Everything below Up-Top
Welcome to Underbottom
Under the roots of old hills, below the world you know, there’s a warren of hollows full of goblins. They farm mushrooms, stir stew, pour grog, bang on scrap, gossip, prank each other and nap. Mostly nap.
You call where you live “the world”. Goblins call it Up-Top: the place boots, buttons and spoons fall down from.
Every goblin hopes for someone Up-Top
Down here, the name a goblin goes by is just what the neighbors call it. Its true name can only come from someone Up-Top: a friend who picks it, and remembers it. A goblin who has someone walks a little taller. (In the village, you can spot them: they have a gift box over their head.)
The goblins without anyone yet are perfectly happy, gossiping and eating stew. They’re just hoping.
- Gifting a goblin is finding it its someone Up-Top.
- The private link is the lantern path: the one way down to your goblin’s burrow. Keep it to yourself.
- The Residency Deed is the Keeper’s proof that your goblin has a forever home, and you.
- A name is for keeps. Once a goblin is named, that’s who it is.
Keeper of the Hollows
Mother Mudcrumple
Mother Mudcrumple keeps the Great Ledger of every goblin in Underbottom, signs every Residency Deed and stamps every wax seal. You’ll never see her in the village. She’s “resting her eyes” in the deepest burrow, which is where she does her best work.
- Claims to be four hundred years old. Has been four hundred for about sixty years.
- Stamps the wax seals so hard her desk has a mushroom-shaped dent in it.
- Keeps the Great Ledger in “an order that makes sense to her”.
- Was not responsible for the Great Stew Spill. (She was.)
- Says she planted the First Mushroom, the one on every seal. Nobody believes her. Nobody can prove otherwise.
From the margin of the Great Ledger, beside No. 034: “Crown again. Why.”
The hollows
Each hollow is its own little village, with its own goblins and its own ledger.
Mossy Hollow
The first hollow in Underbottom: mushroom farms, a stew pot that never goes out (except once), a pond full of unimpressed frogs and sixty goblins.
Visit Mossy Hollow →Gravelton Hollow
Deep under the gravel, where the tunnels ring with picks. Gravelton’s goblins dig for anything that glitters, push rattling carts of ore past the forge, and swear the rocks sing if you listen closely. The rocks deny this.
More hollows
Down other cracks, through tunnels nobody likes to use, more hollows are waiting. When every goblin in Mossy Hollow has someone Up-Top, Mother Mudcrumple opens the next ledger.
Life in a hollow
Goblin Time
Goblins live fast. A whole goblin day passes in about three of our minutes, so there’s always something going on when you drop by.
The Bright
When daylight leaks down the cracks, goblins go to bed and sleep through the Bright. A few night owls stay up every day. Nobody agrees whether they’re brave or just nosy.
Gossip is money
Nobody pays for anything with coins (they bite them to check them, then keep them). News is what gets traded. The more a goblin gossips, the more bonfires it’s invited to.
Pranks are love
You only prank goblins you like. Being pranked by one of the Crowned is an honor nobody admits to wanting.
Who’s who
The jobs
Mushroom Farmers: patient, muddy, sentimental about fungus. Stew Cooks: guardians of the Pot. Grog Keepers: keepers of everyone’s secrets, for a price in gossip. Tinkers: builders of things that mostly work. Layabouts: an honored profession. Somebody has to test the naps.
Common and Uncommon
Commons are the backbone of the Hollow: the ones who keep the Pot bubbling. Uncommons have a bit of Up-Top luck on them: a flower cap, a ski hat, a pilot cap that fell down a crack and fit perfectly.
Rare
Said to be mushroom-touched. A little magic, and wizard hats and viking helmets nobody remembers acquiring.
The Crowned
Only three goblins in a hollow wear crowns. Nobody crowned them. They woke up one evening with crowns on, and Mother Mudcrumple wrote it down. Goblins bow a little when they pass. Then prank them.