This week, Geek Native had the pleasure of joining Robin Zetina and Jack of “Definitely Not Goblins” for an absolutely lovely informal chat in the run-up to their live Christmas Special in aid of the Glasgow Children’s Hospital.
The Definitely Not Goblins: Christmas Special is taking place in Blackfriars’ Basement, Glasgow, on Sunday the 15th December at 6pm (doors 5:30), and tickets are available.
You can find a quick intro to the group on Instagram.
Thank you for taking the time to meet with me tonight. First question: “Definitely Not Goblins”: if not Goblins, what are you, and how did you come up with the name?
Robin: Great question! It was the run-up to our first show, we still had no title, and I was awake at 6am thinking about it.
Jack works night shift, so I got up and we met up and we started a fire in the garden and sat there with a McDonald’s breakfast trying to think of a name.
We both love Goblins, so we looked at each other and said “Goblins?” but it seemed too… on the nose.
So we said “Definitely Not Goblins” (laughing and looking to Jack). Was it me or you? You, I think. But that was where the name came about.
Do you and the cast members play D&D together outside of the shows?
Robin: yes, we have a weekly Pathfinder game, and the cast are made up of my favourite Roleplayers I’ve met over the past 10 years – Liam was my first Dungeonmaster. Jack has been playing since 2014 and introduced me to it: one new Year’s Eve we were looking for something to do. Neither of us are big partiers or huge drinkers, so we decided to try a game on New Year’s Eve: five people without a clue what we were doing, but that’s how it started.
Sounds like a great New Year’s Eve to me! I was wondering what your thoughts are on the state of the gaming scene right now, with D&D 2024 coming in, etc?
Jack: TTRPGs seem to be coming into their own in popular culture right now, with the likes of Dimension 20 and Critical Role getting a lot of attention. We recently ran Daggerheart, the new Critical Role game, actually.
How did you find it?
Robin: Quite fun! Very narrative focussed…. which suits our style of gaming, it did what we wanted it to.
Jack: … and then you’ve also got celebrities like Joe Manganiello, Vin Diesel and Terry Cruise, all gamers. It’s very different from the early days, the satanic panic, etc. Our Guest Roleplayer Tom Stade is a veteran who played all the way back to white box and remembers those days.
Yeah me too; I’ve played from childhood; I remember anti-D&D warnings from my Church, and I had a friend who got told he lost out on a job offer because he put D&D on his CV. Nothing like as bad as things got in the US but it definitely happened here too and I agree the current popularity of D&D is something I personally never thought to see in my lifetime.
You mentioned a Guest Roleplayer – tell me more? Is that a slot that changes from show to show then?
Robin: yes, for our Christmas show, we’ve got Tom Stade, a veteran comedian who just recently returned from a sell-out comedy tour and who has been on all sorts of TV stuff including Late Night at the Apollo. In the past we’ve also had Eddy Mackenzie, star of “Winne the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2“, the horror movie. He plays Piglet.
Wow! Sounds great. Can you tell us a bit more about your Christmas special?
Robin: this will be a one-shot for the Christmas Special, with the cast all playing new characters, quite apart from our main campaign which will resume in 2025.
We’re currently pushing for more audience participation in our shows and we’re going to include interaction where the audience should feel almost like a second dungeon master, and even get to run NPCs: voting as we go to choose the style of voice etc….. scary like this (Robin goes on to animatedly demo a few voices in classic Dungeon-Master style) or high and less threatening like this!
(laughing): I like that last one!
Robin: I’m building and learning as we go along, we’ve now got interactive lighting in the venue – we can even do lightning! – and we also ask people to submit suggestions for encounters ahead of the show. We’re going to be trying out some of these new interactive elements for the first time at the Christmas shows but are planning to continue to develop them throughout 2025.
One thing we do is the “Goblin Roll”: this is one free reroll we let the audience have per show, it has to be an audience member who does the reroll, we have a D24 which is basically a big cardboard dial! And then it’s also the audience who have to decide to what extent they succeed or fail. Players also have their own dice, and we do also have a big digital dice on screen too now.
The audience are right at the centre of our shows and everyone who buys a ticket at any of our shows including the Christmas special goes into a raffle for a prize draw. I’d like to mention too that we at Definitely Not Goblins don’t make anything from these shows, everything goes to the charity we support, which is the Glasgow Children’s Hospital.
We have audience competitions too: for Sunday’s show we have best Christmas jumper and best cosplay – and we’ll be in Cosplay ourselves too. We have quite a few Cosplayers come along to our shows now and we love it!
