A Goblin's History

A Goblin’s History of Angmar
First of all, you can call the place whatever you want. Outsiders always called the place Angmar, and it stuck. We always called it home, the word being Grokka in swamp goblin, but what kind of a place name is that? Everyone calls their own place home. Angmar is really two places, the Snowy Isle, always the province of Elves and Men, and Melumore, the big island, home to abominations. We goblins is abominations, I suppose, though I never felt like one myself. I just likes to eat rats and make traps to catch the humans, but enough about me.
They say this island was once shrouded in darkness, like the rest of the world, all of it shrouded in darkness. Back then there was no elves or dwarves or men or even orcs nor goblins. Back then there was things like spiders and grey jellies, krells and shadow men, and I suppose, they got along just fine without light. When the gods of Arda built two great lights to bring day to the world, the whole place lit up like a chandelier. All the sudden, in Middle Earth up north, green trees started growing, and the troglodyte folk moved underground or just plain died. Even with these lights though, most of Angmor was in shadow. Those lights were pretty far away, and between the Green Mountains and the Red, and the Black, not much of any light crept over those peaks. Angmor is the one place in this universe some of the original, black forests, still stand, their branches tangled with black vines, whispering ugly truths to the passerby. It is still pretty dark down there, in the South, and these forests still stand, but I ain’t never been. You smarties out there might be thinkin’ trees can’t grow in the dark, and I suppose that is true for the fancy green stuff that grows in the North of Angmar, but in the South, we still got the old kind. Black as soot, leaves and branches, they get their power from the Earth itself. I hear them type of trees grows deep under the ground too, where the real power of Angmar lies.
Anyway, Morgoth destroyed them lights. He hated them. He takes all the credit for that, but I hear it was mind flayers that put him up to it, or Krakkens, or the Aboleths. For a while, it was dark damned near everywhere. This is about when goblins and orcs came here, by sea, in great ships. Angmar was so dark a goblin cold walk ten days and not have to cover his eyes. It was paradise. The darkness did not last long because the gods of Arda like their light, and so great trees grew far in the West. For thousands of years, the light of the world came from two mystery trees the elves grew. I ain’t never seen it. Nobody here, not even them folks that is thousands of years old, ever seen them trees. They was so far away and just for elves. Those Elven trees never did last too long. Morgoth came down here and fell in love. Ungloiant, our spider queen, was as lovely as a streak of black storm clouds. They say she had the face of a maiden, and features that captured the best elements of menfolk, goblins, and orcs. She had eight legs too, and could spin webs of darkness so thick ain’t nothing could see through them. The rest is Elven history, but our Ungloiant killed that tree, and ate them gems, the Silmarils, except one. She ate Morgoth out of house and home too, then cut loose, spreading her seed far and wide. Finally she returned home, and spawned three daughters. Then she died. Spiderfolk do that sometimes. The elvenfolk here are the dark kind, and they worship one or the other of them three. They are Ungolia, Lolthina, and Sargon. Them elves arrived about the same time as the orcs, I think, by ship or from tunnels so deep under the ground that they pass beneath the sea.
Dark Elves? The elvies say this. In the beginning, when the great lights were constructed, there was a call by the gods of Arda to migrate, West across the continent of Middle Earth. Most took heed, though some got lost along the way. The lost ones they call the green elves. The ones that made it all the way are the fair elves, and the ones that made it, but with trouble, they call them the grey elves. There were ones that made to the coast and never went across the ocean, and them is the high elves. Two kinds stayed. One was the dark elves. They ignored the call on purpose, and when sunlight finally reached the North of Angmar, they moved underground. The other kind is the Orcs, who never were elves, but close enough. Orcs and elves are kissing cousins, though neither likes to say it. Orcs live underground because they always has, and in places on the surface where they can make a living hunting animals or terrorizing the weak. Then, of course, there are goblins, bugbears, ogres, hobgoblins, dark faeires, gnolls, flinds, lizardfolk, and the underground races like dark creepers, mind flayers, and grimlocks. Angmar has always been home to monster folk. Some say that when, after the mystery trees were killed for good, and the sun was created to light the sky, monster folk of every creed, color, and design came down here and hid in the mountains and the dark woods. Dragons too, and their half-man consorts, came South in those days. That was the time when the great monster cities were built.
