Traveler's Guide to the Goblin Fells

The Traveler's Guide to the Goblin Fells is a 'zine-size sourcebook of traps and trapsmiths, goblins building mechs, and halflings riding giant pugs into battle. Create an aggressive security system with a list of readymade traps and poisons, or play as the Combat Trapsmith sub-class for the Rogue, setting up traps just before or even during a fight so that any baddie who steps on the wrong square will be impaled by a launched spear or sliced in half by whirling blades or whatever.

Create your very own magic-powered mech with the Mech Crafter sub-class for the Artificer, striding into battle with an arbalest strapped to one arm and a flamethrower to the other, but beware, the goblins of the Ietdhamab Clan are masters of exactly this craft, so be ready to fight their own mechs - or you could sign up with them and help them beat on any of the other goblin clans plaguing the Fells, like the Shaljut Clan, adept swimmers who favor amphibious ambushes, or the Puldru Clan, who breed spiders and rely on their own indefatigable numbers to overwhelm foes, or the Kodarshakur Clan, who form powerful bonds with their dire wolf mounts to create the most fearsome cavalry the Fells have ever seen.

But while the wolf-riding Kodarshakur may be the most fearsome, the halfling Pug Knights have the most indomitable spirit. Riding into battle on giant pugs, poodles, labradors, and rottweilers, the Pug Knights seek to seize the Goblin Fells back from the goblin clans and restore the halflings - who still make up the bulk of the population - to rulership over the lands. Side with the Kodarshakur with the Wolf Knight sub-class for Fighters and the Culorate background, or with the halflings with the Pug Knight sub-class and matching background, or the Idyllburg diaspora background, representing the third and fourth generation descendants of those halflings who fled the Idyllburgs as the goblins took over, returned now to help those trapped in the old country - or stab them in the back.

These three setting-specific backgrounds each come with a number of features that allow you to spend your hit dice on cool powers and abilities, and are joined by four conversions of generic backgrounds that give them the same hit die-fueled abilities: the Guild Artisan, the Merchant, the Noble, and the Soldier. These backgrounds can be used to enhance your existing class, giving you the ability to trigger limited-use powers with hit dice after you’ve run out of spell slots or second winds or whatever, or as a soft-multiclass, giving you access to other classes’ features for as long as you have hit dice to fuel them.