The Black Tome

Kenny

Properties2
tagscharacter
aliasesKenny the Goblin

10 min read

First appearance: S2 Ep1, Fate of the Arbiter (Fate of the Arbiter Part 1) · watch it on YouTube

Kenny is a goblin gambler, cheat and self-described “steel trap” who served the Faithful, the resistance loyal to the Grandmaster, as an intelligence agent. He was a bad spy, a worse gambler and, by his own account, a man with no friends. Even so, his scouting got two separate parties where they needed to go, and his ugly end in the sewers beneath The Dread Fortress gave his allies a warning. Long after his death he kept turning up: in memories, in illusions, and once as a detached arm.

Story

Fate of the Arbiter, Part 1

Kenny’s legend arrived before he did. In Fate of the Arbiter Part 1, Orin warned the party about a local goblin: “There’s a goblin around here. He cheats. Watch out for him. His name is Kenny. He’s kind of a piece of shit, but he’s good with a dagger.” The goblin they then ran into was almost certainly him. He bit a coin to test it, cheated at dice, asked to buy an ear, and fled after declaring himself “not vaccinated.” Flynry would later remember Kenny’s gambling game on his very first day. He put jewelry on the line, lost it, and had to intimidate his way into getting it back.

Fate of the Faithful

When the heroes of the Coriander Society crossed into The Void and joined the Faithful, Lyrus told them that intelligence was Kenny’s job. Kenny was overdue from an assignment. He had been asking after a magical silver ewer lost in The Tumult, a region made from the body of a dead titan, and he was now pinned down in a safe house in the Hanging City of Prexmarin. Local thieves around the Roundhouse tavern were sheltering him. Agents of The Arbiter, dressed as the Grandmaster’s soldiers, kept hunting him door to door. Lyrus described him simply: “Small. Big nose.” “He gambles, but not well.” “You would know him if you saw him. He’s very obnoxious.” To draw out his protectors, the disguise artist John made himself up as Kenny, complete with “kind of an annoying voice.” He was told to make sure he lost at dice, because “Kenny always loses… sometimes he wins, but then he usually gets cheated out of it later.”

Ralzamon had found Kenny with his psychic scanning and sent a kill team: Circe, the Master of Magitek, and Ganyu Sinmal. As Lyrus dueled Ganyu above a monstrous lurker in the depths below the city, Kenny made his entrance. He burst from the shadows where he had been hiding all along, tied himself to a rope and dove. He had recently taken a roachkin “for everything he owned,” including a mecha punch-arm, and he also carried a bottle of sovereign glue. With it he glued himself to Lyrus’s boot: “Don’t worry, I got you.” Ganyu plunged into the lurker’s grasp. Lyrus asked what the second part of the plan was, and Kenny answered, “I thought you would know.”

The rescue unravelled from there. Tentacles battered the glued pair. Lyrus escaped by teleporting out of his own boot, which left Kenny dangling forty feet below the city with the boot stuck to his hand (“You’re just gonna leave me here after I saved your ass?”). Lyrus came back and hauled him up. Kenny tried to bolt for a waygate he had found during his recon, but Lyrus refused to leave without his friends. Kenny protested that he had none, and Lyrus made it an order. The party followed Kenny through the keyed portal: each person flipped a copper coin, slapped it on their hand, walked into a grubby alley and came out in another one, back at the Faithful’s headquarters.

At the debriefing Kenny was in fine form. He hid the boot still glued to his hand. He claimed he couldn’t be found because “my brain works on a different wavelength… I’m an individual. I think for myself, that’s why I’m not vaccinated.” He insisted he was “not a sheep,” so John quietly made him look like an upright sheep in his little hat, an illusion only the others could see. Kenny had spent weeks undercover among the Children of the Void, getting them drunk and gambling with them. He reported that the Arbiter knew the general area of the ewer but not the exact spot. The answer was the Tumult, where an ethereal waterfall of titan blood flows, “and you need the blood to do the teleporting.” The verdict at the table was blunt: “He’s just a bad spy. He’s not trying to trick you. He’s just not very good at his job.” Kenny’s crude drawing turned out to be a good map of the whole Tumult, which Lawrence Booker Green carried off to study. Kenny himself chose to stay behind to shower and work out how to get the boot off his hand. The recap of the next chapter credited the rescued spy’s knowledge of secret passageways and side alleys with getting the party home.

