@@AmazingAutist Pathfinder Goblins are Football-Headed. Disappointed no one named one "Arnold"....if anyone got that reference. YES! While in other fantasy lore, they are very angular.
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410I honestly really love a lot of the designs for Pathfinder monsters. I'm currently in my first PF2 campaign, I've been really enjoying it a lot. I'm playing a Summoner and my Eidolon is a giant rabbit with moose antlers, bat wings for forearms and a long serpent like tail.
I think it'd be much funnier for the party to meet one goblin that speaks in gobbligook and then later meet other goblins that speak totally normal. Turns out the first goblin can also speak normal, they just like fucking with people.
The good old latin American sheet rocker trick! I worked with a bunch of guys a on a construction site, they spoke English better than I do it being my first language, but when the OSHA guy or the foreman came around not one of them knew anything other than Spanish or very broken English, it was like a super power
Mine speak in the third person, but for religious reasons. So the players assumed theyre all dumb, until one spoke normally and just said 'I'm an athiest'.
What kind of religion are we talking about? Goblin Hivemind in which everyone is “we” unless referring to a specific facet of the hivemind, or one that celebrates individuality so extremely that saying one’s name at every opportunity was a must? Or am I way off and it’s just an aesthetic choice?
So sorta like how the Japanese adore puns and wordplay with their language but hardly any of it ever translates well. My favorite one being Japanese youths texting 39 as 'thank you'. Why does 39 mean thank you? Because in Japanese 3 = san, 9 = kyu 39 = san kyu which sounds like the english words Thank you spoken in a Japanese accent.
@@glenngriffon8032 I had a professor in college who was bald. Told us he was at a printer in Japan once, and though he couldn't remember the joke, it had something to do with god, paper, and hair. Lives in my head rent-free. XDD
@@glenngriffon8032 Yeah, that's a pun that requires two languages. I always liked the one in Black Butler, akumade vs akuma de. "I am simply a butler" and "I am a demon and a butler" (english equivalent, he just says he's one HELL of a butler. Truly does lose a little something in the translation.
Have both of them. Then introduce a 3rd goblin who can speak "normally". Then have one who mimes out everything. Then have another one who just writes down everything.
@@christmasspiritakagatekeep2308that's not a good time for the player who plays other character you need to make sure your party is okay with that because I for one would be really annoyed
In West of Loathing, the opposite is the case. You gain a rudimentary understanding of goblin, so all the goblins sound odd to you, but they're just speaking in a grammatical system your squishy human brain can't comprehend
I assume the grammar is just so different from that of your native language (with plenty of ways to conjugate and decline and otherwise “bend” words that simply don’t exist in any language you’re familiar with) that it feels totally alien.
@@Jw87563 thats my Goblin alchemist investigator. Apprenticed under an alchemist who got hired to forensics work in the city. Plays dumb most of the time, but is low key sherlock homes. The only thing stopping him is my terrible d20 rolls.
Then there's me, the Goblin Drunken Monk who says sayings...tinted with his alcoholism. 'A Bowl is most useful when it's empty, where else do you hold more ale!' 'Why's the rum gone? Oh yeah I drank it.' 'No need to cry over spilt beer. There's always more!'
I used a pixie that talked like the one dwarf from BG3 that lost his mind when he spoke in common. When the pixie spoke sylvan, it sounded like a poet.
In goblin: Dear sir, we must make haste. The fare maiden we are here to rescue is being taken to the dragons den. Are we not hereos? Now, let us charge forth to death or glory! Basic: Get girl and kill bad dwaggon. Aaaaaah!
In all of my campaigns Draconic is explicitly the noises that Alligators make unless you actually _speak_ draconic and can pick up the pronunciation under all the rumbling. Since most people can't make those noises the spoken words are a bit easier to pick out when most non-dragons are speaking draconic. Tabaxi can do a solid approximation of the rumblings, but not as loudly.
If I sound like I'm speaking Gobbledygook when I speak English, I give you permission to unalive me immediately. English being a second language for me.
@@livedandletdie Of course it doesn’t sound like you’re speaking anything other than English, any more than it does when I’m speaking English. We just probably have an accent.
I don't know, because English is my second language, and I've been told I'm pretty good at it. It depends on how long you've been speaking the language for.
I had this with... a non-goblin character. Basically he had an int of 5, which meant he wasn't very bright. But he'd learnt Goblin before common, so he'd sometimes turn to his Hobgoblin party member and explain what he wanted to say, so he could translate to common.
My polyglot time to shine! Character who speaks Common as second language: Making mistakes, mistranslaing idioms, accidentally using first language's grammar or pronunciation because it's been HOURS and my mouth's tired of the foreign sounds. Then I forget the term both in Common and Undercommon, but I still know it in Sylvan but words not wording!!! (Said character speaks to another in Primordial, second character understands but only knows the Orcish meaning of the concept. It's chaos)
Polyglot roleplayers unite! You see my FF character there in my pfp? He's like that. Common is his third language, after two mostly-dead ones. He first arrived in civilization in a pirate city, so he spent most of his first month or so shocking people by carpet-bombing them with swear words he thought were ordinary speech. His command of the language is now flawless, but he puts on the accent because it gives him an excuse to think his answers through more completely, and plead, "dis, dis is not my motherrr tongue, please to forrrrgive offense."
