While mulling over the whole ‘beastman problem’, I had some ideas about the goblins. At first they were just one more variety of beastman, but that quickly went away. For them I wanted something different.
In a lot of modern games, goblins are either treated as comic relief or granted weird tinkering techno abilities (often supplanting the dwarves as the preeminent anachronistic engineers and scientists of the setting). I’m not fond of this. I don’t like the comic angle because, frankly, I feel it’s quite meta. If the little toothy bastards are trying to stab you or rob you, there is little humorous about them. I feel that the ‘humor’ that arises from such characterizations is too postmodern for my tastes.
To put it another way, if the majority of players did not view them as so inconsequential after years of slaughtering them, these comic iterations wouldn’t be so prevalent. Players do not view them as a threat, and so you can make them comedic without any great effort. Goblins are a joke, they die in droves, so let’s riff on that and make them even more funny and irrelevant.
So, without changing stats, what could I do to make them more menacing?
M Blackburn: A Writer's Journey 