You are a goblin...

... one of the smallfolk of the Realm. Your people live on the edges of places settled by the tallfolk of the Realm. Though you are smaller than most, your heart is large and your courage is no less than any other folk's.

You are a knight...

... sworn in service to the Goblin King. You have formed a band of companions among your fellow knights. Together you undertake quests of great importance in search of glory and honor, in the name of the King and the Realm.

You are one of... All the King's Goblins.

What This Is

All the King's Goblins is a GMless tabletop roleplaying game for at least 2 players, in which you tell the story of a daring quest undertaken by goblin knights! Together with the other players, you will create a story goal, some story elements, and one knight each to fill out the questing party. You will take turns controlling story elements to narrate the story and describe the world, turning to dice when things are dangerous or uncertain. The game ends when you complete the story goal or when you feel the tale has reached a satisfying conclusion!

How It Works

All the King's Goblins is Loaded by a Goblin, which means it was built on "The Goblin Pulls Out a Gun" by Viditya Voleti. This is a tech pack that presents game designers with an engaging system for GMless scene resolution, handling concurrent outcomes and player-driven choice in narrative-focused results.

The core mechanic of "The Goblin Pulls Out a Gun" is a GMless opposed dice roll system. In short, you'll create a pool of Player Dice representing skills, items, and positive fictional positioning and a pool of Difficulty Dice representing negative traits, character flaws, and negative fictional positioning.

After rolling all dice, players work together to assign one or more Player Dice against the Difficulty Dice. If assigned Player Dice are higher than a Difficulty Die, for example, that's a Success!

Depending on the dice and how you choose to assign them — you might choose to make a roll harder or fail on purpose for the purpose of the story — a roll of the dice will result in Successes, Failures, Collateral, Catastrophes, and Spectacles. You can have multiple outcomes in a single roll!

This system makes every die roll exciting and engaging while offering multiple ways for the story to move forward. It also puts the odds of success and the possibility of success or failure entirely in the hands of the players.

The Knights

Your character is one of six classes of knight based on familiar tropes. Choose from the Brave, the Wise, the Sly, the Dashing, the Pious, or the Strange. Each class gives you a unique way of gaining Player and Difficulty Dice based on tags — traits you can invoke when rolling dice, which represent your character's virtues and skills, gear, and flaws. All of this information can easily fit on a single index card!

Collaborative Storytelling

This game uses story elements to help guide and structure GMless play. These are index cards (or digital equivalent) that you, the players, create to represent things like Major Characters, Places, Items, Enemies, and more. Each story element also has touchstones which help you describe them when narrating or roleplaying, or even how they might affect dice rolls.

Players may pick up story elements from the table at any time to take over narration and describe new events, twists, etc. in the fiction. You may create new elements as well as you need them. In this way, everyone is both in control of adding to the richness of the story and its world, as well as having a say in what happens and how the world reacts to the characters' actions.

Made for a Goblin

All the King's Goblins was written for Viditya Voleti's Birthday Goblin Game Jam in October of 2022. This means it was written both to make use of his previous work, as well to be a game that he would enjoy. It is lovingly presented here both as a gift to Viditya as well as something that hopefully you have fun with as well.