Goblins appear very similar in many regards to other humanoids. And so many wonder why they have such a propensity for chaos, so little self determination? How can a species survive with no self preservation instincts?

Goblins are not exactly humanoid. The flesh appears similar at first glance, as do the minds. But they do not share an origin with men and elves. But there is a reason they share so many similarities.

Art: Svetoslav Petrov

Goblins are a form of fungus. There is a psychically active type of fungus that originated from a bloom deep in Faerie. It consumes rot and flesh as mushrooms do, but its preferred food is the mind. Like many abberant creatures, it can take memories and thought straight from the minds of creatures it infects.

This fungus is where goblins grow, straight from the walls of infested tunnels. We collected some for study after a brave order of paladins cleared the warren. At first we thought that the psychic fungus was the cause of the goblin’s mental deficiency. Infected humanoids certainly showed decreased cognition.

The truth was somewhat more horrifying. We fed a man bound for the gallows to our fungus sample. His… sacrifice has allowed us to understand the stages of infection.

First, the fugus starts to repair the body, even as it saps away memories. The subject develops an intense fear of fire. N.B. fire is one of the only effective methods of destroying the fungus.

Second, the fungus improves the body. They become much stronger, but the devolve to almost animal intelligence during this stage. The subject nearly escaped confinement.

Third, the subject climbs to a high place, or a waterway, or a food store, and all body functions stop. They begin to sporofy. Within a few weeks they are an indistinguishable mass of fungus.

Then the horrifying bit begins. The fungus starts to try and replicate the subject. With so little mass it wasn’t successful at forming whole bodies, but hands and faces, half flesh half fungus, started pushing out. One of them talked. The man was a brutal murderer, and the face was filled with vitrilic hatred for all people around it. I lost a lot of sleep that night.

The goblins weren’t being fed on by the fungus. They were the result of the feeding. Crude replication of whatever is in the captured mind, or minds. I believe other species of goblinoids are caused by different types of people being absorbed.

The paladins brought me onto the next mission, as I warned them of additional dangers. We found a much larger warren, and a much more powerful fungus. Even crude magics could detect the psychic presence, totally devoid of will or sentience, just consuming and replicating and rotting down there.

Art: Marco Gorlei

Thank the divine Pyri for gifting fire to this world, and this journey. We burned our way down into the warren. We lost one man to a goblin trap, and we had to cauterize a woman’s arm to stop the infection. But we cut into the spawning pits and incinerated them. Waves of goblins came up from a dark passage, and so to protect the others while they worked, three paladins and myself cut down that passage to stem the tide.

We reached the bottom and stepped out on a sunlit plain. How had we come abovegroud? Illusion? Portals? Two armies, looking human, clashed amid rivers of blood. And in the center of the carnage sat a roiling mass, boiling out of the remains of a barely visible skeleton.

Me and the team leader realized the partial truth at the same time. The ground flowed out of that central mass. The soldiers were imperfect facsimiles. Their faces were blank, as in a drean. Nothing but more mimicry.

She fired an arrow upwards, we both expected it to strike a cavern ceiling disguised as a bright sky. Bioluminescence must be creating the light. But the arrow soared up into the air, higher than any cavern could be, then landed a hundred yards away, shattering on what looked like stone.

Over years of study, I learned that the fungus, when grown to this size, unconsciously weilds enough arcane power to bend space, creating a dreamscape from the minds it absorbed. In that moment, I only felt panic at the unknown. This alien thing was a blight to be destroyed.

The captain and I charged the center. The armies turned against us and she cut them limb from limb. It was easy. I think the man had seen so much death in whatever moment was being replayed, the fungus made these soldiers to die. Humans were not heroic and strong in his mind, and so they were not here.

A stone fortress sprung whole from the ground blocking our path. We hoped it was illusion over fleshy fungus, but we found only solid stone. I threw a black powder bomb into the gate, and the licking flames did more damage than I expected. The fire even spread to the stone, if only a little. She barged through the weakened wood, paying no attention to the splinters or flames.

Then the ground itself rose against us. It beant and reared like an angry bull, battering a paladin aside with a sick crunch. Then a swirl of earth grabbed the captain. She hacked against it, but it was stone against her sword. It dragged her towards the mass. She put out a hand to stop herself, and it was sucked into the shifting form.

Immediately the entire false world sprung up with replications. copies of her hand sprung from the ground, from soldier’s faces, tesselating across the sky. She screamed. She hacked a blade into it to no effect. I could sense the psychic part of the thing start to sink its teeth into her, as the soldiers started gleaming and standing up straighter, more heroic. But it pulled her in less as it tried to replicate and blend the two minds. A sliver of hope.

I pulled a spell into my mind. One to light a fire. I envisoned myself casting it on myself, burning myself to pieces. I held it at the front of my mind. I ran to the mass, and rather than release the spell, I let the thing grab my mind. It ripped and tore, but as I hoped, it took the top first. And it started to mimic it.

The spell started in the sun above. The firey ball expanded, less brilliant but hotter. The captain ripped herself free as it turned on me, and dragged my near catatonic body away. Fire bloomed in every surface. The soldiers turned to pillars of flame as she ran. We escaped into the breeding chamber, and the fungi there was already generating flames. I blacked out.

Art: Grosnez

When I came to, the captain and myself, along with half the company, were laying a hundred yards from a series of smoking crevasses. Black marks covered trees where fungi had grown before. A blessed rain had saved us from burning to death, though none of us felt lucky.

We returned to my lab and utterly destroyed my experiments. I tried to burn them with magic, but that spell had forever been lost to me. We burned it more conventionally. I put myself and all the others on quarantine under the watch of a priest until I was sure none of us were infected. We all underwent purification rituals before we left.

Goblins are violent cowards because the people the fungus takes are usually adventurers or soldiers, and they all die in fear. I thought for a time about trying to create a more docile, or even a altruistic creature using the fungus, but I know now I could not control it. I fear what would become of a warren that ate any great mind: a general, an archmage, a king.

My list of recommendations when fighting this scourge is bring fire, and be prepared to smash the brains of anyone about to be taken by the things. We cannot let this menace absorb more and greater pieces of man and elfkind.

– Royal Wizard Tel-moran