What's in a name? Hobgoblins, grumkins and snarks

Less orangey than some ...

Giving monsters names gets in the way. To build on my last post, while "militaristic, orange-skinned, blue-nosed ape-man" is a bit of a mouthful, it works much better in games than "hobgoblin".

Not that hobgoblin isn't evocative: it's just that in everyday English and with normal people, hobgoblin doesn't evoke militaristic, orange-skinned, blue-nosed ape-men. Nor should it; I'd hate to think of Gygaxian imagery intruding into A Midsummer Night's Dream: 

Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck, You do their work, and they shall have good luck

Not really Shakespearian ...

And David Sutherland's classic samurai-hobgoblins aren't really appropriate in Bunyan either:

Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend

Can daunt his spirit

The hobgoblins of Dragon Warriors fit much better, of course; they're Bunyan hobgoblins rather than Shakespearian ones, because by Bunyan's time, the word had shifted from connoting a friendly or domestic spirit to suggesting a more malevolent one. But they're certainly folkloric hobgoblins. Old Ned in The Elven Crystals doesn't need much description because he's a capricious fairy who abducts innkeepers' daughters (and doubtless daunts the spirits of pilgrims when he can). So call him a hobgoblin and be done with it.

Now, in generic D&D, "hobgoblin" works if everyone's familiar with the old Gygaxian tropes. But doesn't that familiarity breed a certain amount of contempt? Isn't it often - dare I say? - boring? 

That's why I find tribe more interesting than species when it comes to humanoids. What scraps of anthropology I've picked up over the years suggests that pretty much any tribal people will call themselves something that means The People or The Folk. Translate that into the tongue of your blue-nosed orange apes or your greenish pig-folk or your pallid cave dwellers, and you've got the 'race' name. (Tolkien understood this; the Uruk-hai translates, pretty much, as the Orc-folk.) And then for the particular clan or sub-tribe are in the area, you can have your Marrow Suckers or Slow Killers or whatever. 

I find that approach much more evocative than hobgoblins. But there's more. Going with gonzo descriptions and a tribal approach to names frees up the folkloric terms to solve the "grumkin and snark" problem. The what? Remember Tyrion Lannister dismissing talk of the Others/White Walkers as "grumkins and snarks" in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones? 

Here's the problem. If you use up your mythic and folkloric terms for real-world things, you rob your setting of the unknown, the weird and the eerie. Then, instead of hobgoblin or ghost, you have to turn to the equivalent of grumkins and snarks to fill in. And that's less than satisfying: I think George Martin would have been better served by having Tyrion talk of goblins and elves or something. 

But if the uplands are colonised by blue-nosed orange ape-men who call themselves Ar Urtog ("The People") and belong to the Marrow Sucker clan, then NPCs are freed up to spread rumours of ghosts, hobgoblins and devils in them thar hills ...