The Trolls of Kuramen

Journal of Darrien Omsten, 14th day of the Beetle, Year 201 M.R.

I fear this is the final entry I will ever make; curse me for a fool for ever daring to look for a troll! Forgive my shaky hand, reader; I am wracked by such pain that it makes it hard to focus at all. The beast was put off for a moment by the flames of my trap, but then bounded through it when it saw me moving in the tree, climbing swiftly by the claws it has on each limb. I was swiftly overwhelmed, for the creature seems not to feel pain, and even the goblin shockprod that served me against so many other beasts failed me; any wounds I dealt the monster healed as I watched, and even the limb I broke became whole again, although with a new crook to it. Eventually it bore me to the ground and broke my legs, then dragged me through the flames; I feared it would kill me, or begin to devour me still-living. Would that it had, now. The monster sits, replete with the meal from before, preventing me from escape even if my legs were whole; and soon there will be even less chance of escape for me, as I now know how these creatures spread. It tore a strip of my leg open, and to my revulsion tore a piece of itself free and shoved it into my injury; the pain almost instantly became more than I could bear, and I realized that I could feel it, after a fashion - it had fused to my leg's internal meat. Now it spreads with the same sick speed of the troll's healing injuries, and much of my lower body is the same twisted and cancerous mess as the troll; I can only dimly feel those limbs, but I can track where this cancer grows by the searing pain within me. Soon, it will be spreading up from my chest into my neck and head, and I fear I will

(In a different hand)

This journal, filth-stained, was recovered from the lair of a pair of trolls in the Scarlet Grove by the guards of a steam-wagon train after killing the creatures and putting them to the torch. One of the creatures was clad in the tattered remnants of a traveling scholar's garments, and one finger proved to have a signet ring of the High Temple of Muriken, Lord of Knowledge. It is surmised that this beast is the troll resulting from the journal's author; may his soul rest, as his research has been recovered and archived properly. By the hand of Adael Gleser, 21st day of the Beetle, Year 203 M.R.

Additional Information

Kuramen's trolls originated from a spell gone awry; a wizard, researching ways to improve the ability to heal, reached too far and attempted to tap the primal energy of the Great Mother, infusing herself in the backlash radius with so much raw vitality that her cellular regeneration went mad, a runaway cancer that overwhelmed her mind and original shape as one of the lizardfolk, with nothing but the sharp teeth and claws of her people left to indicate her origin.

-Trolls spread when scraps of their flesh are introduced into the flesh of other things, be they living or dead; a corpse will quickly become a live troll, while a living person will, over the course of a few days, be twisted into a monstrous parody of what they were; the basic shape will remain the same, but a troll is generally horrifically disfigured from the base stock. Damaged organs are healed, but malfunctioning ones are simply replaced; trolls with multiple eyes, most blinded in some fashion, are relatively common.
-Trolls have no centralized nervous system. The entire creature is self-sufficient and dimly aware on a cellular level; a troll's heart, removed, will continue to beat until it runs out of energy to drive it, and decapitating a troll merely blinds the body and leaves you with a head flopping around and trying to bite you.
-Trolls are wary of flame, but do not fear it; fire and acid burns take longer to heal due to the scarring, but unless a troll is reduced to ash or sealed away to starve to death, no injuries are truly permanent.
-Trollish regeneration is such that broken bones will heal in whatever shape the break leaves them in; despite this, their constitution is such that the body adapts to these deformities, scarcely slowing them down. Likewise, often an injury will provoke strange new growths; many a troll has passable spines jutting upward from their scars.
-Trollish metabolisms are sickeningly fast; they require roughly their own weight in biomass, preferably meat, every few days; a troll deprived of this will begin to waste away with astonishing speed as the body devours itself. Most dead trolls are those which depleted the area of food and failed to move on in time, leaving a mummified and deformed skeleton with loosely sagging skin clinging to it. Most trolls will die of starvation within a week.
-Likewise, trolls require a tremendous about of fluid to sustain themselves; a troll without drinking water will die of dehydration within 48 hours in a hospitable climate. For this reason, few trolls ever wander into the world's desert regions.

Dealing with Trolls
-The two best methods for dealing with a troll are to either be faster than it - capable with a good mount - or too tough for it to harm - such as the armored steam-wagon trains that wind between settlements. Most of these wagon trains have a few specially outfitted guards who wear steam-driven suits of heavy armor and bear weapons that can produce sufficiently hot flame to incinerate a troll.
-Piercing weapons are effectively useless against a troll; the wound often seal around the weapon, doing little more than weighting the creature down a bit. That said, some settlements have effectively defeated trolls by shooting them with so many arrows and quarrels that they can no long move, then leaving them to starve to death before retrieving their weapons.
-Bludgeoning weapons are effectively useless against a troll; even staving in their skulls has no real effect on these creatures behind probably blinding them until they regenerate. Sufficiently strong bludgeoning can do significant damage, of course, ripping loose the troll's parts and pounding them into an organic mush; they can recover even from this state, however.
-Hacking and slashing weapons tend to be the most effective basic weaponry to use against a troll, as severing parts and leaving them too distant to reattach is one of the best ways to deplete a troll's recuperative ability. Even this tends to be insufficient, however.
-Incineration and acid are, in truth, the most effective ways to kill a troll; even they cannot renegerate if reduced to ash or a structureless puddle of organic sludge.
-Intense cold can seriously harm a troll, disrupting the cellular structure as ice crystals form, but unless the creature starves in this state, it will recover as soon as it warms up again.
-Trollflesh will infest any organic substance if left in prolonged contact; some nations are known to keep a cative troll which they use to infuse wooden arrowheads with trollish flesh; even one of these arrows striking an enemy can be decimating, if not dealt with promptly, as the victim will begin to undergo the transformation into a troll, necessitating that they be killed before they decimate the ranks of the army they were formerly allied with.
-Rumors persist of alchemical solutions which can halt the spread of tollish cancer within a person, if taken regularly; those undergoing such a regimen do not gain the trollish regenerative ability, but retain their individuality and intelligence (unless the head has been consumed by the cancer, but then the beast isn't bright enough to take the solutions in the first place).