Dungeon Master Information

Trolls are not your usual player race, and it is up to your discretion to allow them into your campaign. There are a few prominent reasons not to allow in your campaign.

Trolls are overpowered compared to other player races. They gradually grow in power over the first 4 levels. When preparing encounters you have to take this into account. Trolls choosing fighter and barbarian classes end up being roughly twice the strength of other normal characters, once they become level 5. If they choose the ranger or rogue class, count them as 1½ times the strength of normal characters once they become level 5. The availability of large size armor and weapons may postpone this power increase a little.

Being this overpowered may cause discontent or jalousie at the table. Other players may be jealous of the power of the troll or the troll player may be hugging the spotlight in combat over shining the other players.

Trolls are monsters. Most villages, towns and cities do not allow trolls to enter. This may cause some problems, the troll player is excluded from the action that takes place here, and the player basically have to wait until these errands have been performed. One way to overcome this may be to have the player play two characters, a troll and a goblin or gnome. This secondary character does not take part in combat and is only used for social encounters. It can go where the troll cannot. If you want to use this approach, talk to all your players, not just the troll player.

Trolls become large. They are unable to fit into small spaces. They may be unable to go into the or gnome inn. The upper floors of a building may not be able to support their weight. When fighting in a contained space they have disadvantage. They cannot buy large size weapons and armor from a normal blacksmith; it has to be custom made.

Troll has to reacquire weapons and armor to fit its large size as it becomes large, make sure to either plan for it or somehow make appropriate weapons/armor become available. It is very frustrating for a player to have this unused potential for extended periods of time. Likewise it is very frustrating if all encounters take place in confined space where the troll player has disadvantage on attacks, so make sure not to over use this weakness.

Trolls have weaknesses when it comes to fire and acid damage. They cannot regenerate this kind of damage, when preparing encounters, take this weakness into account. A fight with a fire elemental, a black dragon or a spellcaster relying on spells that deals fire or acid damage, may leave the party in need of extra healing because the troll cannot regenerate this.

In other words, before allowing a troll into you campaign, be sure to have a talk with all your players about it and make sure they are OK with it. Are they OK with a character eating fallen enemies? You also have to make sure that the troll player understands that there are significant drawbacks by playing a troll, and that they won’t try to steal the entire spotlight from the other players. You have to gage your players before introducingSample the troll race. Most children are not up to this, but mature players should file be able to handle this responsibility. A bad player can easily and even unintentionally destroy a good D&D game. When playing a troll you specifically have to take care not to. Are your players up to the task? On the other hand trolls can be a lot of fun to play and have in your party. Yes, their low intelligence may cause them to behave, - erhm, - suboptimal, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be fun. In fact it could be hilarious.

And remember if anything goes wrong, talk to your players.

Loath some limbs When you read the , you will find a variant about detached limbs. I found those rules a bit clunky, but if you like them, feel free to use them. – They are way more canon than the rest of this document.

You become what you eat Similarly you will also find information on mutant trolls. To expand on the rules about acquiring traits from food, here are some examples:

