I actually rather like the dragons. While I'll confess to a soft spot for dragons that might be clouding my judgement, I found your take on them somewhat interesting.
My Games & Writing
The changelings seem a bit...eurocentric. Yes, these are the three ethnic groups most famous for having faerie-type beings in their mythology (and most people do seem to overlook the slavic traditions), but they're by far the only ones. Several native american groups have stories of 'little people', as do cultures across africa, but perhaps the most direct parallels would be asian. Consider the japanese stories of yōsei (generally translated as 'fairies' these days) and yōkai, or indian myths involving yaksha.
What I'm saying is that you're limiting yourself to three 'human' cultures when there's a lot more material out there. You could have 'abductees' from dozens of other cultures forming their own societies in Faerie. And in this case (parallel Earth with travel between the worlds), nobody's going to blame you for throwing in the odd Fantasy Counterpart Culture.
Reality is for those who lack imagination.
Evolutionary Byproduct
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I might not have been clear, the only stuff I'm throwing out is the stuff I've written about the Rock Trolls. Outside of their culinary style, which I modeled on Southeast Asia, they're pretty much just Dwarves with cow tails, and a big goal here is to create a fantasy setting with as little in common with traditional fantasy as possible. No Dwarves, no Orcs, and no Elves.
Ah yes, the elephant in the room. The big, white, skinhead elephant with a swastika carved into it's forehead and an iPod full of some of the worst Heavy Metal ever made. I mentioned my dislike of traditional, cookie-cutter fantasy already, but another popular trend I'm sick of is the obsession with Japanese cartoons, both animated and not. I don't like the drawing style, I find it excessively minimalistic and lacking. I don't like the animation style, if I wanted to watch something composed entirely of stock footage and little to no frames of animation for movement I'd watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, because at least then I have funny writing to amuse me. I find many of the plots and characters common to Japanese cartoons boring or irritating. Moron heroes who happen to be the hero solely because they happen to be better at whatever skill the whole damn world revolves around than the bad guys don't interest me. A dozen women fighting each other for the right to be some loser's stay-at-home wife offends me. But wait, it gets worse! The damn style is so simplistic and easy that anyone can do it. There's no effort required. And now they've infested every part of the internet. There's no creative place left untouched by them, no franchise or intellectual property untainted by anime-style fanart. And the icing on the cake? The Kitsunes. Oh how I hate them. You wanna know why? They are to the cultural and mythological history of the Fox what Twilight was to vampires. They ruin it simply by existing. The Fox has had a long and proud history across the world as a symbol of cunning and trickery. No matter where you went, if Foxes existed there they'd have stories about them. The French word for fox, Reynard, originated from stories about a fox. The French thought that saying the true word for 'fox' in their language would draw the attention of foxes to them, so they started to use 'reynard' as a euphemism to avoid attention, and they did it for so long that they've long forgotten that they're even doing it. Does anyone even remember Zorro? The masked hero of the oppressed Mexicans? 'Zorro' is Spanish for 'fox'. Do I need to go on? And now, whenever anyone thinks of foxes in a fantastical light, all they think of is Some bug-eyed girl with a pair of ears stuck to her head like a playboy bunny's and a bunch of bottle-brush tails sticking out of her backside. So no. No, I'm not putting anything Japanese in my setting. No Youkai. No Tengu, no Oni, no Nekomata, no hundred-year-old man-made objects brought to life, and NO KITSUNE.
There, I said it, I feel better.
Where were we? Oh yeah, the unintended consequences of basing a fantasy setting entirely off of European Mythologies. There's a lot of material to be found there, all of it quite interesting. For example, the Leprechaun is only a Leprechaun during work hours. You see, Leprechauns are the shoemakers of the Faerie world. When work is over, they stop being Leprechauns and become Clurichauns, who wear red instead of green, are always drunk, and prone to causing mischief. Then there's the Nuckelavee, a Faerie from the Orkney Islands. Resembling either a centaur or a man on a horse, the Nuckelavee has no skin, and black blood pumps through it's highly visible yellow veins. It has only a single, burning red eye, and it's breath infects you with a horrible disease. It lives in the ocean, and the scent of drying kelp enrages it, driving it to leave the water and pursue you. The only thing that can stop it is running water. It can't even go over a bridge, such is the power water has over it. Have you ever seen traditional Scandinavian Troll art? It's very different from what most people expect. There's so much here, in these stories, that's been forgotten, passed over in favor of the Monster Manual.
