Todd Kenreck: Trolls have been in D&D since the very beginning, and they're one of my favorite creatures to use in any campaign setting. That's why I'm incredibly excited that their in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and that they have a new variety of trolls that you can use in your games.

There are new types of trolls in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. How did these come about? What are they?

Jeremy Crawford: So trolls are a staple of Dungeons & Dragons and they have been going all the way back to the first edition monster manual, where they appear on the cover. Their long noses and their green skin. And the inspiration for them certainly comes from a lot of European folklore where trolls of various sorts appear, but there is a specific influence for the D&D troll, and that is Poul Anderson's novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, and that's where we get the regenerating troll. It's in that novel where you see the troll whose limbs are lopped off and then those limbs animate, and that was the inspiration for us in the fifth-edition monster manual, including as an option this ability called Loathsome Limbs where as you fight the troll, pieces of it are animating.

In many ways it is one of the first icky monsters of Dungeons & Dragons going all the way back, again, to that first edition monster manual. So we decided in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, we're gonna lean into that ickiness. So in this book we provide a variety of trolls, and the theme for all of them is mutation. This idea that trolls can be mutated by what they eat, including each other, because there are cannibal trolls that can sprout multiple heads, but then there are also trolls where if they are killed or seemingly killed by certain energy forms, they can then regenerate mutated by the energy form that killed them.

So in this book, we have trolls who are mutated by psychic energy. We have trolls that come back and that are rotting. Again, we have trolls with multiple heads. This idea that it's almost like a troll's body is this colony of things constantly regenerating, constantly mutating. Honestly once we started walking down this road, it's like, we can fill half a book just with horrific trolls.

So for people who like trolls, going back to the original, now we provide you essentially a buffet of trolls that, what's really neat about them is now they can pop up in specific locations. Again, there's the ghostly troll. Others, where if you want to emphasize disease and rot, you can have a troll lurking in the sewers of the city and its abilities are gonna be different from one of the other sorts of trolls. So these are some really great pieces for building some adventures, for building some scariness, and I hope will also inspire DMs to customize other versions of mutated trolls, because in many ways the sky is the limit once you start thinking about all the ways you could alter trolls based on what they eat, based on what almost kills them.

We also talk about they can also be mutated by powerful magic in their environment. They can be mutated by planar rifts and portals that are near them. This is what I mean. Once you kind of open this creative gate, you can just fill campaigns with trolls.