Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Where Credit is Due


Foreword




I would like to officially thank David C. Sutherland III for the yalkhoi.

That was long overdue. By almost forty years. Though I first encountered the hobgoblin in the Moldvay edit of the Basic Rules, there were no illustrations to be found. Seriously? You provide illustrations of the White Ape, Sabre-Tooth Tiger, Killer Bee, Giant Lizard, Skeleton and Giant Spider? As if no one has an idea of what those look like! But you can’t be bothered to depict any of the goblinoids. I think the thoul would’ve been a good choice for a picture as well. Imagine my excitement when I found the Monster Manual.

So, hobgoblins were Asian. Huh. Neat! Hey – according to the Sutherland illustrations (two of them!), hobgoblins wore distinctly samurai-inspired armor into battle. You know who else had the same kind of look? The ogre mage (oni). And another Sutherland illustration, no-less. My wheels immediately started to spin. I liked the hobgoblin. The hobgoblin was (stat-wise) better than the orc (also illustrated by DCS). Orcs seemed like nothing more than hobgoblins with pig heads to me. It was at that point that I decided never to use orcs in my games – I was Team Hobgoblin right from the start. Once that was decided, my mind connected the hobgoblin and the ogre mage as the representatives of Asian culture in my fantasy setting.

Hobgoblins went through a few iterations during the development of the Avremier setting. There were essentially two castes, the samurai (noble) and the steppe-riders (commoners modeled after Mongols). Over the years, I merged the two castes, but split the hobgoblin into two distinct evolutionary paths. Replacing the half-orc PC race with the hobgoblin (yalkhoi), I developed the “monster” version of the hobgoblin (yarcha) as another branch. The ogre mage started as the overlords (shogun) of the hobgoblins, and slowly evolved into a higher evolutionary form to which an honorable yalkhoi might aspire.

All from a few David C. Sutherland III black-and-white line drawings. That’s what I call Old-School.


David A. Hill

Mothshade Concepts Editor

1 May 2019




1 comment: