Hobgoblins

The word "hobgoblin" is older than D&D by about five centuries, and it originally meant almost the opposite of what the game turned it into. In English folklore, a hobgoblin was a helpful household spirit — "hob" being a familiar form of Robin or Robert, the way you'd nickname a friendly neighbor. Hobgoblins cleaned your hearth, mended your shoes, and only turned nasty if you forgot to leave out a bowl of cream. They were brownies with better PR. The shift from helpful brownie to iron-clad military officer is one of the stranger etymological journeys in fantasy gaming, and it happened because D&D needed something to fill a gap in the monster manual that Tolkien hadn't quite covered.

Tolkien's orcs were the obvious martial humanoid antagonists, but they had a problem: they were chaotic. They fought in mobs, they broke rank, they killed their own officers when things went badly. Gary Gygax and the early D&D designers needed a humanoid enemy that fought like a professional army — shield walls, tactical retreats, coordinated assaults, the whole Roman legion package — and the orc template didn't support it. The hobgoblin became the answer. Take the goblinoid family, scale up one member to Medium size, replace cunning with discipline, and you have a species that can challenge adventuring parties not with raw power but with organized, intelligent warfare.

This design decision has shaped every subsequent depiction of hobgoblins. They're not the strongest species in D&D. They're not the most magical, the most numerous, or the most individually dangerous. What they are is the most organized. A hobgoblin army doesn't rely on a powerful leader's charisma or a god's divine mandate to hold together. It holds together because every hobgoblin in the formation has been drilled since birth to hold together. The institution is the weapon. The individual hobgoblin is a component.

That's also why hobgoblins are the most underrated species in D&D. Every other antagonist species gets a dramatic hook — orcs have primal fury, drow have scheming intrigue, mind flayers have cosmic horror. Hobgoblins have logistics. They have supply chains. They have training regimens and promotion criteria and standardized equipment. This is incredibly effective in practice and incredibly boring to describe on the back of a sourcebook, which is why hobgoblins consistently get less narrative attention than species half as dangerous.

Hobgoblin names are functional. That's the first thing to understand, and it tells you everything about the culture they come from. A hobgoblin's name isn't an expression of parental hope or a family legacy or an artistic statement. It's a designation — a sound that identifies a specific unit within a hierarchy. Hobgoblin parents don't agonize over baby names the way humans do. They assign a name the way a quartermaster assigns a billet: efficiently, with an eye toward practical distinction from the names already in use.

The phonetic palette is heavy on hard consonants and short vowels: Krath, Gorzul, Thokk, Mazkur, Brezzik. The sounds are designed to carry across a battlefield without ambiguity. You can't mishear "Krath" as "Gorzul" when someone's screaming it over the clash of weapons. This isn't coincidence — hobgoblin culture has been shaped by military necessity for so many generations that even their language has been optimized for combat communication. Longer names exist for high-ranking officers and are typically compound constructions: Krath-Volur (Krath of the Volur legion), Mazkur-Ironwall (Mazkur who held the Ironwall pass).

Titles matter more than birth names in hobgoblin society. A hobgoblin's rank title — Fist, Blade, Iron Shadow, War Marshal — is the name used in formal address, and earning a higher title is the closest thing hobgoblin culture has to a rite of passage. A hobgoblin stripped of title is socially invisible, which is why demotion is considered a punishment worse than physical pain. The title is the self. Losing it means losing your place in the only structure that gives hobgoblin life meaning.

Female and male hobgoblin names follow the same phonetic rules — the culture doesn't differentiate naming conventions by gender because the military hierarchy doesn't differentiate roles by gender. A hobgoblin named Brezzik could be any gender, and asking would be considered irrelevant. What matters is Brezzik's rank, Brezzik's unit, and Brezzik's combat record. Everything else is personal business that the legion doesn't need to know about.

Hobgoblins have appeared in every edition of D&D, and their trajectory is a study in gradual promotion. They started as slightly tougher goblins — a speed bump between the goblin cave and the orc stronghold — and have slowly been elevated into one of the game's most sophisticated antagonist species. The promotion happened not because designers suddenly decided hobgoblins were interesting, but because the game's audience matured enough to appreciate an enemy that wins through planning rather than power.

The mechanical evolution tells a clear story: from generic medium humanoid to a species with unique tactical identity. The introduction of Martial Advantage in 5th edition was the turning point. Suddenly, hobgoblins weren't just orcs with better armor — they were creatures that fought demonstrably better when they worked together. The mechanic said what the lore had been claiming for decades: hobgoblin strength is collective, not individual.

A hobgoblin fortress is the architectural expression of a species that has been thinking about war for its entire existence. Where dwarven strongholds are built to endure and elven settlements are built to harmonize, hobgoblin fortifications are built to win. Every wall angle, every tower placement, every gate design reflects centuries of military engineering doctrine refined through constant warfare. The result is not beautiful. It is extremely effective.

The standard hobgoblin fortress follows a template called the Iron Form — a concentric design with overlapping fields of fire, multiple fallback positions, and a central keep that can sustain a garrison for months without resupply. The outer walls are thick and sloped to deflect siege projectiles. The inner walls are higher, allowing defenders to fire over retreating troops from the outer ring. Between the walls lies the killing ground — an open space designed to be a death trap for any attacker who breaches the first barrier. This isn't innovative engineering. It's the result of a species applying every lesson from every siege it has ever fought.

What distinguishes hobgoblin military architecture from human castle design is the degree of standardization. Human fortresses reflect the preferences, resources, and ego of their builders — every castle is different. Hobgoblin fortresses built a thousand miles apart by different legions are functionally identical because they follow the same engineering manuals. A hobgoblin commander stationed at a new fortress can orient themselves in minutes because they already know where everything is. Standardization eliminates confusion, confusion causes casualties, and casualties are waste. Hobgoblins despise waste.

The civilian areas of a hobgoblin stronghold — barracks, mess halls, training grounds, smithies, and the administrative quarters where the endless paperwork of military governance takes place — are organized with the same precision as the defenses. There is no residential district in a hobgoblin fortress because there are no civilians. Every inhabitant has a military function. The smith is a military smith. The cook is a military cook. The children in the training yard are pre-enlisted soldiers receiving their first instruction. The fortress is not a city that happens to have defenses. It is a military installation that happens to have residents.

Hobgoblins are Medium humanoids standing between five and six-and-a-half feet tall, with dense musculature, broad frames, and a bearing that communicates barely restrained violence even when they're standing perfectly still. Their skin ranges from dark orange to deep reddish-brown, their eyes are typically dark orange or amber, and their dark hair is usually cropped short or shaved for helmet fitment. Everything about hobgoblin physiology suggests a species engineered — through divine creation, magical breeding, or simple relentless natural selection — for sustained physical performance under harsh conditions.

The hobgoblin build is not about explosive power. Orcs are stronger in a sprint, bugbears hit harder in an ambush, and goliaths can outlift them in a dead pull. What hobgoblins have is endurance. Hobgoblin muscle fiber is dense with slow-twitch fibers optimized for sustained effort over long periods — the biological profile of a marathon runner rather than a sprinter. A hobgoblin soldier can march thirty miles in a day in full armor, fight a battle at the end of it, and march again the next morning. This capacity for sustained exertion under load is the physiological foundation of hobgoblin military doctrine. They don't need to be the fastest or the strongest. They need to still be standing when the enemy isn't.

Hobgoblin senses are sharp but not exceptional by goblinoid standards. They retain darkvision to 60 feet — a legacy of the goblinoid family's underground origins — but their hearing and smell are roughly comparable to a human's. What they have instead of goblin-grade sensory equipment is an unusual capacity for focus. Hobgoblin cognitive architecture favors sustained attention over the broad environmental awareness that goblins use. A goblin hears everything and gets distracted by most of it. A hobgoblin hears the thing they're listening for and tunes out everything else. This isn't a trained skill — it's a neurological trait that makes hobgoblins natural sentries, tacticians, and, unfortunately, natural obsessives.

If hobgoblin physiology is built for endurance, hobgoblin psychology is built for discipline — and that's not a metaphor. The hobgoblin mind is structured differently from a human mind in ways that make military service not just culturally expected but cognitively comfortable. Hobgoblins derive genuine satisfaction from functioning within a hierarchy. The feeling a human gets from creative expression or social bonding, a hobgoblin gets from executing a well-coordinated maneuver. This isn't brainwashing. It's biology.

The concept of the Iron Mind — "Ghaal'shaarat" in Goblin — is the closest thing hobgoblins have to a philosophical tradition. It describes the ideal mental state: focused, controlled, subordinating personal desire to collective purpose, maintaining emotional equilibrium under extreme stress. An elf might call it a martial version of Reverie. A human monk might recognize it as a form of moving meditation. The hobgoblin just calls it being professional. The Iron Mind isn't achieved through years of spiritual practice — it's the default state that hobgoblin training reinforces rather than creates.

This cognitive orientation has a shadow side that hobgoblin culture doesn't discuss often. The same neurological architecture that makes hobgoblins excellent soldiers also makes them prone to rigid thinking, difficulty adapting to unexpected situations, and a kind of existential crisis when separated from hierarchy. A hobgoblin exile doesn't just lose their social position — they lose the cognitive framework that organizes their entire experience of reality. Many exiled hobgoblins seek out other hierarchies immediately: mercenary companies, criminal organizations, adventuring parties with a clear leader. The structure matters more than the purpose.

Hobgoblin emotions are real and deeply felt but expressed through a cultural vocabulary that outsiders frequently misread as coldness. Grief is channeled into memorial discipline — a specific training routine performed in honor of fallen comrades. Joy is expressed through precision, through the satisfaction of a complex operation executed without error. Anger is preserved and directed, never wasted. A hobgoblin who seems emotionless to a human observer is actually experiencing intense emotion through a framework that doesn't map to human expressive norms. The mistake of assuming hobgoblins don't feel things has gotten a lot of diplomats killed.

A hobgoblin's day starts before dawn and follows a schedule that varies by rank but never by whim. The morning begins with formation — every hobgoblin in the settlement stands in their assigned position for inspection, announcements, and the day's operational briefing. This isn't ceremonial. It's how the command structure confirms that everyone is alive, functional, and aware of their duties. A hobgoblin who misses formation without authorization is punished. A hobgoblin who misses formation twice is demoted. There is no third time because there is no rank below what a third offense earns: the shame detail, which handles waste disposal and corpse processing.

Training occupies four to six hours of every soldier's day, regardless of peacetime or wartime status. Hobgoblin military doctrine holds that an army that stops training starts dying — skills decay, coordination degrades, and the collective muscle memory that makes a formation function as a single organism fades. Training rotates between weapons drill, formation practice, physical conditioning, and tactical exercises. Officers train longer because they also study doctrine, logistics, and the intelligence reports that the legion's scouts provide.

Meals are communal, timed, and portioned according to rank and duty. Active combat troops eat first and eat the most. Support personnel eat second. Prisoners and shame-detail workers eat last and eat the least. The food itself is functional rather than enjoyable — dried meat, grain porridge, root vegetables, and whatever local provisions the legion has secured. Hobgoblin cuisine is not a tradition that wins cultural exchanges, but it keeps soldiers fed and marching, which is the only criterion that matters.

What passes for leisure in hobgoblin society is competitive. Strategy games — played on boards with pieces representing military units — are universal and taken seriously enough that tournament results affect promotion decisions. Physical competitions test individual combat skill, endurance, and the creative application of tactical principles. Storytelling exists but centers on military history: the battles of famous legions, the tactical innovations of legendary commanders, the cautionary tales of leaders who failed. Entertainment in hobgoblin culture is always, in some form, preparation for war.

Every hobgoblin legion operates under a code so detailed it could fill a library — and in some legions, it literally does. The Iron Code governs not just military conduct but every aspect of hobgoblin social life: how disputes are resolved, how resources are distributed, how ranks are earned and lost, how failure is punished, and how death is honored. The code isn't written in abstract principles. It's written in specific scenarios with specific required responses, because hobgoblins don't trust individuals to interpret principles correctly under pressure.

Failure under the Iron Code is handled with a precision that other species find simultaneously admirable and horrifying. A soldier who retreats without orders faces a specific penalty determined by the circumstances: unauthorized retreat under direct fire carries different consequences than retreat during a flanking maneuver, which differs again from retreat when supplies are exhausted. The code accounts for context because hobgoblin commanders learned centuries ago that blanket punishment for retreat produces soldiers who die uselessly rather than soldiers who fight effectively.

What makes the Iron Code fascinating rather than merely oppressive is its internal logic of fairness. A hobgoblin private and a hobgoblin general face identical penalties for identical infractions. Rank provides authority, not immunity. A commander who orders a suicidal assault for personal glory faces the same tribunal as a private who deserts. This equality before the code is the single thing that keeps hobgoblin society from collapsing into tyranny — the rules constrain everyone equally, and everyone knows it.

The hobgoblin military hierarchy isn't just an organizational tool — it's the operating system of hobgoblin civilization. There is no separate civil government, no merchant class with independent authority, no religious institution that operates outside the chain of command. The military is the civilization, and rank is the only social currency that matters. This makes hobgoblin society either admirably meritocratic or claustrophobically authoritarian, depending on whether you're looking at it from the inside or the outside.

The basic unit is the Fist — a squad of ten soldiers under a Fist Sergeant. Four Fists form a Banner (forty soldiers under a Banner Captain). Four Banners form a Legion (one hundred sixty soldiers plus officers, specialists, and support under a Warlord). These numbers are sacred in the same way that religious texts are sacred to other cultures: deviation is heresy. A Fist that has taken casualties receives replacements before its next deployment. A Fist that has grown beyond ten is split. The number is the doctrine, and the doctrine is the identity.

Promotion is merit-based in theory and mostly merit-based in practice. A hobgoblin advances by demonstrating competence in their current role — combat performance, tactical judgment, the ability to keep subordinates alive and effective. Political maneuvering exists but is constrained by the culture's obsession with measurable results. A Fist Sergeant who wins battles gets promoted regardless of their connections. A Fist Sergeant who loses soldiers because of incompetence gets demoted regardless of their connections. The system isn't perfect, but the feedback loop is tighter than in most human militaries.

The Warlord at the top of a legion commands with near-absolute authority within their domain but answers to a regional command structure that aggregates multiple legions under a High Warlord. Above the High Warlord sits the theoretical supreme commander — usually a figure more mythological than practical, since hobgoblin legions rarely coordinate at that scale except during major campaigns. The chain of command is strong at the squad and company level, functional at the legion level, and increasingly theoretical above that. This is the hobgoblin military's persistent weakness: brilliant tactical coordination, mediocre strategic vision.

Maglubiyet is not a god who inspires devotion. He is a god who demands obedience, and the distinction is the theological core of hobgoblin religion. Where human gods offer salvation, elven gods offer enlightenment, and dwarven gods offer ancestral pride, Maglubiyet offers a deal: serve him in life and in death, or be destroyed by something worse. It's the divine equivalent of a protection racket, and hobgoblins — being fundamentally pragmatic — accept the terms without requiring the transaction to feel meaningful.

Hobgoblin worship of Maglubiyet is indistinguishable from military service because it is military service. The prayers are formation chants. The rituals are pre-battle ceremonies. The temples are war shrines built into fortress walls, staffed by cleric-officers who hold rank in the military hierarchy and answer to the chain of command before they answer to any abstract theological authority. A hobgoblin cleric's job is to keep the legion fighting — healing wounds, bolstering morale, and reminding every soldier that Maglubiyet's afterlife army awaits the cowardly and the incompetent. The theological and military incentives are perfectly aligned, which is either efficient or terrifying.

The hobgoblin relationship with Maglubiyet is more committed than the goblin one. Goblins worship Maglubiyet because they must and maintain older traditions where they can. Hobgoblins worship Maglubiyet because his values and their values are genuinely compatible: strength through organization, victory through discipline, the subordination of individual desire to collective purpose. A hobgoblin doesn't need to be coerced into worshiping a war god because a hobgoblin already lives as if warfare is the highest calling. Maglubiyet just provides the theological scaffolding for a worldview the species had already built.

This compatibility doesn't mean the relationship is healthy. Maglubiyet's afterlife — eternal warfare on the iron fields of Acheron — is presented as a reward, but it's functionally indistinguishable from eternal punishment. The dead fight forever, following the same chain of command they followed in life, with no rest, no victory, and no discharge. Hobgoblin theologians who think too carefully about this tend to reach conclusions the hierarchy finds uncomfortable, which is why hobgoblin theology discourages careful thinking on the subject. The official position is that eternal war is glorious. The unofficial position is that questions about glory are above your pay grade.

Hobgoblins approach magic the way they approach everything else: as a military resource to be organized, standardized, and deployed according to doctrine. Where human wizards pursue magical knowledge for its own sake and elven mages treat magic as an art form, hobgoblin war wizards are specialists whose entire purpose is to multiply the combat effectiveness of the units they're attached to. A hobgoblin war wizard who wastes a spell slot on something that doesn't directly support the current tactical objective has failed in their duty.

The Devastator is the hobgoblin arcane tradition — a war wizard trained not in the broad magical education of a wizard academy but in the specific application of evocation and abjuration to battlefield problems. Devastators learn fewer spells than a generalist wizard but cast their combat spells with mechanical precision. Their fire bolts hit where the formation needs them to hit. Their shield spells protect the officers who need to survive. Their scorching rays break up enemy formations at the exact moment the infantry needs the opposition disrupted. This specialization makes hobgoblin war wizards narrower but more reliable than their counterparts in other armies.

The integration of magic into hobgoblin military structure is formalized to an unusual degree. Devastators are assigned to Banners, not Fists — one wizard per forty soldiers, positioned behind the front line but ahead of the command element. Their orders come from the Banner Captain, not from a separate magical authority. They train with the soldiers they support, eat with them, march with them, and understand the tactical capabilities and limitations of the units they're augmenting. This integration is what makes hobgoblin magic effective: the wizard doesn't operate in isolation. They're a component of a combined-arms team.

Non-arcane magic in hobgoblin society is almost exclusively clerical and almost exclusively oriented toward healing and war blessing. The legion's clerics maintain battlefield readiness, treat wounds that would otherwise remove soldiers from duty, and perform the rites that Maglubiyet requires. Druids are distrusted. Sorcerers are viewed with suspicion because their power isn't earned through study and discipline. Warlocks are actively persecuted — a hobgoblin who makes a personal pact with an extraplanar entity has placed an outside authority above the chain of command, which is indistinguishable from treason.

The Dhakaani Empire is the proof that hobgoblins are not merely an interesting monster — they're a viable civilization. At its height in the Eberron campaign setting, Dhakaan ruled a continent-spanning empire that lasted for thousands of years, with architecture, law, art, and military science that rivaled anything the "civilized" species had produced. The empire's fall wasn't caused by internal weakness but by an invasion from the extraplanar daelkyr — aberrations so alien that no conventional military could hold against them. The Dhakaani fought longer and harder than any other force on Khorvaire before retreating underground to preserve what they could. That's not a failure of civilization. That's a civilization doing everything right against an impossible enemy.

Outside Eberron, hobgoblin empires appear in setting after setting, always following the same pattern: a hobgoblin warlord unifies the goblinoid tribes, builds a military machine, conquers territory, and establishes a state that functions with frightening efficiency until it's broken by an external threat or internal succession crisis. The Red Hand of Doom adventure (2006) depicted one such empire in its expansion phase and became one of the most acclaimed D&D adventures ever published. The reason is simple: a hobgoblin army is a better adversary than a dragon because it thinks, plans, and adapts. You can't solve it with one fight.

The goblinoid hierarchy within these empires is consistent. Hobgoblins command. Goblins serve as skirmishers, scouts, laborers, and expendable screens. Bugbears serve as shock troops, enforcers, and special operations units. This isn't egalitarian, and the game has never pretended it is — the hobgoblin empire runs on the exploitation of its smaller and larger cousins. But the relationship is also functional in a way that pure exploitation typically isn't. Goblins within a hobgoblin empire eat regularly, live in defended settlements, and have a social role that provides identity if not respect. The empire offers security in exchange for autonomy, and enough goblins accept the bargain to keep the system working.

The question that hobgoblin empires pose to D&D worldbuilding is uncomfortable: if hobgoblin civilization works — if it feeds its people, defends its territory, maintains order, and produces lasting institutions — then why is it "evil"? The answer, to the extent that there is one, is that hobgoblin civilization works by subordinating individual freedom to collective function. It works by treating goblin lives as less valuable than hobgoblin lives. It works by maintaining a permanent war footing that requires external enemies to justify internal control. It works the way every authoritarian state works: efficiently, at a cost that the people paying it don't get to negotiate.

Named hobgoblin characters are more common in D&D lore than named goblins but still rarer than they should be, given the species' military sophistication. The hobgoblins who do appear by name tend to be warlords and commanders — which makes sense for a species that defines itself through military achievement, but also limits the narrative range. Somewhere in D&D's multiverse there's a hobgoblin poet, a hobgoblin philosopher, a hobgoblin who just wants to run a really good bakery. We never meet them because the game only remembers hobgoblins when it needs an army.