The Hall of Fates

By The Hall of Fates, Kenny was in a sorry state. He was missing an arm, had large claw marks across his chest and face, and kept a nervous distance from Toddleheim: “You were standing right there. He ripped my arm right off.” When Flynry stepped on him (“Hey, would you get the fuck off me?”), Flynry asked whether he’d “been attending those secret meetings again. Did you remember the safe word this time?” He still coveted the bracelet Flynry had kept from their old gambling match, and he still recruited for the cause. He had brought in Baptiste, a self-styled knife smith who couldn’t remember Kenny’s name.

Kenny’s real contribution was a set of Dread Fortress schematics, smuggled out “a little bit broken, a little bit torn.” They showed old tunnels running against the fortress sewers up into the western wing, possibly to the kitchen, the brewery, the tiger pit or the Hall of Fates itself. Toddleheim promised that if things went sideways, “I will be back for that other arm.” Flynry tried to patch things up by sliding his mood bracelet over Kenny’s stump as an armband. It turned red, and then blue as Kenny felt sorry for himself.

Kenny led the party through the town’s worst alleys and wrenched a sewer grate free one-handed. Then he shot down the pipe first, straight into the sewage of a magical society: oil, sludge, magical waste and toxic biological waste. His skin sizzled. He sank with his one arm raised, melting away until only the armband was left, and then that melted too. The schematics went with him. Flynry was visibly shaken. Lyrus gave the eulogy:

“Don’t get into the water. Don’t let his death be in vain. He showed us the dangers of this place.” — Lyrus

After death

Kenny lived on in Flynry’s memory. In Into the Mirror 10–11, Flynry smiled at the memory of that first-day dice game and heard Kenny’s voice again: “I’m not vaccinated!” In Into the Mirror Session 4, Flynry faced The dragon in its lair beside the wounded Elianna and Cerys. He conjured an illusion of a one-armed Kenny greedily shovelling gold from a chest into his pockets: “It’s typical Kenny.” The dragon fell for it and brought down a rain of icicles on the fake goblin, then slipped on its own shifting gold when it turned back in rage.

In Rise of the Lord of Fate, during the Season of Fate (a timeline only the Arbiter lived through), Atlas won Kenny’s missing arm as a prize in his fight against Killy Yesman. Thea read its description from her clipboard: “Small and green, the arm magically attaches itself to lend you a hand. Don’t feel bad about using it. He’s not gonna be needing it anyway.” It came with a catch: it could go dead at the worst moment, “because it’s Kenny. Kenny is pretty useless.” Atlas attached it to the middle of his chest, imagining a bit of Kenny’s soul still clinging to it, and used it to heal himself.

Personality and Abilities

Kenny was small and green, with a big, crooked nose, a little hat and a voice others called annoying. He insisted it was “much deeper than that.” He was a compulsive gambler who usually lost, and a cheat when he could get away with it. His braggadocio rarely matched his results. He called his brain “a steel trap,” and he was promptly ambushed in it by Asena’s telepathy (“You can’t just sneak up on somebody’s brain like that”). He was proudly “not vaccinated,” claimed to have no friends, and toyed with faking his own death to escape his gambling debts.

Orin called him “good with a dagger,” though Kenny himself said “I’m more of a bow guy.” His tools were the ones he won or scrounged: a roachkin’s mecha punch-arm and a bottle of rare sovereign glue. For all his flaws, he was a genuine asset in the field. He could infiltrate the enemy, find hidden waygates and secret tunnels, and smuggle out documents as valuable as the Dread Fortress schematics.

Relationships

  • Orin: Warned newcomers that Kenny cheats, but conceded he was handy with a dagger.
  • Lyrus: His Faithful superior, rescuer and unwilling boot-donor, who ordered him not to abandon his allies and gave his eulogy.
  • Flynry: An old gambling rival who kept the bracelet Kenny felt he had won, gave it to him as an armband, and was upset by his death.
  • Toddleheim: The one Kenny blamed for ripping his arm off. He feared him and stayed well away.
  • Baptiste: A recruit Kenny brought in with the promise of stabbing.
  • Ralzamon: Hunted Kenny psychically and sent a kill team after him.
  • Circe: One of the assassins sent for him, later a reluctant ally who told him he might die if he kept refusing vaccines.
  • Asena: Spoke into his “steel trap” brain uninvited.
  • Atlas: Wore Kenny’s severed arm in his chest during the Season of Fate.

Memorable Quotes

Appearances

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