 Animals in general: The troll can mimic their sound.  Creatures with horns, antlers or tusks: The troll starts to grow this feature.  Roosters: The troll feels an urge to wake everybody in the party at the crack of dawn, with a rooster like sound.  Dogs: The troll feels an urge to sniff other creatures’ butts, and urinate where ever the troll goes.  Cats: The troll feels an urge to climb trees, and doesn’t worry about getting down till it is up there.  Spell casters (including couatls, darkmantles, death knights etc.): The troll gain access to one cantrip or one first level spell and have a single spell slot. (The cantrip and the spell must be known or memorized by the spellcaster)  Elves: The ears become pointy.  Dwarves: The troll starts to grow a beard.  Angels: The troll can do one healing touch, healing 1d8 points of damage.  Ankheg, umber hulks and insects: The troll grows an exoskeleton, giving the troll an AC bonus of 1.  Basilisk: The troll can gaze as an attack. Target must make a DC 10 con save or be paralyzed till the end of its next round.  Behir: The troll deals an extra 1d4 points of lighting damage when the troll bite.  Beholders: The trolls gaze now infers an antimagic cone of 10 feet range.  Bugbears: The troll becomes very furry.  Bulette: The troll gains a burrowing speed of 1 foot per round, or increases it, if the troll already has a burrowing speed.  Bullywugs, Chuuls, Kua-toa, Merfolk and merrows: The troll can breathe under water.  Carrion crawlers, Chuuls, Grells and Mindflayers: The troll starts to grow tentacles around the mouth.  Chimeras and Ettins: The troll start to grow and extra head. After one hour it starts talking. It will always disagree with the troll, but not endanger itself (or the troll) deliberately. Sample Elephant: The troll can remember everything that happens from now on. file  Flumphs: The troll farts a lot more than usual.  Goblins: The teeth become crooked.  Kenku: The troll can repeat everything it hears flawlessly, in the voice of the original speaker.  Medusa: The troll starts to grow snakes for hair.  Mindflayers: The troll acquires a few random memories of the food.  Mindflayers, Nothic, Otyughs and pseudo dragons: The troll become telepathic, range 30 feet.  Otyughs: The troll craves the droppings of other creatures.  Pixies and sprites: The troll can turn invisible once for one minute. The invisibility ends if the troll attacks, casts a spell or eats.

Once a creature has been dead for more than 3 days, the troll gains no effects from eating it. Generally the effect is way less powerful than that of the original creature, for instance paralyzing instead of turning to stone.

The effects start to manifest themselves after 10 minutes of eating and go away usually after a long rest, but in certain cases they may continue a day or two more.

The effect scales with level. For a level 1 troll the effects should only be visual in nature. For level 2 trolls, the effect may have a power level compared to that of a cantrip. For level 3 trolls the power level increases to a level on spell. For a level 5 and higher troll the power level increases to that of a level 2 spell. Thus the troll will never gain flight ability, but feather fall and levitation is OK.

More than one effect may be gained, particularly if it is a weak effect, but no more than 3.

When selecting an effect, wary the effect, sometimes when eating a dwarf, the troll grow a beard, other times the troll just becomes stubborn. Sometimes nothing happens. Make sure not to select an effect that is too detrimental for the party. Think in terms of what would be fun. A farting troll might be fun, but it might also be too much. Think ahead. Knowing of an upcoming social encounter an extra head that disagrees with the troll and openly contradicts the troll might be fun. The effect might give the party an extra advantage, but the players should not calculate with such an advantage in advance. The party shouldn’t go stockpiling dead pixies, because troll thinks it can insure the ability to become invisible.

Tell the player who plays the troll the exact extend of the ability. Be specific about limitations such as a spell that can only be cast once.

It is your game, you have permission to change it A lot of dungeon masters will not change or expand the rules of the game. They fear they may break the game, or they simply have a compulsion to play as correctly as possible. (I used to be like that.)

Well, fear not! Once you have changed the rules a few times, it actually becomes fun. When you include a troll into your game, you have to be prepared to be a little more flexible than a regular DM. Trolls weren’t meant to be player races, and there will be unforeseen complications.

This is your game, and you are not breaking any laws by changing the rules. When in doubt say “yes, you can”,Sample and remember the “rule of cool”. (Rule of cool: you should allow it even though file the rules say not to, if it will be awesome if it succeeds, and hilarious if it fails, and there are no lingering repercussions.)

Remember you can always change it back. Designer’s notes

The background for this document I have played D&D on and off for close to three decades. I have played a lot in the old campaign setting. I like the of Thar Gazetteer. So when Volo’s guide to Monsters was released I was thrilled. Now I could dig up that old gazetteer and play in it using 5th edition rules. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that they didn’t include trolls or ogres. Well I guess I’ll just have to wait for “’s guide to Monsters”.

