Badgrim
03-10-09, 04:42 AM
The idea of N'Thayn'sal is taken from the thread "The Cosmic Detour" by Sighter Tnailog and Caden Law. I hope they won't mind me stealing the idea for my biography. I also hope the format is okay, everything required should be included, just in a slightly different order. Please enjoy!
A slow drizzle settles over the battlefield and a soldier escapes it, slipping into a thatched-roof hut. The hut is not long for this world, battered and windblown. It is abandoned, and water drips from everywhere. The soldier sets his back against the sturdy beam at the hut’s center, facing the door. He is bleeding. Outside, he can hear the pitiable cries of wounded men, the prayers of the dying. These are familiar sounds to him, and cannot disturb his mind. Farther away, he can hear the guttural shouts of goblins and ogres. These sounds make his chest feel empty.
The soldier pulls a thin yet sturdy book from the folds of his tattered, blood-stained coat. It is a valuable work, complete with a clasp on the cover and the hint of gilded pages. It is a work of magic, but its subject is not The Arts. The soldier understands that it is a compilation of practical knowledge, a history of things and people, and things considered people. He also understands how the book functions.
There is only one subject of any interest to the soldier or any other desperate man on this gods-forsaken region of N’Thayn’sal: goblins and their ilk. But of all the known goblins and ogres and brutish fiends, the soldier summons up just one name and holds it in his mind as he undoes the clasp and peels back the first, blank page of the book.
The second page is mostly empty, half of its length catching the anemic green-tinted light with a dull golden sheen. At the center of the page is a circular blot of ink, which in a moment stretches, reaching out and forming words as if filling invisible indentations on the page.
The ink swims, and against the glinting paper appears a name from the soldier’s darkest thoughts. Before his eyes, the ink dances, penning that name rife with dire implications, and there the soldier learns of a time before the goblins, a time when the world was called Althanas and nobody had ever heard of…
BADGRIM
Race: Ork
Hair Color: N/A (Bald)
Eye Color: Red
Height: 6’0”
Weight: 312 lbs
Occupation: Warrior. In orkish, the word for “ork” is the same as the word for “warrior.”
Personality
Exceptional people are defined by what they overcome, or fail to – their flaws, real or perceived or feared. Badgrim’s flaw is that he thinks too much. This is not to say that he is any sort of “noble savage” or somehow separate from the rest of his monstrous race. He isn’t. One must realize that most orks live by senseless whim, and their chief whim is violence and rapine. Badgrim is only different because he thinks about his urges for violence and rapine before carrying them out, and has a basic philosophy behind his usually-warlike actions.
For an ork this is an incredible encumbrance, which dulls the joy of blind bloodlust and prevents even momentary satisfaction. As such, Badgrim is quiet and, per his namesake, grim. Among goblins he’s a bit of an oddity, neither perpetually enraged nor exuberantly happy (as some orks are, fresh off the last fight and gleefully spoiling for the next).
Badgrim’s great flaw and his efforts to overcome it, however, have forged him into an exceptional creature. The features that make him an oddity among his kind make him also an oddity amongst the civilized races. He is capable, and willing, to communicate peaceably – sometimes even intelligently - with beings other goblins would rather just smash for the fun of it. His goal has been, and will always be the search for a never-ending war on which to test his mettle and grow ever-stronger.
Do not mistake his thoughtfulness for a gracious nature or unnatural intelligence.
Appearance
The ink drains from the words, and for a moment the soldier is concerned that a stray droplet of rain has ruined the book. Then the ink begins filling out another shape. As he watches, it draws a picture of a young ork, barely into his eleventh year by the soldier’s estimation – but, of course, because it is an ork it is already a fair way into adulthood. The last of the ink drains from the word “intelligence” to form the monstrous head and face, and then new words soak the fine paper as if from the pages behind. They are captions, connected to the image of the ork by spidery-thin lines. The soldier reads them from topmost to bottommost.
