My roomate's got this goal of one day owning a goat farm, and she's always reading these goat books. The other day she was reading one that teaches how to "debud" goats. This is a process where I think you take a hot iron to the buds on a baby goat that will eventually turn into horns, and it keeps them from turning into horns. Seemed to me to be cruel, and I probably wouldn't have the stomach for it, but then, I don't have the stomach to visit the suburbs, either. I guess there's differing schools of thought on the debudding issue, and the book laid out some of the pros and cons, but whether or not goats should be debudded isn't the question I want to get into here.

Does anyone see this being done to Troll babies? Any parent is going to want their baby to fit in as much as possible, and I can easily see a lot of parents thinking "well, at least he doesn't have to have ram horns." Also, I can see a lot of meta-haters encouraging (or forcing) the practice, because if your enemy is going to be 12 ft. tall and have the strength of 3 men, it would be nice if he didn't also have horns (which are basically a weapon that can't be taken away short of sawing them off). If you're going to exploit Trolls for menial labor, I can see it making your scummy life easier if the "workers" had bumps instead of weapons on their head.

Also, a wacky idea: not being a goat farmer, I have no idea how feasible this is, but maybe it would be possible to partially stunt the growth of the horns in a controlled manner, and end up with sort of bonsai horns for extra badassery points.

Man, I was TOTALLY thinking about this just yesterday. I figured that yes, there must be a way to do that, since you can do it to every other horned mammal.

But I was also having a dream about shape-shifting billy goats who would shift into Trolls and then headbutt expensive sports cars owned by corporate bigwigs.

Wow, I think your dream just got the extra point of karma for amusing the GM.

Trolls apparently have Proper Horns. So yes, they should be sculptable and removable. Since it's living bone, merely carving into it will not prevent it from regrowing and healing over. If you drilled a hole through (for example: to run jewelry through), the hole would seal itself back up.

In other news, Troll Tusks doubtless grow continuously from the base because that's how tusks work. So while a troll could scrimshaw some fine etchings into his tusks, fresh tusk would slowly push those etchings up until you had to grind down the old tooth and start over.

It's a lot of work beautifying a troll.

-Frank

When I saw this thread, I had a vision of Hellboy taking a lathe and grinding his horns off to look more human.

BTW, simsense starlet Suzie Trollipop's newest release, Caress My Horns, is now playing on the AfterDark™ Channel.

-Frank

You know, I never imagined this would be relevant on Dumpshock, but I actually grew up on a goat farm.

Debudding works pretty much how you describe, and it looks about as painful as it sounds, but let me tell you it smells a whole lot worse. However, they also seem to forget that anything bad happened to them about 5 seconds after you're done. Human circumcision sounds pretty awful, too, but it's not like people are walking around emotionally scarred by it; I certainly don't remember mine.
But yeah, you have to do it when they're really little because the horns start growing within a few days, and it rapidly becomes too late. I'm sure there are ways to remove horns after that, but I'm betting it's a lot more involved and requires surgery; certainly nothing you'd do on a goat. They have little round scabs on their heads for a little while, sometimes they bleed a little if they itch them, but they quickly heal over and are covered with normal skin and fur and everything. They don't have grody wrinkly bald patches or anything.

I could definitely see this being done to troll babies, but in general I would think it's really only in the (increasingly rare) cases of two humans having a troll baby. In general I would think Troll families have enough "troll pride" that they'd want the horns, and there's just no way you're going to have other groups imposing it on people.
So IMO, it wouldn't be common, but it would be an excellent bit of flavor for a troll with human parents

edit: Oh, and speaking of the bonsai horns, sometimes if the debudding isn't done quite properly sometimes they'll grow an itty bitty little curvy horn thing, where one bit of one edge of the horn continued to grow, but the worst case of that I've ever seen was still only about a 1 inch horn.

Scrimshaw Artists are a popular thing in Shadowrun.

It's also a lot of work for human ladies keeping themselves looking beautiful, too. I can just imagine it: troll beauty salons, complete with manicures! Popular amongst the lady trolls!

A horn treatment would be called a cephalicure.

-Frank

You seem to know a lot about Trolls.

Speaking of horns - how do you imagine Trolls wearing helmets, NBC suits or both?

I would imagine helmets would have to be constructed as separate front-piece and back-piece and would simply leave the horns exposed. NBC suits would need "horn-booties" which attach to the helmet/hood in a sealed fashion. This is, I suspect, the real reason there are less troll scientists working in high-tech clean labs; the horn-booties simply look too ridiculous for the scientist to be taken seriously.

edit: typos