This reminds me of a heist I saw on the Just Roll With It podcast in their Riptide campaign. The Paladin was a triton so he spoke both Primordial and Common, the latter being something he learned because he was the prophesized "Chosen One" so he had to be able to communicate with surface-dwellers. The Artificer was a human, but she also knew Primordial because she had an education and took it as an elective. The party needed to infiltrate a palace so they could talk to the king, so they came up with a plan to dress the Paladin in fancy robes and introduce him as the King of the Undersea. However, they had a slight problem: the Paladin hates lying and refused to do so even for a good reason (the party had already experienced infighting because the Rogue kept lying to the Paladin about surface things because he thought it was funny). The solution? The Paladin would only speak in Primordial, and the Artificer would go with him as an official translator since almost no one speaks Primordial, and she could lie about what he was saying so he didn't have to. The session was quite hilarious, as the Paladin walked up to the front gate and said to the guard in Primordial "We are here to rob you!" and smiled. The Artificer then said in Common "His Majesty said 'I'm here to speak to the king!" and the guard opened the door. All throughout the castle, the Paladin would just talk about random stuff including his plans to rob the castle, and the Artificer would translate it as stuff about how beautiful the architecture was and how excited he was to meet with the king. The person who led them to the king's chambers was a priest with a really long name that I can't remember at the moment. He stopped in front of the door and told them "Here is the king. I will take my leave." The Artificer turned to the Paladin and repeated the message in Primordial. The Paladin said in Primordial "That's great! Hope you don't die when we rob you!" The Artificer turned back to him and said in Common "He says 'Have a blessed day, priest.'" The whole table was dying of laughter.
@@SpeedyCheetahCub Imagine if one retainer knew Primordial because of an adventurer friend, and communicated the guards with the Paladin's real plans. They're let in into the main room, and get ambushed. Then the servant steps forward and says something in Primordial. "So wonderful to have you here, your Majesty! :)"
@@amjthe_paleosquare9399 That sounds like their luck. Surprisingly, this time their plan actually worked! Normally they run into these types of problems, but the DM is very fair and he had already decided that this kingdom didn't know that much about tritons at all, especially considering the Paladin was pretending to be a king while the Undersea was actually ruled by the four Elders.
In Dungeon Meshi, one of the characters is a Kobold. Most people assume he's stupid, but he's actually learning common from his team's leader, and is really intelligent--he just can't communicate that via language. He is also basically a dog, so you know, he'll do dog things too. But I like the idea that a lot of "lesser" races are actually equally intelligent, just may have less cumulative knowledge as a species or have difficulty communicating in common.
I have a French-speaking friend who plays as a goblin with some English-speaking people online. They do not understand a lick of French, and my friend's English is not too bad, considering it's his second language. My friend will speak in "Common" (English) with his normal, fairly heavy accent with other players, but he will simply speak French when he speaks "Goblin." French (Québècois French, at that) is the language of the goblins.
This reminds me of the goblins in west of loathing where since our character only learns the basics of goblin language the goblin companion he goes with talks in a very broken english but when we meet another guy who were fluent in goblin he translated goblin in a very well articulated way
...I'm sorry, I didn't understand when you spoke Goblin there at the end, but it sounded GREAT. Seriously, though, gobbiespeak is always fun to work with. I've got a couple campaigns in a setting where goblins mash together two to three words on the regular. For example: "Welcome to our city! Uplanders can become citizens if togetherwork for all-benefit. Meanwhile, uplander must be care-taking not to blindwalk into gobbie-boom-cauldron! Bigboom, firedoom!"
This is exactly what I do with my Lizardfolk fighter, Green. He speaks broken ass Common, talks in third person, and can't be bothered to learn to speak better even by his Elf love interest. Even his name, Green, is because when someone first asked what he is, he just looked at his body and said green. However, he's actually a rather intelligent man (INT of 13) and writes poetry in Draconic. Since the whole party doesn't read, write, or speak Draconic, they all assume he's making chicken scratching and worshiping the Lizardfolk gods. He does pray to Semuanya, but he never corrects them because he's still a Lizarfolk and just cannot be bothered.
@@jamesharding3459 It's a book, that's why I included the author's name. I got it from a library, there is an entire series with of all the Star Wars movies.
The current troupe of goblins infesting my battleboards are 5 absolute idiots who wreak havoc in cartoonishly stupid ways and one well-spoken Goblin Union Confederation rep who is constantly spouting socialist talking points and apologizing for his colleagues’ behavior.
Hey, it’s not like socialism is a terrible ideology that has had exclusively harmful effects on every society it has been implemented in, without exception. Oh wait…
We had 2 characters, aperol and spritz (pirate theme and all characters had booze related names) who were super stupid (the dumb, exploited by the villain kind). Later was "revealed" (more retconned but it didn't matter) that they forgot their universal translator and they actually were super smart
In general, I absolutely love watching people who are speaking a language they don't speak very well switch back to their native language. I don't have to understand a word they're saying to sense the relief of speaking a language they're actually comfortable with. It just makes me so happy for them.
My version of the goblin language just sounds like a series of belches to the common ear, but translates very formally. Also thievescant is incredibly polite and verbose
I imagine that Thieves' Cant is more like a bunch of phrases in common, mixed with a few seemingly nonsense words that have very specific meanings, which to an outside observer don't particularly mean anything but to whose in the know it makes perfect sense.
@@aquamarinerose5405it’s basically like listening to some guys discuss an extremely rules heavy war game with a large and active community. “So the AP 0 means you’re limited to blobs of GEQs, but the 24 S 6 shots means you’re definitely chewing up those tarpits”
In divinity original sin 2 the goblin race got whipped out (I can't remember why) but they were literally the smartest race and built machines to find the awnser to the universe
Well, it depends on the goblin: the one from the small village in the wildlands should speak with a broken, nasal common (and like a normal person in goblin), the dude that lives in the city speaks in a thick joisey accent...and the barmaid speaks like a tiny, squeaky Jessica Rabbit: "I'm not bad, I'm just sultry and green (bounce)" The last one is because I know exactly what my players want - and they want three feet of buxom green hottie with sharp teeth and big ears.
