Currently, the only information on Gruff is this one paragraph:


That's a bit sad and it's far too little. We would never accept a 'walker with this little information anymore.

I've said that I had long-term plans for Gruff and in this thread I'll try to explain them a bit. I'm not sure if or when they'll ever get written (I'm a very slow and insecure writer, especially in English), but if you want to avoid spoilers about this little Goblin, this is the time to close your tab. I'd also like to make it clear that this is the direction I think the character should be taken into and as long as it's not voted into the Archives, everyone is free to do with Gruff what they want. He is marked as Open (I believe) and I'd be okay if anyone wants to do something different with him.

First of all, some additional information:

Looks: I originally envisioned Gruff as looking something like the Jund Goblins, because that would upped the cute-factor of Gruff. Then someone (I can't remember who) made some artwork about Gruff, depicting him as the more traditional greenskinned goblins and I actually quite liked that. Like most Goblins, Gruff is smaller than an adult human. He comes up to about the navel of an average human, maybe slightly above. He looks pretty average for a goblin, pointy ears, a mouth that tends towards a green... His clothing consists of a tunic bound with a rope and a pair of pants, both in a gray-brownish color. On any plane with some amount of "civilization" he looks like a beggar. He is most recognizable because he carries a big wooden stick and a simple shoulderslung satchel.

Origin: I haven't actually decided on his actual homeplane, but it's supposed to be a bit of a backwater plane. He used to live in a large clan of goblins on a mountain forest-edge. The social structure was that of a large-close family headed by several shamans. For the most part, these shamans are the only goblins in the clan capable of magic, although some other goblins knew simple tricks to light a fire or conjure up a light. These shamans also teach those willing a rudimentary writing system, so Gruff can put, to some extent, his thoughts on paper. (Or scratches in wood.)

Possessions: Gruff does not own a lot of things. He has his clothes, which he wears almost constantly, except when washing himself in a stream or a lake. He has his stick, which is a long (about the length of Gruff's body), slender piece of wood that suddenly becomes wider at the end, with intricate branch-ends attached (It's likely that the stick was actually a root.) The other end of the stick is slightly sharpened. Gruff also has a satchel. The contents of this satchel vary, but almost always contain some food, stored in small bags or other containers. (Later in his life he begins to store things in vials and small glass pots.) It usually also contains: some ends of rope, some sort of toy, a skin of water, varies shiny things, a piece of bark with "writing" on it...

Other info and personality: Gruff's age is that of approximately a teenager (I don't know how old Goblins tend to become. I'm guess not all that old, so he may just be 10, but his intelligence and mindset corresponds to that of a human teenager). He's fairly young and has a lot to learn. Goblins in his tribe tended to learn while doing and helping with chores where the adults thought them mnemonics and rhymes on what to gather, what to eat, where to be careful. He has most of this necessary survival stuff down, but not all. He can build a simple shelter and find food, but he doesn't know how to track or make pots or other things, other than very simple weapons and traps.

Gruff is, at his core, a very fun-loving and social person. This is where the core conflict of this character comes from. He is as far removed from his preferred state as is possible without outright torture. His main goal is to get home, but he doesn't fully understand the nature of his planeswalking, which makes things a lot harder. If he can't get home, he wants to find a nice and fun community to be a part of.

He's also, like most Goblins, easily distracted and feels his current emotion always very heavily. This makes him depressed most of the time, but when something good happens, the sad feelings disappear almost completely to make room for the good feelings.

The Plan: The ultimate goal I want with Gruff is for him to become awesome. He needs to be cool, competent and skilled. I intended to give him emotion-based magic (manipulating and channeling emotions, think Act of Treason) when he fully matures. The path towards this goal should be long, arduous and painful. It has to take very, very small steps to get there. Early stories with Gruff should just be about Gruff running away from things, finding a nice place and losing it again. My early draft for Gruff on Jund was exactly this. A later story I've had in mind consists of him being captured and put into some sort of emotion-eating machine to provide power to some villain or other. It would have been really "break-the-cutie" sort of stuff. Eventually he'd run into someone who knew about planeswalking and slowly learn how to control it better. He's also slowly develop a sense of magic. He'd sorta intuitively make mana bonds (which was also hinted at in the Gruff on Jund story) and eventually develops some sort of accidental magic whenever he's even more emotional than otherwise. Ultimately (and very slowly) he learns to master his magical arts.

