July 4, 2025 • 13 mins
Today we take a strange turn into the warped world of the Nilbog... a creature that breaks the rules just by existing. This goblin flips logic on its head, turning damage into healing and making every attack against it an act of kindness. I talk about its origins in the Fiend Folio, the spatio-temporal weirdness that defines it, and why this chaotic little creature can derail even the best-planned dungeon. I’ll share ways to use it in your campaign, twist your players’ expectations, and spark chaos with every swing.
#ADnD #OldSchoolRPG #NilbogMayhem
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:18):
Welcome back to the podcast. It's Friday and it is the 4th of
July. Happy 4th of July.
I know I will be having a wonderful day.
Hopefully you as well celebrating the 4th of July like
the rest of America and having fun with your family, fireworks,
things like that. Having a good old time
celebrating our Independence Day.
(00:40):
Anyway, ask the DM at the evil dm.com and the evil dm.com is my
website. patreon.com/the evil DMis where you can support me.
This is the Evil Dungeon Master Universe podcast.
Hopefully you found the right place and hopefully you're
enjoying it. Today we're going to talk a
little bit about a monster. Now, I was looking through the
(01:04):
book a little bit trying to finda monster that would, I don't
know, be interesting to talk about, and I flipped over to
what the most interesting monsters are always about, and
that's the Fiend Folio. We all love the monsters from
the Fiend Folio. These crazy and strange oddities
of monsters that they came up with are just amazing.
(01:29):
So I jumped over to the Nilbog. Now, the Nilbogs are not what
you think, and the name sounds dumb and there's actually no
picture for it in the book. That's because they look exactly
like a normal goblin. So here is where we get maybe a
little bit of a way you can trick your party and have a
(01:51):
little fun too. They're very rare appearance, at
best 4 to 40 appearing armor class 6 movement 6 inches, one
to one hit dice or 1 -. 140% in layer individuals or K in layer
is C number of attacks, one damage attack 1V6 or by weapon
(02:11):
and special attacks nil blah blah blah.
Intelligence average your lawfulevil.
They're small, no scionics, and their XP level value is 3 slash
53 per per hip point plus one per hip point.
Exactly. So you get a little bit more
(02:32):
because wow, this creature is. I completely forgot about this
creature. It suffers from a curious
spitatio temporal reversal. It remains a mystery why these
goblins are susceptible to this strange disorder.
Nimbleism. Nimblegism is the name we are
(02:56):
giving to the disorder appears to occur when overly heavy use
of magic strains of fabric, of space-time continuum, and leads
to some very strange localized events.
The coincidence of conditions which lead to nimble logism is
extremely rare and is only imperfectly understood.
(03:16):
Although the creature itself does not in any sense transmit
this disorder to those around it, some of the effects are
transmitted. Many and varied accounts have
been received about the nature of the space-time disturbances
which take place in the presenceof mailbox.
(03:37):
Only one factor appears to be incommon.
Adventures will have no control over their own actions.
Will generally pursue courses ofactions contrary to their normal
intent. For example, they may feel an
overwhelming compulsion compulsion to load all their
treasure into an empty treasure chest in the mailbox layer and
leave empty handed. There are no saving throws
(03:59):
against those effects, nor is there any known defense, though
a powerful spell such as a wish will, if properly used, have a
good chance of rendering the local immunity against these
effects. Wow, a good chance.
A wish spell has a good chance. Let's see.
Another curious feature about the Nilborg power is that the
(04:21):
creature gains hip points when struck, the additional being
equal to the intended damage role.
So whatever your role is, that'show many hip points they get
into, addition to what they automatically have.
It can only lose hip points by such means as casting Cure
Wounds spells on itself, forcefully feeding it healing
(04:44):
potions, and so on. For obvious reasons, encounters
with these strange creatures aredreaded, and as a result normal
gomblets tend to be treated withextreme caution lest they turn
out to be no bugs. There appears to be no way to
(05:05):
distinguishing between the two apart from the use of such
spells as Commune or and or trial by trial and error.