Later on I heard that Wizard of the Coast was never going to release a large player race because it would be overpowered compared to the other player races, and would result in bad roleplaying. Who the *blip* are they, to tell us what we are allowed to do in their …. Right. Well, they did create it, and own the IP, and have been developing it for more than 20 years, but still…

If you play in an all adult group and everyone are clear about stuff like social contracts, letting other players shine, and are well aware of the fact that a troll is overpowered in combat, but also recognize that combat is only one of the three pillars of D&D; I don’t see any serious obstacles for playing a troll. In fact I see a lot of fun roleplaying resulting from playing a troll. (“Oh, were we supposed to use that horse? I thought it was just my midnight snack.”)

When the DMs Guild was created there was finally and outlet, that let you share (some1 of) your homebrew content with others.

When started with his happy fun hour, I saw that WotC were not as scientific as I thought they would be, nor did they possess any deep game design secrets beyond the realm of mortal man. Sure, they have a lot more experience, and they know bunch of tricks more than I do, and have access to tons and tons of playtester, but no voodoo magic. On several occasions I would disagree with Mike Mearls, suspecting that the chosen features was overly complicated or had power issues. This made me feel comfortable releasing my own designs to a broad audience. So, - time to patch up a short one coming.

Why these notes Considering the nature of the troll race, chances are that you occasionally have to do a bit of “tinkering” with it. Maybe your DM’ing style is different in some aspect causing a feature to become overpowered or underpowered in your game, or you may simply prefer a different approach to something.

Some of the rules here are just random, others are based on knowledge that might not be immediately apparent,Sample and a few are based on my desires to change some of the core rules of the filesystem.

1 I have a lot of content regarding Norse clerics that I am dying to share, but not allowed to release through DMs Guild, because it would violate some content guideline. You are not allowed to reference gods from other released settings, and these gods was used in the Mystara setting. Bummer. Knowing the background for a rule will often make it easier to adopt it to your own game. For instance knowing that the rule for natural armor is based on my dislike of the way it normally works, should make it easier for you to go with a more “cannon” approach.

Overall design goal I see a lot of potential for fun in playing a troll. Particular if you play a one session silly monster campaign. It could also work in short evil campaigns.

I also wanted to make a race the preserves the flavor of the troll as it appears in the Monster Manual.

The main problem in a achieving this goal is that the normal troll is way too powerful to use as a player race unmodified. Particularly the facts that trolls are large creatures and have regenerative abilities are troublesome. In other words the troll race from the monster manual will have to be modified so that it would work well with the normal core rules, while preserving the overall feel of race.

How do you do that?

In 2nd edition AD&D there was a concept called hit dice. It was used to figure out how many hit points a monster has. Even though it share the same name it very different from the 5th edition hit dice. A monster stat block would state a number of hit dices. To figure out how many hit points that monster had, you would roll that many d8’s. These monster hit dice could be thought of as class levels.

With that in mind if you look at the NPC section of the monster manual. You can compare the commoner and the bandit captain. You will see that they each have hit points that can be compared to a 1st level and a 10th level character. They also have fighting capabilities that (to some degree) compares to a level 1 and a level 10 fighter. In other words we can think of a commoner as a simplified level 1 fighter and a bandit captain as a simplified level 10 fighter.

From the ’s guide, we know that medium characters use d8’s for hit points and large creatures use d10 for hit points.

When you look at the troll in the monster manual, is has 8d10 + 40 hit points. You should think of the troll in the monster manual as a large level 8 character with a constitution modifier of 5.

Now we only need to roll that character back to level one.

Racial adjustment One of the design goals for 5th edition was that there shouldn’t be any negative racial adjustment. That works fine for your standard playable races. However we are so far of the beaten path that we have to ignore that rule. If youSample analyze all the martial NPC’s in the Monster Manual in regards to stat points, youfile will discover two things: 1, they are not completely random. 2, they don’t following any exact rule either. If you plot these NPCs in a graph, with the number of “hit dices” as the x-axis, and the and the number of points you need to use from the point buy system (after level stat bumps) as the y-axis, you will be able to draw a line. No NPC will deviate more than 5 points from this line. This line tells us that an 8th level NPC on average uses 26 points from the point buy system, which is close enough to the standard 27 points to ignore this entirely.

