Tag: trolls

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.

A Word about the Much-Maligned Troll, Part Two

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Troll carved into a hillside

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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.

A Word about the Much-Maligned Troll, Part One

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Rocks shaped to look like giant trolls

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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.