Sounds like the Murlocks in Wrath of The Lich King where their attempts to speak common or orcish sound like a drowning toddler (they're piranhas with money limbs) but they're language is eloquent despite sounding like gurgling.
Now I'm just remembering the Murloc Stormcaller card from Hearthstone, where the flavor text is: The Elements respond to any call, even if that call is "MURRGRULLLARGGH!"
I had a Goliath Barbarian that I played for a year going from lv2 to 13, she spoke in typical "Me hit this hard, you follow" style speech when roleplaying. However, about 6 months into play I started to speak Giant to an NPC in a perfectly articulate british accent. Gigus was not stupid, Common was just his 3rd language.
First Character I built for my brother, a Ranger with Goblinoids as a Favored Enemy. knew the Goblin language - the party encounters Goblins, Bugbears, and Hobgoblins - can you say, Chit-Chat, all things between them are good, or at least good enough to not cause any fights.
That’s what happened in my game! A goblin who only spoke broken common was hilarious, but the moment there was another goblin, the suave British accent would come out!
Goblins only grasping the core element of common actually sounds amazing. Especially for a wizard or artificer who should seem smart but ends up sounding dumb.
My campeign has a grung that only speaks grung- no common. He’s kinda the joke character until one day we cast comprehend languages in him and he turns out to be a deep voiced chad that proceeds to talk our way out of every situation. In short- peak
@@deathhawk300 To use the common European framework of reference for languages, he might be at a B1 (“threshold”) level in Common, but when speaking Giant he’s at a C2 (“mastery”) level.
Made a character like that He was a lawyer (paladin oath crown), But his first language was dwarf and so in common he'd speak with the roughest scottish brouge and be very all over the place and just messy in speaking, But in dwarvish, very eloquent and beautifully spoken, his dwarvish, fluent and uneering and very well pronounced So most times he'd only be able to represent in dwarven courts
In my current PF campaign the regional goblins have regional accents. One PC is a gobbo from the region, while another gobbo grew up with humans and has a common accent. They realized something with an NPC was off because he didn't have either accent when I was talking as him.
I once had a goblin that struggled to speak common and it always frustrated him so he looked made all the time but later one of the party members revealed they knew goblin and with the biggest sign of relief the goblin starts speaking normally and lost his entire temper
Even if he continued to mostly speak Common due to it being the only language that everyone knew, having one person who could help translate if he didn’t know the Common word he needed would be a great help.
That is the thing with my Druid Amara. She thinks and speaks fluently in Druidic, just absolutely brilliant. Her common is jangled and stilted because she's literally having to translate everything from Druidic into common. For her trying to talk in common is very frustrating, so she spends a lot of time being quiet.
I have sparingly used this trick though not on Goblins. Some NPCs speak broken English which is common but suddenly if you talk to them in their native language, they speak fluently with almost perfect grammar.
The players in my current dnd campaign have freed a female goblin slave (very homebrew) and now she’s the groups pet/child/friend thing and she speaks in 3rd person and she stays hidden from the public under the barbs clothes so they’ll just be talking to a merchant and out of nowhere the goblin just shimmy’s her way out of his clothes and freaks out all the npcs
My goblin barbarian is actually terrible at Goblin because she was originally an orc and got reincarnated (happened before the campaige, she doesn't remember being an orc). So she is super fluent in Orcish, Sphinx, Varki, and Common but sucks ass at actually speaking Goblin. We had a adventure take us to the middle of a goblin wedding (in the middle of the god damn amber temble) and they are tried to speak to her in goblin and my party got to hear me stumblr through words in a terrible slavic accent for 15 minutes.
i always loved the idea of a character that speaks only a broken version of the common spoken language, but it's a genius in reality or intelligent enough to speak a really good natal language (above the average person)
Reminds me of a game where we were Starfinders who crash landed in a different universe. We thought we were the only survivors but turned out there was a whole colony of goblins who also travelled here from our universe and they became genius space ship engineers through sheer trial and error and were later recruited into the starfinder branch we started and made up the majority of our forces.
I did this with a charming little divination wizard / rogue named Greef Fleekman. Greef was a little scoundrel, broken common, everyone thought he was kind of dumb. But his 20 intelligence really shone through with how eloquent he was in goblin
My husband did exactly this for one of our campaigns with a(self proclaimed) goblin King. One of our party spoke goblin, and anytime they interacted in his own language he was so elegant and posh. All hail King Gralsk!
This is actually something I do with one of my characters! A Tiefling Artificer who was adopted and raised by Goblins, he speaks fairly good Common (he was a snake oil salesman at one point in his life and had to get very good at Common to make that work), and when speaking Goblin he's the most eloquent and well spoken person in the room. I haven't gotten to flex that much yet, but it Will come up at some point and it will be glorious
This is why people love Styx. Just a jaded little wisecracking goblin who loves winking at the camera. He's like House but from brooklyn and breaking the fourth wall.
I personally think that the west of loathing (video game) is great to take inspiration from for the goblins because the way the goblins speak in that is pure gold
I did this for a Gnoll Barbarian once. He spoke in extremely broken common, but when he spoke in his native language, he sounded like a British gentleman.
Goblins in my world incorporated themselves with gnomes early on, and as such are very technologically savvy. One player is a Goblin, and her brother lead the robotics division of the local military prior to the world dying. (Now he is being held prisoner after having his tongue removed via torture for helping the party.)
