A necromancer looking to hire

After considering your options for a minute, you almost pick faerie, since you seem to almost have a bit of a druidic shtick going on... but watching your companion's single-minded attempts to pleasure you change your mind. It's... kind of a hackneyed metaphor for your life, really. Like a zombie titjob, it's rough, awkward, and more than a bit uncomfortable right now, but there are grand vistas of potential improvement that have opened up to you, especially once you find a way to... lubricate the process.

Undead Liegelord 1/10 (Class Ability): 20 Fame
Your mastery of life and **** has started to sway the local monster population to your banner. Each day, there is a small chance that local creatures will spontaneously convert to your side and ask to join you. You may also receive gifts from monsters seeking to stave off your wrath or gain your favour.

Not bad. You're concerned that a 'small chance' will be too small to matter quickly enough, but the second part of the ability seems quite nice, and you're in a bit of a pinch logistically right now. Your meager lodgings have taken up almost all of your materials, and you at least need to find a stoneworker if you're going to make yourself any secure holdings. You grab one of the healing potions and some of the small stones to use as emergency throwing weapons and head back towards the swamp-- you're going to need to track down the local goblins.

As you move, you check your zombie's character sheet again, since you recalled her having her own fame tab. Most notably, there's an 'Invite to Lair' option now, which you select. You're not sure what the difference is, at first, but you're pleasantly surprised by the results: By moving her from your summons to your lair minions, you free up all of your MP that was tied up in sustaining her. It also bumps your fame up a bit-- for recruiting your first minion, and recruiting the corpse of your Rival-- but not enough to buy anything else. You assume that as more adventurers become aware of you and try to track you down, you'll start raking in more and more fame, because everything's kind of... expensive. The cheapest non-Liegelord upgrades seem to start at about 50 points, cross-referencing your upgrades and hers, though you don't examine the list thoroughly (since you still need to watch where you're going).

You don't know where the largest concentrations of goblins are in Gnym, but there is a band near your old cave, so you head in that direction, skirting the periphery of the swamp-- it's familiar territory, but you want to minimize the odds of running into any other adventurers who might be skulking about. Along the way, you gather up any herbs you come across (by hitting them with your knife until they're depleted) and take small detours to hunt down level 0-1 critters and blobs (by hitting them with your knife until they're depleted); while they're worth practically no XP, you want to come prepared to barter, and it's good to stockpile food when you can, since your new lair is on mostly-barren foothills. After a good hour-ish of trekking, you finally hear the crackling of a campfire through the trees.

For the most part, you left the goblins alone and they left you alone, so your memory's a little hazy, but you don't remember them being quite this... destitute. There aren't even squalid little huts surrounding the fire; instead, they're more like roughly hut-shaped stick frames covered in brush. The couple milling about the camp seem pretty weary, too, since they don't even notice you or your dead-rat-covered zombie approach until you've nearly cleared the ring of huts.

When they do, though, there's an explosion of activity-- the sentries' eyes bug out, they start hooting and hollering in their guttural tongue, and then all of them are stumbling out of the lean-tos, shouting and pointing at you. Rather than frightened, they seem equal parts bewildered and thrilled. There's only about eight of them, and about half as many full sets of clothes between them, with the men wearing little more than loincloths, and the women, you presume, getting whatever they can wrestle away from the others. Most of them are at least partly exposed, with a couple stuck completely naked. The chieftainess-- or so you assume, since she has enough clothes to be modest and is wearing a deer's skull as a helmet-- runs up to you, starry-eyed and hands clasped in front of her chest. Okay, mostly modest: It's a fur sash that barely contains her chest (in her excitement, she doesn't notice her nipple slip) and a short reed skirt covered in rodent pelts.

"It true! You defeat adventurer, make her your ****! Forager see you give her fucks, take her life! You come to help tribe, lend goblins power?"

Well, not exactly, but you have more tact than that. "Perhaps; I came to negotiate and trade with you. First, though, what happened to your village?"

