dumuzid

Blindfolding them is one of the few ways to reliably transport undisciplined trollkin through daylight. Crueler trolls actually blind lower-value trollkin outright to facilitate moving them through sunlight, leaving them only their rather meager darksense, if it won't disrupt their intended duties. Comparable to real world human societies that deliberately maimed skilled slaves to prevent them from escaping their owners. The only other really reliable way is Argan Argar spearkin training, which takes time, effort, magic, and makes trollkin a lot more dangerous than many dark trolls and mistress trolls are comfortable with.

This is particularly important. Spirit allies, or discorporate shamans for that matter, aren't traveling through the same physical world in a different state, they're traversing a space that's parallel to ours but not exactly the same. My discorporate character was specifically looking for spiritual information about the area they traveled while discorporated, if they'd been trying to get exact information on the physical area they'd come back with woefully distorted perceptions

I've played a character that did just this and they weren't even a shaman, they happened eat magical food that discorporated them for a few hours. One of the big advantages of having a shaman's fetch or a rune-priest's allied spirit is the ability to send them around as immaterial scouts. Sending your spirit pals roaming like that potentially subjects them to your enemies' unseen defenses, of course, and unless you have one of those reliable rune-level relationships with the spirit you'll need Control (Entity) magic to reliably send it out and bring it back.

Flags would also be lost on mer people unless they breach for a look at the topside of the ship, and I'd figure signaling to the triolini would be at least as important for Gloranthan ships as the role signal flags play in real world navigation. How do you proclaim your allegiances to the merfolk? Painting or carving on the keel or the outer hull?

I would guess that in addition to hearing the thunder with their ears just like humans and seeing the lightning with their poor eyes, each peal of thunder would produce echoes to 'light up' the terrain to darksense, adding a layer to the display to trolls that humans can't even perceive.

My GM has the PDF, I look forward to trying it

To any cultured troll i'd expect the difference between herd-man and human to be as stark as between venison and beef

The following are all just my own takes and interpretations, based on reading the Trollpak and Unspoken Word #04: Uz and playing a dark troll, but here goes: On a purely physical level, dark troll eyes are more or less the same ocular organ humans and other sighted beings have. given irritants, i assume they'd water and redden the same as human eyes, that's how i've played it anyway. as others have noted they tend to express grief as pain, through wailing and probably tears Among their own kind trolls are very sensitive to sound. They keep spoken words and ambient noise in general to a bare minimum--their uncontrolled squealing and wailing is one of the ways trollkin are especially annoying to other trolls. Given troll society's emphasis on the primacy of strength, persistent emotional breakdowns, or inability to govern emotion in public could be seen as a psychological weakness worthy of exploitation by rival trolls. The acceptable troll expressions, wailing or hooting etc., are all pretty bombastic--but there's a time and place for everything, and not being able to keep that discipline could have social consequences. The mistress race is deeply unlike the dark trolls, psychologically--most mistress race trolls would be high-functioning sociopaths in human terms, able to shunt emotion aside completely when calculating need and expedience. Emotional breakdowns would be deeply unlike the behavior of mistress race trolls, and so would probably be looked down upon in society in proportion to the mistress race's influence. Very strong in Dagori Inkarth, less so in the Shadow Plateau or Guhan, for instance. The rules are different out on the surface. The mistress race almost never comes there, it's the place where troll life is most thoroughly dominated by the dark troll gods: Xiola Umbar, Zorak Zoran, Argan Argar. XU and AA both embody positive emotions the mistress race has in short supply: mercy, friendship, a willingness to try to understand and get along. Zorak Zoran is all negative emotion, but clearly and thoroughly expressed: bellowing rage, shrieking fear. Dark trolls out and about would be under much less social pressure to show no emotion--I'd expect dark troll bands out on the surface to be about as publicly emotional as a group of humans, allowing for cultural quirks and good or bad feeling between the trolls in question, as much from that lack of pressure as from the sorts of personalities who take to extended time beyond the caves in the first place. In public, when it'd be socially acceptable. There are supposed to be great festivals of mourning and celebration around the Tarpit up on the Shadow Plateau, where Belintar killed the Only Old One for good. I'd expect there's great parades of spectacular mourning as part of those rites, especially with Belintar gone now. Outside of publicly acceptable times I'd expect trolls to keep those outbursts as private as possible, as they try to keep most things. It might be acceptable to show that emotion in front of children or trusted mates, or before friendly companions out on the surface. Dark trolls have the same emotional range as humans as far as I know--they cry out of fear, joy, pain and the rest. Their method of expression will be trollish, but the emotions driving it will be largely the same. Emphatically yes. XU's compassionate and merciful qualities should always be contrasted with Kyger Litor's Hellmother approach. A XU initiate should strive to extend that compassion wherever her comfort is needed, particularly to those suffering emotional breakdowns. Since overpowering emotion could be seen as a taint or curse of the Sun, counseling trolls through those storms could be an important part of a XU initiate's work. Finally, At least one Gold Wheel Dancer had children with a human man in the early First Age, so their versions of love and sexuality can't be that far removed from those of humans, or dark trolls for that matter. Don't know that anybody ever married a dragonewt though, I'll grant you.