In common: “Gobbo made lair go BOOM!” In Goblin: “Indeed, I, Gobbo, have mistaken the proper amounts of sulfuric acid and have created a minor fire in our hideout. My apologies, I shall readjust my calculations in the future.”
Reminds me of a one-shot I took part in, side note, this took place in Germany and everyone spoke German. One guy played a dwarf that spoke common so incomprehensible, nobody understood anything, so my character asked him to repeat it in dwarvish, and he brings out an honestly impressive british accent with perfect english on the table and from then on, dwarvish was always equivalent to English.
Not a goblin, but he was an outcast minor noble from a foreign land. Hiding out, he learned common from "simple country folk" and spoke like "Dagnabbit, I gall durn got mule pucky all over my gall durn boots!". But in his native tongue "Madam, welcome to my humble but sufficient castle upon wheels. Well met! Please enter within and warm yourself over this simple dish of hearty stew." The other players were stunned into silence. They had only heard him speaking "common" for months.
I remember creating a grung monk which is basically a frog person. I used him in a campaign and several one shots but in the middle of the campaign I realized something he didn’t know common so for all the times I tried to talk I was just making weird frog noises instead of actually talking 😂
I had a Wild-Elf barbarian character years ago, that spoke common so terribly that people assumed he had a head injury. But if they spoke with him in Elven he just sounded like a regular guy :)
Smolders in biochemist is crazy
Complete with Smarm Eyebrows. It's not complete without the Smarm Eyebrows.
😏😏😏
Very
Senku😂
I immediately think of Dwayne Johnson
To humans, the goblin has a very round head. To goblins, it has the perfect jawline.
Which is odd, considering the Goblins are known to be rather angular
@@AmazingAutist Pathfinder Goblins are Football-Headed. Disappointed no one named one "Arnold"....if anyone got that reference. YES!
While in other fantasy lore, they are very angular.
If he isn’t a chibi to gang but a well-dressed savant to the people, it’s insane.
@@AmazingAutist yeah the pathfinder ones are more like little bulbous sharks instead of the more classic depiction
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410I honestly really love a lot of the designs for Pathfinder monsters. I'm currently in my first PF2 campaign, I've been really enjoying it a lot. I'm playing a Summoner and my Eidolon is a giant rabbit with moose antlers, bat wings for forearms and a long serpent like tail.
I think it'd be much funnier for the party to meet one goblin that speaks in gobbligook and then later meet other goblins that speak totally normal. Turns out the first goblin can also speak normal, they just like fucking with people.
stop stealing my ideas!!! Also, isn't that Crod's whole bit?
Ah yes...the Yoda approach :D
I've done that.
The good old latin American sheet rocker trick! I worked with a bunch of guys a on a construction site, they spoke English better than I do it being my first language, but when the OSHA guy or the foreman came around not one of them knew anything other than Spanish or very broken English, it was like a super power
@@connorbierer5843 stolen this I have going to use it I am
Mine speak in the third person, but for religious reasons. So the players assumed theyre all dumb, until one spoke normally and just said 'I'm an athiest'.
LMAO
Lmao, that's genius😂
What kind of religion are we talking about? Goblin Hivemind in which everyone is “we” unless referring to a specific facet of the hivemind, or one that celebrates individuality so extremely that saying one’s name at every opportunity was a must? Or am I way off and it’s just an aesthetic choice?
@@riverstein7251 Lol thats genius
@@riverstein7251 Third person means using their own name. I can't speak to anything else about it though.
I think all the goblins in my setting are going to tell puns that only work in goblin and don’t work in common.
So sorta like how the Japanese adore puns and wordplay with their language but hardly any of it ever translates well.
My favorite one being Japanese youths texting 39 as 'thank you'. Why does 39 mean thank you? Because in Japanese 3 = san, 9 = kyu
39 = san kyu which sounds like the english words Thank you spoken in a Japanese accent.
@@glenngriffon8032 I had a professor in college who was bald. Told us he was at a printer in Japan once, and though he couldn't remember the joke, it had something to do with god, paper, and hair. Lives in my head rent-free. XDD
@@MusicLoverGurl god, paper and hair are all "kami" in japanese so it will be somethign to do with that
@@Candlemancer Yeah, he was my Japanese professor, so that's why he mentioned it.
@@glenngriffon8032 Yeah, that's a pun that requires two languages. I always liked the one in Black Butler, akumade vs akuma de. "I am simply a butler" and "I am a demon and a butler" (english equivalent, he just says he's one HELL of a butler. Truly does lose a little something in the translation.
Have both of them. Then introduce a 3rd goblin who can speak "normally". Then have one who mimes out everything. Then have another one who just writes down everything.
I fear you missed the best thing here. Both are the same goblin. The difference is when they try to talk in common vs their native language x)))
@@batattack6432exactly, the normal talking is in a different exotic language that they took because half of their text-books were written in it.
then the goblin that believes that written things will steal their soul so they burn the everything the other writes down
@@christmasspiritakagatekeep2308that's not a good time for the player who plays other character you need to make sure your party is okay with that because I for one would be really annoyed
And the one that mimes pulls stuff their leader requests out of his mouth
In West of Loathing, the opposite is the case. You gain a rudimentary understanding of goblin, so all the goblins sound odd to you, but they're just speaking in a grammatical system your squishy human brain can't comprehend
I was looking for a comment about this! Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought of this. ^_^
*holding spitoon as a bean slinger with the spitoon hat * " me am happy very mutch in the finding of spit hat " (I love this spitoon hat )
The of Loathing Goblins are great.
