The Xibli are an aquatic offshoot of goblins inhabiting the islands around Melrox. They have blue skin, webbed hands and feet, and spiny backs. Unlike their land-bound cousins, they are excellent swimmers who live a semi-aquatic life in the intertidal zones.
They are freedom-loving hedonists who sleep on the beach and party in the waves. While they trade with outsiders, they view anyone who can't hold their breath for five minutes as lesser beings.
The making
Most goblin broods need standing water and rot to take hold. The Xibli came from a brood-resonance that caught in moving saltwater instead, in the intertidal shelves of the islands around Melrox where the sea covers and uncovers the rock twice a day. A resonance that sets in tidewater sets in something that never holds still, and it fixed the brood to the water rather than to a place: webbed hands and feet, a spiny back, skin gone blue, lungs that take air and sea without choosing between them. The making bound the Xibli to the rhythm that bore them. Their broods spend their matter back into the shallows the way every other lineage spends it into the ground, and a Xibli raised anywhere the tide cannot reach is a goblin cut off from the thing that made it. The hedonism the islanders are famous for sits on top of that. You do not fear the water when the water is the reason you exist.
Aspects
- Slippery as a fish
- Tide-born