Also, I'm thinking that by the time of the story, contact between Faerie and Earth has long since been lost for some reason.
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Evolutionary Byproduct
Here's some additional tropes for the setting:
- Functional Magic: Rules Magic Alchemy Device Magic, with the innate Glamour abilities of the Sprights as an exception.
- Spell Construction: Eye of Newt Magic Prerequisite Magic Wand.
- Eye of Newt: Thanks to Sufficently Analyzed Magic,it's progressed to the point that ingredients are magically broken down into their component essences and attributes. You store these until you need them for magical stuff. Lots of these are Insubstantial Ingredients.
- Magical Prerequisite: There's a Background Magic Field, but it's strength varies from location to location. There are some areas where it's weak, Ley Lines where it flows more strongly, and Places of Power where there's lots of magical energy. Since you can't always rely on the ambient magical energy to provide enough juice for what you're doing, smart people carry around a magical capacitor that sucks up magic when it's plentiful and stores it for when you need it. People who manage to set up shop on a Ley Line or a Place of Power can leave a large capacitor behind and tap into it remotely. On the other hand, a sufficiently strong enough Background Magic Field can overcharge magical efforts and cause the effects to rage out of control, so using magic in certain places can be incredibly dangerous.
- Magic Wand: There are a large number of special devices needed to do all this stuff. Apart from a magic capacitor, a storage device, and a special control item holding a piece of your soul, allowing you to mentally manipulate incorporeal elements of magic, I have no idea what these things would be.
- Spell Construction: Eye of Newt Magic Prerequisite Magic Wand.
- Magic Enhancement: This is the single biggest part of magic in this setting.
- Summon Magic: This does and doesn't apply here, as instead of summoning things out of nothing, you attach a magical tag to someone or something, and then can trigger it and have whatever it is the tag is attached to teleported directly to your location, so Summon to Hand is most likely the more appropriate trope.
- No Self Buff: Haha, no. This is a big part of combative magical practices.
- Squishy Wizard: Nope.
- Magitek: Big time.
- Magic Carpet Magic Compass Magic Map Magic Ring: Very common.
- Magic Mushroom: The cellular structure of Fungi makes them extremely absorbent to magical energy and essences.
edited 2nd Oct '13 5:28:39 PM by Gralien
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Just dropping by to say two things:
1) Your premise sounds pretty damn awesome. I'm more of a midway point between low-fantasy and heroic fantasy myself, but I do appreciate subtle magic systems as well. The fungi are a particularly good point, but what aspect makes them so absorbent with magic? Since your setting is Euro-centric, I would have expected trees to feature at least somewhat.
Is it because shrooms feature so heavily as ritual drugs in folk/shamanistic traditions?
2) I am also upset at how nobody remembers that mythological foxes run straight into "crazy-ass fucker" territory as well. They're not tricksters because they're cute and like pulling pranks, they're tricksters because nobody knows what they will or won't do. (Although a lot of them have soft spots for children.)
edited 5th Oct '13 9:46:54 PM by Sharysa
Evolutionary Byproduct
In regards to your first point, the readiness of fungi to absorb magical energy and display it's effects is drawn from the fact that "giant, brightly colored mushrooms" are frequently found in magical settings. I probably should have mentioned another fact along with it in my previous post: After Fungi, Plants are the most magically absorbent of lifeforms. The idea is that the old fantasy staple, The Enchanted Forest, forms naturally without outside intervention. You keep finding dark forests of massive and twisted trees redolent with ambient magic and a large variety of fantastic plants, mushrooms, and eerie behaviors because the whole thing is such a magical SPONGE that even without outside intervention the forest becomes enchanted. It's like how Chernobyl made all the local earthworms grow to the size of garden hoses, but with magic instead of nuclear radiation.
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Oh, that makes a LOT of sense.