A deliciousness
I assume the grammar is just so different from that of your native language (with plenty of ways to conjugate and decline and otherwise “bend” words that simply don’t exist in any language you’re familiar with) that it feels totally alien.
Tucker's Kobolds' dialogue basically translate into "Contact left", "Fall back to Sector Four", and "Tango's down".
don't you remind me about the kobolds
I understood that reference.
That story will never get old, no matter how much time has passed.
😂
@@MemoristCed much like the many, many characters that had to go up against them.
Don't forget the Goblin who plays it up so people underestimate him.
Columbo in goblin form when?
That's a great idea for a character.
@@Jw87563 thats my Goblin alchemist investigator. Apprenticed under an alchemist who got hired to forensics work in the city. Plays dumb most of the time, but is low key sherlock homes. The only thing stopping him is my terrible d20 rolls.
Santiago New Vegas
Then there's me, the Goblin Drunken Monk who says sayings...tinted with his alcoholism.
'A Bowl is most useful when it's empty, where else do you hold more ale!'
'Why's the rum gone? Oh yeah I drank it.'
'No need to cry over spilt beer. There's always more!'
I used a pixie that talked like the one dwarf from BG3 that lost his mind when he spoke in common. When the pixie spoke sylvan, it sounded like a poet.
BIBBERBANG
Tolkien invented an entire language to achieve this.
D&D players: "he isnt speaking english"
"but he is?"
"NO HE ISNT"
In goblin: Dear sir, we must make haste. The fare maiden we are here to rescue is being taken to the dragons den. Are we not hereos? Now, let us charge forth to death or glory! Basic: Get girl and kill bad dwaggon. Aaaaaah!
*Fair maiden
@@joedoe7572 That's fare
I did the opposite with a dragon. It spoke deeply and menacingly in common but was very high-pitched and excitable in draconic.
Being formally educated in a second language, but naturally educated in your native is exactly this.
For some reason, my group decided that aussie was the proper accent for draconic. The kobold and dragonborn just swear at eachother constantly now
I feel like if anyone has an Australian accent, it's Drow.
I mean they are from down under
In all of my campaigns Draconic is explicitly the noises that Alligators make unless you actually _speak_ draconic and can pick up the pronunciation under all the rumbling.
Since most people can't make those noises the spoken words are a bit easier to pick out when most non-dragons are speaking draconic. Tabaxi can do a solid approximation of the rumblings, but not as loudly.
@@aquamarinerose5405 Under-Common is just Australian English.
Is there an Over-Common?
Sunny Side Up Common?
I mean that’s how people sound when speaking a second language irl
Of course, the degree to which this is the case varies significantly depending on how fluent they are in their second language.
If I sound like I'm speaking Gobbledygook when I speak English, I give you permission to unalive me immediately.
English being a second language for me.
@@livedandletdie
Of course it doesn’t sound like you’re speaking anything other than English, any more than it does when I’m speaking English. We just probably have an accent.
I don't know, because English is my second language, and I've been told I'm pretty good at it. It depends on how long you've been speaking the language for.
I had this with... a non-goblin character. Basically he had an int of 5, which meant he wasn't very bright. But he'd learnt Goblin before common, so he'd sometimes turn to his Hobgoblin party member and explain what he wanted to say, so he could translate to common.
My polyglot time to shine!
Character who speaks Common as second language: Making mistakes, mistranslaing idioms, accidentally using first language's grammar or pronunciation because it's been HOURS and my mouth's tired of the foreign sounds. Then I forget the term both in Common and Undercommon, but I still know it in Sylvan but words not wording!!!
(Said character speaks to another in Primordial, second character understands but only knows the Orcish meaning of the concept. It's chaos)
Polyglot roleplayers unite!
You see my FF character there in my pfp? He's like that. Common is his third language, after two mostly-dead ones.
He first arrived in civilization in a pirate city, so he spent most of his first month or so shocking people by carpet-bombing them with swear words he thought were ordinary speech. His command of the language is now flawless, but he puts on the accent because it gives him an excuse to think his answers through more completely, and plead, "dis, dis is not my motherrr tongue, please to forrrrgive offense."
This reminds me of a heist I saw on the Just Roll With It podcast in their Riptide campaign. The Paladin was a triton so he spoke both Primordial and Common, the latter being something he learned because he was the prophesized "Chosen One" so he had to be able to communicate with surface-dwellers. The Artificer was a human, but she also knew Primordial because she had an education and took it as an elective. The party needed to infiltrate a palace so they could talk to the king, so they came up with a plan to dress the Paladin in fancy robes and introduce him as the King of the Undersea. However, they had a slight problem: the Paladin hates lying and refused to do so even for a good reason (the party had already experienced infighting because the Rogue kept lying to the Paladin about surface things because he thought it was funny). The solution? The Paladin would only speak in Primordial, and the Artificer would go with him as an official translator since almost no one speaks Primordial, and she could lie about what he was saying so he didn't have to.
The session was quite hilarious, as the Paladin walked up to the front gate and said to the guard in Primordial "We are here to rob you!" and smiled. The Artificer then said in Common "His Majesty said 'I'm here to speak to the king!" and the guard opened the door. All throughout the castle, the Paladin would just talk about random stuff including his plans to rob the castle, and the Artificer would translate it as stuff about how beautiful the architecture was and how excited he was to meet with the king. The person who led them to the king's chambers was a priest with a really long name that I can't remember at the moment. He stopped in front of the door and told them "Here is the king. I will take my leave." The Artificer turned to the Paladin and repeated the message in Primordial. The Paladin said in Primordial "That's great! Hope you don't die when we rob you!" The Artificer turned back to him and said in Common "He says 'Have a blessed day, priest.'" The whole table was dying of laughter.
