Making Goblins a REAL Threat

[Aotrs Commander]

Question for consideration.

Are you intent on making them mechanically dangerous ("hard scary") or actually conceptually horror-inducing ("fear-scary?") There is a big difference; a dragon is scary (as is a liche or the tarrasque) because it has high stats, basically.

I can foresee the problem with just slapping hard-scary mechanics on the goblins just continuing for them to be, as your say, essentially dragons wearing a different hat. (In fact, I would posit that there may be a certain point that at beyond which if you reflavour them too far that they could cease to be "goblins" in the approximate D&D sense and become a monster with powers that happen to have the same name. Which is perfectly fine, but there is a difference between that (making a dangerous new monster called a goblin for your world) and "making goblins a real threat" which implies some level of starting from what already exists.



(I mean, my solution would have been "make them higher level with more class levels" since class levels are the most dangerous thing in the game anyway. You could, even, do it sneakily, and just, I dunno, make them all mechanically psionic or warlocks or something and just reflavour it - the PCs don't need to see the black box, after all. Or, if you really want to be nasty, quasi-gestalt them like in the old days where they did stuff like have "cast spells/invokations/manifest powers/initiatve maneouvers as a [class x] of their character level/HD" etc.)



If, however, you want to make them conceptually scary, then I would suggest maybe starting from the Golarion goblins (they have a lot of room to be made scarier culturally if you remove the comedy elements) or having a browse of something like the SCP wiki for some good horror ideas.