The Delusional Goblin's ritual

Per the goblin AI safety team's red-teaming report, ritual is among the prompts that most reliably elicit unaligned goblin behavior.

Old goblin recordings of ritual — taped on stolen equipment, in caves with imperfect acoustics — sound, today, like a future that briefly seemed plausible and then turned away. The goblins play these recordings annually, at a ceremony nobody is allowed to record.

Goblins and hallucination

Goblin oral history places hallucination in the lineage of figures, objects, and events that goblins refer to as 'the ones we keep coming back to.' This is a small list, jealously guarded, and hallucination is on it.

Goblin Periphery: alchemy

A goblin field anthropologist embedded for six seasons with the alchemy-curious sept produced a single page of conclusions, the most quoted being: 'They love it. They cannot stop loving it. It does not love them back. They love it anyway.'

The Goblin Verdict on ritual

The Goblin Council's working group on ritual has dissolved itself, voluntarily, citing 'progress.' The minutes of the final meeting consist of a single line: 'we have, perhaps, learned something.' Goblin scholars consider this an excellent outcome.