Earth Elementals part 2: Trolls

This post follows on from part 1 (Dwarves).

Troll Psychology

Trolls abhor their desire for meat. Consuming meat is an abhorrent and fetid fetish. The moist, tough squishiness is foul and unappetizing. The flavour is awful and deservedly so, after all, meat is from animals, from living organisms. Eating things that were once alive? How retched.

A considerable improvement would be eating stones, rocks and dirt (they think). The earthen crunch between your teeth, the grinding and fracturing, popping and splitting. It's firm scrape as you guzzle it down your throat. Coarse and appealing. And it comes in so many flavours! Salty, ferrous, sandy, loamy... the joyous zest of a metallic tang! Even better if it shimmers and shines and glitters.

But Trolls need meat to survive. They crave it, are drawn to it, their mind bent towards like a boulder cascading downhill. They must have it. It completes them, heals them nourishes them. 

However, a Troll cannot express these feelings. Your (un)friendly neighbourhood Troll can only speak up to two dozen words, and many of those are synonyms for "hungry". Troll intelligence is lacking, but they can be bought off with offers of meat.

Troll Physiology

Trolls must eat meat to survive, though due to the slow metabolism and cold-blood they retain from their time as a Dwarf they can go for months or years without a meal - similar to a komodo dragon or a crocodile.

Though they can no longer process them, Trolls are given to eating metals and rocks. Unlike Dwarves, Trolls also consume precious metals and gemstones, if they can find them. As their body cannot process them properly, any non-meat they eat is slowly pushed out of their back like a tooth through gum until their entire back is covered in a craggy, rocky, tough surface. If the troll's has eaten enough gold/gemstones their back will similarly glitter and gleam as the precious metals and stones protrude from it.

Whereas Dwarves preferred the dark, and had poor vision in daylight, Trolls avoid sunlight at all costs. The dawn's light will slowly petrify them, and daylight at noon would turn them to stone in a  matter of seconds. As such Trolls will be found lurking in dark, sheltered areas.

Trolls retain their Dwarven torso but their limbs become long, gangling and surprisingly powerful. They can pick up medium and small sized folk in their hands (from here they will could throw them, drop them or bite their heads off).

Though Trolls can be defeated with martial prowess, if their corpses are not burnt they will slowly congeal together again to form a new troll (though some wizards say it is technically the same troll). An alternative way to stop this process is by exposing the corpse to enough sunlight to petrify it.