Kobold

The goblin answer to the Gnome, and the most numerous and industrious race of the lot. Kobolds live miles beneath the surface in tunnel-cities they cut themselves, can taste the difference between one ore and another, and shape metal the way a gnome shapes stone.

Nearly every ingot in the Eternal City passed through kobold hands first, bought for a pittance through Faerie middlemen who take great care never to mention the source.

Appearance

Small, dark-scaled, and heavily built through the shoulders, with eyes suited to total darkness and a nose that does most of the work. Kobold metallurgy is largely a matter of smell and taste; a master smelter can identify a vein's composition by licking the rock.

Scale color runs with diet and therefore with the works: a Deepworks kobold's shade tells another kobold which city they came up in and roughly what it smelts, which makes the whole race legible to itself and opaque to everyone else.

Attuned Magic

Metal. A nascent kobold can sense ore through stone and judge a metal's purity by touch. A powerful one can draw metal out of raw rock without heat, work an alloy cold, and find a fault in a finished blade from across a room. The Dwarf buy kobold stock in preference to their own and do not put this in writing.

The cold-working is the part that matters commercially and the part the Winterworks cannot replicate: no fuel, no forge, no smoke, and no way to tell from the finished piece how it was made.

Life

A tunnel-city is one enterprise and everyone in it holds a share. Housing, food, schooling, and the works are all accounted in the same books, and a kobold can tell you their share to three places. The cities are hot, loud, immaculately organized, and — by every visitor's account — startlingly comfortable.

Names. Personal name plus works-and-share: Third Anvil, nine-hundredths. The share is not private and quoting it is not boasting; it is the equivalent of an address.

Arrival. A new kobold is issued a share. Immediately, in full, on arrival, out of the city's own reserve — housing, food, training, and a stake in the enterprise — and it cannot be taken away. It is the most generous arrival custom in either realm and it is entirely unsentimental: a share-holder works, and a city that dilutes itself for new arrivals grows.

Records. Kobolds keep meticulous books, which is unusual in the Wilds and inconvenient for everyone who has ever tried to underpay them. Four centuries of purchase records exist. The Kingdom's merchants have never asked what is in them.

Society

Dense, industrious, and organized around the works. Governance is shareholders' assembly rather than chieftain, disputes are arbitrated on the books, and the Deepworks have no king because a king would be a line item nobody could justify.

Currents

The Assemblies. Each tunnel-city governs itself; there is no Deepworks-wide authority, and attempts to create one have failed on the reasonable objection that it would have to be paid for.

The Middlemen's Question. A growing argument about the Faerie factors who buy kobold stock at a pittance and resell it at the Ring's prices. The younger assemblies want to cut them out. The older ones point out what happens to a supplier who becomes visible.

Gate-Under-Stone. The customs post that has never examined anybody's paperwork: the ore-and-grain trade with the Gnomes above, two crowns lied to about the volume, and a great many unregistered marriages.

The Quiet Descent. Kobolds and Gnomes who have stopped pretending and argue for a union of the underground against both surface crowns. The Chancery's file on them is thicker than the movement.

Relations

At their upper reaches the Deepworks run into the Gnomish Deephearth, and the two peoples have been trading, intermarrying by metamorphosis, and lying to their respective authorities about it for a very long time. It is the oldest and warmest relationship across the Faerie–Goblin line, and neither crown has been told.

Playing One