From the Publisher of Royal Road West
It’s time to talk about trolls.
When we at Royal Road West say our RPG publications are “somewhat” optimized for the Dungeon World game, it’s for good reason. Despite its otherwise excellent qualities, sometimes Dungeon World’s stats don’t jibe with the historical facts of ancient Kesteva. Trolls are a case in point.
The Dungeon World guide gives these stats. Don’t worry; I’ll pick them apart in a minute.
TROLL Solitary, Large
Club (d10+3 damage) 20 HP 1 Armor
Close, Reach, Forceful
Special Qualities: Regeneration
Tall. Real tall. Eight or nine feet when they’re young or weak. Covered all over in warty, tough skin, too. Big teeth, stringy hair like swamp moss and long, dirty nails. Some are green, some gray, some black. They’re clannish and hateful of each other, not to mention all the rest of us. Near impossible to kill, too, unless you’ve fire or acid to spare—cut a limb off and watch. In a few days, you’ve got two trolls where you once had one. A real serious problem, as you can imagine.
Instinct: To smash
Undo the effects of an attack (unless caused by a weakness, your call)
Hurl something or someone
When we read an entry like that, we have to say we’re disappointed, and we have to ask: what are the sources for such nonsense? It’s as though the writers were making it all up. Our own sources at Royal Road West are historical documents, books and papers that have come to us through a multidimensional door into ancient Kesteva itself, a door discovered by an anonymous former newspaper Editor from a fog-shrouded Midwestern town. Which is more trustworthy: a multidimensional door into another world or unspecified sources?
At any rate, we say: Give the much-maligned troll a break. Give more, in fact: Give some pity
What Ulric had to say
According to the pamphlet The Tragedy of Trolls, published in ancient Kesteva by Ulric of Skara (obviously a real book since our Editor retrieved it through his multidimensional door), trolls lived in Kesteva’s hills and mountains long before humans arrived.
We all know that Kestevan history begins with Aelfric & Aelin’s descent from the Parthian Mountains and their march to the sea. But that’s human history. Ulric’s pamphlet gives us insight into trollish history. Much of this, by the way, is based on accounts of elves, gnomes and the like, since trolls themselves were and are illiterate. And yet they – the trolls – told stories and conveyed oral histories that these other races sometimes captured into words. Despite this filtering of history, Ulric was confident to write of trolls’ society, how they lived in cave-villages, and how they called themselves Trollin, and how they fished and hunted and traded among themselves and rarely with elves and gnomes.
All this so far puts the unfortunate Dungeon World entry on trolls to shame. Hateful brutes? Not at all.
The so-called tragedy of trolls also is covered in Ulric’s pamphlet and was the inspiration for our Translator’s short story of the same name. The short story is part of the collection Tales From the Royal Road. As for what the tragedy of trolls was … that will be next week’s blog entry.