Overview
Goblins are feral, rift-mutated scavengers that manifest in fractured Nodes, especially warped apartment blocks, broken housing sectors, abandoned factories, and industrial ruins.
Once theorized to be the degenerate remnants of an exiled race, most Diver logs now classify Goblins as dimensional parasites: lifeforms that adapt, infest, reproduce, and weaponize whatever ecosystem they breach.
Small, fast, and violently unpredictable, Goblins are far more dangerous in swarms than alone. A single Goblin may be a nuisance. A group can become a disaster.
They display crude tactics, use scavenged weapons, and show no concern for safety, territory damage, or self-preservation. Their only consistent goals appear to be survival, consumption, reproduction, and destruction by any means available.
Physical Traits
Goblins are small humanoid creatures usually standing between 3 and 5 feet tall. Their bodies are thin, wiry, and built for speed, climbing, crawling, and sudden bursts of violence.
Their skin is mottled in shades of green, gray, rust-brown, yellowed flesh, or bruised purple. Many appear scarred, burned, diseased, or mutated by the Nodes they infest.
They have oversized eyes adapted to dim light, flickering static, and unstable interiors. Their teeth are sharp, uneven, and often cracked. Their hands are clawed, with long fingers suited for grabbing tools, climbing walls, and tearing through scrap.
Most Goblins wear scavenged clothing, armor scraps, wires, broken helmets, stolen packs, or improvised gear taken from victims and abandoned rooms.
Some exhibit severe mutation, including extra limbs, mismatched eyes, twisted bone growths, swollen jaws, exposed spines, or unstable flesh clusters.
Culture
Goblins organize into clans, mobs, nests, or infestation groups led by the strongest, loudest, fastest, or most dangerously unstable among them.
Their social structure is simple and brutal. Power belongs to those who can take, survive, intimidate, or kill. Leadership changes quickly and often violently.
Goblins do not farm in any traditional sense. They rarely build stable settlements. Instead, they infest existing structures, hollow them out, trap them, and turn them into lairs filled with stolen tools, scrap, bones, wires, and unstable machinery.
They reproduce rapidly when food, heat, and shelter are available. A small Goblin presence can become a full infestation if ignored for too long.
Goblins have no known formal civilization, but they do express themselves through chaotic markings, shrieking songs, rhythm-based speech, scavenged trophies, and primal graffiti.
Their symbols are often drawn in blood, paint, grease, ash, or whatever burns best. Some markings appear to warn other Goblins of food, danger, traps, territory, or powerful prey.
Abilities
Goblins rely on swarm tactics. They prefer ambush, misdirection, noise, traps, and overwhelming numbers over fair combat.
They are skilled scavengers and can use human, Diver, and faction equipment with disturbing speed. Firearms, blades, explosives, traps, tools, radios, and relic fragments may all be repurposed crudely but effectively.
Some Goblins possess an explosive instinct, carrying makeshift bombs, unstable grenades, fuel canisters, pressure traps, or suicide-triggered devices. These weapons are usually unreliable, but still deadly.
Their adaptive aggression allows them to learn from failed attacks. Goblin mobs may change routes, set traps, fake retreats, or mimic sounds after observing prey behavior.
Goblins show extreme pain ignorance. Many continue fighting through wounds, burns, broken limbs, or partial dismemberment until completely disabled.
They are especially dangerous in closed spaces, including apartment corridors, stairwells, vents, crawlspaces, factory floors, sewer tunnels, and maintenance shafts.
Relationship to Postremo Limine
Goblins are treated as an infestation threat across Postremo Limine. Most Safe Zones, Diver crews, and factions do not negotiate with them, because most Goblins interpret hesitation as weakness.
They are drawn to energy fluctuations, static anomalies, fear spikes, unstable food sources, and abandoned structures with many hiding places.
Diver squads have repeatedly been overrun after underestimating Goblin numbers. A quiet building may contain one scout, a dozen ambushers, or an entire nest hidden behind walls and vents.
Goblins rarely attack directly unless they have numbers, terrain advantage, or stolen weaponry. They prefer noise, panic, traps, and sudden pressure from multiple directions.
Some carry salvaged grenades, pipe bombs, teeth-marked blades, or stolen firearms marked with crude symbols.
Unconfirmed reports describe rare Goblin leaders capable of fluent human speech. Whether these are intelligent mutants, mimics, parasitic hosts, or something wearing a Goblin shape remains unknown.
Entities generally treat Goblins as prey, pests, or competing infestations. However, Goblin mobs have been observed swarming weakened Entities, stripping them for meat, bone, organs, and usable anomaly fragments.
A Goblin alone is a warning. A Goblin nest is a countdown.