Evolutionary Byproduct
Another issue I think I'm having with my world building is that I don't feel my efforts are working the way I want them to. I want to do things in a way that either avoids or minimizes most of the standardized crap that's built up around the genre, and I don't feel like the way I'm World Building is doing that. One of the issues with Fantasy I want to do away with is the whole "Species = Personality" thing that's so prevalent in Fantasy (and for that matter, Star Trek). Biggest example? Dwarves. You don't have to put any effort into writing a Dwarf character. You just say "he's a Dwarf" and that's that. Everyone already knows what that means. A Dwarf is a Dwarf is a Dwarf. "I like beer, I like gold, I hate Elves but I hate Orcs more, my name is Scandinavian but my accent's Scottish, I don't like magic spells but I love magic weapons..." It's actually quite racist if you think about it. It's like if a work of fiction that takes place in the real world simply said "He's Black" or "She's Mexican", and that was all the characterization they got. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like the way I'm writing things up now, I'm perpetuating the idea that, outside of humans, every member of a species is exactly the same. I want there to be distinct kinds of Faeries, but at the same time I want a character's species or race to just be one part of their characterization, rather than the whole damn thing. Maybe it's because it still feels like a Traditional Medieval Europe Fantasy setting. It's not supposed to be. Mundane Fantastic might be a better description. It's another world. With magic, and monsters, and people that aren't human. But it's not a "Fantasy" as we think of it. There's no Quest, no Mentor, no Dark Lord that needs a killin'. Hell, Fantasy Gun Control is deliberately denied. There's plenty of magically created and operated technology comparable to ours there.
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If you want to avoid having a Race Of Hats, either don't describe the non-biological aspects of the race if you're not specifically describing an individual, or make sure that you describe several to many different culture groups of that race.
Peephole of the Ninth
Hey, it's nice to see that someone else agrees with my general stance on... well, surprisingly enough, nearly damn everything you've just mentioned up there now. You see, I'm trying to work on something very similiar to what you've got here... except that I'm gonna do it with Urban Fantasy. In Korea.
((And naturally written in Korean, but I'm good enough at English to translate it myself and have done enough research to have the translations actually make sense.))
I've done away with some of the 'entire race being defined by few, simple cultural traits' stuff by saying that some of those different 'races' are actually in fact the same race that humans mistakenly classified as different races. So yes, the Alfar and the Svartalfar (Elves and Black elves) belong to the same race. So are the dozen different types of trolls rampant all over Europe. After all, humans have historically mis-identified other people of different ethnicity as completely different beings, no? It wouldn't be awkward to say that we've misclassified other beings. Trouble is, since the various faerie creatures live in the Ethereal Plane, their bodily form tends to be quite strongly affected by the mind... So a race that culturally emphasizes physical might, battle, and honor will look like well-built warriors.
About your rage about Japanese Anime styles, I also agree - it is damn near impossible to find good Fantasy, SF, Wuxia, or just about any good fiction in the vast internet forums and portals sites of Korea... because of what we call 'Mass-Produced Fantasy Novel Phenomenon'. I'm starting to get allergic reactions from all the lack of originality (aka plagiarism) and over-the-top Mary Sues here. Doing some actual research about the juicy stuff of myths and legends, or just simply getting over the need to conform to 'Moe' will probably bring lots of interesting results.
Oh, and mushrooms. My explanation for them was that the hallucinations they induce trigger a specific state of mind, which links a practitioner of thaumaturgy to the non-Material Planes where the spirits or the impersonal arcane forces lie. It's treated as an old and dangerous method by modern and contemporary thaumaturges, who've researched how to enter trances more effectively and safely.
Lastly, I don't think you're too much trapped in conventionalities and cliches like you think you are - all the factors of your setting that you've shared are so far, doing a good job at reimagining the traditional cliches you're trying to grow out of. And remember, Tropes Are Not Bad - just relax a lil bit.
edited 13th Oct '13 8:42:12 AM by Ninth
Evolutionary Byproduct
I just had a breakthrough! Hopefully this'll lead to me posting more stuff for feedback, but there's only one way to find out!
Regardless of species, all Faeries fall somewhere on the same set of axis:
- Trooping vs Solitary
- Seelie vs Unseelie
- Trooping vs Solitary:
- Essentially the Faerie equivalent to Extroverted vs Introverted. Trooping Faeries like to be around and interact with other people, while Solitary Faeries prefer to be by themselves and will at most only have a few friends or associates. Sufficiently large enough groups of Trooping Faeries will transform into Courts, organizations somewhere between "group of friends", "social club", and "secret society". Exactly which definition best reflects a given Court generally depends on where on the other axis it's members fall.
