Could a Stolen Relic Break the Trollkin Curse?

[EricW]

I was thinking of a charming story (no idea if it is canon) Orlanth makes a ring, in which one of the gifts is the baby cauldron which "which produced a healthy young child for whomever came to it and properly devoted herself to it". 

Could trolls heroquest to steal such an artefact and use it to break the curse? 

Edited April 25, 2020 by EricW

[metcalph]

Depends on whether you think reliably producing Superior Trollkin counts as breaking the curse. 

[soltakss]

14 hours ago, EricW said:

Could trolls heroquest to steal such an artefact and use it to break the curse? 

Individually, yes.

I am sure that some Trolls have some kind of magic item that helps them with the Curse of Kin.

However, most trolls don't want that, they want to break the Curse for everyone, so look at ways to give the powers to all trolls.

Edited April 25, 2020 by soltakss

[Dissolv]

My thought would be no, it can't be that simple.  My yardstick is Cragspider couldn't do it, so it has to be hella hard.

[dumuzid]

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.

[Lordabdul]

27 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

To date their greatest sucess is Cragspider's, in creating the great trolls.

Is there any theory as to why this resulted in an additional sub-race, as opposed to, say, replace Trollkin births by Great Troll births?

[soltakss]

58 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

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. 

On of our RQ2 PCs, Derak the Dark Troll, came to the conclusion that this method did not work because it was the wrong thing to do. He also thought that troll Mothers who put themselves in the way of Gbaji's Claws only succeed in Reinforcing the Curse, not defeating it,l as they themselves are Cursed.

1 hour ago, dumuzid said:

To date their greatest sucess is Cragspider's, in creating the great trolls.

Derak thought that Cragspider had a good idea about strengthening the mother rather than trying to block the curse.

1 hour ago, dumuzid said:

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.

Which is exactly the conclusion that Derak came to. He had to search for something that was not of darkness, as darkness always fails. He had to do it as a man, as attempts by Mothers always failed.

1 hour ago, dumuzid said:

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.

Derak thought about that and concluded that trolls use Xiola Umbar as Midwife and she failed abysmally. The other Darkness Midwife we know about is Mallia, but that might cause problems of its own.

Derak's conclusion was to become as Gbaji, take his Adamantine claws, HeroQuest as Gbaji in the God Time at the Cursing of the Kin and, at the crucial point, deliberately fail to wound Korasting with the Claws, possibly wounding himself (Gbaji) in the process. Unfortunately the campaign ended just after he gained the Adamantine Claws but before he could test his theory.

[dumuzid]

37 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Is there any theory as to why this resulted in an additional sub-race, as opposed to, say, replace Trollkin births by Great Troll births?

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.

[soltakss]

37 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Is there any theory as to why this resulted in an additional sub-race, as opposed to, say, replace Trollkin births by Great Troll births?

For me, because it was a personal victory by individual mothers, rather than a victory for All Mothers.

To get it to work with all Trolls, Cragspider would have had to strengthen Korasting with a Darkness Being with more power than Korasting. Kyger Litor wouldn't work, as she is heavily identified with Korasting. Maybe someone like Subere might work, but she might be as much intertwined with Korasting as Kyger Litor is. Zorak Zoran or Argan Argar might work, as might Dehor himself, but they are not really more powerful than Korasting.

My thought is that the Young Elemental of Darkness might be enough, as it is a new form and new power of Darkness. It is also something normally unavailable to Trolls, except through the Jalakeel cult. So, all you need to do is to infuse Korasting with the Young Elemental of Darkness and perhaps with other Darkness Deities and hope that it strengthens her enough to withstand the blows. If it doesn't, it probably weakens all those deities.

Another way that might work is to give Korasting something like the Shield of Arran, or stand between Gbaji and Korasting, taking the blow on the Shield of Arran. That might deflect the blow enough to save her from harm.

[Joerg]

The Dark Troll race has no healed future. A new race, born to mistress race questers, may be able to escape the Curse of Kin and mitigate the burning of the Womb caused by the Evil Emperor.

Intervening with Gbaji a the Battle of Night and Day is defeatist, uzko questing. Maybe the answer lies in the uz side of the prequel to Orlanth's fight with Aroka?

 

[Rodney Dangerduck]

In our group's mythology, the Curse was caused when the "Claw of Gbaji" wounded Kygor Lytor at The Battle of Night and Day.  If one could somehow obtain the Claw, that would be a good start.  It came up in one of our stranger campaigns involving a "Rune Chef" competition, which was essentially "Extreme Iron Chef".

[EricW]

I’m sure there are quests which can break the curse which the Uz haven’t considered, for example if a party successfully completed a LBQ and stood in the halls of justice, and when asked what they wanted as a reward, demanded that the mother of trolls be healed of her chaos wound, that would surely have a successful outcome.
 

But stealing a fertility artefact from another cult seems a very troll hero like thing to do.

