Ever done anything interesting with Giants? (besides putting them in playgrounds!)

[Dargaron]

Hello folks,

As should probably be obvious, I kind of like some of the changes that 4e Dungeons and Dragons made. One of them was the refluffing of Giants to elemental creatures. Unfortunately, none of my campaigns have gotten to a high enough level at which I could reasonably use giants as antagonists, so I was wondering what interesting ways folks on these forums have used giants for their campaigns. I guess other giant-type critters from 3.0/3.5 would also apply: ogres, trolls, fomorians, etc.

The idea that I've always wanted to use is that the giants are the children of an "unmoved mover" archetype called "He-Who-Was." He-Who-Was created the physical world by thinking it into existence, and created the various giants to inhabit it. However, the more traditional gods, being personifications of abstract concepts, overthrew He-Who-Was by infecting him with Doubt, which caused him to think himself out of existence. They then rules-lawyered the progenitors of the giant races by offering to reunite them with their forebear, which they naively accepted and were also deleted from reality (basically, magic+consent can do a lot more than just magic on its own). Only the progenitor of the arcane giants saw past the ruse, leading the lesser giants/titans to the ends of the earth where they hid themselves from the gods under the aegis of his power.

So, what interesting things have you DMs done with giants recently?

EDIT: On a semi-related note, since I mentioned trolls, my trolls are flesh puppets of a massive subterranean organism called Nerthus that is basically a pit of endless hunger. The trolls are sent out to gorge themselves on organic material before returning to the tendrils of Nerthus (living caves) and being reabsorbed to turn into more trolls.

[Grim Portent]

In my setting giants are the children of the gargantuan being known as the Mountain Father, himself the son of the solitary god of the setting and one of his monstrous mates from before the dawn of civilizations, who carved them from ice and rock before transforming them to flesh with fire. The Mountain Father also spawned the subteranean insectoid race of dwarves by granting sapience to maggots that cleaned his wounds of necrotic flesh after he was injured in a battle, before hibernating in a mountaintop glacier to stop himself bleeding to death from his injuries.

Giants are cold blooded, stand 20 feet tall and are mercenary in mindset. Most live in colder regions of their home contintent because straying into warmer regions speeds up their metabolism and usually results in them antagonising the smaller races by needing to gorge to sate their appetites, most tales of evil giants come from the lowlands as a result. They're often found in the employ of powerful lords who can afford to feed and armour them, but more commonly just wander the outskirts of civilization bartering menial labour services for food or just travelling around hunting things.

It is considered shameful for a giant to knowingly hurt a dwarf, they hold a loose sense of obligation towards them due to their shared lineage. Not enough to help them out much but enough to not harm them. Dwarves in a similar sense of obligation leave spare food out for giants at large sacrifical stones near their tunnels.

Due to their sheer size giants don't usually live in groups and are slowly dying out. Finding sufficient food can be hard for those that don't throw in their lot with small folk, and the realms of men are ill inclined to support multiple giants when just one or two is sufficient for their military needs.

There is a magical ritual that can be performed by other races to turn themselves into giants, performed by self immolation in a bonfire erected at the foot of a naturally formed wall of ice and stone, from which the performer emerges as a new giant when their flesh is consumed by the flames. Usually only performed by warlords who covet the power of the colossal beings and usually a symbolic human sacrifice is involved.


Giant equivalents are found elsewhere in the world, but are unrelated to the giant race. Some members of the seer lineage (a bloodline which occasionally produces blind fortune tellers) are born as monstrous cyclops who tower above their human kin, the titans of the east were formed from wind and war and the storm's wrath and take the form of huge metal clad storm clouds in the shape of men that rage across the land, in the region known as the Walking Lands the very hills sometimes rise from the ground to reveal the form of huge hunchbacked figures formed of earth that roam the wilderness before settling down again to sleep in new locations.

[brian 333]

In my campaign giants were right out of the Monster Manual.

Except for one.

South of the Boreal Forest and north of The Burning Sands lies the Sea of Grass, in which few humanoids can thrive. It is there that Grat roams, feasting on the abundant large herbivores which graze there.

Grat is a hill giant of high intelligence, (for a hill giant,) and is a 1st ed. NPC shaman, which makes him a 10 HD giant with the spells of a 3rd level Wizard and 5th level druid. His homd is in a sinkhole which was once home to a giant family, but Grat is alone now. (He never speaks of the dead.)

My players made a joke about "Little John" because Grat's leather clothes are grass stained. He's a bit of a slob, and his cave home reflects this.

But he is rather friendly if he realizes the PCs are capable of beating him. He's Evil, but prioritizes survival. He will allow adventurers to spend the night, possibly hoping for the chance to slit throats and roast them on a spit.


I know you were asking for more than a single exception to the rule, but giant societies were never my thing.

[Dargaron]

@Grim Portent: Nifty. So giants are sort-of in a symbiotic relationship with the smaller races. Do the "natural-born" giants view the "humans-turned-giants" as kindred, or is there a distinction?

I always like when dwarves are given connections to other races: it seems like elves get all the social mojo in vanilla D&D. Didn't we have to wait for Dark Sun to get half-dwarves, frex?

@brian 333: Grat sounds cool: I'm getting a sort-of "lone survivor of the apocalypse" feel from him. It's always good to have reasonable Evil contacts for the PCs to exploit if they need to: if nothing else, the temptation of easy help in return for a "favor" of dubious morality later seems like a good way to add tension.

[Grim Portent]

The human-giants are considered different from normal giants, normal giants are generally quite passive as long as they have enough to eat and drink, stuff to wear and something they can do for fun. They only get violent and raid smallfolk when they need something they can't barter services for and can't get in the wilderness*. Human-giants usually become one because they want to conquer and pillage using their new might and usually don't even speak the giant language, nor do they share the cultural norms of giants, they're warlords and conquerers for the most part.

