Trolls

oh yeah motherfucker

we're not talking about pharion anymore i'm not thinkin about it rn

we are, however, talkin about trolls

most of this is paraphrased from a twitter thread i put up a while back, so if you've read that you won't be reading a whole lot of new here

Everquest 1's trolls are basically my ideal. For as long as I've played WoW, I've never really liked what they did with the concept, and Blizzard are not the people I trust with the more interesting aspects of their culture and history.

EQ1 trolls, though? They're big, they're ugly, they live in a swamp. They regenerate like crazy, and they let the dark elves do all the hard work. I don't really like "evil" or "monster" races as a concept, but you can just play as these dudes. It's great.

The fact that they have relatively little dimorphism is nice, too.

Fleshpigs, from Cruelty Squad

I’ve been poking into writing fantasy stuff again- Vyre’s bigger world, mainly. We'll get a proper post on Vyre later. For now, all you need to know is it's a big city with a lot of undead that lots of oddballs and fugitives end up in. Considering how spun out and queer Vyre is meant to be, I want a really bog standard fantasy world around it for contrast.

So, I want big ugly trolls.

Why are trolls huge and warty and a bit misshapen? That's how troll regeneration makes you look- and all trolls are victims of their own regeneration. To go from birth to physical adulthood, for a troll, takes about a week and a half. They start out life as four-legged piggish things with flabby skin and flat faces, and practically rip themselves to pieces as they grow. Most trolls survive this process, becoming tall, stocky bipeds with all the hallmarks of regenerative scarring. It only gets wartier from here.

This is where the stereotype of big, dumb, near-feral trolls comes from. A fully-grown troll might have only existed for half a month, and it's hard for non-trolls to tell the fledglings from the elders.

Left to their own devices, trolls will adapt both their bodies and minds to suit their environment. You'll get trolls with skin for stone, trolls with gills and fins, trolls who leap from tree to tree, effete bespectacled trolls who give university lectures, dockworking trolls in flat-caps, so on and so forth. They can subsist on scraps and rotten flesh and tolerate deserts and tundras alike, given sufficient acclimation.  When it harms them, their bodies alter to suit it. They learn languages through overhearing conversation and learn etiquette through its breaches. They can live a good while, too.

grungus

When a troll wants to reproduce, another troll will have to eat its guts. The latter will grow a great, fat tumor on its back that will bud off into a new troll. Trolls don't raise their young or care much for family. They also can't crossbreed, but you can drink troll's blood. Most creatures can, and they'll get a bit lumpy and warty and thickset from it. Some settled troll tribes will even allow outsiders to join after undergoing this metamorphosis. Troll life is painful and dysmorphic, but it's hard to argue with the upsides.

Notably, trolls are immune to undeath. This is partly because it's hard to keep one dead without destroying the corpse, but if you manage to raise one it will, over a week or two, simply shake undeath off like a head-cold, along with any associated enthrallment. Many an enterprising necromancer has been crushed by vengeful, warty hands for this mistake. 

The Order of St. Etrigor, one of the few canonized trolls, is comprised entirely of troll-blooded paladins for this reason.  Sadly, troll-blood does not cure undeath retroactively- all it does is produce smelly tumors.

In New Vyre, most trolls live in the vast network of crypt-tunnels below the city. They have little enclaves of their own in the deepest reaches, and are treasured for their willingness and ability to guard the way against other subterranean horrors. Trolls aren't wholly reclusive, however, and the townsfolk regard them fondly. The sixth Bellwether of New Vyre was a troll- Ol' Hardluck, who'd come up from the factory-worker's union and is frequently credited with the invention of modern radio-age architecture.

While trolls can be quite gregarious, they get along best with gnolls. This is because gnollish friendship involves a lot of biting and unprompted punching, and trolls tend to think that stuff's a riot anyway.