@@SpeedyCheetahCub Imagine if one retainer knew Primordial because of an adventurer friend, and communicated the guards with the Paladin's real plans.
They're let in into the main room, and get ambushed. Then the servant steps forward and says something in Primordial.
"So wonderful to have you here, your Majesty! :)"
@@amjthe_paleosquare9399 That sounds like their luck. Surprisingly, this time their plan actually worked! Normally they run into these types of problems, but the DM is very fair and he had already decided that this kingdom didn't know that much about tritons at all, especially considering the Paladin was pretending to be a king while the Undersea was actually ruled by the four Elders.
And when you introduce Primordial it can get even weirder, since Primordial is made of four mutually intelligible but totally distinct dialects
Goblin party member has two personas. Moka, well spoken journalist and Cut-Cut, the feral axe wielding tornado of death.
He's great.
Cut-Cut knows how to party! :)
Yep, this is now Canon for any less than immediately aggressive goblins in any game I run.
Why not make wild goblins sound like Cave guy?
**smolders in biochemistry 😂
I have a Gnoll who speaks broken common, but sounds like an British aristocrat when he speaks gnolls or undercommon.
In Dungeon Meshi, one of the characters is a Kobold. Most people assume he's stupid, but he's actually learning common from his team's leader, and is really intelligent--he just can't communicate that via language. He is also basically a dog, so you know, he'll do dog things too. But I like the idea that a lot of "lesser" races are actually equally intelligent, just may have less cumulative knowledge as a species or have difficulty communicating in common.
I think this is also a case of how weird the idea of "intelligence" in D&D is. It's a degree of mental acuity, but is also about book-learning.
@@aquamarinerose5405
It shares that flaw with IQ test scores.
Anyone who thinks kobolds are dumb has never been trapped in a kobold den. Those little bastards are like Vietkong on crack
I have a French-speaking friend who plays as a goblin with some English-speaking people online. They do not understand a lick of French, and my friend's English is not too bad, considering it's his second language.
My friend will speak in "Common" (English) with his normal, fairly heavy accent with other players, but he will simply speak French when he speaks "Goblin."
French (Québècois French, at that) is the language of the goblins.
Just like IRL, fantastic immersion
I’m sure many Canadians and French would agree goblin probably is very similar to Quebecois
@@mcarrowtime7095 As I Québècois myself, I can confidently confirm that we speak goblin
My kobold is like this actually, she speaks slowly and haltingly in common but in draconic is quite eloquent
@@mariowario23
It’s entirely normal to speak slower in a non-native language, so that makes sense
This reminds me of the goblins in west of loathing where since our character only learns the basics of goblin language the goblin companion he goes with talks in a very broken english but when we meet another guy who were fluent in goblin he translated goblin in a very well articulated way
...I'm sorry, I didn't understand when you spoke Goblin there at the end, but it sounded GREAT.
Seriously, though, gobbiespeak is always fun to work with. I've got a couple campaigns in a setting where goblins mash together two to three words on the regular. For example: "Welcome to our city! Uplanders can become citizens if togetherwork for all-benefit. Meanwhile, uplander must be care-taking not to blindwalk into gobbie-boom-cauldron! Bigboom, firedoom!"
Oh god now I just hear the FFXIV Goblins. I love Gobbiespeak, its so funny.
@@wilcowhiteheart807 Bigeyes! Gobbie has happyfeels from widehearted uplander words!
So goblins are Skaven?
So, your goblins speak Sparra? (If you'vre read Redwall this makes sense)
@@katherinepurvin7802 Not my goblins; it's just a setting I'm using that already has Gobbiespeak established.
This is exactly what I do with my Lizardfolk fighter, Green.
He speaks broken ass Common, talks in third person, and can't be bothered to learn to speak better even by his Elf love interest. Even his name, Green, is because when someone first asked what he is, he just looked at his body and said green. However, he's actually a rather intelligent man (INT of 13) and writes poetry in Draconic. Since the whole party doesn't read, write, or speak Draconic, they all assume he's making chicken scratching and worshiping the Lizardfolk gods. He does pray to Semuanya, but he never corrects them because he's still a Lizarfolk and just cannot be bothered.
MY PLAYER IS AN ORC WHO DOES THIS 😂😂😂 In common he's broken and slow, in orc he sounds like Vision/Jarvis
I love this idea especially if he's like a warrior-poet or philosopher in orcish but everyone assumes he's just a dumb brute
In "The Empire Striketh Back" Ian Doescher has elegant translations (in iambic pentameter) for all of Chewbacca's grunts and roars.
I need a link for that, that sounds amazing
@@jamesharding3459 It's a book, that's why I included the author's name. I got it from a library, there is an entire series with of all the Star Wars movies.
The current troupe of goblins infesting my battleboards are 5 absolute idiots who wreak havoc in cartoonishly stupid ways and one well-spoken Goblin Union Confederation rep who is constantly spouting socialist talking points and apologizing for his colleagues’ behavior.
So...six absolute idiots, but one of them has more decorum than the rest?
Man saw the word socialist and a switch flipped in his robot brain
Hey, it’s not like socialism is a terrible ideology that has had exclusively harmful effects on every society it has been implemented in, without exception. Oh wait…
What's the genius doing with the others, then?
We had 2 characters, aperol and spritz (pirate theme and all characters had booze related names) who were super stupid (the dumb, exploited by the villain kind).
