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Deep underground, in what most people who aren't 3ft tall fully grown would describe as a "claustrophobic labyrinth of tunnels and pitfalls" a warren of Kobolds live. It is not a comfortable or easy way of life, but one they guard with fervor, turning tooth, claw, and trap on that which threatens it.
They collect and cultivate a variety of cave mushrooms, teaching their young the careful art of separating safe food from dangerous poisons, and their shamans teach their apprentices how to isolate and refine the stranger sorts of fungus that aren't quite either, to see things that can't normally be seen, or heal sickness that only the strongest would have survived, or many stranger things.
The fishers, spearing or netting meals from vast underground lakes, always careful to watch the surface and never stray from the shore.
In pens and pits and the precious ground more soil than stone, that smells of that healthy rot that means life and survival and food they spread their scraps and lay their dead to rest and hunt for centipedes and maggots and other delicious bugs and burrowers.
As always, hatchlings are taught the most important lesson of all: Kobolds are themselves delicious and vulnerable burrowers to those bigger, faster, sneakier, or smarter. The giant centipedes, fat with a thousand successful hunts, waiting to turn the unwary kobold into one more, but a delicious feast for the warren when hunted and slain themselves! The fearsome clawbat, able to sniff and track a kobold through miles and miles of maze if they let it land even the smallest scratch first. Cave Fishers, horrific giant crablike creatures that will snatch a kobold from where they stand into its waiting maws with its horrible sticky snaretongue.
And older tribesmen whisper over meals tales of stronger and stranger things yet, the kind that must never find their home or hope is already lost, and so the warren is an impossible to navigate maze of tunnels and traps. so that they never be found by horrific beasts from deep deep below, clawing upwards in unstoppable hunger and hate.
And in the very next breathe they'll proudly tell of their birthright, of what kobolds are meant to be. They will speak eagerly of Dragons, the greatest creature in all of Creation, mightier than every living thing above the surface and below, unafraid of any foe, invulnerable to any attack, spewing lightning or fire or poison or ice from their maw and killing any foolish creature that dare get in there way. Scaley and winged, free to explore the skies of the surface. It is said that kobolds are cursed, dragons kept small and powerless and weak so that they never grow into the Gods they are meant to be.
It is a dangerous way to live, in a dangerous place to live. But in their own way, the warren is a happy place to live. Full of opportunities to be honorable and proud, to be clever and resourceful, and to earn the respect of your peers and elders, and rewarded for it, to grow stronger and protect those things important to you.
To a couple hundred kobolds, this is Home.