So these creatures, so far no one has really encountered these
creatures according to this or there's no other creatures that
have this disease or weirdness going on about them.
(05:27):
So you have to actually like cure wounds on them to actually
attack them or feed them healingpotions to actually, you know,
get them to die, which is why their XP value is 53 plus per
hip point extra. So by the time you figure out
what's going on, you're adding actual hit point, you're adding
(05:48):
actual XP value to them. So a couple ways thought about
using them in your campaign. The deeper the players go, the
stranger things get until they meet a group of goblins who are
thriving. Every blow they take sort of
heals them. Every spell goes haywire and the
goblins seem more confused than the party and Nilbag is in their
(06:12):
ranks and it's warping reality all around it.
Players must figure out what's causing the inversion before
they start healing enemies and hurting allies.
What you can do that there may be hidden inside the crowd of
goblins and making everything screwed up.
A small village has been cursed with the strange behavior.
The mayor is hiding from his guards.
(06:34):
The children are keeping their parents in bed, and laws are
being enforced in reverse. A nilbog wandered in weeks ago
and was mistaken for a goblin pet.
It's hiding in plain sight, possibly even helping out.
Or thinks it is. Can the players identify and
remove it without causing chaos?There's a little hook for you.
(06:58):
A notorious goblin criminal has a price on his head, but every
time adventurers kill him and inquotes kill him, he gets
stronger. The Nilbag has figured out how
to exploit adventurers for healing.
He lures them in, takes a hit, and escapes Healthier.
The party might be hired to track him down, only to discover
(07:20):
he wants to be hit. Now what do they do?
I could see this one actually, as I was writing it, this one
could be really a good one because you're going to track
this goblin down and he you hit him and he's like, ow, oh, oh,
that hurts. And then suddenly he falls and
you think you killed him. And really, you just healed him
(07:44):
up and gave him extra hit pointsand he's pretending to be dead
on the ground. And you're like, aha, I'm going
to grab the gold, search him, whatever, and move on.
And he's just like, he gives up and dusts himself off after you
guys leave and he's back out there at it again.
And you're like, wait, didn't wekill him?
When you find out later on that he's still wanted or still out
there, and you start to wonder, is this guy like, you know, a
(08:06):
magician? Is he, you know, a necromancer?
Is he, is he, you know, undead or something?
So it cuts a little strange thing going on.
Let's see another one here. An evil knight is plagued with
misfortune. His enemies keep getting lucky.
His blade heals the wounded. The War Horse tripped over a
(08:28):
goblin weeks ago, and ever sincenothing goes right.
The goblin, A Nilbog, now bondedto him through some magical
fluke slaying. It only made things worse.
The players must break the bond before their own weapons start
to heal the villains. Let's see here.
The goblin tribe believes the Nilbag is a divine prophet.
(08:53):
They start to worship him. They start to give him things.
They offer him sacrifices, eagerto be in his good favor and
blessed. It's a twisted loop of
accidental healing and misinterpretation of miracles.
The tribe is now invaded now, sorry, the tribe is now invading
(09:14):
a local town, not to raid it, but to convert.
Can the players stop the cult without turning them all into
health tanks? Interesting that there would
run, I'm thinking about this nowout loud.
And they're going into the town and they're trying to convert
people, but they're goblins, so.And they're like showing the
(09:34):
people that, you know, we are good, we are divine.
Our prophet shows us the way. We cannot be killed.
Look, strike me and see that I do not hurt and I do not die.
And then the villagers obviouslydon't like not liking goblins.
Attack this goblin and see that the strongest men with the sword
(09:59):
swipe away at this warrior, at this goblin who's in robes and
peaceful. And he's swiping him and swiping
him and swiping him. And after a little bit of being
tired, they see the goblin is standing there stronger than
ever and taking all these hits. And they're like, what?