Hellgar, city of black minotaur folk, was built at the base of the Mountain of Fire. Here, the minotaur men forged great machines and weapons, and built libraries and roads underground. Their big and stupid cousins, the Red Minotaurs, guard this place with axes made of steel and bone, or so I hears.
Deeper down still is the land of the dark elvenfolk. They have a couple cities down there, not as big, but by some recollections, prettier. Black tile streets and slaves to do all the lifting, the Drow, as they are called, farm beasts for food and work strange feats of magic. Below them is the city of the mind flayers, but the less said about them, the better.
There is a goblin city down there too. Moglog, ruled by a goblin king twenty feet tall, who can read and write, and breathe fire. Goblin smiths down there build the best weapons of the land, and make nine out of ten horseshoes and carriage wheels. Only problem is all the blood goblins. Another story there.
Then you gots all the evil gnomes that came overseas recently, with all the troubles up north. Gnome folk and dwarf folk get along ok, I guess, but there is bad dwarves and there is very bad dwarves and neither fits in. Most of em drink too much and fall off a ship, from the north, drunk, down in Angmar, sooner or later.
They say that nowadays, the sea people, the Numenoreans, are building a world empire, and carting all the gold and silver to their island, far out in the ocean. Wherever they go, they bring war, and trouble for beasts and evil men.
Now, our land has been through an age like that. Five centuries ago, Elves and Men and Dwarves from oversea came to our dark island seeking treasure. They found it, in the hands of dragons and giants, mokroths and beholders. These men were tough, and dwarves and elves too, and they built three kingdoms. The kingdom of the men, by the sea, grew town by town along the coast, fishing village connected to seaport connected to farm town by ships and boats and canoes. Alongside them were the sea elves. Inland were fair elves and grey elves, building stone towns along the rivers and connecting them with mighty roads. Trees were cut by the men, but the elves mostly worked around them. They planted gardens and brought fair deer, bunny rabbits, badgers, and the kind of birds that don’t lay eggs under your skin when you are not lookin’. By turns, the place was tamed, and there was no place a su monster could find a decent meal without ending up at the end of a sword, so the monsters fled South, and East, and underground. In the mountains was the dwarves, and they built underground cities of their own. Their mightiest was a six foot tall dwarf named Kargoth Kollossus, King Under the Mountain, and after him followed three great ones. Gimolf, Gloin, Borgstor, and Nilbor. They reaped great treasure and mined gems.
In the kingoms of men and sea elves there was mighty kings as well. Zardozar, the mighty wizard, built an upside down tower into the ground and filled it with wonders. He ruled with a wand, and some say he had a beard ten foot long by the time he died, centuries after he was born. Finally, the grey elves had their own kings and queens. Luthinia, the mightiest of them all, ruled from a castle deep in the forest. Swamps were cleared, black trees were cut and replaced by the green kind, displacer beasts and devil dogs were slain and replaced by white deer and wild horses. Ravens replaced blood birds, bats moved into caves, and for a while things looked bleak. Finally, up North, there were troubles for the elven folk and the men. An Orkish army was fighting the elves again, this time with the help of dragons, and fighters from this land left to lend a hand. This was our moment. A mighty alliance was formed between the dark elves and the mind flayers, the lizardfolk and orcs and goblins, and even the dragons were in on it. This was about the time of Rhohan and Zelgar, who tried to hold us back, just fifty years ago, but it feels like much more.
Overwhelmed, the forces of good were eaten or destroyed. Only a few fled tell the tale. The old cities still stand-some goblin and ogre towns, some inhabited by men and all sort of monster folk, and many more still abandoned, home to vampires and unmentionable horrors.
Now, this world of ours has places for everyone. The big cities haves a thieves guild and houses and smiths and even places where a goblin can get a knife sharpened. We have taverns for menfolk, and many more for monsterfolk, places weirder still that takes magic words to get into. Underground, we have tunnels connecting the dark cities, and people in the know can usually find the ways they connect to the sewers of the surface towns. We have our wizards and our priests, and we have slaves to do all the work. In the South, we got dark forests full of things I can’t even find names for, and in our seas, we got krakkens, and sea monsters, and cities out in the deep too.
Now, the sea people don’t see our ways as the right ones at all. In the North, their galleys have come and reclaimed the old towns. Some say Snowy Isle never really fell, and there they got great castles and princes, gold and ballgowns. Down here we have rat meat and cockfighting. We got tribes of orcs in the hills, and gnolls, and lizardmen in the swamps, but we got orcs workin the streets sellin’, though what kind of sausages I don’t ever ask. Our ways aren’t their ways. I think you can see the problem.

