Trolls

A **troll** is a monstrous giant with a rough, green hide, clawed hands, and a bestial face with a hideous, tusked underbite. These fearsome monsters regenerate all damage not inflicted through fire or acid, and a full-sized troll can regrow from even a tiny scrap of flesh.

## Appearance

Large green brutes, trolls stand anywhere from 12 to 16 feet tall, though they prefer to hunch for comfort and to lull foes into a false sense of security.

## History

Trolls are generally believed to be heavily mutated and degenerated giants, though this belief is staunchly refuted by Giants who feel insulted by the association.

## Society

Trolls are solitary hunters, though they occasionally roam in small gangs of two to four, but only when prey is plentiful or a particularly strong counterforce has broached their hunting grounds. In rare instances, an old and powerful troll comes to lead small tribes of trolls. Such “troll kings” possess enough cunning to lead their hordes in devastating raids and massacres, and their presence permanently alters the surrounding ecosystem. To prove themselves worthy of rulership a troll must prove that they are strong and brave enough not to be scared by fire and acid, trolls well-known weaknesses.

Some Trolls, called augurs, claim to possess the so‑called “gift of sight,” which they believe was granted to them by Mollog the Mighty, the first and greatest of trolls. Augurs practice a disturbing method of future‑telling, in which a troll slashes open its own abdomen and pulls out its entrails to interpret the prophecies in its quivering innards. Often, other trolls prod and agitate their gutted diviner to keep it conscious throughout the gruesome ordeal.

## Troll Variants

There are many different variants of Trolls, partly because of their quick regeneration makes trolls prone to mutations.

### Bloated Trolls

A trolls regenerative ability is heightened as the troll is injured. The wound site sending signal to the rest of the body to increase its metabolism and regeneration to the legendary heights of the Trolls. For some unfortunate trolls, called Bloated Trolls, the response is often too strong for the actual wound, Even a scratch actives the same response as if a limb were severed. This leads the Bloated Troll to regenerate vastly more flesh than is needed to be whole again. This surplus of flesh leaves the troll bloated and hulking, hence its name. All this increased uptime of peak troll metabolism makes bloated trolls ravenously hungry even by troll standards.

### Two-Headed Trolls

Two-headed trolls are savage, dual-minded monsters with an unquenchable thirst for bloodshed, and dread tales of their ravenous appetites are whispered of in homesteads throughout the lands of Vasloria. Trolls are the result of Ettin and Troll breeding, resulting in a troll-like body with two sentient heads. Trolls and ettins do not normally seek one another as mates, but this pairing is the source of the original two-headed trolls—such couplings were engineered and arranged by the cult of Saint Lamashtu in ages past. Oblivious to their origin, two-headed trolls tend to give no deference to the Mother of Monsters.

### Jotund Trolls

Jotund trolls are gigantic, nine-headed horrors who prowl frigid moors, marshes, and wastelands, always alone and always enraged. While each of the jotund troll's nine heads possess their own brains and senses, they work much more in tandem than the dual-minded nature of the two-headed troll. Despite this, the heads often argue and bicker, particularly over which head gets to eat. The fact that all nine maws lead to the same shared stomach makes little difference in such culinary disagreements.

### Rockgut Trolls

Rockgut Trolls are those that inhabit the bowels of the earther through which the travel by gouging out tunnels and caverns by devouring the solid heartsrock of the world. They are akin to living heaps of stone, with hide as tough as mountains and giving them a stubborn resistance to spells, turning hostile magics like flame cascading off the back of a Ur-salamander. They can manipulate stone, a power they use to scoop up massive clubs or flingable boulders at will to mash their victims to pulp with.

### Dankhold Trolls

Dankhold Trolls are considered loners, even by the standards of the anti-social trolls. They prefer to lumber ever downwards in the deepest tunnels until they find a Dankhold where they will sleep for decades of even centuries. Dankhold Trolls shrink and grow to fit the space of the Dankhold they have chosen. Those that cram themselves into cramped caverns will wake up half their original size and those that fall asleep in an echoing cavern will wake up twenty years later several times larger. This is believed to be because of a unique combination between the strange twisting magic radiation of the Underdark combined with the strong regeneration of the trolls.

When they sleep, mushroom and puffballs take root in their flesh as well on their crude clubs of stone and fossilized wood they drag around like beloved companions. This alongside the deep-cavern stench that lingers to them and the forest of small stalagmites that built up on their shoulders and heads, makes the Dankhold Troll look like the Underdark grew legs and walked out from beneath the earth.

## Loot

#### Body

The blood of trolls is a valuable and difficult-to-procure substance of intense interest to alchemists, witches, and doctors the world over. Though initially it is of little interest other than its unnaturally vibrant hue, when processed correctly its applications are numerous. Experiments have produced oils that restore lost limbs, potions that grant the imbiber supernatural strength, and even smoke bombs that cause anyone caught in the haze to fly into an unstoppable rage.