(10:19):
And the goblin is like, whoa. As you can see, I survived.
And now that I have survived, I can bestow this magical ability
upon your village and your people.
If only you, I feel like I'm doing like one of those sermons.
If only you give to the church for 1999, you know, something
(10:42):
like that. And you know, I'll get the
little rag across the face, you know, Jimmy Swaggart style stuff
like, you know, he passed away recently.
So that's that's why kind of whythis thing came into my mind.
But yeah, I can see, and, you know, 2999 of gold, you too can
receive miracle water, which canheal something silly like that
(11:08):
because yeah, that's how it works.
Yeah. So this was just some ways you
could use it in your campaign and use these little creatures
and have little ways of doing it.
I don't think I've ever used these creatures and completely
forgot about them. And I think they'd be a great
way to screw with party members.They find a bunch of goblins.
(11:30):
They don't really know that they're not goblins.
They're a Nilbog, which is, you know, obviously goblin
backwards. And then when they start
attacking them just just like, oh, oh, the goblins are like,
ow, stop it. No, please don't hit me again.
(11:51):
And and they're just getting damaged, but they're just
actually gaining hip points and they're just like, no, stop,
please don't ow we're one of those type of things.
I just find it interesting that it you could do something like
that and they're like, what the Hell's going on?
Why aren't these things dying? There's just a bunch of ways you
(12:13):
could really use it. The Nilbog hit me again.
It feels great. You know, that's going to be the
title of this podcast. Nilbog hit me again.
It feels great. I love that title.
Tell me what you think of the comments below of this creature.
Have you used the Nil bog in your campaigns and how did your
party to react to it? I'm interested to hear about
that. Definitely in the comments.
(12:35):
Don't forget to check out the YouTube channel.
We usually have polls on the community tab on the channel.
So you just go right to the channel and go to the community
for the channel. And if you follow the channel on
YouTube, you'll see them pop up eventually.
But we put up polls every coupleof days just to see what people
think about gaming topics. And we always like to see what
(12:57):
you vote for and comment on. So we usually go over it on the
live stream as well on Wednesdays and talk about
everything. Anyway, I'm going to head out
for today. So keep it original, keep it all
at school. Goodnight and God bless and
happy 4th of July 10th.
Welcome back to the podcast. It's Friday and it is the 4th of
July. Happy 4th of July.
I know I will be having a wonderful day.
Hopefully you as well celebrating the 4th of July like
the rest of America and having fun with your family, fireworks,
things like that. Having a good old time
celebrating our Independence Day.
(00:40):
Anyway, ask the DM at the evil dm.com and the evil dm.com is my
website. patreon.com/the evil DMis where you can support me.
This is the Evil Dungeon Master Universe podcast.
Hopefully you found the right place and hopefully you're
enjoying it. Today we're going to talk a
little bit about a monster. Now, I was looking through the
(01:04):
book a little bit trying to finda monster that would, I don't
know, be interesting to talk about, and I flipped over to
what the most interesting monsters are always about, and
that's the Fiend Folio. We all love the monsters from
the Fiend Folio. These crazy and strange oddities
of monsters that they came up with are just amazing.
(01:29):
So I jumped over to the Nilbog. Now, the Nilbogs are not what
you think, and the name sounds dumb and there's actually no
picture for it in the book. That's because they look exactly
like a normal goblin. So here is where we get maybe a
little bit of a way you can trick your party and have a
(01:51):
little fun too. They're very rare appearance, at
best 4 to 40 appearing armor class 6 movement 6 inches, one
to one hit dice or 1 -. 140% in layer individuals or K in layer
is C number of attacks, one damage attack 1V6 or by weapon
(02:11):
and special attacks nil blah blah blah.
Intelligence average your lawfulevil.
They're small, no scionics, and their XP level value is 3 slash
53 per per hip point plus one per hip point.
