Can goblins be both civilized and animalistic?
I'm struggling to implement goblins in my medieval fantasy world for my ttrpg in a way that would make them feel like both animalistic savages and civilized tribes at the same time and I want help.
To clear things out, in this world goblins are not meant to be a part of a larger civilized world created by larger races. Goblins are regarded as lacking self-consciousness and sentience in spite of their ability to assemble tools, being able to talk and having culture, basically they are considered as animals by humans/elves/dwarves/etc and this view is strengthened by goblins' inherent alignment to evil. Goblins aren't allowed to be near any settlement and can be killed with no law or moral repercussions whatsoever.
So, I'm having a hard time trying to balance these both aspects that need to be true simultaneously by tweaking their aspects. It needs to be true that goblins have a reasonable level of developed culture and intelligence which makes them civilized, cultured and having actual personalities, yet their nature itself have to be actually evil to a degree of being irredeemable so they can be considered as monster fodder instead of people by other races. This whole problem itself was created in my mind because of arguably recent tendency to humanize goblins in medieval fantasy media — they are drawn having pretty faces, acting good and being included in parties of adventurers that consist of other races and I somehow grown to partially like despite strongly preferring classical depiction of goblins as simple evil monsters. I don't want players to sympathize with goblins but I also want to provide them with personalities, will, and culture which inevitably creates room for sympathy. I don't know the way to achieve this middleground or even perharps fake sapience? The world in which game takes place in is quite generic with multiple other neighboring realms that each have their own set of gods overseeing them and so far I tried to come up with explanations like goblins originating from a Mystical Realm along with elves (think of dnd Feywild, a place that looks very similar to our world but on a closer inspection it turns out as twisted insane magical place inhabited by creatures with morale and logic that is completely alien to us) which serves the goal well, but all creatures from there do not reproduce like we do, they grow on special trees and pair of parents have to ritually tie a knot on the branch of the tree with a prayer to the god to gift them a child, even all animals there get born this way except there is no need for a prayer because gods manage quantity of fauna by themselves, and this limitation doesn't allow goblins to appear as a common monster in the world where humans live, which is a Realm of Giants, because they won't be able to reproduce there or because they would have to be transdimentional conquerrors instead of savage tribal societies like I want them to be, the other way goblins could be done is that they are a product of wizard's genetic experiment, which is a common thing to happen in Realm of Giants, but orcs were made this exact way from goblins so I'm not sure if it is a good idea, because orcs would now be a second generation of genetic experimentation, a double mutants, which just sounds silly and amature.
If you have any idea how to justify goblins being the way I described, then let me know, please. I will add about the lore that there is no evolution in this world beyond what could happen in a span of just few tens of thousands of years and that there are 8 realms in total, but 5 are very very incomplete as of right now. You could guess that I'm in early development phase if I'm having a problem with goblins, so if you can come up with how goblins can originate from some other realm, then I will listen, otherwise creatures in Realm of Giants were mainly created by it's demiurge god and some were made by smaller gods, Mystical Realm was explained enough I think and Mirrored World is a gloomy reflected copy dimension of Realm of Giants, entrable through any mirror or reflection and filled with nightmares created from people's thoughts, but it makes a poor origin for goblins as its inhabitans are supposed to be more like spirits in nature and there is no god that govern this place.