Well the one true goblin lord we know is the one that summoned the black hole who they never defeated and only managed to exhaust him to death, and then the goblin king took the attacks of an entire army, shrugged it off then chose to die so who knows his level, goblins are insane and the black hole one is the only powerful one we haven’t seen hold back

I think tyrion is the dude who goes and fights in the blood fields every year, he’s the one keeping the war going, or at least he’s the face of the party that does it

Their blood can be diluted – Ceria’s grandmother even says they likely only have a drop of eleven blood anymore – but I imagine it’s more of many elven genes having some sort of genetic super-dominance, and others have a super-recessiveness.

In other words, if those gene are present at all, the super-dominant genes will always win out against any other genes for the same trait. The super-recessive genes will always lose out for their traits.

This would be a viable way to make it so that only elf + elf pairings resulted in another elf. Any elf + whatever pairing would have all of the super-dominant genes winning out, but the genes of whatever other species would always beat the super-recessive genes. Thus you could have things like the “normal” half-elf appearance (i.e. humanish with pointed ears, magical bones, etc.) but other things like hair or eye color could vary, heights could be different, etc. But you would never get, say, scales or fur instead of skin, if they paired with a drake/gnoll, because the genes for elf-like skin are super-dominant.

Goblins could essentially be the same way, but with essentially all super-dominant genes. Genes that don’t have any really effect on the “goblinness” of a being could be “normal”, which would allow them to not be clones of one another (along with minor mutations).

As far as goblin + half-elf pairings, I assume the goblin gene dominance wins out, or they are just incompatible with one another. There must have been at least a few half-elves getting raped over the years and producing offspring, if it is possible to do so, and someone should have noted if a half-elf was produced from such instead of a goblin.

We do know for a fact that leveling increases your base bodily attributes, though by an unknown amount. If you body is undergoing actual, physical changes as you level, then it makes sense that higher leveled individuals would be able to withstand more trauma than would normally be possible to.

For example, imagine that a level 60 heart could still maintain enough blood pressure to sustain the body for a while, even with a hole in it. Suddenly, stabbing that level 60 in the heart isn’t an instant death sentence, but a prolonged 5 minute death until they bleed out internally… or get a healing potion in time.

Or if your brain starts making redundant connections all over the place. Losing a chunk of your head is no longer instant death, a la Zel.

So long as you have the willpower to push through the pain and whatnot, you could keep fighting. It may not always allow you to live beyond the next few minutes, but it would make high level beings much more difficult to kill, which is exactly what we see.

In Tremborag’s case, it might only be just his level, but his form that is doing a lot of the work. Advanced goblin forms could provide the same sort of redundancy and resilience. Same thing would probably be true of many monster species, especially magical monsters.

Pretty sure your original numbers were more correct. Rags had about 8,000 or so, I believe, prior to getting ambushed by Laken. She lost 1,000 or so there, and then however many hundreds Pyrite lost running away from the from the army. More would have been lost getting into the city, as well as quite a number during her raiding tactics. They lost more when Wiskeria was tricked into starting a fight, and Pellmia came to save the humans. More lost during the run as the humans were herding them.

If Rags was down to like 5,000 or so, and Tremborag was somewhere just below 40,000, then “10 to 1” as a really rough estimate wouldn’t be super far off.

There are likely considerably fewer cave goblins than there are goblins being driven south right now, probably by about an order of magnitude. The goblins outnumbered the Rhaskgar, yes, but not by that much. Maybe 2-3 goblins per Rhaskgar, give or take. There were only a few thousand Rhaskgar, which would probably mean somewhere around 10,000 cave goblins

Dumping over 100,000 goblins – not to mention thousands of hobs, which eat considerably more – into the dungeon would almost assuredly overwhelm the “food supply” of other monsters.

The city in the center is also underground. This means no growing plants that rely on the sun for food. No raising animals that would rely on such food supplies to grow. A population of goblins of that size in that type of contained space would simply not be sustainable.