For Gold & Glory: Card of the Week: Goblins of the Flarg

A little bit better than Mons's Goblin Raiders. Nobody plays dwarves anyways!

New Neighbors

The border tower was long abandoned when I came to it, home only to vermin and birds. The outbuildings had collapsed and the roof leaked, but the stone walls still stood strong. It would take some time to repair, but time was something I now had plenty of. Some time, some magic, and plenty of hard work, and it would make a suitable home.

The tower stood on the border of what was once the domain of the Malpiri tribes, one of the last before the road it watched over wound up into the mountains. In previous centuries, trade had thrived between the Malpiri plainsmen and the dwarves of then-Sardia—gone now, swept away by the Artificiers’ War. My tower and other similar ruins were all that remained of that alliance: though the Malpiri still ruled their plains, the dwarves were gone and the goblins had moved in to replace them. What once was Sardia was now the Flarg.

It wasn’t long after I had repaired the worst of the roof—enough to sustain me through the coming winter, at least—when the local goblins took notice of my presence. Whether it was the woodsmoke rising into the thin mountain air or the light in the once-darkened windows, the presence of an outsider in their territory drew them like filings to a lodestone. One person, alone so far from human civilization, must have seemed like easy pickings for a goblin tribe. Normally, they’d be right—even a dozen refugees taking up in an abandoned tower wouldn’t stand much chance against a goblin warband.

But I was no refugee—no ordinary one, at least, not anymore. A goblin warband may be many things, but quiet isn’t usually one of them. Having heard their approach, I was ready. Standing atop my newly repaired roof, I called down to them as they gathered around my tower with torches and spears and swords in hand. I warned them that I was a mage, that their fire and steel could not succeed against my magic. They did not listen.

Although a number of them shrank back from my words, the warband’s leaders were made of braver material. Shrieking and screaming, they drove their underlings at my tower. The trickle of the first few so intimidated quickly became an avalanche as the rest joined in. But my Circles held, and a few goblins fell back in understanding. Yet the majority of them continued to beat against my wards. Summoning forth my connections with the Mountains, I split the sky with lightning.

I struck down only a few of the goblins before the host turned and fled. In the following season and the next they gathered to attack again, but soon the attacks diminished and eventually stopped. As warlike as goblins can be, they are not entirely foolhardy, and they quickly learned that I would not succumb to their usual tactics. Before long, they accepted my presence as if I’d always been there.

In the season after their last attack, they came again...but this time to trade. Instead of weapons, they brought timber, furs, and meat. In such isolation, where I lived on stored food and whatever I could manage to hunt, gather, or grow, even goblin foodstuffs were a welcome addition...and the other goods allowed me to finish repairing my tower all the faster. It was not long before I returned their favor and went among them, visiting their warren-cities and learning their language. I spent years living alongside them before moving on, and returned to visit for decades after until their society fell.

A Bitter History

Nobody uses Dwarven Weaponsmith in their decks, but they are lore-appropriate foes of the Goblins of the Flarg.

The Goblins of the Flarg are little different from other tribes of goblins in their dislike for dwarves: after all, the two peoples often compete for the same territories and resources. But the hatred that the dwarves hold for the Flarg is exceptional. And like many of Terisiare’s peculiarities, it stems from the Artificiers’ War.

The dwarves of Sardia allied themselves with Urza during the war and supplied his armies with weapons, armor, and great works of artifice—most famously their dreaded Colossus. But they traded with Mishra as well, and when Urza discovered this he turned his armies against Sardia. The few survivors of this genocide fled their homeland, and the progenitors of the Flarg soon claimed the empty mountains.

After the end of the war, the Sardian exiles fled to the far corners of Terisiare. But they still held Sardia in their hearts as their home, and yearned to take it back from the Goblins of the Flarg. Though too dispersed and too few to directly fight for their land, the Sardian dwarves took grim satisfaction in killing their rivals for as long as the Flarg existed.

"Goblinology" by Frances Lebaron is part of The Colors of Magic anthology. Go Raiders! (I can't bring myself to cheer for the Packers, even if they're a fictional goblin "Cricket" team.)

The history that I have given is largely unrecorded and based only on my experiences and inferences with other, better-known events. Goblin society holds little interest to historians, and the Goblins of the Flarg are no exception. It would be amiss, though, to not mention the one history that does mention them, even if it is suspect. By the scholar Armand Ar-Basinno, this is a study not of Flarg's society as a whole but of one small part of it: a recreational sport. The Goblins of the Flarg, according to the scholar responsible for the history, developed and enjoyed a game in which teams competed to carry a ball past the other team's defenders and into a goal--in short, a form of football. Other scholars debate this conclusion under the auspices of misinterpretation of evidence and preconceived beliefs by Ar-Basinno. I myself believe that the practice of such a sport by the Goblins of the Flarg is reasonable, but the details--including specific names for the various teams and the initial use of a bomb instead of a ball--are not. Furthermore, Ar-Basinno conflates what is likely a recreational activity with religious ritual without evidence to back up his claim. In my opinion, Ar-Bassino's Goblinology is not very useful in the study of the Flarg's society.

Channeling the Goblin Hordes

Many a mage has built an army on the basis of goblins—they are cheap to hire and plentiful, and become quite terrifying when organized under a Goblin King. Those mages who have studied Sarpadian magic find this strategy even more advantageous. As a large population, the Goblins of the Flarg are almost always employed in these strategies. Their ability to sneak through the Mountains is sometimes useful as well. Their only drawback is hardly a drawback at all: the genocidal hatred of the dwarves towards them rarely matters, as very few mages employ dwarven mercenaries.