Goblins

Though other Karrusk may be more physically dangerous, none are more thoroughly reviled as goblins. These child-snatching thieves are the bane of any small settlement, stealing children and charming their parents.
Like other Karrusk, goblins are incapable of sexual reproduction. Instead, they kidnap children from poorly guarded settlements and turn them into new goblins. Through beguiling lies, trickery or plain torture, the goblins convince their captives to eat goblin flesh, which is virulently poisonous. Upon eating the tainted meat, children quickly die and the goblins perform innate magic rites to reanimate the body and transform it into their own likeness.
Every goblin can naturally cast an illusion on itself to resemble the child it was created from. Goblins use this ability to gain devoted protectors by returning changed children to the homes they were taken from and slowly charming the parents to be their fanatical bodyguards. Over many years the parents of a goblin child fall further and further under its domination until they can no longer disobey its insane commands. Goblins delight in pitting their charmed guards against one another, laughing from their windows as their parents fight in the streets.
Above all, goblins despise order. They are compulsively destructive, unable to resist knocking over anything they see standing up. What a goblin hates most, what drives them into the most frenzied rage, is a healthy family unit. This is one of the smallest but most important forms of order in the world, and goblins will go to any length to tear families apart, relishing the opportunity to do so from within while disguised as a young member.
When a group of goblins has managed to charm an entire town, they generally remain in the area for several years, allowing their adults to produce more children for turning. When the women are too old to have more children, the goblins will either coerce the adults into killing one another in a blood-soaked brawl and/or march them to the nearest ork encampment. Goblins dislike ork's sense of order, but find it endlessly amusing to watch their former parents ripped apart and stitched into orkish abominations. They consider it an even trade.
A telltale sign that a village has been conquered by goblins is when all the children are very young and all the adults are very old, with none in between. Goblins will allow newborns to mature for several years before killing and turning them, resulting in the described disparity in age. A common protection against goblin possession is for parents to refuse affection to a child who was missing and returns. Distressing and exhausting as it is, such actions have saved entire villages when an ignored child's growing tantrums disrupted its natural illusion magic and revealed it to be a goblin.

Basic Information

Biological Traits

As body snatchers, goblins tend to look like an extremely twisted and evil version of the child whose body they have turned. They inherit most of the original body's racial traits, from a dwarven child's stocky physique to fey children's highly specialized structures or appendages.