Forest Goblin Tribes

The forest goblins are the goblins of the deep woods, a wilder and gaudier breed than their tunnel-dwelling cousins, decked in feathers, warpaint, and the shed fangs of the things they worship. For they keep a dark faith all their own: they venerate the great spiders of the canopy as the children of a vast Spider God, whose hunger they serve and whose favour they court with blood. Their shamans drink spider-venom until the visions come, and speak its will aloud.

They live and fight amid the branches, where a man on the ground never thinks to look. Mounted on monstrous arachnids that climb as easily as they crawl, they move through the high canopy in silence, then drop onto the trail in a rush of fangs and crude spears. The heads and captives they take are borne back as offerings for the god behind the webs, and a raid that feeds the idols nothing is a failure.

Travellers who find thick webs strung across a forest path have blundered into the tribe's hunting ground, and the woodwise turn back at the sight. The lucky ones, at least. Deeper in squats the Arachnarok, a spider grown to the size of a siege-tower, in whose shadow whole tribes lair. Where it walks the forest goblins swarm behind in chittering thousands, and the deep woods, never safe, become something worse.