Grinholdt
Grinholdt, the realm of the Goblin Court, is a rickety, raucous, and strangely ingenious sprawl of mischief, invention, and organized chaos—a realm where logic takes a holiday and lunacy holds a parade. On the surface, Grinholdt begins with the infamous Goblin Market, a crooked, ever-changing bazaar of squeaking carts, shouting hawkers, and twisted tents made of patchwork tarps, bones, and stolen curtains. The ground is uneven, the paths are never the same twice, and the vendors and customers are a collection of fey from almost every Court, wanting to make use of the Market's laws wherein there is no violence tolerated and every Court is welcomed--making it a place where members of opposing courts can meet safely and prized wares crafted solely by one Court can be traded here. This also means that much in the way of contraband is available as well.
Below the market—accessible through trapdoors, sinkholes, barrels with secret staircases, and the occasional well marked stairway—lies the true domain of the Goblin Court. The Underrealm of Grinholdt is a sprawling network of twisting burrows, wobbling halls, and damp, vaulted chambers, all dug out in defiance of reason. Tunnels intersect at impossible angles, gravity is optional in some stairwells, and entire wings of the subterranean city rearrange themselves. Walls are built of scavenged stone, rusted pipes, fungal brickwork, and even papier-mâché that somehow holds—at least for the moment.
At the heart of the underground realm is Throneburrow, the courtly seat of the Goblin King, where law and decorum are inverted by decree. The Goblin King presides from a gilded throne, surrounded by a dozen contradictory proclamations nailed to the walls and a council of advisors who argue for the sake of argument. The court’s laws demand lawlessness, enforce disobedience, and punish those who follow the rules without first breaking them. The chamber glows with bioluminescent toadstools and the occasional belch of colored smoke from random vents in the walls.
Surrounding Throneburrow are districts such as Scampergut, Toadspine Row, and Mucklick Square, each with its own flavor of goblin chaos. There’s a massive foundry that burns coal mined from lower levels which only produces widgets, a museum of biting things with a healthy mix of things visitors can bite as well as a things that will bite the visitors, and a school where students learn the art of sneakery--one of the greatest tenets of goblinhood. The Gullet Tunnels, a deeper, damper set of caverns, are rumored to house the Goblin Court’s secret vaults which holds the horde of valuables collected from goblin raids as well as collected treasures from the market above.
Despite its filth, flickering lights, and ongoing structural debates between resident engineers and anarchists, Grinholdt thrives. Everything smells faintly of damp and dirt. Fey from other courts come to the Goblin Market above, but only the desperate, the daring, or the delightfully foolish venture into the Underrealm below.
Grinholdt is not a place of safety, but it is a place of freedom. Freedom to barter your fondest wish for the color of your eyes. Freedom to enjoy the wild raucousness of a spontaneous victory party for winning a hand of cards. Freedom to obey every anarchic law decreed by the Goblin King under threat of painful death. Beneath its chaos lies a specific craftiness—a cunning that uses the veneer of freedom and chaos to catch visitors in binding promises and oaths never meant to be taken.
Geography
The geographic features of Grinholdt are a bizarre blend of surface squalor, subterranean sprawl, and intricately structured chaos, cobbled together with goblin wit and Feywild unpredictability. Above ground, the Goblin Market sprawls across a lopsided plain with twisting corridors and vast open parks. The terrain is uneven and ever-shifting—what was solid cobble one day may become mossy mud the next, and no two paths through the market remain the same for long. Ramshackle stalls sit precariously along the pathways, often never to appear again in the same location. Numerous shifting alleyways appear to allow the meetings and trade between people whom anywhere else, would not be allowed to meet. Even the sky above Grinholdt seems slightly off-kilter, often filled with sooty black smoke belched out from the great foundries below burning remarkable amounts of coal to produce their great fires.
Beneath this chaotic marketplace lies the true realm: a vast, tangled warren of tunnels, burrows, and half-sunken chambers, expanding in every direction like an underground ant colony designed with no plan in mind. The upper layers, closest to the market, are relatively wide and bustling—built from scavenged brick, packed dirt, and the bones of larger things that didn’t make it out. Farther down, the passages twist unpredictably, forming looping spirals, upside-down stairwells, and entire rooms that rotate when no one’s looking. The deeper one travels, the more organic the structures become, shaped by fungal overgrowths, slime-coated root-systems, and caves that breathe softly like sleeping giants.
Certain geographic landmarks in the Underrealm defy classification. The Toadstool Gulch is a massive fungal ravine filled with glowing, fungal bridges and springy mushroom terraces, while the Burbling Sink is a crater-sized, semi-sentient mud pit that digests gossip and possibly a former mayor who went missing. Streams in Grinholdt don’t run straight—they loop, climb, or double back, some flowing uphill rather than down. Most feed into the Groanflow, a slow-moving underground river that churns forward constantly, fed by natural springs, kitchen drains, and emptied bathwater.
Despite its layered chaos, Grinholdt functions with uncanny internal logic. There are no mountains, but there are ranges of hills made of very small mountains, valleys of discarded waste and rubbish, and caves which house terrible beasts waiting to be unleashed. The land reacts subtly to mood and madness—a tantrum might collapse a ceiling, while a clever joke could open a secret door behind a tapestry.
Grinholdt's geography isn’t just strange—it’s alive, shaped by goblin instinct and Feywild whimsy. It respects trickery more than maps, chaos more than order, and storytelling more than stone. You don't find your way through Grinholdt by walking straight—you find it by getting lost with style.
Climate
The climate of Grinholdt is damp, muggy, and unpredictably fragrant—a stew of underground must, fermented onion air, and the occasional whiff of sulfur, and burning coal. The surface realm of the Goblin Market sits under a sun occasionally clouded by bellowing clouds of smoke from burning coal. The temperature above ground is cool and sometimes cold, though rarely freezing. Beneath the earth, the Underrealm is warm and clammy, insulated by the soil and warmed from the heat of the foundries. In Grinholdt, weather is forecast by the Goblin King, who has a perfect weather prediction rate of 50%.