What Exactly ARE the Yo Gabba Gabba Creatures??

Brobee is probably a shambling mound.

Ruby is 21 months old, and we watch a lot of Yo Gabba Gabba together. If you do not know about the show, you have probably googled it by now, so i need not explain it. My question, shared by nearly every viewer, is what the HELL are the protagonists. Sure, you can give the lame Richard Dawkins no mystery answer and say that they are cartoony creatures made by the designer Kid Robot to communicate a sense of otherness and friendliness combined, and to look cool to parents as they deliver repetitive diatribes, in song, on the virtues of sharing. Yes, fine, but from a more in-universe perspective, as Wikkipedia would define it, what the bloody hell are those things?? Dear Reader, at Blood on a Spaceguitar, we are uniquely qualified to identify monsters, so let me share my taxonimic assessments of them.


1) DJ Lance Rock is a well-known club DJ and is a real person. He really does have a sister, named Kemba Russel, by the way...so his sister Kimba is real. His character on the show has significant magical powers, most notably the ability to fly, and of course, to animate and de-animate the inhabitants of Yo Gabba Gabba land. Interestingly, he cannot enter that series of pocket universes without the aid of Plex.

Yes, Gabba Gabba land is a system of four linked pocket universes, with a common electrical grid understood only by Plex, who alone has the power to throw a switch and turn the lights back on if they go out. None of these places makes sense from a geometric point of view because Moono and Brobie need to be transported to a separate set, through the usual white void Lance Rock occupies, to go to a family house Moono must frequently return to. Each is linked to one, or two adjacent partners via a series of square dimension doors, though there seem to be invisible freeways running through the void that DJ rock walks through as he comes and goes about his business.

Dimension door? You heard me. That is a Dungeons and Dragons term and I use it proudly, because only Dungeons and Dragons gives people a perspective by which to answer such dorky questions in a way that has some objective structure. For instance, Dungeons and Dragons can tell you who would most likely win in a fight between a vampire and a mummy (almost certainly the vampire), or a goblin and a dwarf (advantage to the dwarf, but they are hereditary enemies and would never be fighting alone).

So, I picked up my field guides, a smattering of Monster Manuals from the first and third editions, and my memories of books I have lost.

The five protagonists clearly spend much of their time in a carrying case, as inanimate toys, by DJ Lance Rock. He also has a second, rarely-used case containing the members of Moono's family. Thus, they are animate toys, who enter a series of toy universes, by a godlike overseer. This, of course, including the extraimensional goofiness of invisible freeways and wierd geometry, usually going from couch to coffee table, is exactly how children play with toys. A toy will become animate, teleport to another room in the kid's imagination, or follow an illogical freeway through the air, to enter the frame of reference of other toys.

1) Plex. Plex really is a magic robot. Robots do not occur in any D and D campaign I would play, but they occur in some. The character is about a fifteenth level magic user, who is unaware or unconcerned with his vast powers, and plays the role of a loving caretaker to the others. The creature has perfect common sense and is incredibly patient and tolerant, he also has a sense of fun, friendship and play, though the concept of fun had to be explained to him, though when he realized what it was, he was able to put a name on feelings he had clearly been experiencing. Wierd Al Yankovik wanders through with his circus on his own somehow, and Jack Black, running out of gas on an invisible freeway, gets stranded there for a while, but mostly, Plex is responsible for beaming characters into and out of these pocket universes. He can even shrink the toy characters into a smaller frame of reference, the underground world of the oskybugs, with his amazing powers. For some reason, the logs in Brobieland need to be dusted by him, indicating that he is a caretaker of Yo Gabba Gabba Land in many unspecified ways. Clearly, this place is a sort of metaphor for a day care center or preschool, and he is a sort of babysiter. Give him teleport, dimension door, whatever, as long as it is not a combat spell, he probably has it. The character has an armour class of ten, by the way, and one hit point, because he is rendered comatose and nearly destroyed by a snowball in one episode, though his other powers are vast.

Now things get fun. Each creature clearly has elemental properties, of some sort, because the four pocket universes they occupy have an elemental logic symbolized by the character. Toodies is a land of perpetual winter and snow, Brobie's is an autumnal forest, Foofa's is a land of spring and summer dominated by flowers, and Moono's is a rocky and warm desert or moonscape inhabited by ants and talking cacti. Moono we know to have a nuclear family. and we have seen adults of his species, but the others we have not seen as adults. Each is in the mindset of a small child, and each has been an infant at some point in its existence. Brobie is four years old, but we do not know the ages of the others. Only Brobie required a diaper as a one year old. They all possess a stomach and eat food. Even Plex, the robot, comes from a design that must spend some time in the body of a small robot, with the mind of an infant, so childhood is universal even to the robot, who has the mind of a sensible but nonauthoritarian adult, has a baby niece. Presumably, Plex's highly intelligent mind needs to be educated like that of a human in order to function.

