Five Bells

Five Bells is the name of both the goblin kingdom in the Forges, and its "capital"—a sprawling underground city built into and around five enormous caverns. The Bells themselves constitute most of the kingdom, along with various smaller settlements in the tunneled-out caves surrounding them.
The caverns called Five Bells are very deep underground, too deep for most other peoples to bother with. They were formed by volcanic activity thousands of years ago; Hewellen will sometimes say that they must therefore have been the first to live in those caverns, back when the magma flowed, but the goblins disagree.
Five Bells is one of the very few unified polities of any size in the Sealands or southern Chadun. It is mostly quite insular; the so-called sea goblins of the Small Coast have nothing to do with Five Bells, and don't even know much about it.

Goblin gems

The cooling of the magma pockets that became the Five Bells led eventually to the formation of gems in and around the caverns. These gems are what make Five Bells rich enough to be a kingdom, rather than a hardscrabble collection of underground settlements.
Most of the gems produced from the Five Bells' mines are tourmalines of various kinds, which are therefore sometimes called goblin gems. But there is one ruby mine, whose exact location is a state secret. Five Bells trades these gems with other peoples (e.g. Hewellen and Valni, and through them, surface-dwellers). For protection, trade and other contact with the outside is strictly controlled, which is what led to the establishment of the kingdom in the first place.

Social organisation

Like other underground peoples, goblins are neither matriarchal nor patriarchal, but a mixture of both, which in the case of Five Bells has created a political structure that other peoples find peculiar. There is a war-leader who is always male, called the king, and a steward-leader who is always female, called the queen. Occasionally they are equal co-rulers, in which case they are symbolically married to each other. Often, though, only one of them is the "true" ruler (by higher inherited status), in which case the other ruler is in a subordinate, advisory position. In this case they are called either the King and Land-queen (if the king is the true ruler), or the Queen and War-king. If the king and queen aren't equal co-rulers, they are each generally married to other people. Monarchs are decided upon by a combination of being declared heir by the previous monarchs, and being voted upon by the nobility. The goblins of Five Bells consider all this merely the natural order of things, but it does tend to lead to civil war, such as the one they are currently embroiled in.

The Civil War

For the past five or ten years, Five Bells has been ruled by a Queen (the monarch) and a War-king (her adviser). The War-king had no desire to be titular monarch himself, but he despises the queen, and also it happened that his own wife had a moderately good claim to the throne. The War-king first attempted a coup, shortly after the queen's ascension; it failed, and the result was civil war, which has escalated to the point that control of the Bells themselves are split between the two factions.
Among other things, the civil war makes some goblins quite nervous about the Five Bells' vulnerability to outside attack. Other peoples in the Forges haven't moved in on Five Bells' gem mines because they're very far underground, and it's just easier to let the goblins do the mining and trade with them. For that matter, nobody else in the area is organised on the same scale as Five Bells; dwarf and orc communities are too small to mount an actual army of any size. The dwarves at least don't even want to. But if Five Bells' capacity for defense is split, who knows who might decide to come raiding from the Higher-Up?