There's also the chaos god Thanatar, who gives their cultists magic to sever people's heads but preserve them 'alive' as sources of knowledge and magic

Lots of interesting stuff in this thread, I'm glad it was bumped. Because it seems like some here might find it interesting, I wrote up one potential resolution for the fates of Vamargic and the Smoking Ruin: the one reached by my own Runequest group. It's a substantial story, so rather than post a wall of text I've attached this PDF. I certainly hope @Joerg finds Vamargic's ending suitable. The Smoking Ruin Unity Battle.pdf

Why did Belintar establish the Holy Country?

In that case Argan Argar and Xiola Umbar will just have to remind Kyger Litor that we're already down to ~70% kin/30% uz. And maybe Ernalda can help show her that there's always another way.

Ah, thanks, I see that changed in the 600s. Well, like @Minion1stClass was saying, the mistress race is not infallible. And this shows that the definition can change with the circumstances. If suddenly every successful trollkin birth was a value, whole litters of values, it could change again.

Right up until your murderhobos become the ruling power somewhere, of course.

I'm particularly interested in what could happen if a troll mother pregnant with a trollkin litter didn't deliver prematurely, but carried the full litter to healthy term and birth. By definition, any 'trollkin' born past the traditional cut-off point is not an enlo by anyone's standard, but an uz. They'd probably be little uz, goblins, but presumably they'd lack the developmental issues trollkin face.

My Argan Argar dark troll has wound up as something like the chieftain of a community of dark trolls, trollkin, a couple different human cultures, even beastmen who visit for holidays. He's been involved in some pretty heavy Earth magic in the last year, and is starting to get all sorts of funny ideas about what might a genuine accord between Ernalda and Kyger Litor could mean for trolls. One of the results of this was that he got the community's KL/Korasting shamaness to consent to designating the community's trollkin as uz, not merely enlo.

Hmm. If the Unity Council's project had followed the original plan and brought Argan Argar into Time, instead of making the hard swerve towards Nysalor that broke the council, I wonder if that wouldn't have created a 'Solar destroyer,' a Pelorian or Pentan Arkat. I also wonder if Only Old One withdrew his support from the project when he realized that repercussion, prompting the Broken Council to turn to Dara Happa to fill the elemental breach, rather than the inclusion of the Dara Happans prompting Only Old One's withdrawal. He seems to have deliberately used this effect, of gods bringing their antithesis with them into Time, to wage the Machine War in the Second Age. He gave the Zistorites the broken shell of the Pseudocosmic Egg that birthed Nysalor in exchange for some examples of their machinery, just enough for them to get their own God Project off the ground, and just enough for him and his allies to start learning how the Zistorites' mass-produced magic functioned. The breach in the Compromise created by Zistor's accelerating construction allowed Only Old One to first bring his father back into the world to unite the Kethaelans against the Zistorites, even the perennially rebellious Gemborg dwarves and Arstolan elves, and later allowed the Unity Army to bring Orlanth to the field to smite the machine god directly.

Or Genert as a mediator, the way Pamalt seems to be in his part of the cosmos--or indeed both. In any case, it seems to be a form of elemental interplay that lost some of its necessary components in the Greater Darkness.

We all already know plenty about how Light and Dark have fought. What I am more interested in is when and how they've made peace.

My own research into Argan Argar and Darkness myth recently led me to looking into the star gods, which turned up these Yelorna details from her old cult write-up courtesy of jajagappa: I wasn't aware of Yelorna's Ernalda/Genert connection until today though. I'd been looking for myths dealing with the relationships between the stars and Xentha. What I've found ist mostly bits like Yelorna mustering the star captains into the Sky Dome to oppose Xentha's new reign there. Yet the stars hung in the night sky, without breaking the darkness and without being devoured by it, for an awful long time until they descended in the Great Darkness, where Argan Argar's son was also helping the last hold-out populations survive. I can't help but wonder if the story of Yelorna's epic struggle with Argan Argar had a rather different connotation and conclusion in the part of the Gods War where Genert's Garden still exists.

My group does a bit of a mix of those approaches. We mostly handwave spirit magic casting rolls outside of combat, since you can just re-attempt with no ill effect, but we always roll rune magic since a fumble can have such drastic effects

welcome to the dancing grounds

I hunted down the Tradetalks in question and they proved quite interesting. Another question: does anyone know of myths establishing the relationship between Xentha and the solar star gods? I've been enduringly curious about the relationship between trolls and the stars. The mistress race can't usually see the stars, but dark trolls with their better-developed eyes can. The stars hung in Xentha's night skies from the start of the Storm Age down through their descent to help the last scattered survivor groups of the Greater Darkness. There at the very nadir of existence just about the last cosmic forces reliably aiding the mortal struggle to survive on the surface were the powers of harmonious Darkness embodied by Ezkankekko and the last flickers of Sky power in the persons of the star captains/khans. Does anyone know of any myths that deal with the relationship between the stars and the night sky?