- Seelie vs Unseelie:
- The closest equivalent to "Good vs Evil" Faeries have. A Seelie Faerie might cause you problems for his own amusement, but once he's made aware of just how damaging to you his actions have been he'll stop. Likewise, a Seelie Faerie can behave in a perfectly normal manner until he's offended, at which point he'll have no problem turning his efforts towards getting revenge in some manner. Conversely, an Unseelie Faerie will do something horrible to you because he knows how damaging it'll be.
- Trooping vs Solitary:
A Solitary Seelie Faerie might be perfectly polite to someone intruding on their privacy, at least up until the point they turn into The Thing That Would Not Leave, while a Solitary Unseelie Faerie would spend the whole time trying to either drive away or kill the intruder.
While a Court of Trooping Seelie Faeries might be united in friendship, a Court comprised of Trooping Unseelie would probably be held together by their mutual need to use each other for their own benefit.
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Break the stereotype. Imagine a gay dwarf. What if Dwarven society was more like the romans and greeks, with an emphasis on gay lovers? Dragon age did a great job of breaking up the Dwarven stereotype by playing up individual goals.
In my story, "Dwarves" are pale, blind, spidery creatures with large ears who navigate by eco-location and who shape rock with their bare hands. They don't hammer steel. They shape it like a sculptor would clay. They treasure gemstones not for their rarity, but for the sounds they make when struck. They eat fungus, cave fish and crustaceans, and cave birds. They sing melodies that build and resonate and echo in caves for months or even years.
Evolutionary Byproduct
Remember how I mentioned Ogres in the first post? Forget them. They've been replaced with Giants as of now.
Giants are normally around 10' to 12' tall, and are proportionately wider, so the overall effect is basically a person scaled up to twice their original size, rather than looking stretched out or something. Traditional Giant environs are fields, mountains, and oddly enough, clouds. Giants can also be found in more cosmopolitan locations, but are limited by what buildings they can go into. On Faerie, 'Universal Access' basically means designing Giant-sized buildings, then adding in extra features for the smaller people. A Giant-sized door, for example, might have a series of increasingly smaller doors built into it if it's intended location has lots of non-Giant traffic. Giants tend to not be found in forested areas, something I derived from an old Slavic myth. Before making Humans, the gods made a race of Giants to inhabit the world, but they died out because they kept falling over from getting their feet caught in blackberry bushes. It got so bad that they tried offering the bushes sacrifices in hopes of not tripping anymore. The funny thing is, this actually makes sense, thanks to The Square Cube Law and the physics of gravity and acceleration. Basically, the more mass something has, the faster it accelerates when falling. Some things are so light that they never accelerate to "Terminal Velocity," which is the speed at which you can't survive crashing into something. Drop an ant off the tallest building in the world, it'll land and walk away, completely unhurt, because it's so small and light it never accelerated to the point that impacting the ground would hurt it. When you get to objects with much greater mass than that, like humans, it becomes much easier to accelerate to a speed you couldn't survive stopping at. With Giants, science says that the act of falling over, something which humans can survive (usually) would invariably be fatal, since their so massive and are, even though it might not look it, falling from a great height.
Anyway, back to the Giants. Giants are not, as a species, stupid. Any stupid Giant you encounter is stupid because he just is, not because he's a giant. The myth that Giants are stupid comes from the fact that Giants aren't very sneaky, or complicated. They're at least twice the size of everyone else, they just don't see the point in subterfuge. Giants tend towards being direct, blunt, and honest. They're almost universally bad liars, if it even occurs to them to lie at all, and they generally take you at your word, at least the first time. They're also all gourmets. The Giant sense of taste is incredibly well-developed, and they even gain strength from good food. Conversely, fast food is like a drug to them, as the artificially-enhanced flavor gives them a false food high, while it's crappy nutritional value causes their bodies to fall apart.
Giants, at least some of them, have a very structured and regimented society. This was based on the fact that Giants are usually found living in castles in Fairy Tales. Also, a group of Giants living in mountains is responsible for inventing the Faerie equivalent of Martial Arts.
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Evolutionary Byproduct
Oh, and I've found myself conceptualizing a video game based on this setting.
