While digging through some old back-ups I found a download folder I had thought had been lost.
On it was a copy of Ron Edwards' "Trollbabe" RPG.
I was reading through it and forgot how much fun it was. It also got me thinking about trolls, troll magic, and all sorts of related topics.
I remember back in the earliest days of my Dragon magazine reading and getting mail-order catalogs from Games Plus and the Dungeon Hobby Shop one of the products that always jumped out at me was Runequest's TrollPak.
It was the exact sort of deep dive into a singular topic that appealed to me then and now. Of course at the time I thought it might be related to Tunnels & Trolls. When I discovered it wasn't I figured I could convert it and have a Troll-focused game.
You can't read a bunch of myths, legends, and fairy tales about witches and not run across the occasional troll. They are all over the place. Especially any of the stories of Northern Europe.
What I never liked though was how the trolls of myth and in particular the trolls from the Hobbit looked and acted nothing like the trolls of D&D. Sure ogres are fine, but thin rubbery dudes that regenerate? Not so much. As time went on I of course saw where the D&D trolls came from and why they were chosen; a stronger differentiation between ogres and trolls needed to be made. But I still never really liked them.
In my games I made a new troll, the Earth Troll, that was more like the trolls I saw in the books I was reading. These trolls were often the lackeys of hags, in particular, the Wood Hag. These were much closer and I would later go one to make more trolls. The idea here that trolls are highly adaptable to their environment. They are Lamarckian Evolution played out in D&D. Put a troll near water and in a couple of generations, they are adapted to it.
But one thing I never did and will do this week, is adapt Troll Pak and Tunnels & Trolls to the Trolls of D&D.
Looking forward to seeing what I can come up with!
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