Uz: The Trolls of Glorantha
Why I care, and why you should
Uz: the Trolls of Glorantha (U:ToG) is the licensed supplement for Hero Wars covering the most populous "monster" race of the game-world Glorantha. As such, it traces it's own ancestry back to one of the milestone publications in RPG history, Trollpack for Runquest 2nd Edition. Pretty much any game supplement that presents a "monster" species as an intelligent and, more importantly, intelligible culture owes a debt to Trollpack. Certainly, Tolkien never cared to expand much on the society of Orcs, and most high fantasy has seen fit to continue that tradition, starving themselves of potential stories. Gloranthan trolls were, as far as I can tell, the first "monster" race to emerge with their own culture, struggles, and heroic stories.
Okay, so Trollish heroes do tend towards the "kill the hoo-mans, eat their villages" end of the spectrum, but is that any less "heroic" that clearing tunnel complexes of trollish infestation?
Oh, and the original Trollpack was just about the first game supplement I ever bought. In 1982. Goddamn, typing that makes me feel old.
But since then, practically any game that has thought out it's background beyond "The ecology of the gelatinous cube" has given us "noble enemy" races for the heroes to take a break playing, or even to try to understand. Whole games have tried to call themselves revolutionary for doing it (you know who you are, and you should know better). While the Most Popular RPG In The World™ does okay letting the independents D20 their intelligent monsters, everyone else seems to have them built into the world. What make the Uz so special these days?
Closer to the truth
One problem of Trollpack was the disjoint between the system for Runequest and the world of Glorantha. No one could deny that Runequest made a very good simulationist system that could fairly accurately model man to man combat in an Ancient Europe flavour. But Glorantha is built on a foundation of myth: everything in Glorantha is shot through with a mythical perspective, every character has some connection with a mythical past and otherworld that, through magic / religion, is available to everyone.
RQ had cool specialist spells for each cult... oh, and some cults didn't let you get them unless you promised not to kill people, or not tell lies to fishmongers if there's an R in the month.
Hero Wars is much closer to Greg Stafford's' (and pretty nearly everyone else who's tinkered with it) vision of Glorantha. A far more freeform method of character generation / definition, and a game system that can make trading as dramatically and tactically interesting as combat, has really opened up the story making elements of Glorantha, as opposed to the simulationist view.
U:ToG can therefore capitalize on the changes to use the role-playing elements to shine through.
It has also has a couple more advantages over the original Trollpack; firstly, it has the original Trollpack and the other Troll supplements for RQ to draw on and plunder. This isn't such a fantastic advantage as you may think, as it's a running gag that, during the Avalon Hill years of RQ, it seemed to be a contractual requirement to place a new version of the cult of Kyger Litor in every new supplement. A lot of information was repeated, or summarised from old supplements.
The other advantage is that, since Trollpack appeared, we've had 21 years (goddamn I feel old) of "spirited discussion" about Glorantha in Fanzines, personal correspondence, and some new fangled thing called the internet, which I believe you may have heard of. Now, much of the debate has been a pile of Enlo droppings, but until U:ToG came out, what was likely to be declared official and what was to be thrown away has been somewhat of a minefield. That problem hasn't entirely gone away, as U:ToG has a status relating to being canon best described as "officially not likely to be completely overturned by future official publications." I mean, James Frusetta is the guy who has the penultimate word (second only to Greg Stafford) on what's going to be in the canon Issaries Inc Troll publications.
The meat and potatoes (and the table, the plate, and, hey, are you gonna eat that rat?)
U:ToG is a 64 PP black and white, illustrated A4 size book with colour, soft covers. Of this, there's about a fifty fifty split between background without game stats, and material such as keywords, cults, etc, which I count as much as background as rules.
I'll take this piece by piece:
After the intro, setting up the intention of the book (can we have more of this in rpg writing, please?), we're led into eight pages of mythology, history (both fairly interchangeable in Glorantha), common knowledge (see more details later), gross physiology, geographic distribution, social organisation, the bare bones of the legal principles, diet (everything), perception, language, clothing, and a pretty superfluous page on how non-trolls may become trolls.
