of surviving them.

Actually, Meph, you brought up that you wanted goblins to have several individual isolated 'towers'.  The easiest way to encourage that would be to just work with the personality values they already have, which by default should lead to a lot of in-fighting.  Splitting up your population should ensure that even if one group tantrums itself into oblivion, the others should still survive.

So going with that in mind, pets should probably be powerful (to make enemies easier to fight off) but also come with significant downsides just by having them around.  Random, short-term outbursts, for instance, should create occasional deaths among the population, leading to potential tantrums.

They could carry contagious diseases, which should encourage the isolated-tower setup as well.  This would also be a fun way of including diseases among the other races - goblin pets could roam wild in the caverns, and other races who tried to tame them would also have to deal with things like troll fever, jabberer flu and crundle itch.  Oh, and rabies, of course.

Slaves require a lot of micromanagement.  I don't think they'd work too well with the chaos that should be daily life in a goblin tower.

[Meph]

Yes, I mentioned the infighting as an idea for undisciplined murderous goblins, but I'm not working on goblins atm. Just wanted to know what the people think.

[Boltgun]

I like the idea of dividing your goblins to better reign over them. Perhaps having dead goblins would provide useful opportunities so if one of the colonies is destroyed that would not be a loss after all.

It would encourage larger maps or to use z levels  and burrows to create a layered society. With only a few select haulers who supply the different parts.

[Baka Kenshi]

Hey,
Not a big fan of goblins but would like to help from a d&d standpoint.
Goblins have so called "goblin dogs" which they believe are far more superior to regular dogs. They often use them as mounts. Wargs and wolves are quite rare among goblins since they are too strong for them to tame.
And since they like caves I could suggest some kind of maggots for cattle. And those should be large since goblins ought to eat their weight of food every day.
Forest goblin tribes probably can tame a couple of ferocious badgers. So that's a viable option too.
Also, don't forget about writing. Goblins believe that it you write or read a written word it'll be stolen from your head. So no scribes for goblins

[chaosfiend]

Hey,
Not a big fan of goblins but would like to help from a d&d standpoint.
Goblins have so called "goblin dogs" which they believe are far more superior to regular dogs. They often use them as mounts. Wargs and wolves are quite rare among goblins since they are too strong for them to tame.
And since they like caves I could suggest some kind of maggots for cattle. And those should be large since goblins ought to eat their weight of food every day.
Forest goblin tribes probably can tame a couple of ferocious badgers. So that's a viable option too.
Also, don't forget about writing. Goblins believe that it you write or read a written word it'll be stolen from your head. So no scribes for goblins

Goblin dogs would be really interesting. If I recall correctly, Goblin Dogs in D&D have something in their dander that acts as an extreme irritant to non-goblinoids. Basically causing a brief rash and your eyes to tear up, and burn your nose. Possibly workable as one of the few 'unique' pets of the goblins [rather than being a diseased/berserk version of a 'vanilla' pet]. I think they would work great for the Diseased/Berserk style variants as well.

Man, just from the limited talk here it sounds like goblins would very well be the most headache inducing of the races to play.

[Reelya]

swamp rats instead of cats

[twryst]

Combining ideas of multi-tower, separate forts and goblins' code of ethics, why not have goblins essentially dog-fight their slave captives to death as representatives of the independent towers? Basically throw some captive in a pit with a couple rabid beak-dogs and let goblins spectate as they get mauled to death fight valiantly to survive? Maybe make the captives, on death, give all nearby goblins a euphoric burst of mood, giving the player a respite from their otherwise normal gradual descent into chaos and tantrum spirals?

I'm basically picturing that the canonical goblin fortress has multiple separate towers, each with its own breeding-stocks of disease-prone overcrowded murderous beasts, where the towers are only unified at a big, occasionally-out-of-control colosseum where prisoners-turned-tower-representative-fighters fight to the death to give goblins brief respite from how miserable their lives actually are. Where snatched babies are made the "pet" of the snatcher that caught them, so when they inevitably die in the constant hunger-games below the snatcher latches that much closer to breakdown while the rest of the fortress celebrates their grotesque demise. Where in order to have long-term fortress longevity, you have to build-in divided populations of goblins to fortify against your snatchers inevitable psychological breakdowns.

Or does that sound too messy to play?

[Dwarf_Fever]

What sort of animals do people think Goblins should have access to at embark?  What fits the Goblin flavour best? [...] So what do the rest of you guys think Goblins should be taming? fasquardon

Pet rocks, and also other, smaller goblins.