The Spine Goblins are perhaps the most disturbing of all goblin subraces, afflicted with a leprosy-like disease that causes their bones to pierce through their skin. Their spinal columns protrude grotesquely from their backs, and rather than hide this deformity, they have embraced it by binding nails, spikes, and other sharp implements to their exposed bones.
These crude and malevolent creatures represent the darkest aspects of goblin nature, using their horrifying appearance and weaponized deformities to terrorize their enemies. They are among the most feared and reviled of all goblins, and for good reason.
The making
What afflicts the Spine Goblins was a disease before it was a heritage. One brood took a wasting sickness that loosens the binding between bone and flesh until the skeleton works its way to the surface, and in any other people it would have killed the sick and ended there. It did not end there, because a goblin brood does not copy individuals. It copies the working that makes them. The infected brood-father lived long enough to choose a queen, and the loop wrote the disease in alongside everything else it carries, so the next father was not infected. He was born this way. The sickness stopped being something a Spine Goblin catches and became something a Spine Goblin is, breeding true down every line descended from that first ruined brood. They bind nails and spikes to the bone that pushes through their backs because the bone is going to come through regardless, and a people cannot be made afraid of the thing they are born as.
Aspects
- My deformity is my weapon
- Pain has made me stronger