Rolling back a large 8th level character to first level, you remove two 2-point stat bumps from the highest ability scores. Now you have an ability score array of 16, 13, 18, 7, 9 and 7. If you subtract an additional 4 points from the constitution scores counting them as growth, you now the ability score array of 16, 13, 14, 7, 9 and 7.

Then using a number of different character generation methods, I tried to match these numbers, using racial adjustments to bridge any gaps, or make exact matches. Fiddling around with these numbers, rounding them of and using my gut feeling, I ended up with something like the stated adjustments. An alternative racial adjustment that I almost chose was +2, +1, 0, -2, 0 and -2. Depending on the preferred character generation method in you group you might want to use these adjustments instead. The reason for the choice that I made was that it was less intrusive than the alternative.

I also looked at the racial adjustments for the 3.5 edition stated in the Monster Manual but came to the conclusion that the two editions are too different from each other to serve as more than inspiration.

Regeneration This is definitely the interesting part of this race.

First of all, you need to acknowledge that the monsters in the monster manual are simplified. A DM needs to be able to run them at a moment’s notice. For instance Second Wind is a key feature for low-level fighters, but no NPC in the Monster Manual has this feature, because it is too complex to run during encounters.

So when you turn a monster race into a player race, you are allowed to expand and change things from the Monster Manual.

For instance, let us assume that the troll from the Monster Manual had a limited pool of regeneration instead of unlimited regeneration. That troll would have to regenerate for 9 rounds to empty that pool. My guess is that, if you engage in combat with a troll, that combat would take less than those 9 rounds. This means that the DM doesn’t need to keep track of this regeneration, and you can simplify running that troll by saying it has unlimited regeneration.

Second of all, you need to understand that normally there are three ways of getting hit points back: long rest, short rest + hit dice and magic healing (spells and potions). When you introduce regeneration into this, you are messing with the core mechanics of the game.

Instead of introducing a new core mechanic, altering an existing one is much less dangerous and easier, in this case the short rest/hit die mechanic. So think of the regeneration as a sped up version of short resting. DuringSample a short rest you can approximately heal a number of hit points equivalent to yourfile maximum hit point score. Now you have the size of the pool. The regeneration also needs to scale. From the on encounter building we know that a CR5 monster, such as the troll is equivalent to a level 12 character, if that character should have a tough but fair chance of coming out on top. So if we put up a level 10 character against a troll it would be a very even fight. And a troll regenerates 10 hit points per round. What a coincidence! Now we know how to scale it.

Being unable to use short rests for its main purpose, of getting hit points back, sucks! So you have to introduce some mechanic to still achieve that without making the race overpowered. So you introduce the eating frenzy. A large troll needs to eat enough food for a normal size M creature for a month in the course of one hour. If you eat rations, that will run 15 GP. (Compare that to the price of a healing potion of 50 GP.) There has to be some downside of it, so it causes one level of exhaustion.

Exhaustion is another core mechanic of the game. To remove exhaustion magically requires a level 5 spell slot. To put this into perspective raising a dead person that have been dead for more than a minute also requires a level 5 spell slot. A mass cure wounds is also a level 5 spell slot, in your standard 4½ player groups it will on average restore 83 hit points. (And the monster manual troll has 84 hit points.) But taking a long rest reduces the level of exhaustion by one. So one level of exhaustion is at the same time a very high price but also a very low price.

Let us imagine the following scenario. During an adventure day the party has three tough fights. After each of the two first, they take a short rest, the normal races spend half their hit dices to heal up and the troll eats and gain a level of exhaustion. After the third fight the party is spent. Both the normal races and the troll need two days to fully recover. In my mind that sounds reasonable, and balanced.

Finally, this kind of eating frenzy is completely in line with the troll theme. Trolls are always hungry and they eat everything, indiscriminately.

It is simple, it is neat and it is thematic. It is everything you hope for in a good game design

Racial restrictions In old editions of D&D there where a lot of class restriction based on ability scores and race. 5th edition has done a good job getting rid of these restrictions.

