Like others said, help files are your friend. Also the newbie channel. There are disadvantages to choosing goblin for your first character, as you've found, but if it's what you interests you the most then that's probably more important than the mechanical stuff.

There are "signs" posted along roads; those can help some. Once you find the roads, at least. Many cities have maps for sale someplace, and you get some in the academy as well.

For longer questions, like this one, I would encourage you to make heavy use of these forums.

If you get too frustrated with your goblin, I would recommend trying one of the following:

* neutral human/arial assassin
* svirfnebli ranger, mountaineer explorer
* neutral offense/defense shapeshifter, or possibly offense/air
* neutral healer

First two give you built-in detect invisible along with a way to hide. Ranger gets pathfinding, which drastically reduces your movement cost, which is nice for new players who're still learning how areas are laid out.

Shapeshifter and healer are nice because they're not as dependent on gear, or skill percentages, to be useful in a ranking group. Both also have built-in detect invisible, along with word of recall. And identify, which can be a big deal.

Neutral because, as a brand new player, you want to minimize the # of people trying to kill you and maximize the # of people you can be friendly with, so that they'll show you around and help you rank.