Exactly. So you get a little bit more
(02:32):
because wow, this creature is. I completely forgot about this
creature. It suffers from a curious
spitatio temporal reversal. It remains a mystery why these
goblins are susceptible to this strange disorder.
Nimbleism. Nimblegism is the name we are
(02:56):
giving to the disorder appears to occur when overly heavy use
of magic strains of fabric, of space-time continuum, and leads
to some very strange localized events.
The coincidence of conditions which lead to nimble logism is
extremely rare and is only imperfectly understood.
(03:16):
Although the creature itself does not in any sense transmit
this disorder to those around it, some of the effects are
transmitted. Many and varied accounts have
been received about the nature of the space-time disturbances
which take place in the presenceof mailbox.
(03:37):
Only one factor appears to be incommon.
Adventures will have no control over their own actions.
Will generally pursue courses ofactions contrary to their normal
intent. For example, they may feel an
overwhelming compulsion compulsion to load all their
treasure into an empty treasure chest in the mailbox layer and
leave empty handed. There are no saving throws
(03:59):
against those effects, nor is there any known defense, though
a powerful spell such as a wish will, if properly used, have a
good chance of rendering the local immunity against these
effects. Wow, a good chance.
A wish spell has a good chance. Let's see.
Another curious feature about the Nilborg power is that the
(04:21):
creature gains hip points when struck, the additional being
equal to the intended damage role.
So whatever your role is, that'show many hip points they get
into, addition to what they automatically have.
It can only lose hip points by such means as casting Cure
Wounds spells on itself, forcefully feeding it healing
(04:44):
potions, and so on. For obvious reasons, encounters
with these strange creatures aredreaded, and as a result normal
gomblets tend to be treated withextreme caution lest they turn
out to be no bugs. There appears to be no way to
(05:05):
distinguishing between the two apart from the use of such
spells as Commune or and or trial by trial and error.
So these creatures, so far no one has really encountered these
creatures according to this or there's no other creatures that
have this disease or weirdness going on about them.
(05:27):
So you have to actually like cure wounds on them to actually
attack them or feed them healingpotions to actually, you know,
get them to die, which is why their XP value is 53 plus per
hip point extra. So by the time you figure out
what's going on, you're adding actual hit point, you're adding
(05:48):
actual XP value to them. So a couple ways thought about
using them in your campaign. The deeper the players go, the
stranger things get until they meet a group of goblins who are
thriving. Every blow they take sort of
heals them. Every spell goes haywire and the
goblins seem more confused than the party and Nilbag is in their
(06:12):
ranks and it's warping reality all around it.
Players must figure out what's causing the inversion before
they start healing enemies and hurting allies.
What you can do that there may be hidden inside the crowd of
goblins and making everything screwed up.
A small village has been cursed with the strange behavior.
The mayor is hiding from his guards.
(06:34):
The children are keeping their parents in bed, and laws are
being enforced in reverse. A nilbog wandered in weeks ago
and was mistaken for a goblin pet.
It's hiding in plain sight, possibly even helping out.
Or thinks it is. Can the players identify and
remove it without causing chaos?There's a little hook for you.
(06:58):
A notorious goblin criminal has a price on his head, but every
time adventurers kill him and inquotes kill him, he gets
stronger. The Nilbag has figured out how
to exploit adventurers for healing.
He lures them in, takes a hit, and escapes Healthier.
The party might be hired to track him down, only to discover
(07:20):
he wants to be hit. Now what do they do?
I could see this one actually, as I was writing it, this one
could be really a good one because you're going to track
this goblin down and he you hit him and he's like, ow, oh, oh,
that hurts. And then suddenly he falls and
you think you killed him. And really, you just healed him
(07:44):
up and gave him extra hit pointsand he's pretending to be dead
on the ground. And you're like, aha, I'm going
to grab the gold, search him, whatever, and move on.
And he's just like, he gives up and dusts himself off after you
guys leave and he's back out there at it again.
And you're like, wait, didn't wekill him?