She shakes her head ruefully. "No can build. Don't know why. Very trying time for tribe. Builder builds hut, but always fall apart and make 'dwee-oo' noise." Even at her impression, a couple of the goblins cringe. The chieftainess looks up at you hopefully. "You can help goblins rebuild?"

You chuckle. "Well, Fate happens to have conspired to bestow me with a power for building, so I might just. More importantly, I'd like to form an alliance with your tribe-- Adventurers will be coming to try to take that power away from me, and I need manpower to build a fortress strong enough to defend it." Either the suggestions you made or all of the big words you used sets off more whooping and hollering. "Gods give you power to command dead! Goblins want strong friends! You show us what you have, what you want trade! Buuuut first, show us building power?" Restraining the urge to roll your eyes, you let them lead you to the patch of dry ground between shanties where they've piled up materials. You tap it with your makeshift hammer, and, pleased to see the building prompt pop up, leave your zombie to hammer away at it while you unload her and haul your cargo over to the campfire for trade.

First, of course, both parties have to take stock of what they have-- your Anatomy skill, aside from helping you pinpoint areas of weakness on enemies, improves your yield when butchering, so you lay into that task first, and the goblins seem to be willing to accept your butchering their recent hunt (a deer) as a traded service. You can't imagine what it must be like not to spawn with a dagger like yours... You still don't know what you want from them, though, and it's kind of a freebie, so you half-jokingly ask for the goblin women to take off their clothes in exchange, and are mildly (but pleasantly) shocked when they seem to think that's a fair trade. Unbalanced in their favor, in fact, since their leader (who you've started internally calling Deer-Skull) invites you strip her down yourself (though naturally, the skull stays on), and, if anything, encourages you to continue feeling her up her mottled green skin after she's nude-- she certainly seems to appreciate your hardening cock.

She's about to go after it, too when the atmosphere is abruptly ruined by a loud error message ringing out from the construction site. The goblins alternately cry out in despair or throw things in frustration-- Deer-Skull in particular is doing more than a little bit of both. You cut off her wailing accusations with a raised hand, though, and rush over to see what the problem is. As you expected, your zombie is kneeling in front of the unbuilt pile of materials, staring at it blankly, with the one goblin who isn't visibly distraught; halfway through the process, he sat down across from her to jack off to her voluptuous body while she worked (you warned him away from doing anything more than that with a thrown rock to the skull), and seems to be coping with her failure by beating off even harder. What you didn't expect was the pop-up in front of the pile. You ask Deer-Skull if she's read it before as you move in to check what it says.

"You think we know human squiggle?" she snaps back, and you have to concede the point-- you'd be surprised if they knew how to read anything. Given that, you elect to read it out loud:

Structure outside of claimed zone. Upgrade your Lair to expand your claim, or ask the owner of the Lair for build permissions.

Deer-Skull frowns. "What claim zone?" A good enough cue to take things from the top, you suppose. "Since the update yesterday, it seems that humans and their kin need a special crystal to mark land as theirs so they can build houses on it. The Gods must have extended that to include all peoples and all houses... My lair is up in the foothills, so your village is way too far away for me to help you rebuild, but..." You draw yourself up, pausing dramatically to appraise the collection of (mostly) nude goblinesses clinging to your words. "As part of our alliance, I'll help you claim a crystal of your own from a hero so that you can rebuild your village and tribe!"

Since you will need to ambush a hero for it, and some of them may have already used theirs, you quickly hash out a strategy: Once you have a base secured, you'll start producing weapons and armor for the goblins to use, while the goblins focus on breeding and training-- they'll lose their experience if they die, but their natural camouflage helps them hide in the swamp, so they can scatter if anything too tough for them to handle shows up while they build up their numbers. To that end, you give them all of the food you've hunted, and they immediately set about preparing a feast/orgy in your honor. In exchange, you need a stoneworker-- or, to put it in terms the goblins can understand, a digger. Deer-Skull ponders that for a moment. "I dig. Digging not much good around here, though. Only mud and clay goblins can dig with hands, so I have lots of time to practice fighting. That how I become chief! You want me?" She laughs when she catches your dick twitch. "Not want that way, but that way good too!"