Trolls

You got a purty mouth. Heh. Heh. Heh.

Big ugly green monsters without too much going on inside their noggin, and most of them have the ability to regenerate. That’s probably all you really need to know about trolls. But, cutting the post off there would be kind of lame. So, I’ll see what else I can weasel out of these critters.

Trolls, in Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, are just shy of being a giant in height (nix that, they are giants) topping off between seven and eight feet tall and weighing anywhere between three and eight hundred pounds. If they have hair it’s greasy and limp and their noses often look like it’s been broken one too many times. They favor swamps, bogs, and moors as their homes. Trolls, like I mentioned above, have the ability to regenerate hit points over time and re-grow limbs and such. It’s not a fun thing to come up against, especially if you’re lacking a torch, or a campfire, or a weapon with a flame enchantment on it.

Another interesting thing to note is the lack of gender among trolls (at least from my point of view and my house rules) as they reproduce asexually. To make more trolls you cut a piece of an existing one off and a new troll, minus a few points of intelligence from the base troll, will grow in 3d6 days. This makes it really nasty for adventurers who hack and slash their way through a whole troop of trolls and don’t take the precaution of burning the bits and pieces after the fight. What that group gets is an army of pissed off trolls tracking them down later in the week.

And, one fun thing that comes along with this is making a smart troll.

According to 3.5 stats for a troll the average intelligence is a 6. This means the troll gets a -2 modifier to anything that requires the use of intelligence. And, if you’re making a troll PC you take a -4 racial adjustment to whatever you rolled for intelligence. The statistic block even goes so far as to state that 3 is the lowest a trolls intelligence can drop.

So, how do you make a smart troll?

First, you bring a little malevolent pixie named Damien Trollbringer (he’s been mentioned on the blog before) into the picture.

Second, you pick up as many wondrous items as you can that give bonuses to intelligence.

Third, you let Damien go at applying all of these magic items, ointments, potions, and what have you, and then use a Wish spell to bind all of the items to the troll as if they were a natural part of his body.

Not Revenire the Troll King, but I can't draw so he's close enough.

The result is Revenire the Troll King. Revenire (the last time I looked at the character sheet) has an intelligence of 35 giving him a +12 to any intelligence related skill. He used this intellect to escape Damien and went about creating an army of super trolls. He used his own fingers to spawn the first ten of his army, those are his generals, each with an intelligence of 30, the subsequent generations, after the fourth, is back to having average troll intelligence.

I would do the math on that, but it seems like it would be a lot. At a random guess, I’d say you’d have around 100,000 trolls, assuming that each general cut off all ten fingers, and then the next generation did the same, and so on and so forth.

Yeah, that’s an epic level adventure waiting to happen J

Anywho, I’m off.

Later kids.

Ryan

4-10-14

Pixies-Damien

I really wish I knew how to draw... This looks nothing like Damien.
http://wolverine041269.deviantart.com/

Or to be more accurate I should say Damien, since I’m dedicating this post to my miniature titan of terror.

Damien Trollbringer is the name he gave himself when he decided the run of the mill pixie shit wasn’t for him. Sure, he enjoyed causing chaos, and he enjoyed causing it even more due to his demonic heritage. It was a miracle he even survived his birth. The younger pixies, in spite of the elders’ decision, wanted to destroy him. The elders protected him though, using powerful illusions cast on both the other pixies and on him. Even now, Damien maintains the ability to switch from pleasant looking pixie to his true half demon form.

Now, the chaos he causes is much more of the evil variety. Most of the time he won’t fool with little pranks, believing them to be childish and beneath him, but when he does he’ll set powerful spells, such as a planar gate (opened to a random lower plane) placed directly behind a door. Or he’ll scatter a box of fireball beads along a forest trail, then wait and watch for some poor fool to step on one.

Then there are the rage filled moments where Damien will fly into a village and just start killing. He’ll burn the whole town to the ground in one night. Maybe he’ll take two, and find a way to make the townsfolk kill one another.

Damien does run into problems though. Not goodly aligned player characters or NPCs that want his head. Nope, luck is his problem. That planar gate saw to the end of an evil wizard’s reign. The fireball beads were stepped on by bandits who were attacking a passing caravan. And, the villages he’s burned down and slaughtered everybody in town. Well… One was a cultist cabal and each soul in the town was tarnished by murder and sacrifice to a dark god. The other was a lawless village and haven for the malign.

These are facts that bother him to no end.

Damien has been touched by Locestra, chaotic goddess of luck and chance. This touch twists Damien’s actions. When he tries to cause evil and act as he feels a villain should act, his intentions turn into positive results. This infuriates him to no end and he’s pledged to kill Locestra because of it.

He has had projects that were successful beyond his wildest dreams, as well.

1     Tiny- Tiny is a half-ogre half-giant (uses the half giant race from Expanded Psionics Handbook) that Damien modified. He accelerated Tiny’s growth from infancy to adulthood and poured ever ounce of power possible into making Tine the strongest beast he’d ever seen (uses the paragon addition to his strength and charisma scores) but this caused extremely unsatisfactory results with Tiny’s intellect (Int 3, Wis 8, Cha 4). So, Damien created The Monocle, a semi-artifact that increases Tiny’s intellectual scores by two-thirds the paragon addition (+10 to each). This gives Tiny a true split personality, and the ability to just Hulk out.

           Revenire- Revenire, which means troll in Romanian, is considered the Troll King, and the very reason Damien uses the surname Trollbringer. Revenire is a troll Damien experimented on after Tiny escaped, and instead of focusing on the troll’s strength, he focused on its intellect. A troll knows nothing about combat tactics or military maneuvers, they’re lucky if they can speak. Damien knew a real threat in a troll was a smart troll. So, he reversed what he did with Tiny. He made Revenire brilliant, taught him the intricacies of magic. He taught military tactics to him, and everything he could think of. Damien literally made Revenire the most brilliant mind on the face of the planet. But, Damien didn’t put in a control switch. There was a great battle between the two, Damien versus Revenire, survival versus freedom, and magic was the weapon of choice. The two of them expended their most powerful spells and destroyed the tower Damien had built deep in the swamp. Damien woke up, days after the battle, but when he searched the towers remains he found no evidence of Revenire. He assumed Revenire died in the explosion.

Damien was touched by Locestra, the chaotic goddess of luck and chance, who finds Damien’s actions and the results of them entertaining. So, what’s the likelihood that Damien achieved something truly evil in the creation of Revenire? And, what’s the likelihood of Revenire walking away from that battle? Who knows? Sometimes, a mystery is the best type of chaos.

Ryan

3-8-14