In terms of personality, Gruff eventually calms down a bit and becomes more thoughtful about the world around him. I don't have this planned out in detail, but I can see him eventually caring less about getting home and more about carving out his own place in the world, with a community he chose. This would make him lean over into Green territory as he gets older and I'm actually very okay with that. He'll never become very adapt at long-term planning or higher-level thinking, but he'll make up for that with experience and a certain level of trust in those around him. This leaves him open for manipulation and I could (story-hook) him being exploited by a certain organization to (say, for example) bust a couple of Goblins out of a certain prison.

So, those are pretty much all my thoughts on Gruff and where to take him. Maybe it's a terrible idea, maybe it's not. The only way to find out is by sharing the idea.

Sidenote: When did Gatherer become even worse?

I need to read over this in more detail (Sara's coming over so I won't have time to till tonight) but what I'm seeing here looks interesting. Progression from a comic relief character to an actual cool character? Sign me up!

Gruff's name was among the characters I listed as being of potential interest to the folks in YMTC working on Starstill and people latched onto him immediately. There's some discussion of him possibly inadvertently pissing off the Red Dragon, causing zin to basically close off all communication, which has a domino effect where the devotees of the dragon freak out because they don't know why zie's stopped talking to anyone and start flailing out at the other groups on the plane, particularly the group trying to make life less crappy. Gruff would have a minor role to play there, obviously, but it'd be a kind of interesting avalanche-from-a-single-stone effect that appeals a lot to me. And it'd definitely come early in his development.

Also yeah Gatherer sure did get worse didn't it? =_= I wish I knew why the web team was so terrible.

Thanks for that feedback. I'll need to check out that Starstill project. I might make it available offline and read it over the weekend or something.

Unfortunately it's pretty patchy at the moment. The flavor end is at least. People have been weirdly resistant to pinning things down definitively in a single guide =_=

Gruff's portrait was done by digitalsurrealist, AKA phyrexianhailstorm, and I believe that art is now lost.

All known surviving DS artwork is here. It includes a piece titled "Gruff on Jund"

It's not the art I mean, but I'm very happy that there's some art left.

I really like this. As I stated when I first saw the Gruff write-up in the old neighborhood, I really love what you did with him, but I think the development here is also a very nice, organic progression. (Also, Yxoque, I just have to say that from what I've seen here, you have no need to be insecure about your writing in English. This is more well-written than a lot of the stuff my native-English speaking students turn in to me at school.)

I do hope we get to see some Gruff stories at some point in the future! Thanks!

They actually aren't. Middle-management is. The poor web team gets the short end of the stick by people who don't actually understand we design telling them what they want it to look like and the web team has to bend over backwards to accommodate them.

ya gruff is like totes adorbs.

he doesnt have any wikipedia page, tho, so how'm i supposed to write a paper about him, huh?

~sigh~
See, now I need to start drinking...

want a smirnoff ice, bro?

I recently took a (probably unreliable) internet test about my English vocabulary. I scored somewhere in the 70th percentile, which I guess is pretty good, but the real problem is that I have trouble coming up with proper synonyms or other ways to phrase stuff differently. This is great if you want to write Up Goer Five, but gets annoying when you want to tell a story and try not to repeat words all to often. I recognize a lot of words and I understand "difficult" words lackadaisical, acumen, decry or legerdemain but I'd never think of using them in a phrase. (To be fair, I have a similar problem in my native language. I like simple language.)

At least you can do something I can't. I've never heard of that word before and English is my only language.

You should play more Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

Only E.S. game I've played is Skyrim, and that was only for a couple hours.

You're missing out. The games aren't that good in my opinion, but they show how deep and wide you can go with storytelling and worldbuilding. Play them with that in mind if you want to grow as a worldbuilder. (I'm planning on commenting on your plane, by the way. I'm just not particularly motivated to critique at the moment.)

They also show how technical limitations can influence immersion into a story.

I got a chance to read this over, and I like what you've got here quite a lot! I think this is a good progression for Gruff, and I feel even more firmly that his place on Starstill is potentially a good one for his overall character progression.

This, like the rough story map for Illarion, will make it easier, I think, to write for the character.

Yeah, just for the record, I totally encourage other people to write for this character. I really like him, but I don't enjoy writing stories all that much. Give me some worldbuilding any day.

[points in the direction of the God plane] Here you go