Troll & Hero

Gaming, adventure, trolls and heroes. What's not to like?


Heroic fantasy role playing with a simple system, this book is the core of the rules and covers character creation, combat and skills, plus foundational rules for things like fatigue, memory and movement. Additional books include an expanded combat system, more detailed character races, religion, more types of magic than you can shake a wand at, and a fully realized spirit world.

Troll & Hero is a class/skill system where you can use level based character classes to get started, yet smoothly transition to completely skill based play while freely intermingly the two approaches. Both are first-class citizens with classes having the advantage of simplicity and completely skill based being more flexible.

The alignment system used is innovative with four alignment axes (Natural/Creative and Positive/Negative in addition to the traditional Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic) and the concept of traits to determine an alignment score. Discover your character’s alignment by working through his personality using a bottom-up approach.

Languages do not exist in a vacuum and these rules not only provide a framework for proficiency, but also to relate one to another. While communication problems can be ignored by having everyone speaking the same language, or providing a universal common tongue, dealing with these issues can add a lot of depth to a game.

The Troll & Hero system is comprised of the following books:

The following gaming materials are available online:


As an additional resource, there is a spell creation work sheet for wizardry and eventually will be available for other forms of magic. The work sheet's sole purpose is to assist in determining an appropriate complexity for a spell. It does not attempt to enforce any rules and does not account for all determinants of a spell's complexity.

The worksheet is a standalone browser-based application: it can be used online or saved and used offline. Spell descriptions can be saved for future reference, and exported to or imported from a CSV file. Even when used online, all data is stored locally and will only be available using the computer and browser used to create it. The import and export functionality can be used to move data around.

This works best in FireFox and Chromium. In Safari the export function loads as a new page and must be copy and pasted into a text file. Internet Explorer only functions as a temporary scratch pad with no ability to store spell data. Older or broken browsers will not work at all.