Kobold

Origins

In German folklore the kobold was a household spirit before it was anything else. The word first appears in 13th-century Middle High German, where kobolt jokingly named little figures of wood or wax representing a mischievous house sprite; linguists now derive it from kob, "house, chamber", and walt, "ruler". A kobold might do chores, bring luck, play pranks or burn the house down if slighted. The Brothers Grimm collected stories of such spirits, including the shape-shifting Hinzelmann; Cologne told of its own helpful house sprites, the Heinzelmännchen, who secretly finished the craftsmen's work by night.

A second kobold lived underground. Saxon silver miners of the 16th century blamed mine spirits — often conflated with kobolds — for ores that looked rich but yielded no silver and gave off poisonous fumes when smelted. They called it Kobold ore. When the Swedish chemist Georg Brandt isolated a new metal from it in 1735, the goblin's name stuck: cobalt. Paracelsus had equated such mine spirits with the earth elemental he called the gnome, and the boundary between kobolds, gnomes and goblins has been blurry ever since.

Into the dungeon

Kobolds entered gaming before roleplaying existed. Gary Gygax's Fantasy Supplement to Chainmail (1971) listed them as troops alongside goblins, orcs and trolls, and Dungeons & Dragons (1974) kept them as the weakest of the dungeon's humanoid tribes. Gygax even used them in his first playtests. The first-edition Monster Manual (1977) of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gave them a look — hairless humanoids with small horns, living in tribes in dark forests and underground warrens — and SSI's Pool of Radiance (1988) put that look onto computer screens. Generations of players remember kobolds as their first fight, a few hit points apiece.

Then kobolds got clever. In 1987 Dragon editor Roger E. Moore described a Dungeon Master named Tucker whose kobolds, fighting on their own ground with traps, murder holes, fire and retreat, terrified a party of high-level adventurers. "Tucker's Kobolds" became a byword for smart monster tactics. Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (2000) then gave kobolds a new identity: small, reptilian and proudly descended from dragons, whom they worship and serve. The edition's first published adventure, The Sunless Citadel, introduced Meepo, a hapless kobold keeper of a stolen white dragon wyrmling, and players adopted him en masse. BioWare's Shadows of Undrentide (2003), an expansion to Neverwinter Nights, added Deekin Scalesinger, a kobold bard who wants to write the hero's story. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition kept the draconic kobold and has since offered it as a playable race.

Variations

Folklore's kobold is a house spirit, a mine spirit, or both. D&D's kobold passed through a vaguely doglike, horned goblinoid phase in older editions' art before its draconic reinvention, and fans still argue about which is the "real" game kobold. Other games have taken the name their own way: in World of Warcraft kobolds are candle-headed miners muttering "You no take candle!", a joke that quietly restores their folkloric link to mines. Across all versions the kobold's charm is the same: it is small, underestimated and, given time to prepare, much more dangerous than it looks.