The troll shambled closer. He was perhaps eight feet tall, perhaps more. His forward stoop, with arms dangling past thick claw-footed legs to the ground, made it hard to tell. The hairless green skin moved upon his body. His head was a gash of a mouth, a yard-long nose, and two eyes which were black pools, without pupil or white, eyes which drank the feeble torchlight and never gave back a gleam.

  • Three Hearts and Three lions, by Poul Anderson.

Trolls in most D&D derived RPGS are interesting, mainly that they do not in any way reflect mythological trolls. Instead of the typical icelandic trolls, which are giant cliff and cave dwelling creatures, focused on greed, and deadly weak to sunlight.

The D&D troll is explicitly based on Poul Anderson’s book, Three Hearts and Three Lions. In the story, the troll is the nearly one of the last obstacle they have to face on their quest, and nearly the one that does the heroes in.

Keeping in mind they had up to this point defeated a dragon, giant, and werewolf, the troll was considered the most deadly among them.

D&D has made the troll a rather one trick monster, it is terribly hard to defeat, unless you have fire. While accurate to the story, it overdoes the weakness a bit, and underplays the regeneration. Trolls in the story of Three Hearts and Three Lions was considered nigh impossible to defeat, and it was only luck that they discovered the troll could in fact be destroyed with fire.

Even when they did discover this fact it required that they burn the entire body to cinder.

Besides this, the troll was almost depicted like a colony organism, every limb and patch of skin it’s own bristling and alive entity, deadly in it’s own right. It’s arms and hands like spiders, it’s blood alive and moving, it’s guts and entrails like living snakes.

Fighting a troll was nothing like fighting beast or a man, the closet thing which comes to mind is the movie, John Carpenter’s The Thing. Where titular Thing is an ever evolving shifting monster, every torn off or destroyed piece becoming another creature to fight.

Troll

Armor Class: 16

Hit Dice: 9 HD

No. of Attacks: 2 claws, 1 bite (3 tentacle gut attacks

Damage: 1d6 claw, d10 Bite, 1d4 gut whips

Movement: 50'

No. Appearing: 1.

Save As: Fighter 6

Morale: – 11 (7 in the presence of fire) . Treasure Type: – None –

XP: 1200.

-Special Abilities-

After the troll takes damage, every turn it regenerates 2d6 damage. If the troll takes more than 15 points of damage from a single source, a part of it’s body will be ripped off or cut off assuming it’s a blade. Damage dealt via fire or acid reduces the regeneration to 1 hit point per round until the troll heals that damage.

if the troll is dropped to 0 hit points, it will recover in 1d10 rounds.

Trolls can only be truly killed if their body is burned entirely or melted entirely in an acid bath.

Living Body parts: roll a d6 to determine which body part is removed from an attack, that part becomes a living thing, if the torso is struck or in it’s guts region, it merely spills out as extra limbs and attacks.

  1. head, 2. torso, 3. right arm, 4. left arm, 5. right leg, 6. right leg.

Each limb becomes it’s own 1 HD monster which can hobble 10 feet per tun, and has a 1d6 damaging attacking, or in the case of the head, 1d10 bite. limbs will attempt >to reconnect with the troll, if they cannot the troll will replace the limb in 1d6 rounds.

Alright with the stats out of the way, we can get to the ecology part. In my variant of trolls, they should be pretty rare and fierce, to the point even dragons are wary to deal with, unless they have fire breath or spells, they would often resort to picking the troll up and dropping them a couple miles off in the nearest cliff side or lake.

I use dragons as the example monster they often compete with, those this goes for others.

Of course a determined or persistent troll is eventually going to either kill or force the dragon to move.

This is often the case for trolls in my setting, they often kill and attack other monsters and steal their dens or places of habitation.

Often after a battle, any limbs that didn’t manage to reattach in combat, it will eat. limbs left on their own will turn into a new troll, cut a trolls head off and the head will grow a new body, the body a new head. However luckily trolls eat their own spare limbs. This prevents competition with their own species and acts as a spare food source.

Trolls are often named and legendary figures unto themselves, and utterly fearless in battle, and have no real conception of their own mortality unless in the face of a fire.