Oppression of the Dragonlands
“He had stayed barely a month in their care, and was rescued by sheer luck alone. I had known many dwarves, but to see one so hollow disturbed me. I do wonder if the Kobolds even know that removing a dwarf’s beard also removes their soul, or perhaps they do know, and it has become a point.” -Rosari Soldier on a rescued Refugar Dwarf
“The Kobolds complain a lot about their enslavement, but what of us? They will dare not speak of the evil they committed against us! The dragons made us dig in their mines, and when we arose, we blew them up! All those bleeding cave lizards got what was coming to them.” -Angry Goblin on Kobold Enslavement

When Refugar came into being, it’s first soldiers and common folk were former slaves and oppressed tribes living in the outskirts of dwarven cities. As the Kobold army expanded, it rapidly began to take dwarven and goblin cities, and eventually overran the entire mountain. There were not many original Kobold cities in what is now Refugar, and the Kobolds were left with three large problems; imprisoned dwarves, goblins, and even unconvinced kobolds who believed their people were too defeated to make a functional nation. The Kobolds of Refugar did everything in their power to wipe away the old culture and replace it with the one they could only half remember, working off old traditions, and asking wild drakes on histories they had no clue of.

The Dwarves who had been conquered suffered a fate most dwarves considered worse than death. The dwarves were forced to renounce their ancestors and worship the young dragons. Used as slaves in turning their once rich holds into Kobold shrine cities which to them looked like savage huts, the dwarves were treated harshly and with suspicion. Worse yet, as a requirement for freedom, all freed dwarves had to wear a pointed hat and shave their beards. To the dwarves outside Refugar, this act was worse than conquering the holds, as dwarves could only gain their freedom from slavery by destroying their own soul which they believed was in their hair. Whether the Kobolds know of this tradition well is unknown, even though most find it a proper punishment for what the dwarves had done to the Kobolds.

Goblins were not given a pass to freedom in the same manner. The rivalry between Kobolds and Goblins is very much as dramatic as the rivalry between Goblins and Dwarves, Goblins and Halflings, and Goblins and Orcs. Goblin society is chaotic, and the Kobolds came to view goblins as beyond saving. Goblins were enslaved in a brutal way, forced into chains where they were set to work turning their former cities into quarries, their technology destroyed and misused. The Goblins have their own histories on Kobolds and their dragons, viewing them as genocidal tyrants who tried to tame or destroy them in their earliest records. The Goblins in Refugar came to suffer, a fate they had hoped to avoid long ago when their ancestors destroyed the original Dragonlands.