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Raven Wilder
But what species you are does have a huge effect on your personality. Cats behave differently from dogs, who behave differently from horses, who behave differently from humans, who behave differently from monkeys, who behave differently from dolphins, and so on. If dwarves and fairies and whatnot are actually supposed to be different species, not just very exotic breeds of homo-sapien, it makes sense that their general behavior and way of thinking would be distinct from humanity's.
Of course, a lot of fantasy stories have humans interbreeding with the other humanoid races, implying they actually are members of the same species. So I guess my advice would be to decide if you want the fantasy races in your setting to just be races (in which case you should probably avoid having each race follow a stereotype) or if you want them to be genuinely seperate species (in which case you should take care to figure out in what ways their thought processes are alien to human beings).
"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko
Evolutionary Byproduct
OK, so I've got Trolls, and I've got Giants. I think I'll do Goblins next.
Smaller then humans but not as small as Sprites, Goblin physique is proportioned like human physique, lacking the elongated limbs of the Trolls. Goblins can be summerized as "sharp". Sharp eyes, sharp ears, sharp noses, sharp fingers, sharp chins, sharp teeth... And sharp wits. Even the most placid and genial Goblin has a penchant for sarcasm, and that's pretty far out on the bell curve. Many Goblins, especially adolescent males, are surly, irritable, and argumentative in the extreme. Often enough a Goblin is only happy if he has something to be angry about, or at the very least something to loudly complain and be a general nuisance about. It's generally considered a good idea to never take a Goblin being curt with you personally, as it is very likely his default state and reacting to it could very well provoke him into actually being rude with you as opposed to just seeming to be when he was actually, by goblin standards, being polite. Part of Goblin courtships is finding someone you can happily spend the day at eachother's throats with. While most Goblins are perfectly happy verbally sparring with others, a good number prefer their confrontations to be of the more physical sort.
They also have a near universal love of hats. You can often identify a Goblin's chosen profession by his hat, and it is a rare Goblin indeed who would harm another's hat, even for the sake of a fight.
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Yeah, that's a goblin. So, besides the inclusion of literally being a Planet of Hats, what's your take on it?
Evolutionary Byproduct
Could you, perhaps, be a bit more specific in your reply? Namely, providing some examples of how my Goblins are like other settings' Goblins? I genuinely can't think of any work involving Goblins that matches my post, so I'm a bit confused by your feedback.
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Sure.
You've taken a common fantasy race and given them some vague details that are already common to them in various game settings...
Here, how about this. Your description of Goblins could be grafted onto their Dungeons And Dragons depiction without cancelling anything out. Size, proportions, blanket physical description, racial personality, literal Planet of Hats (Gang of Hats?).
The problem here isn't that they are like other goblins, but that there's too little to make them different because you're using the same source material(s) as everyone else. (This is probably why your Rock Trolls came out so similar to "Dwarves".) You are attempting to come to a different conclusion from Tolkien and D&D by doing what they did, and the result is probably going to have some commonality with them.
Besides that, I also don't see the point of this experiment (that doesn't mean I think you should stop, just that I don't understand it). To me it seems like you're not inventing anything new so much as refining older tropes - not world building so much as world assembling, from an unnecessarily limited set of attributes at that.
As someone who writes, I'd recommend researching in a wider variety of cultures.
I am attempting to world-build a fantasy setting that is derived from traditional European mythologies and Fairy Tales, rather than rip off Tolkien and/or Dungeons & Dragons. Progress is slow. Painfully slow. I have some stuff to share, but a good chunk of it I'm planning to throw out anyway. To start with: —-
- Utility Magic: Unlike traditional fantasy settings, magic is both commonplace and on the whole rather unremarkable. Every profession utilizes magic in some manner, no matter how mundane.
- "Wizard" is simply this world's version of "Doctor'"". As in, you go to College and earn your "Wizardry" in a particular field. Those who possess a Wizardry get to preface their name with the abbreviation "Wz." "Wizard" and "Wizardry''" are gender-neutral.
- "Magician" is a separate term. The difference between a Wizard and a Magician is like the difference between the guy who designed your car and the guy who charges you hundreds of dollars to swap out a spark plug.
- Land of Faerie: The story takes place in it's entirety (so far) in the world known as Faerie, which exists parallel to our world known as Earth. Millennia ago the people of Faerie managed to bridge the gap between our two worlds. They then proceeded to mess with the primitive natives for their own amusement. They also took vast numbers of stone-age Europeans back to Faerie, primarily as research subjects and slave labor. These events would form the basis of European mythologies in the centuries to come.