Badgrim has red eyes set deeply in large, round, shadowy eye sockets, crowned by a heavy brow. It is here shown that goblin eyes glow. Orks, like most goblins, have broad, flat, bridgeless noses. Badgrim’s ears are large, somewhat floppy, pointed, and mobile much like that of a cat, if a cat’s ears grew from the sides of the head and were normally held horizontal and down-facing.
In his youth, Badgrim was not easily distinguishable from other male orks. Note the very large lower jaw, armed with a pair of five-and-a-half inch, boar-like tusks. Being chiefly carnivorous, orks and other goblins have more meat-rending teeth than any other sentient race natural to N’Thayn’sal proper, ignoring certain beings from Haidia.
Ignoring the obvious difference in size, orks can be separated from other goblins by merit of being so prodigiously muscled. Even despite the time he spent brooding when other orks were striving toward greater feats of strength, Badgrim had impressive limbs. Some early descriptions of him claim that his biceps were a foot across on the outside – when relaxed.
Badgrim, as other goblins, is and was remarkably broad across the chest and shoulders. With close examination one can see that goblins also have proportionally longer torsos compared to other humanoid races, with the difference subtracted from the length of the legs. A goblin’s arms are also proportionally lengthy, giving men and elves the vaguest notion of an ape-like demeanor. This is compounded upon if ever one ever witnesses an ork or goblin running on all fours.
Food was evidently not plentiful during Badgrim’s early adulthood, as evidenced by his somewhat narrow waist.
and
You have no doubt noticed that orkish legs, as mentioned in caption four, are proportionately shorter than that of the typical human or elf. They are, however, proportionately longer than that of dwarves. Goblins, especially orks, have been said to keep pace with running human beings on two legs, but the joint structure of goblinoid legs allows them also to “run” on all fours as an ape might. In this way, goblins can match foot speed with the fleetest elves, with none of the accompanying grace.
While Badgrim’s skin was (as pictured) a dark drab olive-grey, do not mistakenly assume that all goblins are green-skinned. Indeed, goblins come in hues from palest white to sable, and this author has witnessed orks of scarlet, goblins of cyan, and diminutive hobgoblins that were purple, green, pink, and deepest umber. Their eyes likewise come in many shades, but glow always unless blind by injury, and hair can also come in all manner of exotic colors but is usually black. Note that the young Badgrim was completely bald. His distinctive plume of hair would not grow in until his exploits were more well-known.
and the last caption read
When Badgrim first encountered civilization, it is written that he wore the barbaric loincloth you see depicted here. Because the loincloth is long (reaching beyond his knees in front and back), is lined with dense fur, and apparently thick, we can deduce that he came from a cold, perhaps mountainous region, where there was enough leather to fashion luxurious clothing for even young, unproven warriors. The make is undeniably goblin, and we can be assured that it was tailored specifically for orks, as no man – however barbaric – is a fit for something like this. Still, in relation to where he will one day stand, Badgrim started off owning nothing but these meager rags.
Skills
As the soldier’s eyes sought the bottom of the page, they were drawn up again as the letters blurred, blotting against the page. The picture of his adversary, unfamiliar in youth, distorted and then pooled, until the ink divided itself in half. Part of the ink redrew the picture sans captions on the opposing page, blank until now, and the rest flowed in chaotic rivers to the book’s crease, from whence mad lines stretched outward to swiftly write from left to right, as fast as the soldier could read and then faster. The book, he noticed, was neatly categorizing the skills and abilities Badgrim was capable of at this point in his career.
One must keep in mind, the book wrote, that though he entered the civilized world carrying no tools of war, Badgrim was not helpless. We shall call this “The Goblin Factor.”
“The Goblin Factor:” Goblins, and by extension orks, are among the wilder sentient races. They are worse off than barbarians, for their social structure is rudimentary at best. Indeed, we may as well classify them as sentient animals and, like animals, they are better suited for wild living than the civilized races.
When he was young, Badgrim’s skin was tougher than that of dwarves or men or elves, described as being only slightly thinner than soft leather. Though he carried no blade in those days, his tusks could gore and his bite was sufficient to pierce uncovered flesh and common cloth. His weight was more of an encumbrance to him in those days, so he was not agile or swift in the slightest, but being stout and monstrous and heavily muscled, he could, with his arms, lift 1.5 times his own weight.