Edited April 26, 2020 by EricW

[jajagappa]

20 hours ago, dumuzid said:

quest back to the Battle of Night and Day and interpose yourself between Gbaji/Nysalor/D'wargon and Kyger Litor

I wonder if this isn't sort of a misnomer as the battle probably opened up the Gods War and became an event there.  It might even be an overlay of the invasion of Wonderhome by Yelm, but with Gbaji/Nysalor (or Illuminated Yelm) at the head of the invasion.

20 hours ago, dumuzid said:

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. 

By thinking about this as the fiery invasion of Wonderhome, it then suggests that the efforts to gather power and weapons are likely to be failures because ultimately Yelm invaded and conquered Hell.  To use a variant of the Ernalda expression "there must be another way".

[soltakss]

2 hours ago, jajagappa said:

23 hours ago, dumuzid said:

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. 

By thinking about this as the fiery invasion of Wonderhome, it then suggests that the efforts to gather power and weapons are likely to be failures because ultimately Yelm invaded and conquered Hell.  To use a variant of the Ernalda expression "there must be another way".

Exactly.

Troll Priestess think "Oh, look, a being of Light that hurts us, we can use Yelm in Wonderhome" then fail to realise that they got well and truly shattered by Yelm. They don't tend to use Argan Argar chaining Lodril, as the Mistress race don't really understand Surface Darkness that well, leaving that to Dark Trolls. They know Subere, Kyger Litor and Korasting and stick to those tried and tested techniques, failing each and every time and not understanding why.

[Sir_Godspeed]

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

failing each and every time and not understanding why.

Unless the failures are part of a larger, overarching strategy not known beyond those Mistress trolls. 

 

[soltakss]

16 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Unless the failures are part of a larger, overarching strategy not known beyond those Mistress trolls. 

 

Is this the Rocky Syndrome? Being bashed about so much, being on the ropes, being knocked down, only to come back at the end with a crunching punch that nobody expected?

[Minion1stClass]

Or everyone's thinking is wrong and the cure isn't to fix things, but understand and accept things as they are and work to improve the trollkin's lot and not get rid of them. Even after everything, the mother of trolls makes sure there ARE trolls even if not the ones desired. How shameful are trolls as children of such a great mother to dismiss and spit on the very best that can be done sometimes. And, who trusts those mistress race trolls anyway? They look down on dark trolls as much as dark trolls look down on trollkin. They've failed. They are hiding and wishing for better days.

Ahem. My dark troll Xiola Umbar has many heretical thoughts and was exposed to humans and now has...ideas. Ones she will not be sharing, thank you very much. She's heretical, sure, but not STUPID. But when she gets her own temple set up... things will be different! Although she still listens to all music hoping to find the missing song to act as a cure. Because one shouldn't toss all babies out with the bath water.

[dumuzid]

On 4/28/2020 at 1:13 PM, Minion1stClass said:

Ahem. My dark troll Xiola Umbar has many heretical thoughts and was exposed to humans and now has...ideas.

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.

[Minion1stClass]

Quote

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.

Nice.

My Xu has been somewhat impressed with the Ernaldans, but she isn't convinced of them yet. Not enough to share the prophecy that sent her away from home. But she got most of the clan to accept her Trollkin and when she left, she even got them hired as guards for Apple Lane. Changing hearts and minds! Easier with humans though. If they don't change enough, you can always consume hearts and minds.

[dumuzid]

2 hours ago, Minion1stClass said:

the Ernaldans, but she isn't convinced of them yet.

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.

[soltakss]

4 hours ago, dumuzid said:

By definition, any 'trollkin' born past the traditional cut-off point is not an enlo by anyone's standard, but an uz. 

Actually, no, the definition now is that all multiple births are Trollkin, even twins who would be physically and mentally as Dark Trolls. They normally undergo rebirth to become trolls as they would normally survive.

[dumuzid]

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

Actually, no, the definition now is that all multiple births are Trollkin,

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.

[jajagappa]

28 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

If suddenly every successful trollkin birth was a value, whole litters of values, it could change again.

Or the "value" of value trollkins will be bumped down as the dark trolls decide they need more workers and food.

[dumuzid]

1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

Or the "value" of value trollkins will be bumped down as the dark trolls decide they need more workers and food.

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.

[Minion1stClass]

Quote

And maybe Ernalda can help show her that there's always another way.

THIS is such a dangerous teaching for trolls. Which is why I love it. Which is why my troll is never going to feel comfortable in "normal" troll society. The subversive idea that just because a thing SHOULD be done this way, doesn't mean you HAVE to is a wake up call for those who spend their whole life in the same traditional way. Suddenly, oh, look, the "human trollkin" I am friends with has been given these chances and now he is NOT a human trollkin, but a full on human. How can I do this for my fav little guy Big Boss Big Nose? Well, likely not at home, but outside I am going to find a way.