Since this takes up 16 pages, information is really on a "does the player / GM really need to know this in a Troll game?" level. In most games, the details of how the Trolls were exiled from their paradise (which is the underworld to humans) may seem either irrelevant, or background information for obscure plot development, but in Hero Wars, at least some of the players will be riffing off the mythology of their religion to justify use of magical powers; having a basic idea of the types of myths in Troll culture allows persuasive players a lot more flexibility ("Of course my Zorak Zoran berserker can augment his dancing with his Berserker affinity. While fighting the Chaos Thumping Thing in the Chaos wars, ZZ invented pogoing!" should, in my experience, be allowed once and only once...)
The common knowledge is in the standard for Glorantha "What my elders taught me" format, but nicely, this has explicit permission to photocopy. For pick up games, this and a bare bones character sheet are about all a motivated player needs, even if they've never played in a Gloranthan game before.
While I don't agree with some of the assertions here (in the "real world", gluttons are less likely to be gourmets, for a whole heap of fantastically dull reasons, but argument about Troll culture from "real world" examples is doomed to failure), all the information is reasonably concise, and in use easy to reference. So when your challenged by a player who's just seen the Daredevil movie who says darksense can do something that will de-rail the story, you can very easily find the paragraph to slap them down with.
In fact, the next few pages make that distinction even better: Notes on Being a Troll is the next bit that pick-up players should read if they feel they need to. The absolute fundamentals of troll perception, attitude and behaviour in 2 pages, and wonderfully done. If your troll players still aren't playing like trolls after sending them away with this bit for 5 minutes, there's not much hope for them. Force them to play runty trollkin (the goblin-like weak trollish offspring), they'll die quicker and be less of a burden for everyone.
Calling to the underworld is another two page briefing, this time on Trollish religious / magical practice. And we hit what was, when I first ran through it, the biggest problem with U:ToG.
In Hero Wars, magic / religion comes in four flavours: Theism (emulate pantheonic gods), Shamanism (persuasion, coercion and avoidance of Spirits), Sorcery (grimoires, pointy hat wizards and Bishops) and Mysticism (old guys making you paint fences). No-one can practice more than one of these, and worshipping a spirit, or using a grimoire to get power out of a pantheistic god is possible but, in game mechanics terms, inefficient to say the least.
U:ToG comes out and says Trolls mix shamanism and Theism fairly liberally, without penalty. And, although thankfully only mentioned in passing here, some really odd trolls use sorcery, while still worshipping gods and grooving with their ancestors and darkness spirits.
And in Hero Wars, shamans are, for those of us who care about game balance, somewhat stiffed compared to theists in character creation (during play, they can make up for it, but the initial flexibility seems a bit unfair in comparison). Which means that players should either sacrifice a little utility for authentic troll parties ("Well, at least a couple of us should be spirit prodders instead of god botherers...") or they should resign themselves to playing "inauthentic" parties.
So, does U:ToG break the Hero Wars magic rules? No, because they were pretty broken in this respect already, and didn't reflect Glorantha as shown in the stories about it, where people have a very pragmatic view of getting whatever help they can, be it blessing, fetish or spell. The rules in the forthcoming Heroquest are much more flexible on this front (I'm assured), but...
That does mean that a bit of work would have to go into this chapter especially to make it HQ (rather than HW) compatible. But since this presentation of a Gloranthan belief system is already closer to the HQ paradigm, I think it should be easier to change than, say, retrofitting existing Orlanthi characters for HQ.
And so to character creation itself: with a little hand waving regarding the homogeneity of Troll culture allowing "innate" keywords to replace "cultural" keywords (the mentions of the Blue Moon plateau and other groups pretty heavily contradicts this), we're given a set of good, solid, role play pushing keyword lists, followed by a chunk of occupational keywords that, again, are given an in-game reason for being limited. I'm not sure it's necessary to make excuses for short lists in a book of this brevity, and there's not any noticeable lack of roles compared to those found in Thunder Rebels for humans. It's nice to have a couple of roles that allow for trollkin to be useful to a party as something other than pack animal, cannon fodder and food, those I find these to still be the most fun for one off games (where disposability is a virtue).
