Trolls! The 1982 RuneQuest box set Trollpak is everything you need to know about the trolls of Glorantha, both running them as a GM, learning about them as players, or even generating them as player characters. It is, I think, another Chaosium first. While the ecology articles in Dragon Magazine were around by now, I don’t think anyone had devoted quite so much space to detailing in a sympathetic way a non-human fantasy race for an RPG before Trollpak.
The first book gives a broad overview of Trolls or, as they call themselves, the Uz. Humans in Glorantha were created by combining the powers of the Light rune with the Man rune, while the Uz were formed out of the Man and Darkness runes. As such, much of troll culture is familiar, while other aspects are quite alien – they can eat anything (even dirt can sustain them), they live underground, they breed giant insects as livestock and steed. More than anything, Trollpak emphasizes that trolls can be just as varied as human in both action and moral complexity and have an important role in the broader society of Glorantha – they aren’t mere monsters or fodder for adventurer swords.
Trollpak conveys this with heaps of detail, sober rumination and a surprising amount of good humor. RuneQuest is well known for subverting its seriousness with doofiness, and topics like troll restaurants and troll sports serve that purpose here.
The second book recontextualizes Uz culture for players desiring to play a troll. The third book is a series of adventures (supplemented by two pamphlets) that explore different aspects of Uz culture, giving players the chance to deal with, trade and in traditional RuneQuest fashion, drink too much booze with them.
Lisa A. Free illustrates the whole thing, which is worth the price of admission (OK, the 1982 price of admission, which was $18 – it tends to run a bit more now).
Really an outstanding piece of work from Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen. A big step, I think, in the evolution of RPGs from meat grinder dungeon crawls to a more thoughtful, narrative driven experience.
