None of them are Gobbo, all of them will learn to serve.
This is a game where a group of players work as a team of goblins to make a better life for themselves and evolve into something better. They do this by breeding, by harvesting DNA from other creatures, and becoming stronger.
Gobbo's breed via eggs, they are assumed to always have an egg available in case they die. An egg is either a clone of the existing gobbo, or a prototype of a new gobbo that includes a new Gift. A Gobbo egg is very similar to a rock, so they are extremely difficult to find, and for game purposes impossible. A player gobbo will always have at least one egg surviving to ensure they continue in the game (sort of like a backup). Newly hatched eggs take a little time to grow, so start off weaker (all rolls at -2 for first encounter after recovery) than they were before but quickly grow to full strength. The penalty is reduced 1 for each encounter they survive, so after two encounters they will be back to where they were before.
New Gifts are implemented into a Gobbo by "smelting" them into place and then hatching a new egg. For game purposes this will mean the death of the existing Gobbo, replaced by the new improved model. If this happens at the start or end of a session it is considered to be completely resolved (no penalty phases) before game play begins. You can "smelt" new Giftz into an egg and wait to hatch it, or wait to die and then hatch it.
Gobbo's can be played in Phases, each Phase being a setting in which a series of adventures occur, and with luck at the end of them you progress to a new Phase. The Phases can be assumed to represent various stages in the life of a gobbo (eg juvenile, teen, adult, mature etc), or stages in the development of levels of a Gobbo (eg: based on Respect expenditure). The number of adventures might be set, or you might like to set some kind of target they have to achieve, in the form of Respect points or maybe a certain number of successful adventures. Another option is a set of adventures that leads to a specific event/encounter that represents a transition from one Phase to the next.
Phases basically set an expectation as to the opponents you are likely to encounter, so in the juvenile phase you might only face Tier 1 and 2 monsters, with a boss that is Tier 3. It is ok to tell your players this, so they understand the overall thinking behind the current adventures, and have an idea of what to expect. Which is a really nice way to introduce something not in the settings as an 'end of Phase' mob, once defeated you transition into the next Phase where all the expectations are raised to a new level.
Phases also allow you to control your random decks better, limiting the cards to ones that fit within the Phase guidelines.
Age based phasing gets around some problems that role players often ignore - aging. Even if a game provides aging effect rules it still requires that your characters progress to old age in their adventures. Generally by the time you get to that point, of old age, you have forgotten about it or you are ready to move onto a new game. However if you design your campaign to actually use 'ages' as method of progression then you can easily insert some age based variations, along with some simple transition rules. This is especially true if you place caps on how far your character can progress within a given age, this sort of encourages your players to move forward into a new age so they can improve.
Juvenile.
The juvenile phase deals with Gobbo's in their creche phase. Gobbo's grow quickly from hatching and are functional creatures, able to defend themselves, after a week. They are small but ruthless. In this phase of their development they will exist in a common pool of Gobbo young, surviving by natures rule - 'survival of the fittest'. Adults will supervise a creche at all times but they often will construct tests and challenges for the group to see if it can weed out the stupid or the weak. The final test will usually be sending the entire creche on a raid against a rat den, and its Rat Leader.
Teens
After a year a Gobbo will mature into a juvenile, where they leave the creche and supervision and form groups of their own (the player group being one). These groups are left to develope by themselves as they explore their environment and come up against the most common creatures. Periodically an adult will assign them a mission or task to complete to ensure their skills are developing and that they are well rounded in their experiences. Inter-group rivalry is encouraged but not to a lethal level.
Young Adult
Adult
Mature
Wisened
Old
We live in fear
We work for the man
One with the Man
The man in service
We Rulz.
Task based phasing is where your players have to complete a specific task to progress to the next phase. The task can be to overcome some specific opponent, defeat some physical barrier or achieve a set goal in Respect points. Once the players defeat that task they move into a new phase and face a new task. The Phase Task should never be easy, in fact it should always be the hardest thing to do within that phase.
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Task 5
The Clutch
The Ruins of the Great Rat
The Caves of the Rockbreakers
The Warrens of Death
The Wonders of the City
If you use a phased game it assumes you are leading upto something, and not just old age. There are several options in this regard but most of them should involve the players getting their characters into a position of power to ensure their survival. This can be on a scale from "we settle our own safe little valley and grow old peacefully" upto "We conquer the world as this is the only way to protect our future". The definition of 'the world' is a flexible item also, the world can be a hidden valley, a limited world segment or the entire World. It just depends how BIG you want your game to be.
