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It seems that, despite their long life and even longer histories, these days the Goblins seem to be creating and using much less magic than they used to. I'm not entirely sure why this is so, but I have feeling that it has a lot to do with money. As a race, we Goblins are both inquisitive and acquisitive. Despite the observation that most of us prefer to ignore the existence of the teaming humans on the surface, we have no compunction in acquiring their technology. Over the centuries we have used all manner of acquisition approaches: theft, coercion, reverse-engineering, but these days, we find it best to treat it as a straightforward business proposition. Through trusted agents, merchants buy from the factories in the surface world using the very hard Goblin money - suitably circuitous routes for changing the currency are available - or arrange for copies to be made in our own manufactories. The thing about the technology is that it is both cheap and reliable, although not everything the inventive humans cook up is considered useful or desirable by those in the Lower Realms. For example, although telephones and still cameras are in widespread use in the caverns, films and moving pictures are not a technology that the Goblins have chosen to acquire from the human world: the images just have insufficient fidelity and the lighting levels required are far too high to be comfortable to hypersensitive Goblin eyes. By contrast, creating and stabilising even the simplest glamour takes a good deal of skill and training, and a considerable amount of patience. All Goblins have some facility - even a few humans have managed to acquire a degree of skill, despite their mayfly lifespan - but being really good at magic requires a certain cast of mind, a peculiar twist in the psyche which, perhaps fortunately, is not all that commonplace. Nowadays, Goblin magics are reserved for use in places where the human technology doesn't work but, since those pesky people on the surface have been getting increasingly smart - in this aspect, at least - over the last couple of hundred years, we are perhaps becoming a little lazy in maintaining our ancient skills. Perhaps the reason for not using glamours is not just money, even so. Almost all magic is capricious or, at least, is so often made to be so. This same twist of mind which gives rise to great skill at the creation of glamours also tends to make the thaumaturge both crazily paranoid and pathologically antisocial. This skill is itself is a kind of madness: a way of looking at the world with intent to twist its behaviour to your own desires. This kind of thing tends to warp one’s viewpoint on other aspects of life. For these reasons there are strict rules on exactly what glamours are allowed to be created and sold, and the safety markings and codes of manufacture which must be employed. Of course, there are also some black-market traders and underground practitioners - I use their services myself from time to time - who do not abide by these restrictions. But such services come at a price, a very considerable price, and these days few Goblins choose to pay that price.
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Part 58