OSE Encounter Activities - Trolls

With this entry, I believe we have reached ONE HUNDRED of the OSE Monsters! What better way to celebrate this milestone than with one of the foes that has been with us since the very beginning: The terrible Troll!

Mythological Trolls have interested me ever since I was incredibly young and came across an unusual book about them. It took me ages to track it down, but after several fruitless searches, a ton of blind online buys based on title alone, and a few decades later, I can confidently now say it was the one pictured here.

The book is a compilation of several stories, and surprisingly even features an excerpt from the Fellowship of the Ring that I was definitely unaware of at the time. I had only hazy memories of a particular illustration or two within it, so it is quite miraculous that I managed to definitively track it down.

While nowadays I have a soft spot for Trolls of the more Scandinavian/Norse Fairy Tale variety (particularly the Theodor Kittelsen variety and the cow-tailed Hulder as classic “gotcha monster”), I am still quite fond of the traditional D&D Troll. Usually green, tall and spindly, with that distinctive cuspated nose, I am sure that their Regeneration power has led to many a teachable moment at tables, so much so that it has nearly entered common knowledge. I occasionally still get to surprise new players with them and watch them scramble to try and figure out one of their weaknesses, but these times are now, almost tragically, much fewer and far between.