Talasumi

 The Talasum (Bulgarian: Таласъм) is a spirit in the folklore of my part of the world. In Bulgaria it is primarily described as an often invisible spirit of a person who was built (either physically, or just their shadow) into a house or bridge to keep the construction from collapsing. As the person dies their spirit turns into a talasum, and is either a protector or, more often, a malevolent presence that haunts the place they were built into. In more modern day parlance a talasum is usually described a furry monster of some kind, often mischievous but not necessarily evil. 

In my Greylands game, I don't really have goblins in the typical D&D sense of the word. So during my current house game set in that campaign, I have decided that the goblins the characters encounters are actually talasumi.

The Greylands Goblin -the Talasum

In some of the more remote parts of the Blessed Empire of Unity (say, like the Greylands) as well as neighboring territories like the small mountainous princedom of Mordavia, the ritual practice of building a living person into a construction is still fresh in the minds of the people living there.

While sages, scholars and other learned folk insist that the ritual hasn't been actually practiced in centuries, ever since the light of the Sun God has blessed those lands, old women in the villages tell a different story. Whenever a bridge keeps falling down, or a manor house needs an extra protective oomph to it, a young man or woman are chosen at random from the villages and made part of the building, burying them in the walls so that their spirit might keep the building safe.

Often times this is the end of it, but in areas with high levels of Chaos (again, like the Greylands) those buildings abandoned by their owners or inhabitants tend to get kind of..weird. 

Ruined manor houses or abandoned old castles with a person built into them tend to begin generating these small and hairy creatures the seem to simply appear out of the shadowy corners. These are the talasumi, Chaos-spawned echoes of the person trapped within the building's foundation. They are rather simple and basic construct - they mostly are concerned with eating, guarding their territory and sorting any household goods they might get their hairy hands on. 

Talasumi do not have a conception of name or age, and only the barest sense of individual self. If a talasum is taken out of the ruins that spawned it and away from others of its kind it can start to develop a sense of self, a vestigial trait of having a human soul as its parent. 

They are not innately hostile or friendly, their disposition often simply depending on the environment they are in and what mood strikes them at the time. 

Physical Traits

Talasumi are usually around 100 to 120 cm (so roughly between 3 and a half and 4 feet tall), and look like small men covered in thick black hair or fur, with wide faces and big, saucer-like eyes that seem to reflect light almost like a mirror. They usually do not wear clothes and do not appear to have any sexual organs. Often they are armed with anything from kitchen or farm tools to proper weapons, if they can get their mitts on them. 

There are also taller and much bulkier talasumi who seem to often have a rusty red hair and have large, pronounced noses. They seem to act as leaders to the smaller kind.

Stats

The smaller ones have stats as goblins in whatever system you are using. 

The big ones have the stats as hobgoblins. 

There are even bigger ones, potentially, but those are very rare. Give them stats as appropriate for something big and scary that goes bump in the night.

All Talasumi also have the ability to blend into the shadows of the building that birthed them (and only that one) and become invisible to anyone without magical sight. However doing so for long periods of time (anything over 10 minutes) or too often has the risk of the talasum simply melting back into the shadows that gave it birth and simply disappearing forever. As such they try and not use this ability if they can help it.