Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8295113" data-attributes="member: 6803643">Absolutely. And the Scandinavian Troll was really in a continuum with the Draugr (undead/zombie/vampire) and the Dwergr (dwarves, dark elves) and the Alfar (elves). Fairy creatures, undead, giant monsters, and goblins of the dark places of the world - forests, caves, cellars, etc - are to some extent interchangeable; their specific traits and names differ from story to story. There's a reason why the TV Tropes page says ALL TROLLS ARE DIFFERENT - what measure is a Troll is pretty much impossible to say because our understanding of the term Troll is still influenced by the multitude of fairy stories that have used the term in different ways. Meanwhile the TV Tropes page "All Dwarves Are All the SAME" is a reflection of the ubiquity of the Dwarf miner-warrior archetype that's been codified in modern fantasy by the simultaneous creative iterations of the concept from the minds of Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien. This isn't just a Norse myth thing either. The Welsh term "Ellyllon" could mean elf or fair folk in the terms of like Tolkien's elves or the archfey of D&D, it could mean ghost or spirit, it could mean devil with horns and pitch fork. The Indic term Yaksha could mean nature spirit or hungry ghost (and indeed, in Japan, Yashas are another term for vengeful ghosts of the natural world… sometimes). The lines of the beings from the Perilous Realm are vague and fuzzy at best, defined most prominently by their perilous nature to those from this side of the veil. It's in that sense that D&D's divisions of Feywild and Shadowfell, of Nine Hells and Abyss and Grey Wastes and Arborea and Celestia and Elysium, it actually feels a bit constrained and lacking truth in the old stories. It seems like a way to diminish their power by codifying and providing bounds to the tales. And of course it is - DMs need bounds of genre to lean into specific tropes and not get lost in tropes that would veer their campaign in a different direction and storymind (especially given the sheer ability of players to go right when the DM has designed stories for straight, left, up, down, and backwards).</blockquote>

Verification