Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Leviathan
Knowing that troll's can only be killed by acid or fire requires communication with people who have survived troll attacks by using acid or fire.
|
Sure, but in a fantasy world it's perfectly reasonable to assume that such people exist and their stories have been spread widely.
Quote:
|
Kind of like the hidden lore that if you shoot an elephant in the body with a shotgun it's going to be a day or so of it angrily trampling your village before it ignores the wound.
|
I'm not sure that this is particularly hidden lore in our world. Lots of people have at least vaguely heard of elephant guns, which implies that ordinary guns won't kill an elephant. However, it's not really analogous to the troll case—it's not that elephants have total immunity to bullets less than 3/8ths of an inch in diameter or anything like that, there's a complex relationship between propellant, caliber, and shot placement that determines what happens when you shoot an elephant. The thing
Monsters postulates is not that everyone knows "how to kill a troll", just that everyone know trolls can
in principle be killed by burning them to death but not, say, cutting their heads off with a mundane axe.