His strange, animalistic build also granted him the ability, as mentioned previously, to run on all four like a terrific ape bounding about on his knuckles. This allowed him to travel farther and faster without immediate exhaustion, but his size and weight would have made swift turns or nimble feats impossible. Likewise, his long arms, impressive strength, and apish grip made him a fantastic climber.
It is worthy of note that goblins are biologically different from most of the rest of us. They are mostly carnivorous and prefer their meat raw, and their digestive systems are as hardy as any other animal, making them great survivors. It takes greater extremes in temperature to make them uncomfortable or kill them. A goblin’s eyes, as you know, are suited to life in deep underground caves and the night. Goblins do not, however, see any better than the typical human being. Because their eyes are bioluminescent, goblins of every sort can see in perfect darkness. The price of this night vision is sensitivity, if not downright aversion, to bright light. Orks seem to be harder of hearing than human beings (and to elves seem downright deaf), but their sense of smell is markedly acute.
“Brawling:” As you may know, goblins are brutish and wild creatures, and if they are to be called sentient they must also be dubbed criminally insane. The drive in which a man seeks repose in the arms of his sweetheart, in which an elf finds peace in a moving song and fine art, in which a dwarf finds comfort in heft of a pickaxe and the warm glow of industry, in goblins is a replaced with an unquenchable blood-thirst. Goblins of every description love strife and its overcoming, and a goblin which does not fight is miserable and swiftly becomes mentally unwell before dying wretchedly.
Badgrim has always been a child of his race, and as such has been fighting since the day he was born. Like all orks, he is a brutal, animalistic, cunning, but conspicuously unskilled fighter. The danger isn’t in his technique but in the utter lack of it: he will throw himself fearlessly, thoughtlessly, heedlessly into combat, depending on his weight, fists, teeth, and unbridled fury to simply overwhelm any obstacle before him. He also has the uncanny ability to turn just about anything laying around into some sort of basic weapon, be it a stick, bottle, rock, piece of furniture, or an unfortunate living thing smaller than a dog within arm’s length.
Still, there is merit to culture and progress, for weight, strength, and teeth, no matter how ferocious, are no match for sturdy-minded men with shields and arrows and a head for tactics.
Equipment
The solider observed that no mention was yet made of Badgrim’s famous weapons, and at a second glance he confirmed that in those days, the young ork only had a fur-lined leather loincloth to his name. It struck him as preposterous.
History
The story of Badgrim the ork begins with the goblins. If you are curious about this wild (but intriguing!) race, please do begin by closing this volume and opening it again with the intent to research the race specifically.
In the early days of N’Thayn’sal (perhaps even as far back as when it was commonly called Althanas), goblins were generally seen as a nuisance or, in some select regions, a very minor threat. Knowledge was limited to the fact that goblins were ugly, uncouth, and monstrous. It is perhaps this lack of scholarship that allowed the goblins to become the threat we understand them to be today.
As you may have learned in the writings in this book concerning goblins, they come in many sub-races and varieties, which I have divided based on size (as the goblins themselves do). The very smallest adult goblins are called hobgoblins; the largest orks (sometimes rendered “orcs”). We do not know where Badgrim originally hailed from. The scant direct evidence available to us indicates he was born in a cold, mountainous region, to a scattered band of orks which enslaved dwarves and generally skirmished with other goblin bands in the area. We can assume these bands were universally small, composed of no more than fifteen members apiece, fluctuating often, and that the goblins dwelled in any number of subterranean caves but ventured onto the mountainsides often for food and repose.
In what country these mountains may have been is the subject of much debate. The author of the book in your hands believes that Badgrim hails from deep in the Comb Mountains of Corone, but this is merely speculation based on anecdotal evidence.
In any case, it is known that Badgrim was born and probably never acknowledged or knew his parentage. He did, at one point, claim to remember strangling and eating two of his young siblings during the course of growing up when food was particularly scarce, but tales concerning his origin are few and far between. By the ork’s own admission, he remembers the years of his life before the age of six vaguely, as civilized peoples remember their childhoods.