Next comes the religious keywords, a whistle stop tour of troll religion, packing 19 gods, traditions or practices into twenty pages, and a few more notes on the more mechanical aspects of the less discrete nature of troll religion / magic compared to human. Again, the drift in HQ towards more flexibility in this are makes some of it redundant, but for us poor HW types, it's clear enough for working with. The initial impressions are a bewildering array of names, spirits, talents, secrets, etc. etc. But in part that's the nature of Glorantha, especially when it's packed in as tight as it is here. The secret, as ever, is to take things a bit at a time, as you need them, though this seems odd with such a short book.
With relatively automatic game balancing in the character creation and experience systems in the bas HW system, the problem for designers is to create magic keywords that are interesting and useful without treading on another keywords toes too much. In this, the authors seem to be successful, although there seems to be some redundancy in the presence of, say, Boztakang (chaos fighter spirit practice) and Zorak Zoran (Berserker hatred warrior god) and Karrg (weapon Master), but I think that may be my projection from RQ days when ZZ was more of a Chaos killer. And every other culture seems to have its rival warrior traditions, so just forget I said anything. I may also be projecting from dim memories of Trollpack, but these write-ups, although shorter, seem to include more relevant, playable information about the religious practises and their practitioners that the RQ versions.
"Running Uz as Adversaries;" again, a smack in the face for anyone still deploying their "intelligent monsters" as armed bowling pins for PC's to knock down. Gloranthan trolls are creatures of the dark, masters of ambush, with hordes of trollkin and giant insects to hurl at you before you even see proper troll. Invade troll lands? The real world equivalent is a land war in Asia. Just Plain Don't.
Of course, human players have a chance against them (just a chance, mind), they are heroes, but they should be pant wettingly frightening for "normal humans" in the game. Kind of like the reaction "normal people" should get when on the wrong end of a decent human hero band, for that matter.
The four guide to Dagori Inkarth, including a two page black & white map of the area (reproduced much smaller in colour on the back cover) is, of necessity more suggestive than explicit, but has enough to give a GM enough info to busk any details for their campaign. It also shows a flash of the strange humour that seemed to disappear when HW took over as Gloranthan RPG: the hero cult detailed has the secret of brewing the drink which allows trolls to funciton by day. The name of this heady brew is… Day Club Soda. Wince.
Uz friends and foes gives us a trollish Baba Yaga (a case study in how real world and / or Gloranthan legends are best taken literally in this game), a good "odd" Uz hunter to better demonstrate the diversity of Uz, and a well-defined hero-band (if only to show what a trollish band looks like).
Running the ridges is a two page outline of an adventure for either Humans or Trolls, which on either side is an excellent introduction to Glorantha for either side involved in a contest of speed and cunning, so long as the GM can flesh out the details.
And now we have trollball… Many Glorantha groignards feared this would be quietly dropped from the more "straight" world appearing in official books. While HW/HQ may not seem to be the system of choice at first glance for a sport game, in play it allows a great deal more flexibility to parody, sorry, simulate great sport films of our time. Yes, I am thinking of "Escape to Victory", with extra points for the first human player to utter the immortal line "Hold up lads… we could win this!"
Finally, The End, Uz and Death. It looks a bit like an afterthought, but even here crams in some story seeds.
So, is it worth it?
Okay, I may be biased, as even the news of this supplement brought a smile to my face, but that also meant my demands of it were high. These were tempered by the length of the book, and it's status as a "preview" of official work should make it less of a must.
U:ToG really doesn't need excuses. Trolls are great fun to play, whether playing in stereotype, or playing with them, and the HW system supports the kind of play that I enjoy in Trollish stories. It's also, despite it's brevity, somehow more than a reprint of Trollpack tweaked for HW would be. The change of systems has allowed a change in game philosophy to one that isn't so much interested in bonuses and penalties for darksense skills in odd situations as developing a relationship (or lack thereof) between troll and tribe, and acting like a real Troll Hero.
Despite niggles (the minimal work needed to convert to HQ, the density of information in places), I don't hesitate to recommend this not only to HW/HQ players interested in Uz, but to players of any system looking to beef up their "enemy in the darkness" race.
Review Summary