Oblivion Goblin Wars: 7 Tribes, 1 Trick ⚔️🔥
Oblivion is known for its Radiant AI, an ambitious social network of ants that grants all its friendly NPCs a charming, scheduled daily life. On a typical day, you'll find them waking up in their own beds, farming in the fields, taking a lunch break, and, in the case of the extremely paranoid wood elf Glarthir, spying behind the local church in the middle of the night to plot murder. 🌙
But what many players never suspected was that their enemies also led lives of their own. In particular, goblins: the first truly intelligent opponents you encounter in the sewers of the Imperial City, and a valuable source of door-opening tools in those early hours, when your lockpicks seem to snap like reeds. 🗝️
As it turns out, during all our days and months of entertaining ourselves with guild squabbles, exploring dungeons, and spoofing the main plot, the little green ones were busy with their own activities: goblin wars. These clashes occur between seven different tribes scattered across Cyrodiil, and on that fateful day you’re tossed out of the sewers like so much waste, there are already two feuds underway: between the Sharp Tooth and White Skin goblins just outside Skingrad, and between Bloody Hand and Rock Biters on the Yellow Road. If there’s one recipe for disaster in the goblin community, it’s choosing a cave too close to your neighbors. 😱
Why worry about geography? Because there's a chance you'll get involved in the goblin wars, or even intentionally. The event that precipitates conflict within the species is always the theft of a totem: the spark-throwing staff you'll often find guarded by a shaman, the spiritual leader of a goblin tribe. If a tribe loses their sacred staff, they'll send a war party to retrieve it.
And if that operation leads them to another tribe's mine, there will be many casualties and no respite for anyone. As a player, you can go in and steal a totem yourself: either leave it outside its rightful owner's cave and end hostilities, or plant it elsewhere and let chaos ensue. 🔥
The problem and intrigue of the goblin wars lies in the fact that they are not visible to you as a player. There is no declaration in the interface when they begin or end, nor an easy way to track their progress. They don't happen. for The player is treated as an audience; these events simply happen, regardless of their presence. This has led to numerous confusing threads in Reddit and conflicting wiki entries over the years. 🤔
Talking to the original developers about Goblin Wars has been a similarly murky and mysterious journey. I started with Jeff Gardiner, Oblivion producer and project lead for Fallout 76, who put me in touch with Bruce Nesmith. A Bethesda veteran since the 1990s, Nesmith worked on Oblivion's creature stats and balance—but he didn't personally touch the Goblin Wars system.
“One of the great things about Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout games is the freedom the designers had to get fun extras like that approved and implemented,” he told me. “The studio is also famous for taking on more than it can handle, and sometimes such features were scaled back to meet deadlines, leaving partial implementations for resourceful enthusiasts to figure out.” 🛠️
At this point, it was tempting to believe that the extent of the goblin wars had been exaggerated by the community's collective imagination—inflated as a result of their grim and unconfirmable nature. That was until Nesmith tracked down the true designer responsible: Kurt Kuhlmann, who had recently been the lead systems designer on Starfield.
"It wasn't a secret feature," he says. "It was described in the official Oblivion strategy guide." 📜
Kuhlmann worked on an Oblivion side quest called “Goblin Trouble,” which centers on a group of settlers who are unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire between two tribes. “Since I had to set up a scripted system so that goblins in one dungeon would periodically attack goblins in another, I figured it wouldn’t be too much more work to make it systemic, so that it would work with any goblin tribe if the player stole their totem,” says Kuhlmann. “I’m not sure if the part about ‘not being too much more work’ was actually true, but it certainly allowed for some fun, emergent gameplay.”
