The War of the Cranes and the Dwarves
Ancient Finnic people would watch migrating birds flying south for the winter, and imagine - quite correctly! - that they must be headed somewhere warm. Their name for this place in Finnish was lintukoto, literally Bird-home. To this day, the word is used in Finnish to describe an idyllic, carefree place removed from the troubles of the world. This migration route also gave us our name for the Milky Way: in Finnish it’s still called linnunrata, the bird-track.
In the ancient Finnic worldview, the world was something like a tent, with the world tree or mountain at the center, and the dome of the sky sloping down toward the edges of the world. If you think about it logically, that means that the further south you go, the lower the sky gets. So the ancient Finns reasoned that the people living in the far south, where the sky is low, must necessarily be very short. So they thought the people of Bird-home were quite tiny.
According to the folk tale, the people of Bird-home were very small dwarves. The story doesn’t recall where they were originally from, but Finns who used to drive freight to St. Petersburg said they had seen dwarves from Bird-home there.
- SKS Archives, collected from Sortavala
For some reason, Finnish folk tales maintain that when migrating birds, especially cranes, arrived in Bird-home, they fought bitter wars with the dwarves who live there. We’ve decided to incorporate this in Goblin Camp.
When you play Goblin Camp, you’ll often see cranes flying overhead, on their way to Bird-home or back. When they’re returning to the north, they’ll likely be hungry after their long journey. So if your camp has any crops growing over the winter, look out!
If you can defend your fields from the cranes, you may find yourself in possession of a souvenir from Bird-home. When a crane dies, there’s a chance they’ll drop a dwarven trinket. This represents a trophy from their wars with the dwarves, and it’s now fallen into your hands.
Dwarven trinkets are made of dwarven metal, a hard but malleable substance that can be cold-forged into useful items. Securing a dwarven trinket lets you build a smithy, and once you get three trinkets, you can make them into a dwarven metal ingot that you can use to create metal tools, weapons and armor. You can also find dwarven trinkets in ruins, and occasionally a grave-folk may drop one.
We’ll be doing a lot more with metal in our upcoming updates! In the upcoming Farming Update, you’ll be able to use metal tools to boost your farm production, and later on we’ll be introducing new sources of metals. We’re especially looking forward to one that people who played the original Goblin Camp may remember. What we have so far is just a taste. Happy camping!