That reminds me – I asked some of my gaming buddies if they’d any questions for DNG, and a friend who’d been to the show asked me if I could find out from you, Robin, why you had your face painted like a skull at one of the shows? He loved the show but it wasn’t explained and he is curious to know.
Robin: Wow, it’s really cool your friend remembered that and asked that question! I was in full corpse paint for a comedy show I was performing at the Fringe later and wouldn’t have time to change, so just did both shows in the makeup. I quickly forgot I was even wearing it!
Finally just a couple of lighter questions to finish off…. Both of you: what are your favourite D&D monsters, or do you feel there’s any D&D monster that’s underused / doesn’t get enough love?
Robin (looks at Jack): Well I can guess yours!
Jack and Robin together: SCARECROWS!
Jack: Yep, I really love scarecrows. Also any other monster that’s animated objects – animated armour, animated swords, rugs of smothering – great monsters and nobody seems to use them!
Robin: Yeah, these monsters are great, I once ran this dungeon where a player stood on a rug of smothering but managed to make his DEX roll to avoid the grapple attack but then – instead of attacking, the player decided to try to talk the rug around….. now I’m very much a “Rule of Cool” DM so I decided to allow it…. and the player then went and rolled a Nat20! The rug was tamed and he carried it about rolled up on his with him as a pet for the rest of the game!
Jack: I love Mimics too. I once ran a game where an entire tower the party were inside turned out to be a Mimic, and once it started to digest them, it was a race against time to get out before they were eaten!
Robin: one of my favourite, and also underrated, monsters is kobolds – deadly if used right with all their traps and tactics: tiny little mischievous dragons with pack tactics.
Not underrated, but I also love Strahd. And also the Sorrowsworn.
I’ll confess I’ve not heard of the Sorrowsworn?
Jack: Oh they’re great! Beings trapped in the Shadowfell who are transformed into their negative emotions…. The Angry… The Lost…. there are like four kinds of them….
They do sound great!
Jack: And Ethereal Spiders! They can jump between the material and the ethereal planes. Great for throwing at that player who likes to plane shift out of trouble…. surprise!
Robin: Oh and anything from the plane of law, those round things, what do they call them?
(All think for a minute, then) Modrons?
Jack: Yeah Modrons! Did you know there’s lore that on one particular date, every few hundred or thousand years, all the Modrons cycle through every single dimension in existence and no-one really knows why, but it’s generally feared something really bad will happen if they ever stop?
Awesome! And finally…. what’s your favourite Christmas movie, or what Christmas movie would you like to see remade “More D&D” and what would you do to it?
Robin: funny you should ask that, our Christmas Special is actually a mashup of several Christmas Movies… Home Alone, Die Hard, Santa Claus: the Movie, also “The Santa Clause”…. It was interesting to try and write something for Christmas without doing something that had already been “done” so I decided to recycle and do a mashup! All with a Tim-Burton-esque feel!
That’s going to be awesome! What about Jack, what Christmas movie would you do?
Jack: I want to see a movie featuring Santa Claus, but he gets eaten by a Chimney Mimic, and then all the presents he leaves are little mimics too too… what would we call a D&D version of Amazon delivery?
(laughing): Maybe that’s what happens with certain parcel delivery services when your parcel disappears, it’s because it’s a Mimic, and it runs away!
Jack: Like – post-apocolyptic mimic delivery!
That’s it, I feel “post apocalyptic Mimic delivery” has got to be the quote of the interview today!
Guys it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
On a more serious note would you like to finish up with a few words about the charity you support, Robin?
Robin: Yes, the charity we are supporting is the Glasgow Children’s Charity. I’ve worked with them before, and as the father of a five-year-old son myself, I feel I can easily relate to the families they hel,p and it felt appropriate to give back to something like this. They are an extremely worthwhile charity. We at Definitely Not Goblins would like to make our support of them a year-round thing in future, and I’ve been invited to to visit them on the 11th to see how they’ve been using the money that DNG has helped raise, something I’m really looking forward to.
About the author
Shona Macpherson is a geek, gamer, & Dungeon Master who has been in love with TTRPGs since the 1980s. She spends way more time than she’d like to admit making up twisted little fairy stories featuring hordes of annoying monsters and a sprinkle of gore & glitter in the jangling panopticon of her own weird mind. Shona lives in Scotland, in a cursed hag tower located in the beautiful Southside of Glasgow; where she is also a proud member of the Dungeon Master team for TTRPG Drop-In “Tavern” Night, “Fort-Knight Adventures“. She thinks absolutely everyone should come along and join in playing with her and her pals! The more the merrier, basically.
Quick Links
- Definitely Not Goblins Christmas Special Tickets (there’s even a ScotRail page.
- Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity does great work.
- DnG on Instagram
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