Trolls
Said to have been born from the living rock of Terrace itself, Trolls are generally believed to be oldest inhabitants of Realmgard and perhaps the entire world of Terrace — that Trolls have an innate ability to turn their flesh to stone-like hardness, there is perhaps some credence to this origin myth.
Trollic culture has proven adaptable, with disparate communities of Trolls largely integrating comfortably into local communities, while nevertheless maintaining some of their own customs and cultural practices. In general, Trollic culture values curiosity, discovery, and new experiences and in addition to Trolls being on average the strongest of the peoples of Realmgard physically, Trollic culture also has a proud and longstanding intellectual tradition — though Trolls are nevertheless stereotyped as brutish and aggressive.
Although the ancient forms of the Trollic language did not originally have a written form, the ancient Trolls eagerly adopted the use of written language, as it facilitated the sharing of knowledge, with had previously been done through entirely oral storytelling. The oldest Trollic folktales have survived in some forms down to the present.
Trolls are also notable for displaying the most pronounced differences between the genders. With the caveat that beauty is subjective, male Trolls are larger and generally considered ugly by non-Trolls while female Trolls are more slender and considered attractive by most of the other peoples of Realmgard.
Trolls don’t really correspond to any real culture or ethnicity — not like how, say, Elves are Roman, Aurora is part-Canada and part-Finland, or Hrimfax is Scandinavia. I think there are certain parallels to the European and North American Jewish Diaspora (though facing significantly less discrimination than Jewish communites historically have), in that they’re integrated into local communities but retain their own practices.
But that was never deliberate. I kinda went into it with the same approach I took to Realmgard Goblins, making them gregariously intellectual (hence the male Troll intellectually smoking a pipe) to pointedly invert the established “big, stupid, and Evil” Troll archetype, while still maintaining the folkloric connection to rock and stone — with Trolls traditionally turning to stone when exposed to sunlight (as in The Hobbit).
Incidentally, “ugly males, hot females” also has a mythological basis. In Norse mythology, the terminology is frustratingly vague and it’s not necessarily clear whether Trolls and Jötnar are or aren’t the same thing, but there are several attestations of notably beautiful Jötunn/Troll women.
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