Tag: RPG

The Much-Maligned Troll, Part Three

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Close-up of a troll

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Trolls. Trolls, trolls, trolls … Where were we?

Royal Road West is dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge concerning the ancient kingdom of Kesteva—specifically by creating role-playing game materials. And trolls, our research staff keeps finding, are a problem.

That’s because virtually all RPG material about them perpetuates harmful stereotypes. That not only risks gumming up otherwise good RPG games but denigrating an entire species.

So in this third post about trolls (you can read Part One here and Part Two here), we’ll take a look at what trolls are, since we’re so sure of what they’re not.

To prepare, I sent Kenneth the Intern to our archives to corral all available texts concerning first-person accounts of trolls. As it turns out, the records are nasty, brutish and short–but it’s the best an intern could do on three cups of coffee and short notice:

  • The Troll-Hunter’s Guide. A delightful practical skills book by a professional adventurer named Walls of Roxen. Has two descriptions of encounters with actual trolls.
  • Troll Census, Year 155. Don’t let the title fool you. We think this is a Kestevan bureaucrat’s half-hearted attempt at troll counting and not a serious endeavor. Kenneth the Intern included it because of a brief passage concerning a troll family.
  • Trollkin. Scraps of troll encounters stitched together by Marsus of Kesteva City. Contains at least one encounter by Marsus himself, which is what we think prompted him to search for other accounts.
  • Ulric’s Little Descriptive of Trolls. A rare edition for Ulric, who wrote most of his Little Descriptive series about towns, Royal Road stations and other points of interest to travelers.
  • Mindy’s Adventure School Syllabus. For Year 307.
  • Mindy’s Big Book of Big Monsters.
  • The Tragedy of Trolls. Ulric’s pamphlet, not the work of fiction of the same name by Royal Road West’s Translator.

I’ve asked our esteemed Editor if he might search for more texts concerning trolls on his next expedition to Kesteva through the multidimensional door.

Vote for which text should be published next

On a side note, Royal Road West’s editorial staff decided Thursday morning to publish one of the above titles this fall. We couldn’t agree on which, so we invite you to vote in our online survey. All participants regardless of whether their choice wins will get a free pdf copy of the winner if they sign up for our mailing list.
Click here to vote.

To continue, here is but one extract from the above titles. It comes from The Troll-Hunter’s Guide:

My next lesson is how to hold a spear when faced against a troll. Beware you will seldom have to do this, for trolls are not easily angered. I encountered one such troll on my fifth expedition into the Parthian Mountains. When I feared I had gone too deep into that rocky ocean and climbed too near the Old World, and was short of breath, I missed my footing and plunged down a crevice, leaving behind the waning sun. …

(Several lengthy paragraphs follow, describing Walls’ fall into the darkness, his stumbling around for a while, falling again, more references to the “waning sun,” “flaxen sun,” “sweet mountainy air” and so on, and finally to this next paragraph.)

I had at last tumbled into the mouth of a sort of cave within a cavern, a small and delicate space of glistening stalactites and stalagmites straight out of one of my childhood dreams of pirates grottoes. My body ached and burned, my left arm was broken and bleeding, my head was cluttered, and it was a few moments before I realized my surprise at not only having survived but being able to see in this underground world. There was light, and as my senses returned I could see the light came from a lantern, which was held by a towering gray giant that I knew at once was a troll. …

… I grabbed my spear, and the towering troll swatted it away as it howled a horrid howl, a most horrid howl, into the cavernous depths behind it. …

… Its foul breath stank as it leaned in close, and its menacing teeth jagged and sharp lay inches from my face as it pinned my arms against the damp rock and veritably inspected me head to toe, paying close attention to my damaged arm. A second troll appeared behind the first and moved to my bloody arm. It held a grim roll of bandaging material, and this it proceeded to wrap around my wounded limb. …

… In my struggles against the beasts my body, exhausted, finally collapsed and my mind drifted into a senseless state of slumber. …

(Some paragraphs later, the writer gives the proper technique for actually holding a spear when facing a troll. It’s mostly tips based on his unsuccessful earlier attempt and actually not that helpful.)

Conclusions

I’ll spare you the other extracts and go straight to building up our picture of the accurate troll:

Tall. Ferociously loud when they want to be, which is not often. Compassionate. Fearless. Unable or unwilling to speak the common tongue of Kesteva—but I hasten to add that they seem to have their own language, and failure to speak any particular language is not in itself a sign of stupidity (or intelligence, as most of us can confirm back on Earth). Skilled with bandages. Skilled with spears. Observant—keenly observant.

Accordingly, we’re going to modify our official Royal Road West ancient Kesteva for Dungeon World stats a bit further than we did last week:

TROLL

Solitary, Gregarious, Large

Club (d10+3 damage)     20 HP    1 Armor

Close, Reach, Forceful

Special Qualities: Regeneration (unproven by the historical record, but we’re OK with it for a fun game)

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 (probably not, but it could happen)

These changes, we at Royal Road West believe, will honor the limited, but growing factual knowledge we have of trolls while also giving RPG players a rollicking good time.

What do you think?

Until next time, happy adventuring, wes thu hal, &c.

Those who write, survive: What Kesteva and Gettysburg have in common

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Statue of face of Patrick O'Rorke Monument at Little Round Top

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Once upon a time, an anonymous former newspaper Editor from a fog-shrouded Midwestern town discovered a multidimensional door into the ancient kingdom of Kesteva … and that’s how Royal Road West came to publish RPG material based on Kesteva.

