Trolls

Trolls were a race of towering giants native to the Nine Realms, larger even than Ogres, who carried heavy rune-carved totems that lent them elemental power. Once a civilization spread across Midgard, they were betrayed and broken by the Aesir, and the few that remained became among the deadliest creatures faced by Kratos and Atreus on their journey.

A fallen civilization#

The Trolls were once a powerful and advanced people, with a series of settlements and cities scattered across Midgard and the rest of the Nine Realms. That age ended in betrayal: at some point in their history the Aesir turned against them, and the catastrophe that followed shattered Troll society and brought their race to the edge of extinction. Only a few survivors remained, spread thin across the realms.

Despite their brutality, the Trolls were intelligent creatures. They were capable of speech and possessed their own native tongue, and they were born and raised in tribes of their own. The Bridge Keeper who held the crossing in Helheim could tell a living person from a dead soul, a mark of real sentience. Many were proud: a Frost Troll named himself the Stonebeard King out of confidence in his own strength, and the Trolls were xenophobic toward outsiders, declaring that Kratos and his son had no place in Midgard. By the time Kratos and Atreus walked the realms, the surviving Trolls were violent and territorial, attacking not only the wanderers but the men and dwarves unlucky enough to cross them, and the pair often came upon the corpses of a Troll's victims beside the corpse of the beast itself.

Kinds and powers#

The Trolls were towering, hulking giants with broad, muscular frames and a slightly hunched, beast-of-burden posture. Their skin resembled cracked stone, bark, and flesh, mossy or icy or fiery depending on their nature, and many bore curved horns of stone or bone. Their faces were long and heavy with drooping tusk-like jaws, and their eyes often glowed. They wore little more than crude straps and rags, sometimes hung with bones and runes.

Every Troll possessed massive strength, durability, and stamina, but its true power came from the rune carved upon its totem. The Fire Trolls drew flame from their totems, hurling fire from their hands and stamping the ground to melt the earth, while the Frost Trolls froze their surroundings and slammed the earth to send out shards of ice. The stronger the Troll, the more its body bore the mark of its element and the brighter its totem glowed: powerful Fire Trolls had scorched skin and reddish markings, and powerful Frost Trolls turned bluish with frozen hair and tusks of ice.

Apart stood the Stone Troll Tribe, beings lean of build yet strong, with skin of rock and totems of plain granite. They could enter a deep hibernation, lying unmoving yet aware of their surroundings, and in battle they raised blinding ash from their hands and struck the ground with their totems to scatter grenades of blinding earth. Unlike their kin, the Stone Trolls did not need carved runes to call upon power, their plain diamond-marked totems serving them all the same.

Scattered through the realms#

Not all Trolls dwelt in Midgard. Two members of the Stone Troll Tribe were set as guardians of the Black Rune of Jötunheim deep within Týr's Vault, and others lay slumbering across Midgard near Helheim Tower, the Foothills, and Mountain's Base, waking only when the Black Rune was taken. The Bridge Keeper of Helheim was a Troll born and raised in the realm of the dead, and Muspelheim harbored a particularly powerful Fire Troll of its own.

In the later age, more Trolls still endured in the corners of the realms. Fire Trolls were found in Svartalfheim and Vanaheim, a lone Frost Troll guarded one of the realm towers on the frozen Lake of Nine, and four Stone Trolls slumbered in places such as the Derelict Outpost of Midgard, the Forbidden Sands of Alfheim, and Nóatun's Garden in Vanaheim, all of them imprisoned in sleep by the dwarf Alvíss Stonefoot and roused only by the Mystical Heirloom.