- However, something unexpected happened to the humans brought over. While the humans actually from Earth were primitive, short-lived, and unable to function in a world fundamentally different from their own, the human children conceived and born after were as long-lived as the native peoples, and perfectly capable of living in their world. This new breed of Human was referred to as "Changelings"(Nobody bring up The World of Darkness to me, White Wolf didn't invent that term.)
- There are three races of Humankind on Faerie (technically, three races of Changelings that descended from those races), The Proto-Celtics, the Proto-Germanics, and the Proto-Balto-Slavics. (Yes, I fully intend to come with actual names for them at some point, I'm just not very good with inventing proper nouns.) I'm currently entertaining the idea of representing the three with three color-coded dragons, Red, White and Black respectively, but I probably won't since:
- Our Dragons Are Different: Derived more from actual mythologies than from popular culture, the first big difference is that these dragons can't fly. At all. Those two finny things going down their side? The only muscles attached to them fold them back when they have to crawl through a tight spot. Oh yeah, these dragons crawl. They don't stand up tall with a feline's posture, they scurry across the ground on stumpy legs that stick out of their body like the fat lizards they are. They have a pair of horns sticking out of the backs of their heads, but they also have very prominent pairs of ears, eyes that bulge out of their sockets, and horns on the ends of their noses to help them poke about in rocks. Dragons mostly live underground, but they occasionally wander onto the surface and cause trouble. They can't breath fire, but can expel a toxic gas that can be lethal underground where there's no air flow, but up topside where it dissipates rapidly it's merely incapacitating. Add to that razor sharp teeth the size of knives and a muscular tail, and you've got something that would be incredibly dangerous even if it wasn't covered from head to toe with impenetrable natural armor. The only two weak points on a dragon are a small spot where the jawbone meets the throat, and a small spot between the front legs on it's underside directly over the heart. Good luck with that. It's bad enough they're voracious and will eat anything, but they're also possessed of a maniacal fondness for anything that happens to be shiny, and while they aren't on the same level of sapience as the people of Faerie, they're smart enough to figure out that "People+Buildings=Shiny Things", so if one makes it to the surface it'll usually make for the nearest inhabited area. If you're wondering how they transport stuff they find back to their lair, they swallow it and then puke it back up once they're home. For a while, "Acid Washed Armor" was all the rage.
—-- The Fair Folk: For starters, the world is called "Faerie", not it's peoples. Calling them Faeries is like an alien who won't stop calling you "Earthling", and eventually they're going to get really annoyed by it, and while both good and bad members of every kind of Faerie, they all think and behave in ways that we'd find nonsensical.
- Currently, I've put the most thought into the Trolls, Ogres, and Sprights, but I'm only getting into two of them tonight because it's late.
- Sprights are the little Winged Humanoid type of Faerie that everyone thinks of. Currently never getting more than two feet tall, and I'm thinking very strongly of lowering that, Sprights are nevertheless the most dangerous kind of Faerie. You see, out of all the kinds of Faerie, only Sprights have The Glamour. They can create and control illusions with their minds, and can even mess with your mind. They can make you feel emotions for no reason. They can make you think you're on fire. They can rob you of your fondest memories. They can make you forget everything. Everything but them. Their wings aren't wings at all, but extensions of the organ that allows them to do magic naturally. They also can't fly with them, but thanks to their magic they can float, so it doesn't matter. They're also all crazy. They're so small, they can only feel one emotion at a time. You can be mad at someone you care about, but the positive feelings you have tempers the anger you're feeling. For a Spright, all that caring is shoved aside by HATE. That single emotion consumes them entirely, driving them do things they would normally never do. One of the two main characters for the story I want to write with this setting is a Spright. She's also a child. If that doesn't scare you, I'm not doing a good enough job.
—-- All Trolls Are Different: The most I've written up is about these guys. My initial approach to this project was to write up an encyclopedia-like book about the setting and it's contents, but I barely got started before I burned out. I'm actually getting MORE down here than I did with these documents, so maybe I should try a different tactic, one less structured and formal. Anyway, I decided to split the Troll species into three very different races based on the original myths and stories about them.