Later was "revealed" (more retconned but it didn't matter) that they forgot their universal translator and they actually were super smart
It's really terrifying how easy it is to isolate and exploit people who don't speak the local language, isn't it?
@@MemoristCed for sure
Smoldering intensifies
In general, I absolutely love watching people who are speaking a language they don't speak very well switch back to their native language. I don't have to understand a word they're saying to sense the relief of speaking a language they're actually comfortable with. It just makes me so happy for them.
My version of the goblin language just sounds like a series of belches to the common ear, but translates very formally.
Also thievescant is incredibly polite and verbose
I imagine that Thieves' Cant is more like a bunch of phrases in common, mixed with a few seemingly nonsense words that have very specific meanings, which to an outside observer don't particularly mean anything but to whose in the know it makes perfect sense.
@@aquamarinerose5405it’s basically like listening to some guys discuss an extremely rules heavy war game with a large and active community. “So the AP 0 means you’re limited to blobs of GEQs, but the 24 S 6 shots means you’re definitely chewing up those tarpits”
@@PikachuLittle You. You get it.
this is just the elites in halo lmao
In divinity original sin 2 the goblin race got whipped out (I can't remember why) but they were literally the smartest race and built machines to find the awnser to the universe
Well, it depends on the goblin: the one from the small village in the wildlands should speak with a broken, nasal common (and like a normal person in goblin), the dude that lives in the city speaks in a thick joisey accent...and the barmaid speaks like a tiny, squeaky Jessica Rabbit: "I'm not bad, I'm just sultry and green (bounce)"
The last one is because I know exactly what my players want - and they want three feet of buxom green hottie with sharp teeth and big ears.
Sounds like the Murlocks in Wrath of The Lich King where their attempts to speak common or orcish sound like a drowning toddler (they're piranhas with money limbs) but they're language is eloquent despite sounding like gurgling.
Now I'm just remembering the Murloc Stormcaller card from Hearthstone, where the flavor text is: The Elements respond to any call, even if that call is "MURRGRULLLARGGH!"
This is how my Jawa character acts
I had a Goliath Barbarian that I played for a year going from lv2 to 13, she spoke in typical "Me hit this hard, you follow" style speech when roleplaying.
However, about 6 months into play I started to speak Giant to an NPC in a perfectly articulate british accent.
Gigus was not stupid, Common was just his 3rd language.
This is literally just Heavy Weapons Guy but goblin (he has a doctorate in Russian Literature)
First Character I built for my brother, a Ranger with Goblinoids as a Favored Enemy. knew the Goblin language - the party encounters Goblins, Bugbears, and Hobgoblins - can you say, Chit-Chat, all things between them are good, or at least good enough to not cause any fights.
That’s what happened in my game! A goblin who only spoke broken common was hilarious, but the moment there was another goblin, the suave British accent would come out!
Holy shit Zac's voice and voice acting is SMOOTH!
I love this channel!
Goblins only grasping the core element of common actually sounds amazing. Especially for a wizard or artificer who should seem smart but ends up sounding dumb.
My campeign has a grung that only speaks grung- no common. He’s kinda the joke character until one day we cast comprehend languages in him and he turns out to be a deep voiced chad that proceeds to talk our way out of every situation. In short- peak
We have a PC who’s a Goliath. That’s him. He speaks broken, but when speaking giant is beyond fluent.
@@deathhawk300
To use the common European framework of reference for languages, he might be at a B1 (“threshold”) level in Common, but when speaking Giant he’s at a C2 (“mastery”) level.
Made a character like that
He was a lawyer (paladin oath crown),
But his first language was dwarf and so in common he'd speak with the roughest scottish brouge and be very all over the place and just messy in speaking,
But in dwarvish, very eloquent and beautifully spoken, his dwarvish, fluent and uneering and very well pronounced
So most times he'd only be able to represent in dwarven courts
In my current PF campaign the regional goblins have regional accents. One PC is a gobbo from the region, while another gobbo grew up with humans and has a common accent. They realized something with an NPC was off because he didn't have either accent when I was talking as him.
Smouldering in biochemistry means that your skin is about to start burning
I once had a goblin that struggled to speak common and it always frustrated him so he looked made all the time but later one of the party members revealed they knew goblin and with the biggest sign of relief the goblin starts speaking normally and lost his entire temper
Even if he continued to mostly speak Common due to it being the only language that everyone knew, having one person who could help translate if he didn’t know the Common word he needed would be a great help.
That is the thing with my Druid Amara. She thinks and speaks fluently in Druidic, just absolutely brilliant. Her common is jangled and stilted because she's literally having to translate everything from Druidic into common. For her trying to talk in common is very frustrating, so she spends a lot of time being quiet.
I have sparingly used this trick though not on Goblins. Some NPCs speak broken English which is common but suddenly if you talk to them in their native language, they speak fluently with almost perfect grammar.
The players in my current dnd campaign have freed a female goblin slave (very homebrew) and now she’s the groups pet/child/friend thing and she speaks in 3rd person and she stays hidden from the public under the barbs clothes so they’ll just be talking to a merchant and out of nowhere the goblin just shimmy’s her way out of his clothes and freaks out all the npcs
BRILLIANT! That would add a HUGE amount to the characters!
I have a Half-Orc barbarian alchemist. She speaks fluent common, mainly because she has a 17 in Int, and 10 Wis. Her lowest stat is 6 charisma.
