So! When writing Arena of the Goblin, I started with two ideas.
The first was to create a monster that really got in your face, with the opportunity for desperate hand-to-hand combat against a superior foe. I was looking for a theme for my annual Halloween slasher after running the excellent Vibechete (Hull Breach Vol. 1) the previous year, as well as thinking about what my take on Mothership’s goblin meme might be (much appreciation to Discord and There is a Goblin on the Loose in Icarus Station for the goblinspiration).
There is something really unsettling about the maniac with a knife. We are hard-wired to be careful and vigilant around blades, and they are scary weapons, even for the wielder – see the reluctance of soldiers to use bayonets versus guns. Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking editing jobs I ever did was a research paper about a knife attack at a school. Amid our day-to-day comfort, we try to put it out of our mind how much of a disadvantage we are against those armed and motivated to hurt us. It is a terrifying prospect but also an opportunity for heroism and survival against all odds.
But, what is a goblin doing in space? This is where the second idea came in. If you realistically wanted to make a goblin, you would need money, resources, advanced bioengineering… and all of that for what purpose?
BINGO, *Spoiler*
You wanted to be The Goblin (Goblin Mode!).
Instant villain, who of course would not play fair, which then provides the infrastructure for the various conceits that follow to make Arena of the Goblin both a gripping one-shot, campaign intro, and a high-lethality/low-consequence drop-in (perhaps answering the question of “What happens when your worst enemies catch up with you?”).
From that point on, the adventure basically wrote itself, as I had an immediate picture of the retro aesthetic I wanted. One of the first DnD modules I read was Legions of Thyatis, a Roman-inspired scenario from which the map of the arena had stuck in my mind. Going old-school made sense, also adding a real incongruence with the sci-fi setting. This is an aspect that I think Wardens can really play up–that the Crew are everyday space-dwellers, thrown into a fantasy setting that they have perhaps only the vaguest cultural understanding of (assuming we are not all still playing fantasy RPGs well into the third millennium). The final twist of the knife came pretty late, but is a real blast to run–and honestly, the less said about it the better!
In making the art, I reached out to ruskerdax after seeing some of his unpublished artwork and campaign designs. The art brief I gave him consisted of questionably useful prompts such as “OBSCENELY jacked, like seriously JACKED, no, MORE JACKED than that” (actual words and capitalization used). When presented with the artwork, my players rapidly adopted the moniker “Goblin-Daddy,” so safe to say he nailed it!
-Kris
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