*Not because they don't like violence, but even for them it's dangerous to raid a village for it's cattle. They'd rather cut down trees or break rocks or help build stuff for food than steal or murder for it, but sometimes they get desperate when they can't catch deer or bears or other large prey and decide it's worth the risk of spears and arrows. Some have tried ruling over smallfolk as kings, but most lack any interest in such a dangerous way of getting food and it never ends well in the long run.

[Everyl]

I haven't finished fleshing out the giants of my main 3.5e setting as of yet. I've done more work with trolls, though.

Spoiler: Setting creation summary, for context

Show

The setting has a progenitor deity, an entity always referred to by the Gods and their oldest servants as the Creator (never using any pronoun). In short, the Creator created the Gods and a primal world, leaving them to oversee it for centuries or even millennia at a time. During each visit to the primal world, the Creator taught the Gods more about how to shape the world, create living creatures, etc. On one such visit, the Creator made the dragons as the first mortal race - a sentient species with a soul, capable of growing and reproducing new growth-capable souls without further input from the divine. The Creator then departed, promising to teach the Gods how to create mortal races for themselves upon the next visit, if they proved themselves worthy of the responsibility.

The Gods misunderstood the Creator's wishes, and began trying to create mortals through trial and error. This is the origin of nearly all of the monster species in the setting - failed experimental attempts at creating mortals worthy of the Creator's approval. Many of these creatures are highly durable and difficult to truly kill, or have some very limited means of reproduction, but they can't populate entire ecosystems and they have no afterlife, which is significant to the Gods for cosmological reasons beyond this summary. The Creator was very upset with the Gods, and only taught them the lesser secrets of creating mortals - enough to create humans, elves, and the like, but nothing like the dragons. This was the Creator's last known visit to the Gods, and was many, many millennia ago - the Gods have continued to muck things up in the Creator's absence, and nobody, Gods included, has any idea if or when the Creator may return.

The trolls were one of the monstrous races created by the Gods before they learned how to properly create sentient mortals. Trolls are sentient, or at least capable of sentience, but they do not have a soul that endures into an afterlife, and therefore are of little value to the Gods in the long term. In the pre-mortal world, trolls were one of the few monstrous species who had the intelligence and social inclination to establish societies. They cannot reproduce like mortals, but they can increase their number, thanks to the ridiculous regeneration of D&D-style trolls. If they are decapitated and/or dismembered, the two pieces with the largest non-burned bits of the heart and the brain will grow into new, full-sized trolls. The process is severely traumatic, and very few of the dismembered troll's memories endure. You basically wind up with two trolls with the emotional maturity of a toddler and very little besides pain and hunger to motivate them.

For most purposes that matter to people (and trolls), the old troll is dead and gone. Thus, trolls aren't highly inclined to reproduce this way, and it happens more often through violence or accident. Most civilized trolls know how to tame and socialize newly-spawned trolls, but all too often over the millennia, the process has happened with no surviving civilized trolls around to rein in the spawn. Thus, the trolls that are encountered most often by other races are the pain-mad, uncivilized sort.

There are probably some civilized trolls around somewhere in the setting, as they don't die of old age or non-magical disease. I haven't found a good place to put them yet, though, either geographically or for plot purposes. Also, I'm still brainstorming for ideas for a sufficiently alien-seeming culture to have endured, probably in isolation or hiding, since before the mortal races were created.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I haven't done much with giants (they showed up as bit players in one adventure), but here's how I conceptualize them.

The ancestors of the giants were the Titans. Originally created to aid the Primordial Prince of Life/Matter in her work, they were the overseers for the elementals (especially earth and water). After the Dawn War where Change rebelled against its siblings, the Titans reigned on the mortal plane, warring with the Wyrm (dragon ancestors) for mastery.

Titans used runes--written words with power when empowered. Mostly, they wrote those runes across themselves and activated ones that they needed. This gave them mastery over many different things.

When the First Wish combined the Titan's rune magic with Wyrm's true sorcery, the Titans fell. In a last-ditch effort, they broke the world in half, splitting the pangean continent into an eastern and a western continent.

The Titans then degenerated due to the reduced power of their runes. This produced three different groups:

True Giants
These each "swallowed" (ritually absorbed) one particular elemental rune and attuned to it. They feed off of the associated element, so they don't really need to raid much (and thus don't need quite so much land). They can't write the runes, but are the runes.

* Storm giants swallowed Mol, the rune of lightning.
* Cloud giants swallowed Vet, the rune of wind.
* Fire giants swallowed Agon, the rune of flames.
* Frost giants swallowed Lod, the rune of ice.
* Stone giants swallowed Ka, the rune of rock.

They maintain clear thoughts. Beyond that I haven't done much with them yet.

Giant-kin
These ones failed to absorb their runes, resulting in stupid creatures that must feed normally but they still have some powers.
* Hill giants tried to absorb Ros, rune of size.
* Ogres tried to absorb Sil, rune of strength.
* Trolls tried to absorb Zdro, rune of health.
* Goliaths tried to absorb Vid, rune of perception.
* Firbolg tried to absorb Uum, rune of thought.

The last two mostly succeeded, mostly by only grasping at fragments instead of getting greedy like the others.

Dwarves
The dwarves tried to capture and master all the runes. Their ritual was much different--instead of absorbing them, they etched the writing of runes into their souls. This partially succeeded. They still consider writing to be sacred--lying in writing is one of the ultimate taboos in dwarven culture. They are very tradition bound--things "written in stone" are considered best. Think before you act. Once you make a decision, don't change it.