The restrictions are here because I feel that it will break immersion in the game, if you play for instance a troll wizard. It can be fun to play against type, but sometimes it is just too much. I feel this is one of those situations. Besides why play a bad wizard when you can play a super barbarian. This is why most of the non-martial classes are bared and why the magic heavy subclasses are bared.

I was considering allowing paladins, but decided not to. Trolls don’t have high ideals apart from never being hungry, and I also feel that the paladin class relies too heavily on spells and magic.

I feel that playing a monk requires mental discipline beyond the capabilities of a troll, - they are simply too hungry.Sample file

In second edition there were a few rules for trolls being 7th level shamans, but the notion of spell casting trolls has slowly disappeared into oblivion in later editions. Your average monster manual troll has con 20 and int 7. There need to be some leeway in the normal maximum ability score maximum of 20 to reflect this. I more or less randomly chose the figures.

I also limited the con modifier in regards to unarmored defense, because otherwise your troll barbarian could very easily end up with an AC of 24 without any magic, which is too high. Most weak monsters would need natural 20’s to hit the troll. Even though trolls are tough, they are not that tough.

Playing a large creature and troll growth The rules stated under playing a large creature are the canon rules. (The “enlarge” spell actually don’t follow the normal rules for large creatures, - they were considered too overpowered; thus a nerfed version of size large was created.) I did expand on the use of two handed weapons as one handed weapons a little. You may want to expand on these even further, say include versatile weapons too. There is a lot of leeway for the DM here.

Size is a fluid concept up through the D&D editions. Gnolls and bugbears used to be size large but now they are size M. A goliath is almost as big as a troll being only one or two feet shorter than a fully grown troll and weighing only 160 pounds less. A big goliath can be 4 feet taller than a short dwarf, and only one foot shorter than the adult troll, yet he shares the size category of the dwarf. What I am getting at is that trolls may be large size creatures, but they are small large-size creatures. Being flexible with the large size rules where they differ from the size M rules is not a big stretch.

Size M monsters roll hit points with d8’s. Size large monsters roll hit points with d10’s. Players roll according to their class. The average roll of a d10 is one higher than that of a d8.

There are two ways to handle this, the complicated way where you tell the player to modify the size of the hit point dice for each class or the simple way of just adding 1 to your hit points score for each level. Modifying the hit dice for classes will very quickly get very ugly and complicated. But adding 1 hit point extra to the hit points for each level, just like the dwarven resilience of the hill dwarves, is very easy.

In the old Orcs of Thar gazetteer you would start as a level -3 (yes, that is minus three) troll, because a mature troll was too powerful compared to say a kobold. So I decided to have you start as an adolescent troll. So at level 1 you are not grown up. When do you grow up? A few other races such as and get features at third level, so it seemed natural. We also have to remember that on third level all classes have selected a subclass, so now you should really feel like the character you chose. One of the defining traits of trolls is that they are large, so at third level you become large, in regards to most things.

Originally it was a very clear cut from size M to size L happening at 3rd level. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it was too abrupt and decided to smooth it out over several levels, so I stretched it out to 5 levels. That way you alleviate some pains. You don’t suddenly wake one morning and can’t use your shortsword and your armor. You have time to adjust. ThisSample also gives the player a very strong feeling of progression. And as a DM you get timefile to learn how to adjust your encounters for the added power. I did consider smoothing more of changes out, but felt it would clutter up the rules. For instance I considered making your carrying capacity 1½ the normal at level 2. I also considered a AC penalty of 1 for size large armor at level 2 and medium armor at level 3.

Troll Names Trolls have a bit of the same problem as Half-orcs. They sometimes take names from their surroundings.

I took a lot of inspiration from the Orcs of Thar gazetteer, though none of the names originates from it.

Troll features

Age I have been looking everywhere to find information troll age in D&D, but I was unable to find any. So I just made up the stuff. Due to the troll growth feature, I say that most trolls start adventuring before they are mature.