Goblins go through their early lives without being properly named, since it is felt unworthy of effort to name anything so likely to die as a young goblin. (Indeed, many goblins and most hobgoblins go their entire lives without ever being named, formally or informally.) Badgrim was no different. Though stories of his naming differ subtly, the general consensus is that the young ork began to loiter about the junk-heaps and scrap-piles. This is where the most creative goblins tended to gather and salvage scrap with which to build insidious creations, arm themselves, and discuss the merits of anything and everything they encountered. These places are the closest thing the goblins have to universities, and it is here that Badgrim began to form his (for a goblin) complex philosophies and outlooks on the world.
Because he spent so much time thinking about the nature of the universe, goblins, and tools of war, and so little time engaging in ecstatic battles and head-butting matches, it was agreed that he was a grim sort of ork. Still, his fellows agreed also that he was bad, meaning something feared and dangerous. Thus the unnamed ork earned his orkish title, which we understand translates to Bad-and-grim.
(For more on goblin naming conventions, please explore the section titled “Coming-of-Age Ceremonies in the Various Races of N’Thayn’sal.”)
Now famously named but not yet known in the larger world, Bad-and-grim may have remained a common, if odd goblin, and died an uninteresting death in some unknown cave or hole on some distant mountainside. Yet this is not to be. The stories say that one day while deep in his strange contemplations, Badgrim heard in his head a voice which was not his own, which strove to convince him to leave his ancestral home for the distant land of Raiarea. Badgrim scoffed at the Voice’s arguments, for it argued in the orkish tongue, as Badgrim knew no other.
Thus the Unknown Voice imparted upon the ork a fateful gift: Tradespeak. It is said that the trauma of learning the entirety of a language all at once put Badgrim into a short coma, and when he awoke the Voice argued more eloquently and with greater temptations than were ever possible in the goblin tongue. Badgrim was reluctantly swayed, and without warning simply walked away from the only life he’d ever known.
He traveled for many days and saw many strange sights, and learned to survive in a world he’d never even dreamed of, tempted always forward by the Voice for purposes he could only guess at…
A slow drizzle settles over the battlefield and a soldier escapes it, slipping into a thatched-roof hut. The hut is not long for this world, battered and windblown. It is abandoned, and water drips from everywhere. The soldier sets his back against the sturdy beam at the hut’s center, facing the door. He is bleeding. Outside, he can hear the pitiable cries of wounded men, the prayers of the dying. These are familiar sounds to him, and cannot disturb his mind. Farther away, he can hear the guttural shouts of goblins and ogres. These sounds make his chest feel empty.
The soldier pulls a thin yet sturdy book from the folds of his tattered, blood-stained coat. It is a valuable work, complete with a clasp on the cover and the hint of gilded pages. It is a work of magic, but its subject is not The Arts. The soldier understands that it is a compilation of practical knowledge, a history of things and people, and things considered people. He also understands how the book functions.
There is only one subject of any interest to the soldier or any other desperate man on this gods-forsaken region of N’Thayn’sal: goblins and their ilk. But of all the known goblins and ogres and brutish fiends, the soldier summons up just one name and holds it in his mind as he undoes the clasp and peels back the first, blank page of the book.
The second page is mostly empty, half of its length catching the anemic green-tinted light with a dull golden sheen. At the center of the page is a circular blot of ink, which in a moment stretches, reaching out and forming words as if filling invisible indentations on the page.
The ink swims, and against the glinting paper appears a name from the soldier’s darkest thoughts. Before his eyes, the ink dances, penning that name rife with dire implications, and there the soldier learns of a time before the goblins, a time when the world was called Althanas and nobody had ever heard of…
BADGRIM
Race: Ork
Hair Color: N/A (Bald)
Eye Color: Red
Height: 6’0”
Weight: 312 lbs
Occupation: Warrior. In orkish, the word for “ork” is the same as the word for “warrior.”
