Night Trolls are minor antagonists in the indie management simulation game Dwarf Fortress. They are procedurally generated night creatures.

Due to the procedural generation of the world, coupled with the fact that many elements can be customized by the player, the strength, threat level, placement and physical form of night trolls vary greatly.

These creatures have the unique mechanic of kidnapping others to make them their spouse, rather than outright killing them. The mating process also transforms the kidnapped individual into the same form as the night troll captor, through unknown means.

Despite their name, they are not related to standard trolls.

Gameplay[]

In the original version of the game, or if classic ASCII graphics are enabled in the premium version, night trolls are represented by a yellow green "Ñ" in gameplay. In the premium version, they appear as black, mysterious-looking sprites that match the appearance the game has generated for them, this is similar to the graphical setup of other procedurally-generated creatures, such as bogeymen, megabeasts and experiments, to name a few.

Unlike most enemies/night creatures in the game with the goal to kill and destroy everything they see, their main focus is to kidnap victims, mate with them and produce offspring. As well as mutate their spouses to look like them.

The bigger the world, the more night trolls the game will have, unless the player has them turned off completely through custom settings. Night trolls may not always be named "night trolls", and can take on different names of other species with examples of the following words being used: night, evil, or darkness, crone, freak, hag, horror, man, monster, ogre, ogress, troll, and woman. Night trolls belong to the spheres of death and night, and will be named based on these spheres.

While procedurally generated, night trolls all possess certain characteristics in common: They are all fanciful, evil-aligned humanoids with either extra or missing features; for example, large feathered women, or large skinless one-eyed men with horns and trunks. Some night trolls possess wings which give them flight, though they will only use them to fight adventurers who are also flying. Their description always gives their movement method (e.g. moves with uneven, jerking motions) and detailed descriptions of their skin (smooth, rough, warty, leathery, etc.).

Night trolls have lairs which are mounds or holes in the ground with doors or hatch covers. Depending on the troll, they can contain various tools, small amounts of discarded coins and clothing from their victims, corpses, organs of sentient creatures prepared as food, cauldrons of blood, bone meal, and ground vermin. Most of the time, these lairs will contain just one night troll, but entire families of them can also be found there. Items in these lairs have special coding that prevent them from decomposing, degrading or rotting in any way.

All night trolls possess "Talented" skills (which is six on a scale of fifteen) in wrestling, biting, fighting, striking, kicking, dodging and observing. They also have bonuses in all physical attributes. Night trolls can breathe underwater, feel no exertion, cannot be stunned and are immune to pain, nausea, dizziness and fevers. Night trolls need no food, water or sleep to survive, nor do they need to breathe, meaning they cannot be drowned or strangled. They also have an immunity to traps and the ability of destroying buildings with ease. All night trolls can sense unseen living creatures as the character "☼", similar to vampires, though this cannot normally be observed, as night trolls are not playable.

In "Adventure Mode", players are able to smell night trolls, with the smell being described as smelling like "death" or "bug innards". Night trolls are a somewhat challenging enemy to fight, but are not overly dangerous, even when fighting one alone. Night trolls are not related to the other standard trolls found in the game.

Mating[]

As stated above, night trolls must kidnap a non-goblin civilized being and transform their victim into another night troll of the opposite sex (the process by which this is done is not known, nor is the reason why it cannot be done on goblins) in order to reproduce. The troll can be either gender. The reasoning behind the mating with other species is never specified, but the fact that night troll young are always the same sex as the non-kidnapped parent suggests there may be some sort of issue with attempted reproduction between "natural-born" night trolls (the offspring being sexless, unable to come to term, etc). Since night trolls are heavily implied to be sapient, there could also simply be a cultural stigma against mating with a night troll you didn't kidnap and transform yourself, although if this were the case it would raise the question of why they have their transformation ability in the first place.

It is not known whether spouses can mate with another spouse of the opposite sex (or even with any night troll at all, aside from the one that transformed them), although this would of course be quite a rare event even if possible. Whether spouses can kidnap and transform spouses of their own (such as if the night troll that originally abducted them dies) is also unknown.

When the kidnapped victim is transformed into a night troll, they will share the same name as their captor, but with the inclusion of something indicating their spousal status. For example, a "Dusk Brute" will turn its victim into a "Dusk Brute consort" or "Spouse of the Dusk Brute", with the exact same appearance as the captor.

An aspect of night troll reproduction is that it qualifies as a "genetic barrier", meaning that natural-born male night trolls and natural-born female ones would eventually diverge into separate species if genes and mutation were added as game mechanics, since a mutation that arose amongst one sex would have no way of making it into the gene pool of the other.

External Links[]

• Night Troll - Dwarf Fortress Wiki

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