Hobgoblin

The largest of the goblins, broad-shouldered and shaggy, and by far the most likely to be found in the human world. Hobgoblins attach themselves to human households, labor through the night in exchange for scraps and warmth, and have in the process learned more about humanity than every Faerie scholar combined.

This makes them invaluable and deeply distrusted in equal measure. Nearly everything the Kingdom believes about the "godlike" giants it learned from a hobgoblin, secondhand, and it refuses to admit it.

Appearance

Tall for a goblin — nearly human-child height, which is enormous — with heavy shoulders, coarse hair over most of the body, and hands built for work. A hobgoblin in a human house is usually mistaken for a draft, a mouse, or nothing at all.

They smell of woodsmoke, universally, and it is not habit: ash defeats scent, scent is the only thing in the Waking World that actually matters, and a hobgoblin who has stopped smelling of the hearth has stopped being careful.

Attuned Magic

Hearth: the domestic magic. A nascent hobgoblin keeps a fire from going out, a milk from turning, a hinge from squealing. A powerful one can hold a whole house in good order overnight, make themselves categorically unnoticeable within walls they have claimed, and — the part that alarms Redcaps — extend that unnoticing to whoever they bring inside with them.

The unnoticing is not invisibility and does not work on cats. Nothing works on cats. Every hobgoblin practice in existence is downstream of that sentence.

Life

Inside the walls of a human house: an under-sink warren, a stash, a scent-route, and an arrangement with the local mice. Work is the whole night, every night, and the wage is warmth, scraps, and a place the weather cannot reach.

Names. Given by the house — very often a human's mispronunciation of something, overheard once and adopted permanently. Hobgoblins find this funny and keep the names anyway, and a name that came from the family is worn with something close to pride.

Arrival. A new hobgoblin is placed. The network finds them a house with a vacancy, walks them the scent-routes, teaches them the Cat Watch signals, and leaves them to it — usually within a week, because a hobgoblin without a house is a hobgoblin in the open, and the Waking World is not survivable in the open.

The three rules. The house is kept. The humans are not told. The fey world is not brought here. Enforcement is entirely social, and in a world containing cats, being cut off from the network is a death sentence with a delay.

Society

Solitary by trade and communal by night. Hobgoblins in service pass information among themselves constantly, and the network that results is the single best intelligence apparatus in either world. Old Mother Ash has been in the same household longer than anyone can verify and is the closest thing the race has to an authority.

Currents

The Service. The households, held together by seniority and obligation and the fact that nobody else knows how any of this works.

The Cat Watch. Not a body — a practice. Every household maintains a warning system for the resident colossus, and the systems are shared, standardized, and taught. The most successful cooperative institution in either world, and it has never been written down.

The Long Shelf. Four generations of one family reading a human library at night and transcribing it. Everything the fey world actually knows about humanity is in their handwriting.

The Tellers. A very small group who believe one human should be told — carefully, chosen, as an experiment. Ash has forbidden it. Two of them have not stopped.

Relations

The Kingdom formally forbids crossing into the Waking World and informally depends on it, since Faerie fashion, architecture, and courtly manners are all imitations of human things carried back by travelers and passed off as original. The Goblin King has courted the hobgoblins for centuries with limited success; they have noticed that both crowns want the same thing from them, and that neither is offering a seat.

Playing One