—- Here's what I've got so far:Unique to the Troll species is it’s high level of genetic divergence. While there is little physical difference amongst the races of the other sentient species of Faerie, one can generally tell the race of Troll by physical appearance alone. There are, however, more similarities than differences. All three races exhibit the same body structure, but each exhibiting certain features more pronouncedly. The basic Troll form consists of a wide head attached to a compact body by a short neck. Both the arms and legs are long and gangly, producing an appearance often referred to as ‘spider-like’. Exhibited by every race of Troll is a vestigial tail like that of a cow. The Troll head contains a thin, wide mouth, large bat-like ears, a large protruding nose, and a pair of eyes often described as ‘beady’.
A common topic in wizardly circles is the incredible lack of information surrounding the origins of the Troll races. Currently, the most prevalent theory posits that Rock Trolls are the oldest type of Troll, with Wood and River Trolls developing from groups of Rock Trolls emigrating to the surface. This theory is derived from the fact that Rock Troll recorded history is more extensive than the others. The two problems with this theory frequently brought up are: 1) Being subterranean, Rock Trolls time measurements are completely different from surface units, thus making it difficult to match events with concurrent surface ones, and 2) The more diffuse nature of Wood Troll and River Troll societies makes prolonged record keeping rather difficult, so they could have been around longer and just didn’t write anything down.
Another theory states that Wood Trolls came first, with Rock and River Trolls developing from those who left the forests. That one fell apart pretty quickly when it was realized that, while the Rock Trolls would have shrunk to better live underground, there was no such clear explanation for River Trolls having shrunk as well.
A third theory hypothesizes that all Troll races are descended from the same source, with the differences arising from where they fled to escape some terrible cataclysm that befell the original Troll race.
Rock Trolls are the smallest of the Troll races. This can be attributed to their environment: tunnels and caverns miles underground. The bulbous nose and bat-like ears are the most pronounced in this variety, while the eyes are small and beady. Born with pale skin and thick, black hair, as they age a Rock Troll’s skin [FINISH SENTENCE]. Rock Trolls are also the most hunched over of the Troll races, the increased muscle mass in their backs increasing their upper body strength. Thus, a large back-hump is considered sexually desirable. Because of their truncated bodies and long limbs, Rock Trolls can move comfortably both standing up and on all fours, allowing them to move quickly in cramped conditions.
Rock Trolls are the most communal of the Troll races, to the point where there are fewer things a Rock Troll hates more than being alone. Rock Trolls live in densely packed city-states, made up of networks of tunnels and caverns, laid out for ease of defense. Some of the greatest Rock Troll cities are actually built inside massive caverns, held off the cavern floor with huge, fortified stone columns. Extending out from the cities are branching networks of tunnels miles long. Some connect to other cities, but most are mining shafts. Because of the depth at which they live, Rock Trolls usually have more than adequate stockpiles of building stone, metals and precious gems. Conversely, material for growing food is always in high demand. Rock Troll agriculture is based on growing several varieties of edible and non-edible fungi, supplemented with several species of subterranean arthropods and a handful of subterranean vertebrates. Rock Troll diets are high in vitamins, minerals, and proteins, but are deficient in starches and fats. Thus, many Rock Trolls suffer from a low caloric intake. Due to a lack of any grain-like plants, the closest Rock Trolls come to ‘baking’ is a gooey, fungus-based dough used in the making of dumplings. Animal-derived foodstuffs include worms, arthropod eggs, arthropod secretions, arthropods, reptile eggs, reptiles, amphibian eggs, amphibians, and several mammals of the rodent, insectivore, or bat variety. These foodstuffs are generally boiled, steamed, or pan-fried, then served together in a bowl. Interesting to note is the fact that because of deficiencies in their diet, Rock Trolls have a strong reaction to surface foods high in fat and/or sugar. Not only do they find high-calorie food extremely addictive, they can easily overindulge to the point of entering diabetic shock.