But what if we had never heard of Kesteva?

I visited Gettysburg National Military Park several years ago and took a tour with one of the park’s well-regarded battlefield guides.

When we got to Little Round Top, our guide—he was in his 60s, probably, and we’d learned through the tour that he had taught high school history once upon a time—paused as a faint grin appeared on his face. He told us the story of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment’s heroic defense of the position under the command of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. What’s funny? I asked.

“You’re a publisher,” he said. “So you know who gets published survives, and those who don’t get forgotten.”

How often do we hear of Culp’s Hill?

He went on to say that several other historical figures were just as important as Chamberlain and his 20th Maine. Col. Patrick Henry O’Rorke, for example, on July 3, 1863, brought his 140th New York regiment to bear against advancing Confederates, drove the invaders down the slope and helped win the day for the Union. He was shot dead while urging on his soldiers. A monument to O’Rorke stands at Little Round Top today. But we hear a lot less about O’Rorke than about Chamberlain.

My guide’s point was that O’Rorke, Strong Vincent, and also Charles Hazlett on the Confederate side, weren’t around after the battle to tell their stories. Chamberlain did. Not only that, but he was a university professor and good at it. So movies were made about him, and the others slipped into faded history. Not only that, but over on the other side of the battlefield is Culp’s Hill, the site of a Union defense just as important as Little Round Top’s. But again, Little Round Top is part of the popular culture, while Culp’s Hill is not, except to history enthusiasts like my guide, who insisted we spend a good amount of time there.

If university scholars had taken our Editor seriously when he presented documents he pulled through a multidimensional door from one world into another, they would have found themselves on the fast track to academic greatness. It was fortunate indeed that the multidimensional door this former newspaper Editor from a fog-shrouded Midwestern town opened into an ancient Kestevan library and not into, say, a dovecote or dairy operation. It opened into a chamber of academic treasure. And so what that the writings were of previously unknown languages. Here was an entire library full of such samples. How wonderful a contrast to Linear B, Linear A, and the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Enter Royal Road West

But no, the academic world turned its back on the Editor, and so he turned to Royal Road West.

As the Translator undertakes the work the academics wouldn’t, and we publish the translations, we find matters that surely would have interested the university establishment.

Ulric survives and is remembered because he put down his thoughts. He wrote. He cemented his thoughts.

He shared his thoughts.

Little Round Top vs. Culp’s Hill is only one example of publicity winning over equivalent merit. There are others – maybe Newton vs. Leibnitz inventing calculus (they did it independently, but in our English-speaking corner of the world it took a long time for people to figure out Leibnitz did that). Do you have any favorite examples? Please share in the comments section. I’d love to hear them.

Twentieth Maine monument at Little Round Top

Sunset at Gettysburg, from Little Round Top

Adventuring in Kesteva vs. Adventuring in Our World

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A medieval-looking sword

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Life on modern Earth can feel like an adventure. On any given day we may be fighting traffic, navigating the perils of government or exploring the Web. Every rush of news makes me think there are dark forces looming over the world. Some of us are scraping by in a quest for mere survival. Then there are the police officers, firefighters, EMTs and military personnel, too often caught in real-life, live-fire battles against enemies seen and invisible.

We know from the documents recovered through a multidimensional door by the anonymous Editor in a fog-shrouded Midwestern town that ancient Kesteva was full of danger. Day-to-day survival was a battle for many who lived within the kingdom. Those who ventured into woods and plains faced sabertoothed cats, wolves and a mottle of sentient beings hell-bent on destroying humans: kobolds, trolls, goblins …

Some who made a living at it: adventurers.

It’s a job

What strikes me when I read the raw translations of Kestevan documents is how much of a job adventuring could be. To be sure, some Kestevans went into the wild on a lark. Sometimes it was to prove to their parents that they weren’t soft and could handle dangers. A few families even used places like the Wild Wood or the Caves of Oblivion as testing grounds for their adolescent children, to winnow those who could survive and were fit to lead the clan from those who could not. Others did it out of desperation, to seek profit from whatever riches the unknown held.

Kesteva’s professional adventurers sometimes sounded as though they were owners and operators of small businesses, which indeed they were. The most successful adventuring companies often had partnership agreements, bylaws, accounts and on occasion dispute resolution mechanisms. As for clients, a common source of contracts was the Royal Library. Royal Librarians in the major cities were charged with accumulating and diffusing knowledge. Their realms covered more than books, and most Royal Library buildings would appear to us to be as much museum as library.

History hunters

The librarians most often sought artifacts from previous eras, the ones that should have been destroyed in previous Ragnaroks but whose remnants survived in such places as the Wild Wood, in caves and in mountainous regions. The librarians could trace objects of great value or other interest through the scraps of texts they possessed, and often they could create letters of marque that enabled adventuring companies to venture into these places to retrieve the objects without fear of being branded criminals, since the crown technically owned all such lands and retrieval of anything of value would have been otherwise treated as theft. Adventuring companies and solitary adventurers also sought work from private individuals or companies, and sometimes the work sought them. All manner of adventure was available in Kesteva, and the greater the danger, typically the greater the reward.

That must be another reason why the Editor decided to put Kesteva’s history in front of the world in the guise of a role-playing game, of all things.

As for me, publishing this material is quite a lot of adventure, and the rest of the daily world presents an overabundance of danger and daring. What about you? What are your daily adventures, and how can you use Kesteva to get away from them?

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