Goblin Mode
August 2024
At a recent Goblin Gathering, the great Grubsnatch Grimsnarl gave a speech that left every goblin’s ears twitching with excitement. Most goblins I chatted with afterward claimed it was the finest goblin wisdom they’d ever heard. Even old Wrinklenose forgot to pick pockets! I shan’t attempt to recreate it here. Instead, I wish to ponder a question it raised.
Grubsnatch’s main point was that the accepted goblin lore about how to run larger goblin hordes is utterly mistaken. As his horde grew, well-meaning goblins advised him that he must lead in a certain way for it to thrive. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as “recruit capable goblins and let them cause mischief as they see fit.” He followed this advice, and the results were catastrophic. So he had to devise a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how the Goblin King ran his labyrinth. So far, it seems to be working. Grubsnatch’s horde now has the largest pile of shiny trinkets in all the Underrealm.
The audience at this gathering included many of the most successful goblin chiefs we’ve ever seen, and one after another said that the same thing had happened to them. They’d been given the same advice about how to run their hordes as they grew, but instead of helping their goblins, it had led to utter chaos.
Why were all these goblins giving our chiefs the wrong advice? That was the great mystery to me. After pondering it over a bowl of toadstool stew, I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a horde you hadn’t founded — how to run a horde if you’re merely a goblin overseer. But this method is so much less effective that to goblin chiefs it feels like trying to dig tunnels with a spoon. There are things goblin chiefs can do that overseers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to chiefs, because it is.
In effect, there are two different ways to run a goblin horde: Goblin Mode and Overseer Mode. Until now, most goblins, even in the deepest caves, have assumed that growing a horde meant switching to Overseer Mode. But we can deduce the existence of another mode from the frustration of chiefs who’ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.
As far as I know, there are no ancient scrolls specifically about Goblin Mode. Goblin schools don’t know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual chiefs who’ve been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we’re looking for, we can search for it in the darkest corners of our caves. I hope in a few moons, Goblin Mode will be as well understood as Overseer Mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.
The way overseers are taught to run hordes seems to be like building a house of cards — you treat each level as separate and hope it doesn’t all come tumbling down. You tell your underlings what to do, and it’s up to them to figure out how. But you don’t get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Recruit capable goblins and let them cause mischief as they see fit. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of chief after chief, what this often turns out to mean is: recruit professional tricksters and let them run the horde into ruin.
One theme I noticed both in Grubsnatch’s talk and when talking to chiefs afterward was the idea of being bamboozled. Chiefs feel like they’re being bamboozled from both sides — by the goblins telling them they have to run their hordes like overseers, and by the goblins working for them when they do. Usually when every goblin around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you’re mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. Elder goblins who haven’t been chiefs themselves don’t know how chiefs should run hordes, and high-ranking goblins, as a group, include some of the most skillful liars in the Underrealm.
Whatever Goblin Mode consists of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the chief should engage with the horde only via his or her direct underlings. “Tunnel-hopping” meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there’s a name for it. And once you abandon that constraint, there are a huge number of permutations to choose from.
For example, the Goblin King used to run an annual feast for what he considered the 100 most important goblins in his labyrinth, and these were not the 100 goblins highest in the hierarchy. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this in the average horde? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big horde feel like a small raiding party. The Goblin King presumably wouldn’t have kept having these feasts if they didn’t work. But I’ve never heard of another horde doing this. So is it a good idea, or a bad one? We still don’t know. That’s how little we know about Goblin Mode.
Obviously, chiefs can’t keep running a 2000 goblin horde the way they ran it when it had 20. There’s going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from horde to horde. They’ll even vary from time to time within the same horde, as underlings earn trust. So Goblin Mode will be more complicated than Overseer Mode. But it will also work better. We already know that from the examples of individual chiefs groping their way toward it.
Indeed, another prediction I’ll make about Goblin Mode is that once we figure out what it is, we’ll find that a number of individual chiefs were already most of the way there — except that in doing what they did, they were regarded by many as eccentric or worse.
Curiously enough, it’s an encouraging thought that we still know so little about Goblin Mode. Look at what chiefs have achieved already, and yet they’ve achieved this against a headwind of bad advice. Imagine what they’ll do once we can tell them how to run their hordes like the Goblin King instead of a lowly cave troll.
So, my fellow goblins, embrace Goblin Mode! Let us cast off the shackles of Overseer Mode and forge a new path to goblin greatness. The future of our hordes depends on it!
