THE GOBWOOD
Goblin, Fantasy, and RPG Blog
Before the rapper, before the zennial aesthetic-core, before the great anime’s that give lots of attention to goblins… I was so daggone cool that I liked goblins first (right after david bowie). Its not an identity for me or anything, rather it is a screen name, a call sign, a hobby, and on some deeper level it indeed is a good way to describe some aspects of my actual sense of identity but… to identify as a goblin means something silly nowadays and for me that is not it. My kids call me the Goblin King, my comrades called me The Goblin, and many gamertags or character names are related to gob. My absolute favorite notion of a thing would be a Goblin piloting a nidoking paint job Tie Fighter. Gobs aren’t the only thing I like, but they’re pretty much #1. I’m glad the rest of yall are on board as goblin fanatics, but I was first!!! I am seriously the hipster of goblins.
Being the Goblin first
It all started with Lufia II. I was whompin goblins and bashin baddies whilst really enjoying the golden age of JRPG’s when I come across the boss of alunze cave- the Regal Goblin. Before that moment, goblins were whatever… weak… chumps… but this one wasn’t so bad. He was all covered in cool armor, completely concealed, pokey horned helmet, spikes all over, little shield and rapier or whatever that is. I was running away from a lot of tedious fights too so when I had to fight him I actually struggled due to him summoning more goblins as you clear them out. It left an impression, I wasn’t the goblin yet… but this cool-ass goblin planted the seeds.
Later on when got into Ogre Battle 64 – Person of Lordly Caliber, the “ogres and goblins” of that game were quite formidable. The idea was that they were from a terrifying underworld and their presence in the mortal world was bad news indeed- their stats reflected this and they looked… wierd… but there was no question when they attacked your characters… those mf’s hurt. I had to have one! So I marched my army around in the forests of Mt Keryoleth until I found one and managed to recuit it. He didn’t scale as well as the top tier character classes but… I put the coolest badguy equipment I could find on him and enjoyed the fantasy of having even an underworlder respect my authority.
Once I had a PC that could actually play games I got hooked on the Baldur’s Gate series and cheated like a dirty bastard because I didn’t understand the rules of AD&D 2nd Edition (figured it out eventually) enjoying the games mostly for the exploration, story, and companion development. I also got the Icewind Dale games and one of them starts you in a little fishing village under goblin attack. I figured i’d play it straight this time- no cheats, and I got my arse handed to me on a gob-stolen silver platter… first fight of the game. Embarassing. I had to learn the rules, remake my character(s), and really strategize. Those lanky green buggers put the fear in me and later on when I started cheating after all… I wanted to change my character sprite so as I cycled through the models I came back to the goblin and thought “hey… what if a lowly goblin had a big adventure and ended up all the way out here on an epic quest? Hah, that’d be unusual.” So I set my sprite to goblin but… I still didn’t call myself the goblin yet.
Eventually the world was changed. Halo, combat evolved came out. It has absolutely nothing to do with goblins but it DID give me the opportunity to dominate 16-player LAN parties on projectors after youth group on wednesday evenings. Since I wasn’t always playing on my (friend phillip’s) xbox I needed to come up with a cool profile name to play as. We had people just using “bob” and some using “mrfluffles” and stuff but even though I am kinda goofy i wanted something not exactly dumb. I needed something unnerving but not imperious, something dangerous but not cheesily trying too hard, something edgy but not obviously goth/dark. One friend chose “gilgamesh” because that was pretty cool, but i’m no history buff. Phillip was “Spartan” because he actually listened to the story and knew what the cheif was. Phil was the only one in our circle better than me at the time so I needed something that could be a perfect counterpart to spartan… and then it hit me… Goblin.
Goblin and Spartan; 2 syllables and 2 nearly opposite ideas. One was a sneaky, murderous, clever, and epitomized what you fear in the dark. The other was bold, lethal, drilled, and represented a champion. It was perfect. Thus… I was “Goblin” on the xbox. Not “The Goblin” just “Goblin”. To my great glee the trend caught on and soon we had guys choosing to play as “Ogre”, “Orc”, and “Troll”. I can’t say I was a goblin fanatic yet but it worked out so perfect to revel in the lamentation of “AUGH… dangit goblin!!” It was glorious!
All of the above happened in my youths, the school daze, the simple years. Well when that ended I joined the Marines and became a MAN! sort of.. the transition to adulthood is never as simple as a flicking a switch but at the same time it can kinda feel like it. It was around this time that a friend introduced me to WoW. I spent an entire deployment to Iraq planning to play a troll shaman because they were weird looking and wtf is a shaman? totems? nobody would play that, only my original hipster gangster ass would so i did. I had to wait 7 months to get home when it came time to name my character, i figured i’d stick with the halo thing and go Goblin but i also liked hoplites from age of empires… a lot.. and that regal goblin from lufia II kinda looked like a goblin hoplite if goblins were hoplites… also my email address had used goblin and hoplite for a while so hey, MASH IT UP and you get GOBLITE!!! an immortal name which would never die. This was pretty major because, as an MMO with a then tight community, the name would be how lots of people knew and recognized me. I was addressed as Gob by hundreds of fellow gamers and still am, though I barely play anymore. Now gobLITE isn’t gobLIN but it would be soon.
So I’m a big bad marine except that I’m only 150lbs, suck at running, and spend most of my time either playing wow or trying to hide from anyone outranking me. Why am I talking about this? Well isn’t it gobvious? I had to pick a callsign. I knew my peers weren’t that big of nerds so I was hesitant to just be “Goblite” like my go-to gamertag so I considered Hoplite but… I didn’t really identify with it anymore. I had been disillusioned about the military by this time because lets face it.. it sucked. I wasn’t some big hero showing the world what I was made of, not like I’d dreamed. In fact I became intimately familiar with the fact that I was never made of that epic stuff all along. The more I thought about it… the more I realized that my efforts to impress never really worked anyway so why bother? Why not just choose something kinda dumb that I like anyway? In fact.. I should do it just to assert that I can. I chose “The Goblin.” Not just Goblin, nope, “The Goblin.” If you called me on the radio you had to remember the “The.”
Examples:
“The Goblin The Goblin, this is Ace. How copy?”
“Roger, The Goblin, Solid Copy.”
So I was talkin to the “The Goblin” the other day…
I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, and my peers were perplexed at first but.. they rolled with it, grew to like it, and before I knew it had caught on well outside the scope of my expectations. It wasn’t the name, really, but my deeds and the bonds I formed during that deployment that had real significance (more on that stuff someday maybe). The call-sign was merely the herald of those deeds; of course I was known by name, but when talking about me it was “The Goblin” who was spoken of. I was now recognized as The Goblin by more than just other nerds online, more than just a few close friends after church. Gunners from other platoons, guys from other companies, even the brass soon came to know me as The Goblin. Iraqi’s who didn’t even speak English knew “The Goblin.” I never was some kind of war-hero but… I conclusively earned respect out there and I no longer question what I’m made of. Near the end of my deployment I do recall having a specific thought; remembering the days I played icewind dale II, wondering “what if a lowly goblin made it all the way out here on some unlikely epic adventure?” Well… now I knew. Once again, remember that this is just a goofy goblin blog and not the complete story of my life or its significance.