Great trolls are throwbacks. They have the size and strength of the mistress race, the darksense and digestive system of dark trolls, but they're male-only with stunted intelligence and fertility. They're an unsuccessful effort to restore the ability to birth dark trolls reliably and/or re-open the potential to birth mistress race trolls outside of limited magical circumstances. Even the most pro-Cragspider accounts of her efforts state pretty baldly that she was defeated in heroquest. To date, every single troll hero who's attempted the Battle of Day and Night quest has failed, though their failures have resulted in benefits anyway, not as intended and not without drawbacks, but improvements over how things were right after the curse struck. Before the curse dark troll mothers usually gave birth to single dark trolls, and sometimes had twins and triplets. What the curse did when it first struck was very specific. Mythically, the sunfire spear of Daysenerus/Nysalor maimed Kyger Litor's womb and permanently damaged her power of Fertility when they were incarnated by their worshipers to face each other within Time at the historical battle, during the Sunstop. The curse immediately rendered all dark trolls less fertile, resulting in twin births becoming almost unheard of, while half of all otherwise normal troll pregnancies terminated far too prematurely, resulting in single, often stillborn, trollkin. Mothers who delivered trollkin were initially cursed to never deliver healthy dark trolls again. The first success of the trolls against the curse was the Kyger Litor cult's development of year-long purification rituals that could restore a troll mother's capacity to conceive healthy children after delivering trollkin. These can't guarantee that the troll's next delivery will be healthy, but they restore the possibility for a healthy birth. The other great successes were Cragspider's: opening the possibility for great troll births and, crucially, altering the nature of trollkin births so that they arrived in litters rather than singly while re-opening the potential for dark troll mothers to bear healthy twins. About half of a trollkin litter will probably die before or not long after birth all the same. Despite this, they've slowly come to outnumber dark trolls in troll society in the centuries since the curse took hold. The definition of trollkin is actually pretty specific. A trollkin is anything that survives a troll birth that comes due before a certain, early point in the usual troll gestation cycle. Most of trollkins' physical issues stem from them development being brutally stunted from birth onward. There is no 'standard' trollkin appearance because they all go through random, uneven growth spurts likely to give them mismatched limbs and wrenched postures. Their eyes and darksense are both underdeveloped, the first too sensitive and the other not enough so. Their digestive systems aren't fully developed, and lack the full efficiency of a dark troll or mistress troll gullet. None of this is helped by the typically brutal lives most trollkin lead as slaves of their mother or clan. It's an open question what would happen if some new magic ensured a 'trollkin' pregnancy, a litter of small trolls, that actual came to natural term. Such creatures have never existed before. There's enough differences between trollkin and dark trolls (their digestive sysems, even incomplete more resemble the mistress race's than dark trolls', for instance) that a healthy 'trollkin' birth might not result in a litter of dark trolls, but a litter of some sort of 'healthy trollkin.' Of course, anything born to a troll pregnancy after the trollkin cut-off is not, by definition, a trollkin; if a troll litter were actually brought to term, the resulting children would be considered full trolls, potentially a whole new breed.

One of the greatest and most dangerous heroquests regularly attempted by the modern Kyger Litor cult is to quest back to the Battle of Night and Day and interpose yourself between Gbaji/Nysalor/D'wargon and Kyger Litor, to prevent or ameliorate the Trollkin Curse. Kyger Litor priestesses work for years to gather power and weapons to face the Enemy, and generations of them have done so over a thousand years. To date their greatest sucess is Cragspider's, in creating the great trolls. Anything that could break the curse on a community- or species-wide scale would be something all that labor and sacrifice failed to accomplish, which probably means one of two things: that it's a method of fighting the curse that wasn't available until now, or it's a method that's usually unavailable to Darkness. I've given a lot of thought to ways to negate or mitigate the trollkin curse, and I think one of the most potentially fruitful paths lies in getting forces normally neutral or inimical to Darkness to offer aid--midwife powers to help kyger litor's troubled pregnancies. The trouble there is that the greatest agents of Kyger Litor within Time, the mistress race immortals deep beneath the Castles of Lead, are cold, calculating and deeply inhuman figures who do not invite the friendship of outsiders. They are unlikely to make the alliances, mythic or mundane, necessary to get the sort of outside help that might work against the curse. Personally I think the most likely angle for breaking the curse is cooperation between Darkness and Earth, as once existed in Kethaela.