2) Easiest is Toodie, who is clearly a white dragon, or a white dragon with some blue dragon ancestry. She is a creature of a pocket universe dominated by cold, possibly also inhabited by winter fairies, where frozen lakes exist and salmon and trout swim under the ice. She may actually be dragonkind, with some human ancestry as well, because though the most energetic and impulsive member of the group, she clearly has a good heart and is far from evil. Even among evil species, such as blue dragons, there are good individuals, especially among the hatchlings, and Toodie is obviously a hatchling. It was not much of a stretch for her to pretend she was a dragon in the dress up episode, as it is not a stretch for Plex to dawn a wizard's cap. Toodie is human enough to get a cold, however, and need to be treated by Anthony Bourdain, the doctor. White dragons have some connection to that para elemental plane at the intersection of the elemental plane of water and the negative material plane, and that explains ToodieLand. It is scary to imagine how powerful and dangerous she will become as she ages, it is good that she will be extremely well-socialized.



3) Brobee is clearly some sort of shambling horror. This is not to say he is evil, and in many ways he resembles the DC comic character, the Swamp Thing, who was a person of the greatest possible virtue, comparing favorably to even Batman.



The DC comics character is actually an Earth Elemental, of the specialized type that represent the living part of the plane that is influenced by the positive material plane, and Brobee, since he has a human stomach and many other human attributes, is most likely a creature with an elemental bloodline which also includes humans, a genasi...though his shape and appearance suggest some affinities with the shambling mound..... It is my guess that Brobee will reach a point where he will assimilate and devour everything in his path, growing to enormous proportions, and the "party in his tummy" will be a very real apocalypse for Yo Gabba Gabba Land.



4) Moono is quite clearly a cyclops, but there is more to it than that. Cyclops are actually described in the volume Dieties and Demigods, with the Greek Mythology Pantheon, a rather obscure source. Heraclitus writes of a good cyclops, and they are clearly not all stupid and evil. Moono and his family are nice even by the standards of YoGabbaGabbaLand, a place where no real violence can possibly exist and evil is impossible. He is nice, even among very nice little monsters. He among all of them seems to have the stuff of a hero about him, Toodee showing the potential for deception and cruelty and Brobee being downright maudlin at times. He has a beast within him, and in the bacchanal of childhood play, bites his intimate friend Foofa.



Since we see his whole family, my prediction that the adults of his species were not borne out by future seasons of the show, he is essentially full size, though he towers over the rest of YoGabbaGabbaLand and is a giant by human standards. His family is very much like a human family. Unlike Brobee, he did not germinate from a spore, or like Toodee, hatch from an egg. I wonder about some attachment to the elemental plane of earth, however, possibly through a lineage including xorn, which would explain his columnar appearance.



5) Foofa is certainly the hardest to identify, so here my taxonomic skills are strained, but I think I have her figured out.




She is clearly connected to the Elemental Plane of Earth, specifically that current of living things that runs through it. She and the swamp thing, and Brobee, could share a summer home there. In the DC comic, The Swamp Thing, it was called The Green, and developed in detail. She also has faierie affinities, as evidenced by her desire to play the role of a faerie or faerie princess at every opportunity. She is the most analytically intelligent of the four children, though Moono is very inquisitive. She and Moono seem to be closer to each other than to the other monsters, though the two female characters, Foofa and Toodie, also share a bond, as do Moono and Brobie. She is a vegetable creature, a fact made obvious by the flower perpetually in bloom on her head. She is shaped like a sack, though a cute one, and it is my guess that she is neotenically arrested in some sort of larval form. Clearly, her bloodline includes high elves, faeries, and probably dryads or nymps as well, it includes some monstrous plant creature as well, my guess being a neo-otyugh, explaining her understandable pathos at having the mind of a sensitive and intelligent young girl in a body destined to, or suited to, grow into a horrible, devouring monstrosity.

lizard men

I wasted my adolescence playing Dungeons and Dragons. Seriously. I played some Traveler, some Space Opera, some Gamma World, even some Paranoia, Toon, and Call of Cthulu, but mostly it was DnD, sucking my time, giving me a reason not to hang out near the 7-11 pay phone, smoking a cigarette, trying to look cool, joining a punk band, trying to get laid. Instead, I fought orcs, impaled paladins, befriended dragons, got disintegrated, built vast space empires. Looser. At the end of all of it, what I had to show for my time was a set of amazing writing skills and an even more perverse imagination, along with the knowledge that a mummy could not hope to beat a vampire in hand to hand combat, that hell is ruled by archdevils, followed by dukes of hell, that antipaladins can turn clerics, that wraiths get their power from the negative material plane, and that geodesic is good for mapping countryside, but nothing beats good old grid graph paper for mapping underground labyrinths.

