GURPS Monster: Trollhound

As I'd mentioned, I'd been converting the trollhound that was listed in Trial of the Beast. I did as I'd said in that post: used the Enraged Eggplant's Worg and applied some of the troll's essential aspects. Similar to the troll, I think that the trollhound should have variation as one of its essential qualities, so there should be many different kinds of trollhounds -- especially the troll chieftain's pet.

Troll Racial Template/Monster

When it came to converting the trollhound to GURPS (since my search didn't yield any results), I had the idea that I would just take a formidable canine and apply a troll template on it (and spruce it up with it's fun disease). The first problem was finding which troll template I was going to use. My default as of late is to use the Monster Index of the fabulous Generic Universal Eggplant (sounds delicious), but out of curiosity I checked the Natural Encyclopedia. I had a slight worry about how I wanted to replicate or express the troll's relation to acid and fire in D&D and their regeneration powers. So I looked at quite a few of them and wound up making my own troll. I'm going to space this troll post and the post about the Trollhound fairly close.

The inspiration I got is fairly apparent, since it's mostly a synthesis of the templates I had available to me. The templates that I looked at are: the Enraged Eggplant's Troll, of course; GURPS Dungeon Fantasy's Troll, which was excellent (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1, p.31); the Natural Encyclopedia's Troll (p.73); and finally I glanced at the GURPS Wiki's Troll to help me realize that trolls really are all about wrenching and crushing limbs, necks, and spines.

Something worth mentioning is that trolls can take nearly any shape. They have several essentials, but beyond them trolls have endless variation. In fact, variation should be one of the troll's essential qualities. Most of the trolls that I use, especially those that have names or are plot significant, will be pretty different from this generic template, which should be the starting point. It's also worth noting that trolls could be much weaker than they are depicted here.