From the Publisher:
As I said last week: It’s time to talk about trolls.
Last week that meant identifying a problem: that fantasy RPG stats, and Dungeon World’s in particular, do no justice to troll-kind. Hateful brutes? No. Not at all.
The real story of trolls is found in ancient Kestevan literature. Far from being nasty and hateful, trolls were kind, in their own way, and their story in Kesteva is tragic. Their history, in fact, prompted Ulric of Skara to write a pamphlet called The Tragedy of Trolls, which inspired Royal Road West’s Translator to write a short story of the same name (the story is included in the book Tales From the Royal Road).
The tragedy is everything that happened after humans arrived in what is now the kingdom of Kesteva. Aelfric and Aelin, as scholars of Kestevan history know, escaped the Old World with their followers and then marched from the Parthian Mountains in Kesteva’s east to the Great Western Ocean, founding cities as they went. As humans appeared, trolls visited the new cities and attempted to trade. But whenever they appeared, humans died. Not from violence, mind you – and curse the slanderous words of so many RPG books that say trolls are violent – but from mysterious diseases.
The Great Dying, they called it.
Some of Aelfric and Aelin’s followers said it was dark, evil troll magic, and they were loud. In response, town mayors gathered patrols and sent them into the hills to root out and destroy the trolls. The early kings sent armies to destroy troll-kind. Their cave-villages were burnt. Trolls were slaughtered. by the dozens and hundreds.
The Great Dying ended without explanation. One day, it seems, after many humans and many trolls had died, the humans stopped dying. The trolls by this time were invisible, having moved far from humans without entirely abandoning their homeland. Today—that is, Kesteva’s today when we access it through the multidimensional door—trolls are seldom seen.
Most in Kesteva today do not contemplate the matter. Scholars and philosophers do, some of them. They trace actions and reactions and trace fault. If there is hope, it lies in the trolls, wrote Ulric of Skara.
Where would you assign fault for the Tragedy of Trolls?
But this is a ponderous philosophical quandary to pose in a blog. Royal Road West has adjusted the stereotypical Dungeon World entry on troll to reflect their humanity.
TROLL Solitary, Gregarious, 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 (We think “to smash” is a harmful stereotype perpetuated against the species) To observe
Undo the effects of an attack (unless caused by a weakness, your call)
Hurl something or someone
Perhaps this is pointless talk. Kesteva—the RPG Kesteva, that is—is supposed to be a fun hack-and-slash kind of world. So it shouldn’t matter that the actual, historical Kesteva was complex … right?
The bottom line is, trolls are people, too.
That is, they’re trolls. But people-like. I mean—
Yes: trolls are trolls.
I think that’s the point.
Happy adventuring.