The Red Hand of Doom adventure (2006) gave hobgoblins their finest narrative hour. Warlord Azarr Kul, a hobgoblin cleric-commander serving Tiamat, leads a goblinoid horde against the Elsir Vale in a campaign that plays out like a military thriller. The adventure works because Azarr Kul is not a mindless aggressor — he's a competent strategist with a clear objective, a flexible battle plan, and the logistical infrastructure to sustain a prolonged campaign. Fighting him feels like fighting a general, not a monster. The adventure's enduring popularity is the best argument for hobgoblins as primary antagonists.

In Eberron, the hobgoblin nation of Darguun provides the setting's most interesting political entity: a goblinoid state trying to gain recognition from the nations that fought the Last War. Lhesh Haruuc Shaarat'kor, the hobgoblin warlord who founded Darguun by seizing territory during the war's chaos, represents a rare D&D hobgoblin who succeeds through politics as well as warfare. His nation exists because he was smart enough to claim land when the human nations were too exhausted to stop him, and diplomatic enough to negotiate recognition afterward.

Hobgoblin mechanical design has evolved from "goblin but tougher" to "the species that rewards tactical play" — a trajectory that mirrors the game's own growing sophistication about encounter design. Early hobgoblins were defined by what they weren't: not as sneaky as goblins, not as strong as orcs, not as scary as gnolls. Modern hobgoblins are defined by what they do that no other species does: fight as a unit with mechanical support for coordination. It took forty years to get there, but the destination was worth the trip.

For players, the hobgoblin PC has undergone the most significant identity shift of any goblinoid option. The Volo's Guide version (2016) introduced Saving Face — a bonus to a failed attack, check, or save based on the number of allies who can see you. This brilliant mechanic said everything: a hobgoblin performs better when watched by peers because shame is the species' primary motivator. The 2022 revision replaced this with Fey Gift and Fortune from the Many, trading the shame-motivation flavor for broader tactical support. Both versions work mechanically. Only one captures the species' psychology.

The hobgoblin is one of those D&D species that improves dramatically when transplanted from generic fantasy into a setting with real worldbuilding stakes. In the default D&D cosmology, hobgoblins are "the lawful evil army that shows up sometimes." In Eberron, they're a post-imperial nation navigating the politics of a continent that doesn't want them at the table. In the Forgotten Realms, they're a persistent threat in specific regions — the Goblin Marches, the Moonsea, Thar — but rarely the central antagonists of a major storyline. The quality of the hobgoblin in your game depends almost entirely on how much work your setting does to make them matter.

Eberron remains the gold standard for hobgoblin worldbuilding. The Dhakaani Empire — a civilization that predates human presence on Khorvaire — gives hobgoblins a history that rivals the elves' in depth and exceeds it in military sophistication. The modern nation of Darguun, founded during the chaos of the Last War, creates a politically complex entity: a goblinoid state seeking international recognition while suppressing internal tensions between Ghaal'dar (modern hobgoblins), Marguul (bugbear) tribes, and the ancient Heirs of Dhakaan who want to restore the old empire. This is hobgoblins at their best — not monsters, but a civilization with competing factions, historical trauma, and genuine political agency.

Pathfinder's treatment of hobgoblins is less developed but mechanically interesting. PF2e hobgoblins are "remorseless" rather than "evil" — a subtle distinction that opens more narrative space. Their culture emphasizes victory and competence but doesn't prescribe cruelty. This is arguably the most realistic hobgoblin portrayal: a militaristic society that values results can be brutal without being sadistic. The cruelty in hobgoblin culture comes from indifference to suffering, not from enjoyment of it. That distinction matters for players who want to explore hobgoblin characters without playing comic-book villains.

The hobgoblin's future in D&D probably looks more like Eberron than the Forgotten Realms. As the game moves away from inherent alignment and toward cultural complexity, the species that benefit most are the ones with interesting institutions to explore. Hobgoblins have legions, archives, codified doctrine, and a civilizational identity that supports infinite storytelling. They don't need a moral rehabilitation the way orcs did — they just need screentime. The best hobgoblin stories are already in the game's history. They're just waiting for more DMs to find them.