Like many things in Pathfinder, rock trolls are an attempt
to reunite and reconcile the folkloric origin of a monster with the stat block
it has since become. Trolls in
Scandinavian folk tales were petrified by the sunlight, ditto most trolls in
fiction (Tolkien, anyone?).
Regenerating, fire-fearing trolls are an RPG thing, apparently inspired
by Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three
Lions (which I’ve never read but have many times heard tell of its influence in D&D).
Rock trolls lose the classic RPG vulnerability to fire,
trading it for sonic and sunlight vulnerability instead, which is more in line
with the trolls of legend. And
that’s…pretty much all you need to know really. They’re a hair more powerful and a hair less bright than the
standard troll, so if you wanted a mythologically correct game you could even
just make rock trolls your default troll entirely without disrupting play. You also might play a bit with the
crystalline content of the trolls’ skin—it might change depending on their
region of origin or recent diet, reflecting the stones they’ve eaten. Other than that, they’re just another
fine troll subspecies with which to surprise spelunking PCs and frustrate fireball-tossing mages.
An elderly xorn wants
to consume the tourmaline-studded skin of a live rock troll—a
delicacy. But in its infirmity it
needs guides to help it find one of the creatures, as well as help hacking the
regenerating thing apart if the party can’t find one small enough for the xorn
to gulp whole.
Dwarven bards from
all over the continent are gathering at Caer Undwen to trade songs, sing
dirges, and tune their instruments to the perfect pitch of the Cavern of the
Spheres. Unfortunately, this
leaves no one with musical skill remaining at the dwarf settlement of Holdfast. When the clan unearths a gang of
hibernating rock trolls, there is no one to take hammer to the chimes of shattering that would wound
the creatures. Without the help of
brave adventurers, the clan is doomed to days of tunnel fighting and attrition
in the depths.
Necromancers are
notoriously hard on apprentices, but Maxim of the White Hand is worse than
most. If adventurers enter the
courtyard of his isolated keep, he sends one of his pupils to greet them and offer
refreshments…while another, invisible,
uses scrolls of stone to flesh to
awaken the two rock troll “statues” in the courtyard. If the apprentices are killed in the process (the trolls do
not discriminate), Maxim reanimates their bodies later. What’s left of them, anyway…
—Pathfinder Bestiary 2
272
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