Night Goblin Tribes

The night goblins are the goblins of the under-dark, a hooded and moon-painted people who fled the sun long ago and never came back. They dwell in the endless tunnels and cavern-cities that riddle the roots of the World's Edge Mountains, and for thousands of years they have contested those depths with the dwarfs — a war neither side can remember beginning nor will consent to lose. A night goblin fears sunlight as other creatures fear drowning.

Theirs is a husbandry of the strange and the poisonous. They farm luminous fungus for food, breed the biting squigs that serve them as livestock and weapon both, and cultivate the madcap mushrooms whose brew turns a goblin's cowardice inside out. Fed enough of it, the smallest and most wretched become Fanatics — shrieking things that snatch up huge ball-and-chain flails and go whirling into the enemy, as lethal to friend as to foe.

For all their numbers they are cowards to the marrow, and know it; a night goblin mob will scatter at a reverse and knife its own kind for a mushroom. But in the dark, in their thousands, drunk on fungus and spite, they are a tide that has swallowed dwarf holds whole. They hate the sun, hate the dwarfs, and love almost nothing in the world save mushrooms, malice, and the misfortunes of others.