Tuesday, February 23, 2021

D6x6 Chthonic Kobolds

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D6These kobolds look
1like argyrial old men, blue wrinkles so deep you can’t see their eyes.
2like big grey geckos slipping between cracks in the rock.
3like mangey stray dogs loping on their hind legs.
4like hunched runts crudely carved from cobalt.
5like hairless, albino tarsiers.
6like the bastard offspring of a caiman, a rat, and a monkey.
D6These kobolds’ lair
1in a half-flooded mine. The other half is filled with poisonous gas. The kobolds maintain ingenious mechanisms to manipulate the pressure in their own tunnels to keep them clear of both.
2is a paleontological dig, winding through the fossils of ancient behemoths. Even after their decay and mineralization, some may still not be fully dead.
3in tunnels and boltholes hidden within a giant ant hive.
4in an extinct culture’s catacombs, among the bones of ancestors with no remaining descendants.
5is a sprawling silver mine where escaped slaves have founded their own societies in the lightless, unforgiving depths.
6is a tremendous lock sealing some unspeakable evil beneath the earth.
D6These kobolds’ favourite sort of trap
1are explosives, placed obviously yet triggered by unexpected means.
2are spiked pits, droppable spiked ceilings, and spiked doors that swing out to impale those that try to open them.
3are Rube Goldberg machines as needlessly complex as they are deadly.
4are incendiaries that double as a barbecue.
5are darts and needles and all other things that can be slathered in venom.
6are those baited so their targets bring doom upon their own heads.
D6These kobolds are
1ghosts of those killed by cave-ins.
2homunculi from the lab of an alchemist who studied chthonic strains.
3crafty imps that leaked like radiation from hell into the earth.
4elementals of the world below enraptured by human convention and artifice.
5rebellious fairy proles on whose labour the fantastical luxury of the courts both seelie and un-so were built.
6the multitudinous grubs of dragons. Only a fingertip of a handful will make it to maturation.
D6Something you might find on these kobolds
1is a mole-leather pouch of grey salt that preserves food it’s sprinkled on indefinitely but shrivels it into a tasteless lump.
2is a tooth-tipped pick that can cut through rock as though it were merely dirt.
3is a geodesic arrangement of springs which can be sprung to unfold it into a simple mechanical trap of its user’s choosing. Single use.
4is a rope spun from tarantulas’ hair, which can be made to stretch like a bungee cord and thereby resist being cut.
5is a lantern made from the skull of a burrowing owl. Its light shines through rock and glints brightly off metal.
6is a caged clockwork canary that bursts the moment before its holder makes a lethal mistake.
D6These kobolds’ primary interaction with humans
1is directing them to less valuable veins of ore to deflect them from the good stuff.
2is kidnapping people to trade them to nightmarish creatures living deeper underground.
3is using their low riches to bribe agents to steal the luxuries of the sunlit lands for them.
4is taking over their basements and excavations.
5is to use them as test subjects for their entrapped gauntlets.
6is sapping their fortifications.

6 comments:

  1. geckobolds seems obvious now you say it. obviously an underground creature would find being a gecko convenient

    here in queensland we have the house gecko that lives on the walls, is small and gray-pink and chirps loudly at night. there's one on my window right now. be creepy if it wanted to kill me

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    1. Please delete the bot comments from your blog I'll do it my elf if you give me access somehow

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  2. I like that the 6 varieties cover most mythic and fantasy realisations of kobold. Fun fact: both goblin and kobold have the same etymology.

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    1. I mean to day I like all of it, just that first part especially.

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    2. "Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment-producing minerals; they were so named because they were poor in known metals, and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold."

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