In fantasy literature there are plenty of worlds that are only segments of the whole world, and this is probably a good way to go here. The "limited world" is a nice tool that controls the size you have to deal with. It usually has natural barriers such as oceans and very big mountain ranges that restrict access, or maybe an alien kingdom that is dark and mysterious and has a very big No Trespassers sign. The other advantage of a Limited World is that you can grow it later on, all those barriers can quickly fall away with a convenient mountain pass newly discovered (was there all the time just nobody told us). Another option is for the 'outside world' to suddenly present a threat to your world, an invader sweeps in and threatens to destroy the peace you have established.
All of the phased campaigns should have an "end time", an event or target that is the "end of the story". Books dont go on forever, and games also should stop. Having an end game does not mean your game has to end, it just means that the overall story line ends, and its time to stop, sit back and consider where you are. This allows you to bring in changes, new and fresh ideas, new npc characters, new lands, new creatures, new enemies. But most of all it allows your players to sit back and feel like they have done something quite substantial, they have reached the end, and they are alive.
The end game should end climatically, the biggest boss enemy should be there and overcome. There can be a period after where you wind things up, where loot and rewards and celebrations are undertaken. Where retirement is considered, where maybe characters are replaced with some changes, or the players take on different roles than they had before. Children are an excellent device for moving into a "new game", where the children have the advantages of their parents and thus start out quite well prepared and filled with the knowledge and experiences of past challenges. The death of parents to a new enemy is an excellent device for transitioning into a new game.
The issue that needs to be resolved, ahead of time, is exactly how do you end your game. Mostly this should be pretty self evident - they overcome the biggest baddest guy. So to get to that point you need to control the story to ensure that that specific enemy is still around when you want them. This obviously means the players never get a shot at him till the end, they basically never get to see the 'real enemy' till the very end. This is where phasing has a lot of advantages for a GM, you control what is going to happen during a phase in a "big picture" sense, so the great enemy can simply be left out of the way, acting as a behind the scenes controller, maybe even unknown to the players till they find some specific clue that leads into the final encounter. The players get to have some idea of who the current enemy is and thus have direction. The last thing you want is to have players who don't know what to do next. It's all very well to have an "open world" or a "sandbox" game but it is my experience that most social players simply want a clear and concise story line (which is not to say linear or pre-determined). Give them the big picture stuff and then let them work out the small picture stuff. Give them direction so they don't wander all over the place aimlessly or pointlessly. Give them the chapter title so they know what they are looking for and can direct all their energy to resolving that story.
The other option to the "End game" is World Conquest (or Limited World Conquest as may be). If your players should like to pursue an ending where they quite literally win and take over the place then you need to work out a way of determining this. Other than Disc World stories most characters that take over the world have to go through a long process of accumulating power, mostly in the form of debt or by binding agreements of support. The heroes travel from place to place gathering allies and items and powers till they have accumulated sufficient power to make a play for control. In some stories they seize power from the Evil One who currently has it (bad king-good king transition), or they assemble an army of inestimable might and conquer everyone.
To that end you need to collect "tokens", items, agreements, promises, debts, favours etc. All of the things you need to end the game as a winner and overcome whatever it is that you must overcome. You can do this via story, so the story logically directs the events and the events result in victory, but this can be a bit linear and single pathed. Instead you might consider using the collection of "Tokens" in various forms as a type of game within a game - a poltical game of accumulating power and then deciding when you have enough to make a play for control. But to make it genuine you need to plan this a bit, right from the start, right through each phase.
At the start the Enemy has the needed power to control the world, so you need to define exactly what is it that they have. Some of these things can be taken from them, others can be countered or banished, some can be defeated or slain, some can be discovered or revealed. Other tokens can be collected, power that the Enemy may or may not have been aware of, some they will probably be trying to destroy or recover (eg the One Ring, the Bane Sword etc). All of these tokens need to be defined ahead of time and assigned a place in the story, in a phase, so the players are able to interact with them and try to recruit them. You might use a "request list" for some tokens, ie bring me this and I will get you that which will get you those which you can use to gather them etc. Each of the Tokens is gained during a phase, and as you may already be thinking you can have a Token based Phased game, each phase being one or more tokens.
But try not to be strictly linear, players are only human (mostly), and they actually enjoy failure, hard as it might be to believe. Make room for failure in your story, but just a small amount. Failure tells you that victory is not assured, that things can go wrong, that there is risk involved. Victory without failure is much less satisfying, really. People don't want perfection and absolutes. Mix it up a little so they feel like it is real. Failures should be minor, successes should be major. In a token based game the 'enemy' will eventually pick up that they have someone trying to undo them, and they will begin acting to stop the players, every now and then have the enemy win a token fight, after all the token can come back into play later on, its only a setback not a defeat.