Trolls

Overview

Trolls are one of the three oldest mortal peoples of Vareth. They are tall, lean, long-limbed, and distinguished by exceptional tissue resilience and regenerative healing.

They are not built for the sheer muscular power of orcs. Their durability comes instead from flexible tissues, rapid clotting, and an unusual ability to repair injuries that would permanently disable or kill many other peoples.

Ancestry

Trolls, orcs, and ogres descend from the same ancient ancestral population. Their branch is the oldest known mortal lineage to have separated into distinct peoples.

Trolls developed toward survival through tissue resilience, wound repair, and efficient recovery from physical trauma. They are now a distinct and stable people.

Physical Characteristics

Trolls are taller than orcs and humans on average, though ogres are somewhat taller still. Standard trolls are leaner than orcs, with long arms and legs, relatively long forearms and lower legs, a long torso, large hands and feet, and ropey rather than bulky musculature.

They are physically capable but possess less sheer muscular strength and explosive force than orcs. Their long limbs provide reach and leverage without making them heavy power specialists.

Trolls have tusks or projecting canine teeth. These are normally less massive than the largest orc tusks but remain a recognizable feature of the face.

Their skin is thick and flexible rather than armor-like. Tendons, ligaments, cartilage, muscle fascia, and other connective tissues resist tearing unusually well.

Males are generally taller, heavier, and more muscular than females, though both sexes retain the characteristic long-limbed build.

Variation

Troll skin commonly occurs in cool or muted tones including grey, blue-grey, slate, pale ash, grey-brown, muted blue, mossy grey-green, and darker charcoal shades. Individual and regional variation can be considerable.

Most trolls are tall and lean, but a small minority—around five percent of the population—can become substantially broader and more massive. These individuals are known as Great Trolls.

Great Trolls are not a separate people. Their exceptional mass can result from inherited tendency combined with deliberate selection, intensive feeding, specialized growth and conditioning, and physical alteration. Troll regenerative physiology allows their bodies to survive forms of repeated tissue stress, bone setting, scarification, and structural reshaping that would permanently cripple most peoples.

Great Trolls remain recognizably troll in anatomy, but can become larger and heavier than most orcs.

Growth and Lifespan

Trolls usually reach full physical maturity around 18–20 years of age.

A healthy troll commonly lives around 130–170 years. Reaching around 180 is uncommon but believable, while reaching 200 is exceptional.

Their repair mechanisms help reduce the accumulation of ordinary tissue damage through adulthood. Aging eventually weakens regeneration itself: older trolls heal more slowly, need more food and rest after injury, and gradually lose strength, flexibility, and sensory acuity.

Senses and Physiology

Trolls clot rapidly after injury and rebuild damaged skin, muscle, connective tissue, and bone much faster and more completely than most peoples.

This healing is not instantaneous and has firm limits. Trolls cannot casually regrow entire severed limbs, and destruction of vital organs can still kill them.

Minor and moderate wounds often leave little permanent scarring. Severe trauma may leave broad scars, altered pigmentation, thickened tissue, deformed bone, or chronic pain.

Regeneration consumes enormous amounts of energy, water, minerals, and protein. A badly injured troll becomes intensely hungry, thirsty, tired, and prone to long periods of sleep. Starvation or severe deprivation slows healing dramatically.

Their resting metabolism can also slow during scarcity, allowing them to conserve resources by becoming sluggish rather than immediately wasting away.

Trolls feel pain normally. Their advantage is not insensitivity to injury but their unusual ability to survive and repair it.

They do not share the exceptional disease and poison resistance characteristic of orcs. Regeneration can help repair tissue after some forms of damage, but infection, systemic disease, venom, and toxins can still overwhelm or kill a troll if the underlying cause is not removed.

The Wyre

Trolls possess an uneven innate sensitivity to the Wyre. As with orcs, most trolls are not active magic users, while a minority are born with an aptitude strong enough to be developed deliberately.

Those individuals can become shamans. In Trollish, shamanism is called zhoruk and a shaman a zhorukar. Troll sensitivity often expresses through natural and elemental conditions such as water, earth, weather, mist, growth, decay, healing, and the character of particular places.

The aptitude varies greatly between individuals and does not provide automatic understanding. Training refines perception and control rather than creating the capacity from nothing.

Troll regenerative biology and troll magical sensitivity are separate traits. A troll does not become a stronger shaman merely because they heal unusually well.

Trolls later develop necromancy, called velkhar in Trollish, but this is a learned magical discipline rather than an innate biological function of troll bodies. Its methods and limits belong to the dedicated magic records.

Environmental Adaptation

Trolls tolerate hardship and irregular food supply comparatively well because their metabolism can reduce activity when resources are scarce.

Their large bodies and thick skin provide good cold tolerance, though they are not as specialized for severe cold and altitude as dwarves.

They can inhabit a broad range of climates. Extreme conditions mainly affect the speed and cost of regeneration rather than changing the basic resilience of their tissues.

Reproduction and Heredity

Troll reproduction is moderate.

Single births are strongly dominant and twins are uncommon. Pregnancy lasts roughly nine to ten months. Among trolls who reproduce, around three to five children across a lifetime is ordinary, with several years between births common.

Pregnancy, nursing, and major regeneration compete for the same bodily resources. Serious injury during pregnancy or nursing can greatly increase hunger, fatigue, and recovery time.

Children inherit combinations of stature, limb proportion, tusk size, coloration, build, and regenerative capacity from both parents. The tendency toward the exceptionally broad Great Troll build is uncommon and does not guarantee that an individual will develop into a Great Troll without the conditions that encourage it.