- You are a goblin. You have a week to live and you are going to make a mark. You are going to undertake...A GOBLIN QUEST.
Goblin Quest is a comedic, rules-light and (by default) GM-less Tabletop RPG written by Grant Howitt and published by Rowan, Rook & Decard in 2015.
Players take control of clutches of goblins trying to accomplish some kind of task within the default setting of "The Great Battle Camp", with each clutch consisting of five goblins. The reason for this "clutch" approach to character control is because goblins, by their very nature, are prone to bad luck. As a result, expect even the simplest of tasks to have many, many goblins getting killed in various ways.
During each of the three phases the task has been broken down into, each player declares that they are going to do something, and rolls a D6. 1-2 means they get injured trying to accomplish it (unless both of their injury boxes are checked, in which case, they die). A 3 indicates that something bad happens, a 4 indicates that something good happens, and a 5-6 means they succeed at their task. In addition, each phase has the group roll on one of several misfortune tables to determine something outside the goblins' control going wrong.
In addition to several sets of scenarios and alternative tables provided by various RPG authors, the crowdfunded Kickstarter edition of Goblin Quest comes with a series of rule hacksnote to apply the game's simplicity and general theme of inevitable misfortune to other settings:
- Kobold Quest: A group of kobolds try to please the Mighty Dragon King by assembling a Rube Goldberg Device.
- My Name Is Inigo Montoya Jr.: A structured action romp with a focus on revenge, much like the title character.
- Sean Bean Quest: Five incarnations of famed Chronically Killed Actor Sean Bean aim to survive all the way to the end of a given film scenario.
- The Cthulhu Files: A less-comedic take on the engine, this time applied to the "investigate and go insane" structure popularized by Call of Cthulhu.
- Neither Super, Nor Heroic: Players attempt comic book superheroics while playing as what the book refers to as, "the caped crusaders that get left out of the comic books".
- Space Interns: A sci-fi hack where players play as hapless Redshirts.
Not to be confused with the series of similarly-named novels by Jim C. Hines. Word of God says that the similar name is just a coincidence.
Goblin Quest provides examples of:
- The Beastmaster: Inverted with the Reverse Beastmaster in Frog Croakley's optional character class rules, which consists of a goblin that is unable to resist the commands of wild beasts even of it would interrupt the task at hand.
- Beige Prose: The unifying trait of James Wallis' adventure ideas is to keep them brief. The book describes them as if "the goblins are shouting them aloud in the back of a pub".
- Born Unlucky: Goblins as a species are inherently unlucky, to a fatal extent.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The fact that goblins have a tendency to die very easily is why the players each control their own clutches of five goblins. When one inevitably dies, they switch to another one.
- Dem Bones: One of the "Rogue Magic" misfortunes involves leftover magic animating an animal skeleton. The table specifies that this reanimation upsets the creature in question.
- Garbage Hideout: Made into an entire class in Frog Croakley's optional character class rules with the "Bin Lunger" - if a waste receptacle is nearby, a goblin can lurk inside it until whatever danger is going on has passed.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: Frog Croakley's optional character classes includes the "Hammermancer", which allows a goblin to fashion animals into hammers while they're still alive. The accompanying artwork shows a fox, a chicken and a blackbird bundled together with rope and stuck on the end of a stick.
- Hat of Authority: The optional "Boss Hat" rule where a player who makes another player laugh gets to wear the hat and use one re-roll.
- Nature Is Not Nice: The entire point of the "Cruel Nature" misfortunes table, with ants, a badger, a hawk, a magpie, or possibly "a big, overly-friendly dog" causing problems for the goblins.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: It's possible for a hobgoblin to arrive and demand identity papers. The "Goblins and Hobgoblins" misfortune table specifies that the players don't have these.
- Our Orcs Are Different: In the setting as written, Orcs go hand-in-hand with Bugbears in terms of the complications they can cause, whether it's a drunk orc stepping on everything, or two brawling orcs getting in the way of the goblins.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: The example game with the goblins trying to steal a prize-winning bear involves them constructing and learning how to operate a mechanical bear suit. The artwork depicts this bear suit as crudely-made, with two visible goblins poking out and a sign on its chest saying, "yes im baer".
- Shout-Out: One of Merritt Kopas' adventure ideas involves the goblins trying to stop messages being sent through the battle camp via some kind of magic bird. The adventure is even titled, "Stop The Pigeon".
- Stuff Blowing Up:
- The "Miscellaneous" misfortunes table opens with rolling a 1 translating to, "Something important explodes".
- One of the locations in the map of the Great Battle Camp is a "Magical Explosion Testing Ground", signified by a group of smoking craters.
- Trojan Horse: The example given alongside the basic game structure involves the goblins trying to steal a prize-winning bear from a bear show by creating a bear suit.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Rob Heinsoo's "Transformations" table can have complications arise from previously-killed goblins rising from the dead as zombies, causing the first death to be from one of the zombies.
The various hacks of Goblin Quest provide examples of:
- Chronically Killed Actor: Deconstructed with Sean Bean Quest, portraying the titular actor as some kind of mentally-linked interdimensional hive mind that leads many lives and keeps getting killed, longing for death on his own terms.
- Cosmic Horror Story: The Cthulhu Files, in a non-comedic take on the Goblin Quest rules reminiscent of the familiar "investigate a mystery and potentially go insane" structure popularised by Call of Cthulhu.
- Our Kobolds Are Different: Kobolds in Kobold Quest go with a more reptilian portrayal, all serving under a Dragon King.
- Rube Goldberg Device: The ultimate goal of Kobold Quest is to construct one of these, and hope that each of its components work as expected through a sequence of consecutive dice rolls.
- Shout-Out: The artwork for Sean Bean Quest features Richard Sharpe tending to a dying Ned Stark.
- What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Neither Super, Nor Heroic suggests this for player characters as part of the general theme of lesser characters in a superhero setting, assuming the players create characters that even have powers in the first place.