Personality
Exceptional people are defined by what they overcome, or fail to – their flaws, real or perceived or feared. Badgrim’s flaw is that he thinks too much. This is not to say that he is any sort of “noble savage” or somehow separate from the rest of his monstrous race. He isn’t. One must realize that most orks live by senseless whim, and their chief whim is violence and rapine. Badgrim is only different because he thinks about his urges for violence and rapine before carrying them out, and has a basic philosophy behind his usually-warlike actions.
For an ork this is an incredible encumbrance, which dulls the joy of blind bloodlust and prevents even momentary satisfaction. As such, Badgrim is quiet and, per his namesake, grim. Among goblins he’s a bit of an oddity, neither perpetually enraged nor exuberantly happy (as some orks are, fresh off the last fight and gleefully spoiling for the next).
Badgrim’s great flaw and his efforts to overcome it, however, have forged him into an exceptional creature. The features that make him an oddity among his kind make him also an oddity amongst the civilized races. He is capable, and willing, to communicate peaceably – sometimes even intelligently - with beings other goblins would rather just smash for the fun of it. His goal has been, and will always be the search for a never-ending war on which to test his mettle and grow ever-stronger.
Do not mistake his thoughtfulness for a gracious nature or unnatural intelligence.
Appearance
The ink drains from the words, and for a moment the soldier is concerned that a stray droplet of rain has ruined the book. Then the ink begins filling out another shape. As he watches, it draws a picture of a young ork, barely into his eleventh year by the soldier’s estimation – but, of course, because it is an ork it is already a fair way into adulthood. The last of the ink drains from the word “intelligence” to form the monstrous head and face, and then new words soak the fine paper as if from the pages behind. They are captions, connected to the image of the ork by spidery-thin lines. The soldier reads them from topmost to bottommost.
Badgrim has red eyes set deeply in large, round, shadowy eye sockets, crowned by a heavy brow. It is here shown that goblin eyes glow. Orks, like most goblins, have broad, flat, bridgeless noses. Badgrim’s ears are large, somewhat floppy, pointed, and mobile much like that of a cat, if a cat’s ears grew from the sides of the head and were normally held horizontal and down-facing.
In his youth, Badgrim was not easily distinguishable from other male orks. Note the very large lower jaw, armed with a pair of five-and-a-half inch, boar-like tusks. Being chiefly carnivorous, orks and other goblins have more meat-rending teeth than any other sentient race natural to N’Thayn’sal proper, ignoring certain beings from Haidia.
Ignoring the obvious difference in size, orks can be separated from other goblins by merit of being so prodigiously muscled. Even despite the time he spent brooding when other orks were striving toward greater feats of strength, Badgrim had impressive limbs. Some early descriptions of him claim that his biceps were a foot across on the outside – when relaxed.
Badgrim, as other goblins, is and was remarkably broad across the chest and shoulders. With close examination one can see that goblins also have proportionally longer torsos compared to other humanoid races, with the difference subtracted from the length of the legs. A goblin’s arms are also proportionally lengthy, giving men and elves the vaguest notion of an ape-like demeanor. This is compounded upon if ever one ever witnesses an ork or goblin running on all fours.
Food was evidently not plentiful during Badgrim’s early adulthood, as evidenced by his somewhat narrow waist.
and
You have no doubt noticed that orkish legs, as mentioned in caption four, are proportionately shorter than that of the typical human or elf. They are, however, proportionately longer than that of dwarves. Goblins, especially orks, have been said to keep pace with running human beings on two legs, but the joint structure of goblinoid legs allows them also to “run” on all fours as an ape might. In this way, goblins can match foot speed with the fleetest elves, with none of the accompanying grace.