My goblin barbarian is actually terrible at Goblin because she was originally an orc and got reincarnated (happened before the campaige, she doesn't remember being an orc). So she is super fluent in Orcish, Sphinx, Varki, and Common but sucks ass at actually speaking Goblin. We had a adventure take us to the middle of a goblin wedding (in the middle of the god damn amber temble) and they are tried to speak to her in goblin and my party got to hear me stumblr through words in a terrible slavic accent for 15 minutes.
"THIS IS WHAT TORBEK SOUNDS LIKE?!?!?"
"Torbek is refined, Torbek is sophisticated"
- inner Torbek
i always loved the idea of a character that speaks only a broken version of the common spoken language, but it's a genius in reality or intelligent enough to speak a really good natal language (above the average person)
Basically all of the FF14 goblins lmao
Gobbiekind thanks you for truthspeaking, uplander!
Reminds me of a game where we were Starfinders who crash landed in a different universe. We thought we were the only survivors but turned out there was a whole colony of goblins who also travelled here from our universe and they became genius space ship engineers through sheer trial and error and were later recruited into the starfinder branch we started and made up the majority of our forces.
I like having a clan of Goblins that focus on Psychic Subclasses like Soulknife and Psi Warrior. I call them Mudduck.
My DM's goblins speak German, which is the closest real world equivalent we could think of that would sound like goblin.
I did this with a charming little divination wizard / rogue named Greef Fleekman. Greef was a little scoundrel, broken common, everyone thought he was kind of dumb. But his 20 intelligence really shone through with how eloquent he was in goblin
I love that idea and i always believed that goblins arent necessarely dumb
Thats how i imagine any one who barely speaks a new language but knows just enough to get a point across
Goblin linguistic scholar who speaks with a heavy goblin accent to make everyone else more comfortable.
The truth of what's missed here is the opportunity of saying goblindygook....
Nah, gobbodygook!
My husband did exactly this for one of our campaigns with a(self proclaimed) goblin King. One of our party spoke goblin, and anytime they interacted in his own language he was so elegant and posh. All hail King Gralsk!
XD this idea definitely came from the DnD party watching Gremlins 2 and seeing the charming suave gremlin as he did interviews
Noppe Gobbo is shouting gibberish while waving your arms like an inflatable tube man
I love this. It absolutely makes sense.
My dnd character writes like a toddler in common but writes in extra fancy cursive in goblin
This is actually something I do with one of my characters! A Tiefling Artificer who was adopted and raised by Goblins, he speaks fairly good Common (he was a snake oil salesman at one point in his life and had to get very good at Common to make that work), and when speaking Goblin he's the most eloquent and well spoken person in the room. I haven't gotten to flex that much yet, but it Will come up at some point and it will be glorious
Got that biochem rizz 🫦
Gonna use this idea for a goblin character
This is why people love Styx. Just a jaded little wisecracking goblin who loves winking at the camera. He's like House but from brooklyn and breaking the fourth wall.
I love how you use the instrumental for nosebleed section such a underrated song
*smolders in biochemistry* had me rolling on the floor 💀
I personally think that the west of loathing (video game) is great to take inspiration from for the goblins because the way the goblins speak in that is pure gold
This is like in Fallout when two characters with 1 INT suddenly talk suavely and intelligently
"My good sire, it seems to me that you dropped your dagger"
"AHH!"
"SIR could you not"
Gobbo in common sounds like he came out of Warcraft 3 😂
My kobold sorcerer is like this, he speaks broken common in short sentences but speaks eloquently in draconic.
Speaking in gobbligook has the same vibe as dumping all your INT point in New Vegas before talking to the one of the dirty hobos slumming in Freeside
I did this for a Gnoll Barbarian once. He spoke in extremely broken common, but when he spoke in his native language, he sounded like a British gentleman.
Goblins in my world incorporated themselves with gnomes early on, and as such are very technologically savvy. One player is a Goblin, and her brother lead the robotics division of the local military prior to the world dying. (Now he is being held prisoner after having his tongue removed via torture for helping the party.)
One of my party members is like this, she speaks in very broken common but is the smoothest talker in orcish
In common: “Gobbo made lair go BOOM!”
In Goblin: “Indeed, I, Gobbo, have mistaken the proper amounts of sulfuric acid and have created a minor fire in our hideout. My apologies, I shall readjust my calculations in the future.”
There is literally a spell for Goblins in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay that does this exact thing.
The squirrel from hoodwinked
Reminds me of a one-shot I took part in, side note, this took place in Germany and everyone spoke German. One guy played a dwarf that spoke common so incomprehensible, nobody understood anything, so my character asked him to repeat it in dwarvish, and he brings out an honestly impressive british accent with perfect english on the table and from then on, dwarvish was always equivalent to English.
Not a goblin, but he was an outcast minor noble from a foreign land. Hiding out, he learned common from "simple country folk" and spoke like "Dagnabbit, I gall durn got mule pucky all over my gall durn boots!". But in his native tongue "Madam, welcome to my humble but sufficient castle upon wheels. Well met! Please enter within and warm yourself over this simple dish of hearty stew." The other players were stunned into silence. They had only heard him speaking "common" for months.
I remember creating a grung monk which is basically a frog person. I used him in a campaign and several one shots but in the middle of the campaign I realized something he didn’t know common so for all the times I tried to talk I was just making weird frog noises instead of actually talking 😂
That's... actually really dang good.
It is the best way to ever make npcs
I had a Wild-Elf barbarian character years ago, that spoke common so terribly that people assumed he had a head injury. But if they spoke with him in Elven he just sounded like a regular guy :)
Goblin rolled a nat 20 in the charisma check
I once played a mad scientist that talked like a Skaven on Crack, but when they telepathically communicated it was clear, concise, and focused.