Non-edible fungi are grown for a variety of reasons. There’s the inedible-but-glowing fungus, which is a necessary waste of compost if you want to grow the inedible-but-produces-air-thanks-to-symbiotic-algae fungus, which is a must deep underground. Another non-edible fungus in large amounts is used to produce fibers for weaving into cloth. Another source of clothing material comes from a domesticated species of proto-arachnid. While some fungi are grown for use in construction, most buildings are made from stone and stone based concrete. Mineshafts are supported either through magic or specially treated fungus stalks produced by seeping them in a special solution that hardens them. Because of the depth at which they live, Rock Trolls must frequently make do with few-to-no sources of water. What water they have access to is usually used for drinking, watering crops and livestock, and metalworking. The Rock Troll method of bathing is a three-step process. First, the troll applies liberal amounts of a special fungus-derived oil to the body. The oil attracts things like dirt and dead skin flakes. Once the troll is sufficiently oiled, a special kind of stone-based dust is rubbed over the body. This dust absorbs the oil, producing clumpy, mud-like masses in the hair. The dust also absorbs excess body oil. Finally, a brush made from stiff bristles is used to remove the clumps, which separate cleanly from the hair. The oily dirt clumps are then disposed of.
Because of the constant specter of death by tunnel collapse, cave collapse, poisonous gas inhalation, poisonous gas detonation, starvation, dehydration and wild animal attack, Rock Trolls are usually extremely practical in their daily lives, to the point that most others find them blunt, humorless, and dull. This is a severe misconception, as Rock Trolls are, in fact, extremely passionate about their work, to the point where Rock Troll philosophy could be best described as “Anything worth doing is worth doing well”. Rock Trolls produce some of the finest metalworkers, stonecutters, and jewelers in the world. Because of cultural differences, many Rock Trolls develop a rather dim view of surface dwellers, believing them to be arrogant and incapable of truly appreciating the Rock Troll-made goods they attempt to trade for. They also don’t think much of surface dweller’s spelunking skills, to the point that the most common Rock Troll word for “surface dweller” can also, idiomatically speaking, translate into “city slicker”.
Rock Troll history also contains a great many artists. Because of their rather dark habitat, the great examples of Rock Troll art are in the fields of music and story telling, which come together in the most revered part of Rock Troll cultural history, the Rock Troll Opera. No performer of Rock Troll Opera would willingly perform in any theatre not constructed in the form of the natural cave that Rock Troll Opera got its start in centuries ago. While Rock Troll Opera has become very popular on the surface, cultural differences mean certain plays never achieve the same popularity above the ground that they had beneath. The most popular operas on the surface are usually similar to “Rise of the [SOMETHING] Tower”, a historical drama about the construction of [BLANK], [ROCK TROLL NAME]’s magnum opus, or “The War of the Vein”, a tale about two brothers’ hatred of each other culminating in three kingdoms destroying each other over a large deposit of [RARE METAL]. Conversely, the greatest tragic opera in history has failed to find a large surface audience (The Saga of the Sinking of Shaft Seventy-Seven, chronicling an expedition to find [OTHER RARE METAL] that failed to find anything of value, and ends with the entire team being eaten by a Polypus Horror), and the inspiring “Ballad of [ROCK TROLL NAME], about one farmer’s struggle to create a new cultivar of fungus, has only been performed on the surface ONCE.
Rock Trolls practice Ancestor Worship, with rituals that honor those who came before and the wisdom they bestow upon the living. Rock Trolls have no gods or spirits to honor, instead each community has several nebulous evil entities lurking in the caverns and tunnels that make up the wilderness underground, all of whom are given horrific names and held accountable for the various misfortunes that befall a Rock Troll on any given day. These evils must be warded against through magical charms and talismans, as well as a large amount of whatever the metaphysical equivalent of “trying to be unnoticeable” is. These entities range from “a strong negative emotion that somehow developed an independent existence” to “a mindless malevolent force driven to cause suffering to all that cross it’s path”, all the way up to “mind-hurtingly ancient beings from a point in history so long ago it might have well been an entirely different reality from this one, dreaming of past eternities as they slumber in darkness so ancient it predates the existence of light”.
No matter where you go, every Rock Troll historian will tell you the same origin story, about how originally all Rock Trolls lived “Outside” the world, which was apparently alive back then, in a single glorious kingdom. It’s at this point that accounts vary, but for some reason a bunch of BAD THINGS came and destroyed the kingdom. Some say the Troll King was betrayed by a close friend who summoned the BAD THINGS, others say they came as a punishment for hubris, and still others say “sometimes, shit just happens”. All accounts agree about the end of the story, which is that the kingdom was destroyed, and the survivors fled into the world’s corpse. The world sacrificed itself to save the Trolls.