Here are some highlights from the time I wasted.

1) I first got a copy of the original DnD rules on a family vacation to Minneapolis. It wasn't the boxed set, just the rule book. I filled in the rest. I remember calling my sister an Ogre, but getting the pronunciation wrong. Still, grandma's house was boring, and now I had an excuse to draw one dungeon after another. I still use their notation for doors, cliffs, windows, and trap doors.

2) The first time I fought a skeleton, it had something like six hit points. I had a mace. I was first level. I barely won. I don't think I got too much farther in the dungeon than that. It was in Walnut Creek, CA, and a friend's friend was Dungeon Mastering. He left with the module, whatever it was. I must have been in sixth grade at the time.

3) Keep on the fucking borderlands. Hell. I dunno how many times I burned this thing down and killed everybody in it. Sometimes I had the help of the hobgoblins in the caves of chaos, sometimes not. Sometimes, we killed everything in those caves too. This keep had a way of repeating itself in every fantasy world I constructed...it was they way fantasy empires project power, by replicating this same keep and dropping it all over the map.

4) Riding through a halfling village, on a warhorse, cutting the little fuckers down with a morningstar, or burning their houses down with spells like Flame Strike. I had a predilection for evil clerics, something I can directly attribute to Thulsa Doom's character from Conan the Barbarian. The ones that lived underground, we gassed with spells like Stinking Cloud. We led the women and children away as slaves, in chains, to build a ziggaraut to my mighty power.

5) As an evil, 29th level cleric, we fought the Indian Diety, Ushas, Goddess of Dawn, and defeated her on her own turf, thus destroying her. I still feel guilty about this. She was an awesome goddess. I now realize that we cheated (she should have used her divine command power to completely destroy us...I think we made ourselves deaf or some dumb shit). I don't know how I ended up using clerical spells against another god, but it made sense at the time, even in Elysium. Seems like evil magic should not work there. We had some sort of infernal army helping us. It was like 4:00 AM when we did this, and we were cracked out on Jolt and chocolate chip cookies. Funny, dawn came anyway, in the real world. In my goofy fantasy world, of course, eternal night....EEEVILLL. Everything everywhere must have perished. Dumb cleric, no followers. I was DM and playing with a friend simultaneously, this is something like playing chess against one's self...goofy. That explains it. Seriously, I never see a sunrise nowadays without apologizing to her, or thanking her for making us think we won. Tenth grade, probably.

7) I usually DM'd. I came up with so many fantasy worlds, I could never keep them straight. I remember one scenario where I was breeding armies of undead from caged ghouls and human hostages fed to the ghouls. I would then turn the undead. Another evil cleric. Animate dead was the basis of my power for a hell of a long time. Best third level spell ever, even better than fireball is for magic users, if used properly. One need never to fight opponents again, ZOMBIES do that for you now. Fuck having a thief around to check for traps, let ZOMBIES go first....and hundreds of zombies, led by some fuckwad on a warhorse, is a good time. Hell yeah.

8) I had this campaign with ultra powerful player characters. They were at about 24th level. I translated the book of Revalations into DnD format and ended the fucking world. It was awesome. Early on, they had to keep rolling on the random disease table (yes, there is one in the Dungeon Masters Guide, first edition) for the ailments they got from god, then trying to heal themselves. Somehow, the pagan gods they worshiped still had some modicum of power. There were armies of undead led by a badass antichrist....a big lion-headed beast that breathed sulfur. The PCs knocked those things down, no problem. More monsters though, and earthquakes....I think most of them got wasted before the end. A couple ended up in the lake of fire, tormented eternally. Good job.

9) My friend Rolf was a killer DM. Tomb of Horrors was the perfect module to fuck with me. I think we all died. I was a total pussy about it when my were-rat thief crawled into that fucking sphere of annihilation and disintegrated. I still think that cover is a shitty thing to do...you can clearly see them FIGHTING a lich. Instead, you get this crappy demilitch that is indestructible, and devours your souls forever...it was a total killer dungeon. At the time I was pissed, now KNOW why Gary Gygax wrote it, from the daughter of a woman that played with him all the time. HE DID write it to kill characters, he wrote it to kill her, specifically. This was the same woman who invented the rust monster, by the way. Figures, doesn't it? You DnD fans out there, your most memorable, miserable DnD experience resulted from a personal vendetta. Wouldn't have it any other way, now. Sometimes you are just fucked.


10) THANK YOU, ex wife, for the few times I got laid BECAUSE of DnD. Great times.