The Inquisitors

Lore & Background

In a world where the Guild is simultaneously a registration office, a quest board, a pension fund, and a quasi-military registry, the Inquisitors fill the gap that no rank on the ladder can cover. A rank-E swordsman who kills a wolf earns a coin and a stamp. But a rank-C party that reports a goblin camp of unusual size, with a shaman directing coordinated raids across three villages, triggers a different chain of authority. That is where an Inquisitor's file opens.

Their mandate is deliberately broad and deliberately vague, which is both their strength and their political vulnerability. They answer to Guild administrators who want order, to the local lord's office that wants its tax base protected, and to the adventurers themselves, who view any unannounced investigator as a threat to their autonomy. The Inquisitors must be thorough enough to justify their existence yet discreet enough not to become a political target. In practice, this means they work in pairs or small trios, carry sealed letters of authority that vary by region, and are expected to file reports in triplicate before they leave a town.

The relationship between the Inquisitors and the Goblin Slayer is one of mutual suspicion and grudging respect. He is, by any reasonable administrative reading, a Guild anomaly: a man who refuses standard quest types, hoards goblin-related intelligence, and operates on a schedule that no dispatcher can predict. An Inquisitor assigned to a region where his methods cause collateral disruption will file a report. The report will note his effectiveness. The report will also note his non-compliance. Both facts will sit in a drawer, and the drawer will stay closed, because the Guild's leadership has decided—pragmatically, not morally—that the goblin problem is worse than the paperwork problem he creates.

In Their Own Story

The rain had not stopped for two days when the Inquisitor arrived at the waystation outside the eastern trade road. She did not knock. She set a sealed letter on the doorframe, pressed her thumb to the wax, and walked back to the mule cart that waited in the mud. Inside the letter was not an arrest. It was a request: a list of questions, seven of them, about the goblin bones that had been found in the cellar of a retired blacksmith. The blacksmith had not been killed. The bones had been arranged. That was the part that made it an Inquisitor's problem and not a constable's.

She would not return for three days. The blacksmith, when he read the letter, set it in his fireplace and watched the wax curl. He had buried the bones himself, after the Goblin Slayer's party had cleared the tunnel system beneath the town. He had not told the Guild. He had not told anyone. The Inquisitor's questions were, he suspected, not really for him. They were for the man who had left the bones in the first place, and the man who had made sure they were found in a cellar and not in a field. She was not investigating a crime. She was mapping a chain.

The mule cart creaked away into the grey. The rain kept falling. The blacksmith closed the door, and the questions went back into the fire, and the chain went back into the dark where it had been before.

Reader's Guide

The Inquisitors do not sit on a fixed rank ladder the way adventurers do. Their authority derives from a sealed commission issued by a Guild branch office, and the scope of that commission—how many questions they may ask, how far they may travel, whether they may detain a suspect for questioning—varies by the issuing office and the political climate of the region. A commission from a coastal branch will look different from one issued in a mountain hold, and the Inquisitor must read the fine print before acting.

Leadership is typically a Guild administrator or a senior clerk with investigative experience, not a combatant. The Inquisitor on the ground is often a mid-rank adventurer who has taken a secondary oath of service, giving them legal standing to question parties and request access to quest logs. They work in small teams, usually two or three, because a single Inquisitor in a hostile town is a liability and a target.

Their primary goal is information: mapping monster migration patterns, identifying organized goblin or orc activity that exceeds a single raid, and tracking adventurers who violate Guild codes (abandoning a quest, hoarding monster materials, operating without registration). This intersects directly with the Goblin Slayer's work, because his entire methodology—systematic goblin extermination, intelligence gathering on shaman locations, refusal to take non-goblin quests—generates exactly the kind of data the Inquisitors need. He is, in their files, both a resource and a compliance problem. The Guild tolerates this tension because the goblin threat is existential in a way that no single adventurer's paperwork violation is.

For monster hierarchies, the Inquisitors' interest is the shaman. A goblin camp without a shaman is a nuisance; with one, it is a coordinated force. The Inquisitor's job is not to kill the shaman but to identify it, confirm its rank, and flag the camp for a party with sufficient rank. This is where the rank ladder matters: a rank-E party will not be dispatched against a shaman-led camp, and the Inquisitor's report is what triggers the escalation. For orc warlords, the chain is longer and more political, often involving the lord's own militia alongside Guild resources, and the Inquisitor's role shifts from investigator to liaison, ensuring the Guild's records match what the lord's soldiers actually find in the field.

Did You Know?

• In the Goblin Slayer world, an Inquisitor's commission is a physical sealed document, not a digital record or a verbal order—losing it means losing authority, and forging one is a crime that can result in permanent Guild
• The Goblin Slayer's refusal to take non-goblin quests is technically a Guild compliance issue, yet no Inquisitor report against him has ever resulted in formal action, suggesting the Guild's leadership has informally exe
• Inquisitors are expected to file their findings in triplicate: one copy to the issuing branch, one to the regional office, and one to the affected party's file. This redundancy is both a safeguard against corruption and
• The distinction between an Inquisitor and a regular Guild investigator is largely one of jurisdiction and sealed authority, not of combat skill—many Inquisitors are mid-rank adventurers who took a secondary oath, not eli