# Race: Kobold > [!info] Quick Facts > | | | > |---|---| > | **Rarity** | Rare | > | **Perception in Gryth** | Negative. Treated as thieves and nuisances rather than as a threat, which kobolds find more insulting than fear would be. | > | **Guide Section** | Rare Races | ## Overview Kobolds are found across Gryth, but only ever in the mountains, and only in a handful of places within them. They are small, draconic and extremely numerous where they occur at all, and they have built an entire culture on the proposition that they are related to dragons and that this ought to count for something. The greatest and oldest of their warrens lie in the broken country at the foot of the Terror-Spines, in the tunnel systems and scree slopes on the Edarian side of the [[Region - Pymandi|Pymandi]] border, and every other kobold community in the world is small by comparison. ## Living Under the Mountain The Terror-Spines are impassable, haunted by drakes and shadow wyrms, and nothing with any sense lives at their base. Kobolds have been there for as long as anyone has bothered to record, in warrens that run deep enough to be beyond the reach of most things that hunt the slopes, and they have made the arrangement work through numbers, tunnels and a frankly impressive tolerance for losing individuals. Their warrens are not squalid. A kobold settlement is close-packed, carefully ordered and built in tiers, and the galleries at the deepest levels are decorated with painstaking draconic motifs scratched into the rock over generations. What a visitor notices is that every one of those motifs is a copy of something seen at a distance. ## The Claim Kobolds hold that they are kin to dragons. It is the organising fact of their lives. Their songs, their rites, their hierarchies and their names all rest on it, and a kobold who doubts it in public has no standing with anybody. Pymandi has never answered the claim. The dragonborn beyond the mountains do not acknowledge kobolds at all, which in a society as rigidly ranked as theirs is a position rather than an oversight: there is no caste a kobold could occupy, so there is no kobold. Kobolds make the claim anyway, loudly, and shape their whole existence around a reverence that has never once been returned. ## Scattered Across the Peaks Beyond the Terror-Spines, kobolds turn up wherever there are high places and deep stone. There are warrens in the ranges of [[Continent - Norn|Norn]], in the spines that run through [[Region - Eldvale|Eldvale]] and [[Continent - Auken|Auken]], and in mountain country on continents where no one has troubled to count them. These communities are small, widely separated and entirely self-contained. They do not trade with one another, send messengers or share news, and a kobold of one range will often have no idea that kobolds exist anywhere else at all. Each warren believes itself to be the whole of its people, and each tells its own version of the claim. ## They Do Not Come Down Kobolds are shy to a degree that most folk find difficult to credit in something that lives in such numbers. They do not explore, they do not wander, and they rarely go further from their warren than a day’s climb. A kobold who willingly walks into a town is close to unheard of, and the rare kobold adventurer is regarded by their own people as either touched or disgraced. What contact the settled world has with kobolds is almost always on kobold terms and at night: a sudden raid on an unguarded village, a granary emptied, a smithy stripped of tools, and nothing but small tracks in the morning. ## Close to the Real Thing What makes the situation genuinely strange is that the dragons are there. Pymandi holds a great many of them, wild and unbound, and kobold warrens sit at the edge of that country within sight of the mountains those dragons nest in. Drakes come down the Terror-Spines regularly. Shadow wyrms hunt the scree. Kobolds therefore live closer to actual dragons than nearly anybody else alive, and lose people to them constantly. They do not regard this as a contradiction. A kobold killed by a dragon is held to have been taken rather than killed, and the family is congratulated. Outsiders find this one of the more difficult things about them. ## A Nuisance, Not a Threat Where kobolds are known at all, they are a minor problem. They steal persistently and without malice, they take tools and grain rather than lives, and they are chased off rather than hunted. A village below a kobold range expects to lose something two or three times a year and budgets for it. The settled peoples treat them as vermin with a hierarchy, and the word commonly used is thieves. Kobolds are perfectly aware of this, and resent it more than they would resent being feared. A people whose entire self-understanding rests on kinship with the largest creatures in the world find it intolerable to be regarded as a problem for the grain stores. ## Kobold Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Your Dexterity score increases by 2, and your Charisma score increases by 1. **Age.** Kobolds reach adulthood at 6 and live up to 120 years. **Creature Type.** You are a Humanoid. **Size.** Your size is Small. **Speed.** Your walking speed is 30 feet. **Darkvision.** You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You cannot discern colour in darkness, only shades of grey. **Draconic Cry.** As a bonus action, you let out a cry at your enemies within 10 feet of you. Until the start of your next turn, you and your allies have advantage on attack rolls against any of those enemies who could hear you. You can use this trait a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest. **Kobold Legacy.** Choose one of the following. ***Craftiness.*** You have proficiency in one of the following skills of your choice: Arcana, Investigation, Medicine, Sleight of Hand, or Survival. ***Defiance.*** You have advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the frightened condition on yourself. ***Draconic Sorcery.*** You know one cantrip of your choice from the sorcerer spell list. Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma is your spellcasting ability for it; choose when you select this race. **Languages.** You can speak, read, and write Common and Draconic. ## Connections - [[Region - Pymandi]] — The greatest warrens lie on the Edarian side of the Pymandi border, at the foot of the Terror-Spines - [[Continent - Norn]] — Warrens in its ranges - [[Region - Eldvale]] — Warrens in the spines that run through it - [[Continent - Auken]] — Warrens in the spines that run through it --- ## Gallery ![[Race - Kobold.jpg]] --- *See also: [[Races]]*