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Fall of the Goblin Empire

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Fall of the Goblin Empire (FoGE) is my entry for the SFSFW’s fantasy wargaming competition.  A game of goblins and their varigated, varied and highly unreliable flying machines. Here are a couple of the opening paragraphs that set the scene for a game of goblins going up-tiddle-ee-up coming down-tiddle-ee-down-down…

Ask anyone and they will tell you Goblins are mad, bad braggers, they have an anger in their eyes and can’t hold their drink. What most won’t tell you is they’ve good reason. When chroniclers write out the ages of the world somehow the age of
goblins gets misplaced. Yet there was a time (as any drunk goblin will tell you at length) when the little green folk ruled all the world and everyone in it for over a thousand years. Of course no one pays any attention because who believes a drunk goblin?

Yet it did exist for a thousand years. Eventually, as happens to all empires, the great goblin empire lost its grasp on the land.  In its last days the goblins retreated to the floating isles protecting their most valuable asset: the magical metal goblinic
famed for its ability to lift many times its own weight off the ground. They were fortunate that the islands also produced some iron, flax cloth, vast mounds of guano and some natural gasses. There they fell back into ancient tribal feuds and so the
goblin empire fell. Soon after that they turned to the bottle.

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