Goblindom wants you to be wrong, messy, and laugh about it

Being heroes is a corporate job. There is a list of goals to reach, boxes to check, treasure and cash to pocket, status to elevate. Heroism is performative, all-consuming. But we, as good Italians, grew up with the poems of Cesare Pavese and his “Working Wearies”. Work doesn’t just tire you out; it wears you down to the core.

Because of this, the desire to make an old-school dungeon crawler, where you grind through rooms, bones, loot, and the hopes of local creatures, was non-existent. In all honesty, this “grindset” has completely fed us up. As Oddplan, we could have jumped into cozy TTRPGs, with witches brewing lemon balm tea or little bears playing non-competitive bridge on marshmallow tables. We decided to pull a hard U-turn and unleash our inner, nasty goblin.

What is Goblindom?

Goblindom is what happens when the thing that best represented your collective self to the world over the last decade is that “Goblin Mode is the Oxford Word of the Year for 2022.” 

No more performative rituals, no more relentless pursuit of self-improvement, no more exploiting people and things as a litmus test of one’s ability to fit into the world. We want to be gross, be terrified of things that go bump in the dark, and be as petty and horrible as Goblins.

In Goblindom, you don’t merrily explore Dungeons, because *the* Dungeon is the main character. You are a goblin, a pathetic scrap of magical energy stagnant in some foul corner of the underdark. You just live in the Dungeon; you even stupidly think you own a kingdom inside it, hence Goblindom. But in reality, you’re just a tiny, insignificant part of a complex and mysterious ecosystem that exists completely independent of you. And that’s fine, because as a goblin, you don’t want responsibility. All you need is something shiny in your breeches, a full belly, and your enemies dumped in some ditch.

Unlike humans, who venture into the Dungeon to extract wealth and power, you, as a Goblin, have more mundane goals. Snagging some nice rat tails for the soup, for instance. Looking for gnome volunteers for an all-expenses-paid trip into the Voracious Non-Euclidean Maw, which seems to be expanding right toward your encampment. Or maybe finding a new Thingamagik staff for the village shaman, accidentally dropping it into a subterranean volcano during a scuffle, desperately trying to fake a copy with garbage picked here and there, and ultimately getting caught and pinning the blame on the weakest member of your group, leaving them to face the most barbaric tortures. Simple things, really. Goblin stuff.

No, really, what is it?

Goblindom is a dark slapstick tabletop RPG that mixes Saturday Morning Cartoon vibes with absurd violence, so extreme it’s actually funny. Someone once said it’s a bit like “Tom & Jerry meets Dark Souls.” (Okay, that someone was me.)

It plays just as well as a single reckless one-shot or an ongoing campaign of doomed, ridiculous underdogs clawing their way up or down a Dungeon that would rather they didn’t.

It’s an unusual mix of OSR sensibility in lethal dungeon delving, of an agile, fiction-first game engine based on Rank matchups, and a taste for the comic grotesque and the fantastical as a response to life’s banal horrors.

You play with a pool of d8s, combining Keywords, a Characteristic, a Proficiency, and maybe one of your goblin’s own bizarre Mutations into a Rank you throw against the Challenge in front of you. Failure is never a dead end: it’s a Consequence, and enough of them earn you a Disgrace, a permanent scar that becomes part of your character instead of simply punishing you for existing. I mean, you are a goblin; destiny has already punished you.

For this reason, we created a mechanic called Goblin Luck Coin. You know the coin toss from Fear & Hunger? Like that, but probably worse. And when you’d rather not deal with any of that yourself, there’s always Pass the Buck: spend your Goblin Luck to shove a friend into the line of fire instead. It’s funny, at least for you.

Ok, but what is it? A book? A potato? Who taught you how to write a press release?

Nobody!

Goblindom is a digital-only book, with everything you need to play packed inside, no bloat or expansion bait. It also features simple, intuitive procedures to build your own adventures in a flash, perfect for crafting sessions of tragicomic failures and futile pyrrhic victories.

It is available starting today on itch.io, DriveThruRPG, and RPG Trader with a pretty hefty discount. If you don’t want to waste your money, there’s a web-based Quickstart available on the Oddplan website featuring all (AND I MEAN ALL) the rules to play Goblindom, along with an introductory adventure and 4 pre-generated characters.

See you around with your worst pajamas!