When you find out later on that he's still wanted or still out
there, and you start to wonder, is this guy like, you know, a
(08:06):
magician? Is he, you know, a necromancer?
Is he, is he, you know, undead or something?
So it cuts a little strange thing going on.
Let's see another one here. An evil knight is plagued with
misfortune. His enemies keep getting lucky.
His blade heals the wounded. The War Horse tripped over a
(08:28):
goblin weeks ago, and ever sincenothing goes right.
The goblin, A Nilbog, now bondedto him through some magical
fluke slaying. It only made things worse.
The players must break the bond before their own weapons start
to heal the villains. Let's see here.
The goblin tribe believes the Nilbag is a divine prophet.
(08:53):
They start to worship him. They start to give him things.
They offer him sacrifices, eagerto be in his good favor and
blessed. It's a twisted loop of
accidental healing and misinterpretation of miracles.
The tribe is now invaded now, sorry, the tribe is now invading
(09:14):
a local town, not to raid it, but to convert.
Can the players stop the cult without turning them all into
health tanks? Interesting that there would
run, I'm thinking about this nowout loud.
And they're going into the town and they're trying to convert
people, but they're goblins, so.And they're like showing the
(09:34):
people that, you know, we are good, we are divine.
Our prophet shows us the way. We cannot be killed.
Look, strike me and see that I do not hurt and I do not die.
And then the villagers obviouslydon't like not liking goblins.
Attack this goblin and see that the strongest men with the sword
(09:59):
swipe away at this warrior, at this goblin who's in robes and
peaceful. And he's swiping him and swiping
him and swiping him. And after a little bit of being
tired, they see the goblin is standing there stronger than
ever and taking all these hits. And they're like, what?
(10:19):
And the goblin is like, whoa. As you can see, I survived.
And now that I have survived, I can bestow this magical ability
upon your village and your people.
If only you, I feel like I'm doing like one of those sermons.
If only you give to the church for 1999, you know, something
(10:42):
like that. And you know, I'll get the
little rag across the face, you know, Jimmy Swaggart style stuff
like, you know, he passed away recently.
So that's that's why kind of whythis thing came into my mind.
But yeah, I can see, and, you know, 2999 of gold, you too can
receive miracle water, which canheal something silly like that
(11:08):
because yeah, that's how it works.
Yeah. So this was just some ways you
could use it in your campaign and use these little creatures
and have little ways of doing it.
I don't think I've ever used these creatures and completely
forgot about them. And I think they'd be a great
way to screw with party members.They find a bunch of goblins.
(11:30):
They don't really know that they're not goblins.
They're a Nilbog, which is, you know, obviously goblin
backwards. And then when they start
attacking them just just like, oh, oh, the goblins are like,
ow, stop it. No, please don't hit me again.
(11:51):
And and they're just getting damaged, but they're just
actually gaining hip points and they're just like, no, stop,
please don't ow we're one of those type of things.
I just find it interesting that it you could do something like
that and they're like, what the Hell's going on?
Why aren't these things dying? There's just a bunch of ways you
(12:13):
could really use it. The Nilbog hit me again.
It feels great. You know, that's going to be the
title of this podcast. Nilbog hit me again.
It feels great. I love that title.
Tell me what you think of the comments below of this creature.
Have you used the Nil bog in your campaigns and how did your
party to react to it? I'm interested to hear about
that. Definitely in the comments.
(12:35):
Don't forget to check out the YouTube channel.
We usually have polls on the community tab on the channel.
So you just go right to the channel and go to the community
for the channel. And if you follow the channel on
YouTube, you'll see them pop up eventually.
But we put up polls every coupleof days just to see what people
think about gaming topics. And we always like to see what
(12:57):
you vote for and comment on. So we usually go over it on the
live stream as well on Wednesdays and talk about
everything. Anyway, I'm going to head out
for today. So keep it original, keep it all
at school. Goodnight and God bless and
happy 4th of July 10th.
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