While Badgrim’s skin was (as pictured) a dark drab olive-grey, do not mistakenly assume that all goblins are green-skinned. Indeed, goblins come in hues from palest white to sable, and this author has witnessed orks of scarlet, goblins of cyan, and diminutive hobgoblins that were purple, green, pink, and deepest umber. Their eyes likewise come in many shades, but glow always unless blind by injury, and hair can also come in all manner of exotic colors but is usually black. Note that the young Badgrim was completely bald. His distinctive plume of hair would not grow in until his exploits were more well-known.
and the last caption read
When Badgrim first encountered civilization, it is written that he wore the barbaric loincloth you see depicted here. Because the loincloth is long (reaching beyond his knees in front and back), is lined with dense fur, and apparently thick, we can deduce that he came from a cold, perhaps mountainous region, where there was enough leather to fashion luxurious clothing for even young, unproven warriors. The make is undeniably goblin, and we can be assured that it was tailored specifically for orks, as no man – however barbaric – is a fit for something like this. Still, in relation to where he will one day stand, Badgrim started off owning nothing but these meager rags.
Skills
As the soldier’s eyes sought the bottom of the page, they were drawn up again as the letters blurred, blotting against the page. The picture of his adversary, unfamiliar in youth, distorted and then pooled, until the ink divided itself in half. Part of the ink redrew the picture sans captions on the opposing page, blank until now, and the rest flowed in chaotic rivers to the book’s crease, from whence mad lines stretched outward to swiftly write from left to right, as fast as the soldier could read and then faster. The book, he noticed, was neatly categorizing the skills and abilities Badgrim was capable of at this point in his career.
One must keep in mind, the book wrote, that though he entered the civilized world carrying no tools of war, Badgrim was not helpless. We shall call this “The Goblin Factor.”
“The Goblin Factor:” Goblins, and by extension orks, are among the wilder sentient races. They are worse off than barbarians, for their social structure is rudimentary at best. Indeed, we may as well classify them as sentient animals and, like animals, they are better suited for wild living than the civilized races.
When he was young, Badgrim’s skin was tougher than that of dwarves or men or elves, described as being only slightly thinner than soft leather. Though he carried no blade in those days, his tusks could gore and his bite was sufficient to pierce uncovered flesh and common cloth. His weight was more of an encumbrance to him in those days, so he was not agile or swift in the slightest, but being stout and monstrous and heavily muscled, he could, with his arms, lift 1.5 times his own weight.
His strange, animalistic build also granted him the ability, as mentioned previously, to run on all four like a terrific ape bounding about on his knuckles. This allowed him to travel farther and faster without immediate exhaustion, but his size and weight would have made swift turns or nimble feats impossible. Likewise, his long arms, impressive strength, and apish grip made him a fantastic climber.
It is worthy of note that goblins are biologically different from most of the rest of us. They are mostly carnivorous and prefer their meat raw, and their digestive systems are as hardy as any other animal, making them great survivors. It takes greater extremes in temperature to make them uncomfortable or kill them. A goblin’s eyes, as you know, are suited to life in deep underground caves and the night. Goblins do not, however, see any better than the typical human being. Because their eyes are bioluminescent, goblins of every sort can see in perfect darkness. The price of this night vision is sensitivity, if not downright aversion, to bright light. Orks seem to be harder of hearing than human beings (and to elves seem downright deaf), but their sense of smell is markedly acute.
“Brawling:” As you may know, goblins are brutish and wild creatures, and if they are to be called sentient they must also be dubbed criminally insane. The drive in which a man seeks repose in the arms of his sweetheart, in which an elf finds peace in a moving song and fine art, in which a dwarf finds comfort in heft of a pickaxe and the warm glow of industry, in goblins is a replaced with an unquenchable blood-thirst. Goblins of every description love strife and its overcoming, and a goblin which does not fight is miserable and swiftly becomes mentally unwell before dying wretchedly.
Badgrim has always been a child of his race, and as such has been fighting since the day he was born. Like all orks, he is a brutal, animalistic, cunning, but conspicuously unskilled fighter. The danger isn’t in his technique but in the utter lack of it: he will throw himself fearlessly, thoughtlessly, heedlessly into combat, depending on his weight, fists, teeth, and unbridled fury to simply overwhelm any obstacle before him. He also has the uncanny ability to turn just about anything laying around into some sort of basic weapon, be it a stick, bottle, rock, piece of furniture, or an unfortunate living thing smaller than a dog within arm’s length.
