Trolls/Fire

[Quickleaf]

For those who use trolls in your campaigns, do you even bother with the "can only be killed with fire/acid" deal? It's a cool facet of trolls, but PC's are bound to say "oh, well, we have torches and flint, no problem". Thoughts?

I do something different with trolls. They are fey oathkeepers, seeking any slip up to justify wanton and excessive retribution against the oath-breaker. True to the myth of the Green Knight, they are feared by monarchs, and also by fey warlocks.

Trolls IMC are gluttons, consuming 10 times the amount of food that a man would each day; a clan of trolls can quickly wipe out a region's livestock (not to mention villagers). One nasty way to kill a troll is to throw it in a pit and let it starve.

Another method is "salting" a troll; owing to their bond with the natural world (in days of old oaths were sworn under trees, hence the word "treow" which "troll" may have in part evolved from), trolls respond to salt like most plants - it kills their ability to regenerate. My world has "alchemical salts" which can be added to a single attack (coating a blade or used as spell component) to add the "salt" damage type. Salt has other applications with zombies, giant slugs, treants/dryads, etc.

Fire works against most trolls, but there are a few kinds which fire damage enables them to spawn minions which erupt from the troll's body like in Aliens. Think of how a pine cone needs intense heat to release it's seeds - "coniferous" troll tribes work that way.

Acid doesn't bypass regeneration, but in some cases I let it slow the regeneration down to a crawl, buying the PCs time for a more permanent solution.

 

[WalterKovacs]

We did have one fun variant encounter during the troll 'section' of the campaign. We have a long term arc involving elemental forces at work, so we ended up in an encounter with flaming trolls, and some acid spitting trolls. The former had resist to fire, but could have their regen/resurrect stopped by acid or cold. The latter resisted acid, but we could use fire or cold against it. It worked out nicely, since our party had one flaming weapon and one mordant weapon, and some of us even had some cold attacks we could make use of in that fight. It was an interesting way to break up what could have been monotonous troll fighting.

 

[HolyMan]

Had a smart player knock a full HP hydra out with one spell.

Ray of Stupidity or something like that.

Rolled a 4 for INT drain taking the dumb hydra down to INT 0 first round. It's unconscious and coup de graced without breaking a sweat.

Haven't thought of trolls yet. The one time I had one in a game it came out of the river like a croc and killed one of the PCs horses with it's rend and dragged it back under the water with it. I needed to slow the group down a bit so threw it in. LOL

HM

 

[keterys]

Yeah, that ray was one of the more broken additions to 3e... have a huge class of monsters that never get more Int, and a near auto-hit spell that will always reduce them to 0?

There was one for Dex, too, that was great for taking out dragons.