I also liked that it gave you some perspective on goblin culture and how their tribe was organized. 🌍
It certainly had the desired effect: through my research into the goblin wars, the social intricacies of goblin culture have been revealed. Down in their dungeons, I've discovered prisons and dormitories, kitchens and chefs—the latter seeming to have their own AI that prevents combat. I've learned that goblin outposts have spiritual centers, that their warchiefs can be replaced, but that the death of a shaman leaves their tribe passive and inactive. 😴
“As I recall, one of the big challenges was getting goblins inside the dungeon to exit,” says Kuhlmann. That’s because areas like the dungeon interiors in Oblivion don’t load normally when the player isn’t nearby. “I don’t remember how I solved that, but apparently I did. Probably with some questionable design trickery!” says Kuhlmann. “This also took advantage of some rarely used but powerful AI features, like ‘Find,’ which was how goblins navigated toward the totem, wherever it was.” 🔍
In my own experience, goblin wars have raged whenever I'm not looking. While exploring the ruined mines of the Sharp Tooth tribe, I found the place where guidebooks described invasions by White Skin raiders, fighting on behalf of a cave-dwelling Breton named Goblin Jim. But neither the raiders nor the totem they came to collect were there. The White Skins must have succeeded in their mission.
After I stole the Sharp Tooth totem, meanwhile—taking care to leave their shaman alive, even as he went into a state of desperate searching—I left it on the ground outside Skingrad's gates to see if it might provoke a wider conflict. But while the Sharp Tooth began to flood the road outside their mine, crossing swords with passing Imperial soldiers, they didn't come for the staff. Perhaps that was because they simply couldn't fight through the outside world to get to it.
Or because he relied on Oblivion's 'Wait' function to pass the time – much like the YouTuber Rimmy Downunder, who had similar problems with the goblin wars. 🎮
“I don’t remember the details, but the goblin war was stretching the limits of our game systems, especially the AI and scripting,” says Kuhlmann. “My guess is that, because of the scripted nature of the goblin wars system, when you use Wait, the scripts aren’t updated properly.” It could be that the time the goblins left their base falls in the middle of a Wait period, and therefore isn’t triggered when that time is skipped. “You could try short, one-hour Wait periods,” suggests Kuhlmann. “Or just let the game time pass naturally and see if that makes a difference.” ⏳
Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that, after Oblivion, the Bethesda team tended to restrict "simulationist" systems like this, due to the number of bugs and other problems they caused. However, Kuhlmann continued to build on the Goblin Wars philosophy whenever possible. He was the designer in charge of Fallout 4's workshop feature, which was the source of much unexpected NPC behavior. If a caravan couldn't rendezvous with another base to deliver supplies, the best solution was to wend its way through the streets of Boston, acting as its guard as it passed looter camps and large warehouses filled with super mutants. 🛡️
"I've always loved emergent systems that allow the player to interact with the world and let things happen naturally," says Kuhlmann. "One of my favorite games is Far Cry 2, where roaming patrols, spreading fire, and enemy bases could interact in unexpected and very fun ways." 🎉
You'll see spiritually similar instances of AI interaction even in later Bethesda games. "I took opportunities to introduce elements of 'controlled chaos' whenever I could," says Kuhlmann. "The vertibirds in Fallout, and the dragons in Skyrim, were also sources of great emergent gameplay, as they could find random things and fight, which you could either observe from a distance or join in the fun." 🐉
And the goblin wars he instigated? Kuhlmann is quite happy with how they turned out. “There wasn’t much else like that in Oblivion, where you could freely manipulate the state of the world and it would react in an understandable way,” he says. “I would have loved to do more of that kind of thing, but we didn’t have the extra time—in fact, quite the opposite—and the tools for doing that stuff in Oblivion were very primitive.” 📅
More primitive, as it turns out, than the goblins themselves. The next time you fight a green creature, take a moment to ask yourself: Are its motivations more complex than yours? 🤔
In short, Oblivion’s goblin wars serve as a small but powerful lesson in what emergent design can offer: an imperfect, sometimes invisible, and error-prone system that nonetheless adds depth, humor, and unforeseeable consequences to the game world 🎮🧌.
While technical and time constraints left the system far from perfect, its existence inspired game designers to explore ways to introduce the “controlled chaos” that makes virtual worlds feel alive and organic.
In terms of design, goblin skirmishes provide emergent mechanics that enrich the narrative and replayability, creating surprising moments that the player can observe, manipulate, or ignore 🤯🔧.
And while in Oblivion these fights are entertaining curiosities within the game world, in reality the conflicts branch out with much more serious and complex consequences, reminding us of the difference between treating war as a recreational resource and facing the real dynamics of human and geopolitical conflicts 🌍.
So the next time you come across a green goblin in a cave, stop for a moment: even the smallest of their fights contains design decisions, story choices, and surprise ✨.