Still, there is merit to culture and progress, for weight, strength, and teeth, no matter how ferocious, are no match for sturdy-minded men with shields and arrows and a head for tactics.
Equipment
The solider observed that no mention was yet made of Badgrim’s famous weapons, and at a second glance he confirmed that in those days, the young ork only had a fur-lined leather loincloth to his name. It struck him as preposterous.
History
The story of Badgrim the ork begins with the goblins. If you are curious about this wild (but intriguing!) race, please do begin by closing this volume and opening it again with the intent to research the race specifically.
In the early days of N’Thayn’sal (perhaps even as far back as when it was commonly called Althanas), goblins were generally seen as a nuisance or, in some select regions, a very minor threat. Knowledge was limited to the fact that goblins were ugly, uncouth, and monstrous. It is perhaps this lack of scholarship that allowed the goblins to become the threat we understand them to be today.
As you may have learned in the writings in this book concerning goblins, they come in many sub-races and varieties, which I have divided based on size (as the goblins themselves do). The very smallest adult goblins are called hobgoblins; the largest orks (sometimes rendered “orcs”). We do not know where Badgrim originally hailed from. The scant direct evidence available to us indicates he was born in a cold, mountainous region, to a scattered band of orks which enslaved dwarves and generally skirmished with other goblin bands in the area. We can assume these bands were universally small, composed of no more than fifteen members apiece, fluctuating often, and that the goblins dwelled in any number of subterranean caves but ventured onto the mountainsides often for food and repose.
In what country these mountains may have been is the subject of much debate. The author of the book in your hands believes that Badgrim hails from deep in the Comb Mountains of Corone, but this is merely speculation based on anecdotal evidence.
In any case, it is known that Badgrim was born and probably never acknowledged or knew his parentage. He did, at one point, claim to remember strangling and eating two of his young siblings during the course of growing up when food was particularly scarce, but tales concerning his origin are few and far between. By the ork’s own admission, he remembers the years of his life before the age of six vaguely, as civilized peoples remember their childhoods.
Goblins go through their early lives without being properly named, since it is felt unworthy of effort to name anything so likely to die as a young goblin. (Indeed, many goblins and most hobgoblins go their entire lives without ever being named, formally or informally.) Badgrim was no different. Though stories of his naming differ subtly, the general consensus is that the young ork began to loiter about the junk-heaps and scrap-piles. This is where the most creative goblins tended to gather and salvage scrap with which to build insidious creations, arm themselves, and discuss the merits of anything and everything they encountered. These places are the closest thing the goblins have to universities, and it is here that Badgrim began to form his (for a goblin) complex philosophies and outlooks on the world.
Because he spent so much time thinking about the nature of the universe, goblins, and tools of war, and so little time engaging in ecstatic battles and head-butting matches, it was agreed that he was a grim sort of ork. Still, his fellows agreed also that he was bad, meaning something feared and dangerous. Thus the unnamed ork earned his orkish title, which we understand translates to Bad-and-grim.
(For more on goblin naming conventions, please explore the section titled “Coming-of-Age Ceremonies in the Various Races of N’Thayn’sal.”)
Now famously named but not yet known in the larger world, Bad-and-grim may have remained a common, if odd goblin, and died an uninteresting death in some unknown cave or hole on some distant mountainside. Yet this is not to be. The stories say that one day while deep in his strange contemplations, Badgrim heard in his head a voice which was not his own, which strove to convince him to leave his ancestral home for the distant land of Raiarea. Badgrim scoffed at the Voice’s arguments, for it argued in the orkish tongue, as Badgrim knew no other.
Thus the Unknown Voice imparted upon the ork a fateful gift: Tradespeak. It is said that the trauma of learning the entirety of a language all at once put Badgrim into a short coma, and when he awoke the Voice argued more eloquently and with greater temptations than were ever possible in the goblin tongue. Badgrim was reluctantly swayed, and without warning simply walked away from the only life he’d ever known.
He traveled for many days and saw many strange sights, and learned to survive in a world he’d never even dreamed of, tempted always forward by the Voice for purposes he could only guess at…