Alignment The Monster Manual says chaotic evil. In my opinion trolls are not chaotic evil in the regular sense. They are too stupid, to think and plan ahead, and they are always hungry. Due to their regeneration they are not worried about the consequences of their actions. This kind of behavior can be approximated by the alignment system by categorizing them as chaotic evil.

Speed Grown up trolls have a speed of 30 feet/round. Most size M creatures share that value. I saw no reason to change it.

Darkvision and keen senses These abilities are copied from the monster stat block. I saw no reason to change them.

Always hungry This is one of the key features of a troll race. They are big, stupid and always hungry. I key their regenerative abilities to their metabolism.

The specifics are just random numbers, but I believe they fit nicely.

You become what you eat The Monster Manual has a section on troll freaks. I expect this race to be used in fun silly games. In such a game this feature would add to the fun, so I decided to expand on it, given the DM some more specific guidelines on how to use it. WhenSample I play as a player one of the things that I really hate is when the DM nerfs my character,file such as having a death curse eat away on your hit point maximum, or force you to change race as part of a reincarnate spell. It can be really annoying or frustrating when your painfully min-maxed stats are suddenly thrown out of whack, permanently. For this reason I emphasize that the changes are always temporary. Natural armor One of the design goals of 5th edition was to limit the range of AC’s. In earlier editions AC’s of 30 or higher was not uncommon in min-maxed characters. To achieve this goal in 5th edition, armor class improvements seldom stack. In most simple cases it works fine, but when you get off the beaten path with unusual class race combinations the rules feels clunky. The way they are explained, in my opinion, are less than optimal and make it worse. Figuring out the AC of your lizardfolk multiclass barbarian/monk/fighter/draconic sorcerer with mage armor and blur can be a challenge.

I understand the problems and challenges, but I don’t know how to fix it.

One thing I do know is that, I don’t like the way natural armor works in 5th edition, and I think I have a relatively simple way of fixing it. Natural armor should be considered an AC bonus. You get 3/3 of the bonus when not wearing armor, (and “unarmored defense” counts as armor). You get 2/3 of the bonus when wearing light armor. You get 1/3 of the bonus when wearing medium armor. You get no bonus when wearing heavy armor. If you have several natural armor sources only the highest count. All fractions rounded down. This is the reason why I differentiate between what type of armor you wear.

I also know of other advanced DM’s that use similar methods.

The monster manual Say that the AC is 15. The dexterity bonus is “baked” into this number, which makes the natural AC 14. Trolls in the wild don’t wear armor, your player troll probably will. This would make the AC a little too high in my opinion, so I dropped the natural armor to 3 point (just like lizardfolk and draconic sorcerers).

I specifically added the note about barbarian unarmored defense, even though this is not necessary because this is actual canon. But I also know that because of the way AC is explained, it will come up in discussions in groups.

Natural weapons You have natural weapons just like tabaxi does. They max out at the same damage level as the troll in the monster manual.

The claws start at the same damage level as a tabaxi claw, and increases to that of a normal troll at level 5.

The bite doesn’t increase after level 3. If you have been bitten by a baby who has just gotten some teeth, you know why the bite damage peaks earlier.

Normal Monster Manual troll don’t use weapons. I thought about implementing some sort of mechanism that would encourage players not to use weapons, but rely on the races natural weapons.

I decided not to for several reasons. It would feel restrictive to the player. I would also have to implement some sort of magic attack, like moon circle druids primal strike ability, to overcome magic resistance. The heaviest argument was my memory of fighting a troll on a mountain side about 30 years ago as a player. WeSample couldn’t figure out how to stop the regeneration. Eventually we chopped it to piecesfile and threw it off the mountain into a river. During this fight the DM used the Grenadier 706 troll mini sculpted by Julie Guthrie. So in my mind that is how a real D&D troll looks like. One of these two trolls had a sword twice the length of the dwarf in the group. The other had a similar sized club. So trolls can use weapons. The young forest troll rendered on the cover is one of those trolls.

Languages Most player races speak common and one additional racial language. In addition to this they can even get one or two languages from their background, making them fluent in 4 languages.

