NPCs: Ghoran Karzin Zorthak

“If all I was interested in was killing, I would have stayed in the academy as a boy. What motivates me isn’t killing, it’s killing with style.”

— Ghoran Karzin Zorthak to a young hobgoblin boy

Using Ghoran

Above all else, Ghoran is a showman. Everything he does is done with panache and style. He regularly takes insults, verbal jabs, and such with a returning volley of quips intended to mock in such a way that the target is unsure if they have been insulted.

The Coliseum of Zrukal-az Bashzith

Though gladiatorial combat is a staple source of entertainment throughout the hobgoblin empire, the largest and most extravagant arena is easily the Coliseum in the empire’s capital. Construction began five years after the ancient city was conquered by the hobgoblins, and even with slaves working on construction nonstop it still took six years to complete.

Slavery in the Green Coast

Most were probably expecting this to be in last week’s post, but its deserving on a post of its own.

The hobgoblins are infamous for their practice of keeping members of other races as slaves. The only races that are not kept as slaves are gnomes and halflings. The noble families amongst the northern gnomes have an agreement with the hobgoblins: the gnomes remain free to conduct their archaeological digs while the hobgoblins get any magical items found after they have been cataloged. Halflings on the other hand are not seen as being worth the expense and are simply killed or fed to the warbeasts.

Dreams of Empire: Hobgoblins in the Green Coast

We’ve danced around them up to this point, but now we’re biting the crossbow bolt and talking about the hobgoblins and boy is it a big one.

Hobgoblins have resided in the northern plains and north-eastern mountains for longer than any can remember. Raiding, pillaging, and worse in their nomadic warbands, every so often a leader would arise that had the potential to unify the disparate tribes. In the past, these leaders suffered the fate of all hobgoblin leaders: assassination.

     The traditional means of promotion amongst hobgoblin warbands was to kill and replace their superior. As a result, most attempts to unify into a group larger than a warband have collapsed upon themselves due to infighting. This changed with the rise of Imbatur Thraz.

     A charismatic youth, Imbatur Thraz left his warband seeking out answers to questions of faith that plagued his mind. Where he went no one knows, what is known is that upon his return he was covered in ritual scars and carrying a spear with a charred, blackened haft and a head made from a black stone that glowed with an inner crimson light.

    His and other warbands listened as he told them of the trials he endured, weeks without food and water, slaying beasts with nothing but a sharp stone as a knife, before he found a cave. Within this cave was a boulder, upon which his spear was imbedded. Silver light from Zrukal, the elder and larger of the twin moons, shined through a hole in the ceiling, illuminating the spear. As he approached the spear, a voice whispered to him.

     Take the spear, unite all the land under my light. Be my Herald, and none shall stand against your will.

     The voice could be none other than Zrukal himself, guiding the young hobgoblin. How could any refuse the orders of a god? Thus, he pulled the spear from the stone and returned, to forge the bickering warbands into an empire that would cover the world. Beginning with the Green Coast.