I just don’t see this happening for a troll. They are just too stupid. So I copied the Monster Manual saying that trolls speak giant.

The player needs to be able to speak with the rest of the party. Not being able to speak with the rest of the party may be fun for a few minutes but it gets tiresome and frustrating real fast. I foresee this race used in monster campaigns, like or goblin campaigns. Locking a second language to common would be annoying. So the player gets the primary used language from the background.

Trolls are very stupid. Normally they cannot read or write. However if they give up a tool proficiency they can.

Languages were one of the reasons I decided to create a race specific background.

Sub races These are ribbon abilities. I didn’t give them much thought. Originally there were only four sub races, but I decided to split the cave troll and the moor troll into two distinct sub races.

When it came to the cave troll I was thinking about giving them the same vision as drows, but decided to scale it down a bit.

I was also thinking about letting cave trolls be slightly smaller than the average troll and mountain trolls slightly larger. This would mess up the troll growth table; - I would need to have three separate growth tables, so I decided not to. But feel free to tinker with it.

I know that the Latin name for troll is Troglodytarum, but it sound too much like troglodyte, so I decided to be inspired by the Orcs of Thar and mix it with some Latin.

Troll background I have mixed feelings about the backgrounds, in 5th edition. I could write a long essay about how they are too restrictive, have potential to be expanded into a lot more, should be changed into a variant feature, saved us from a lot of headaches regarding skill point allocation, and are much cooler than the proficiencies and secondary skills of earlier editions, but I will refrain from doing so. Suffice to say that I tried to make a compromise that works well within normal background concept of 5th edition. I lockedSample the troll race to the troll background. file I personally just don’t see the Charlatan troll, and most of the other backgrounds don’t seem to fit either, so I made a background specific for trolls. As a last minute addition I added the tank top sack to the starting equipment. Some women aren’t comfortable playing a male character and some players would be uncomfortable playing topless female character. To make the game as inclusive as possible I added the sack.

We also have to remember that the backgrounds were what you were doing before you started adventuring. Considering that trolls aren’t mature when they start adventuring, it seems weird to talk about them being trained in say mapmaking.

I were tempted to reintroduce the trollspeak from previous editions but decided not to. Trollspeak is a guttural mishmash of common, giant, goblin and orc. One of the things I like about 5th edition is the strong reduction of language.

Trolls only get “giant” as a language from their race. If they need other language they need to get it from their background. I was thinking about giving trolls another language like common or goblin or something like that, but decided not to. Trolls are not masters of language. They rely more on intimidation than fine speech.

I thought about what would happen if a troll couldn’t speak with other party members. While it may be fun at first, it soon gets tiresome if the player is unable or only has limited communication with the rest of the party.

When it comes to tool proficiency remember that trolls aren’t too bright and that most of them are afraid of fire, so nothing with too much fire or intelligence requirements. Cooking may involve fire but considering that trolls are always hungry, it is a risk worth taking.

In a normal background you get two skills and two languages, or two toll proficiency or a combination of the latter. Trolls aren’t big speakers, and they aren’t big crafters either, so needing to spend a proficiency “slot” on a language to be able to speak with the rest of the group and another “slot” on literacy doesn’t seem bad to me.

I was considering giving them an additional skill or two though. Living in the wild it wasn’t a long stretch to give them nature and survival for free. In the end I decided to go a more “cannon” like route for the background.

One of the things I dislike about 5th edition is when classes, races and backgrounds are stepping on each other’s toes. Like when the dwarf get combat training and proficiency with certain weapons, that you would normally get from the class or when criminals and rogues both get proficiency with thieves’ tools. To avoid this I made a list of proficiencies to choose from rather than selecting just two. We also have to remember that since most troll players will only have access to this background, it has to be wide enough to support a wide array of background stories.

In addition the proficiencies and starting equipment, you get a ribbon ability from background. I chose to lean heavily on the outlander background, and the revised ranger, in regards to getting lost. I decided to splitSample them according to sub race, because it felt natural. file