Giants Deserve Better

Everyone Loves A Giant

Giants come up a lot in RPGs. They are especially popular in fantasy RPGs, though there are some I would argue deserve a place in one or two other genres. What made me want to write about giants is that, cool as they are, giants are way more interesting in folklore than in most TTRPGs. In fact, to be honest, I think giants are often sadly undersold in TTRPGs, particularly in bestiaries.

Maybe it has something to do with familiarity. They’ve been there in tomes, the bestiaries and the manuals since… well since before a large proportion of the current community could probably read. And especially in those early entries, they were often not amongst the most exciting pictures available. I mean ugly, stupid looking… guys.

Not even cool armour, and unless it was an ettin, not particularly monstrous. Because the scale of a giant just doesn’t come across in a three-inch illustration.

Maybe that’s why, in many TTRPGs, giants have become a simple, escalating challenge. Bigger and bigger versions of essentially the same thing, encountered in tactical fights as your characters progress. A scalable threat, with a side serving of elemental power. Whether shaped by frost, fire, clouds, or the lumpy quality of a hill, they just get bigger, in a series of power showdowns.

All too often, they have little other presence in the world. They are not usually mysterious, and they certainly are not evocative springboards into otherworldly adventure.

Creatures Of Fairy Tale

It is true that, in many European fairy tales, especially in England, giants are often depicted as being unintelligent, or slow-witted. That is because their purpose in those stories is to give the hero an opportunity to be clever and quick, almost as if, to the original tellers of these tales, these qualities were what defined a hero (rather than any moral compass… ).

The hero doesn’t win by fighting. He wins by being clever. In this way, the stories reflect cultural values: the giant is the larger foe, the seemingly unconquerable enemy who is defeated by cunning alone.

But there are plenty of examples of giants in folklore and mythology that are far more interesting than that. And more three-dimensional than they are sometimes depicted in TTRPG bestiaries.

A Magical, Faraway Land

How about the one with the beanstalk? Its a classic example: he isn’t just big. He lives in another world, possibly The Otherworld. Jack can only go there by magical means. Magical means, by the way, which seem to be intrinsically tied up with leaving his mother and might be seen as a rite of passage. But the journey also involves sowing beans – a clear reference to agriculture. Planting crops leads to all the treasures Jack brings back, which turn out to include music, livestock and commerce (in the form of gold). Late Stone Age, and the advent of farming, anyone? Or maybe the arrival of horse nomads and the cattle-raiding tradition?

When Jack does get to the other world, not only the giant is super-sized but so is everything else. It is a magical place, connected with the sky. And when Jack returns, he comes back with a magical harp that sings songs and tells poems. The harp is therefore symbolic of either wisdom and learning or the skill of the bard, or both. Jack also has a hen that lays golden eggs.

These are magical items. And by the way, Jack doesn’t go there to slay a monster, protect the community, or rescue a hapless gender-stereotyped aristocrat. He goes there to explore. And then he steals loads of stuff. Sound like any player characters you know?

So am I saying you have to have beanstalks in your game? Definitely not. But if you do want a spookily enchanted means of reaching a special place, what about a magical forest that borders the plane that is the land of giants? Or a haunted marshland? Or even a coast?

Creatures Of Legend

We also see wits and cunning in Irish mythology, with Finn McCool defeating the Scottish giant Benandonner. When Benandonner comes to Ulster from Scotland to basically beat up Finn McCool, Finn outwits him by climbing into a crib and pretending to be his own baby.

These giants, may not have even been giants in the stories’ original forms, but instead ‘heroes’ of an older time (see here for a further explanation…). By ‘Heroes’, of course, I mean heroes in the traditional sense: that of killing loads of your people’s enemies.

Some of these are also berserkers, by the way, who are clearly only giants when they adopt the riastrad. That’s a kind of celtic battle frenzy (that you see Slaine go into in the old 2000AD comics). It’s something like becoming the Hulk, but messier, with blood spouting out of the top of your head and your body all bloating up and getting twisted-Arnie.

Which is something we don’t see in TTRPGs very often. I’m NOT suggesting a were-giant by the way. No, I’m NOT. I’m talking about trained, professional warriors who seem absolutely normal until certain conditions are met (such as being pissed off), when they metamorphose into a nine-foot tall… man? Like a were-man? No, I don’t mean that, I don’t…

It would be cool though. A great recurring foe for your party.

Another Irish giant is Dryantore, who is a sorcerer. He conjures mist and puts the heroes to sleep. And why shouldn’t giants cast spells?

Then there’s Jack of Irons, from Yorkshire in the north of England. An undead giant with blackened skin and the decapitated heads of his enemies tied to his belt and, in some versions, I think, his own head strapped to his own huge club (or did I imagine that…?). This guy’s a ghost, essentially, though whether a ghost of a giant or just a big spook, is unclear. I think both are allowed.

Yeah, About Jotuns…

Giants should be wierd, otherworldy creatures, possibly supernatural, and always terrifying.[/caption]
No article on giants would be complete without mentioning the ‘Frost Giants’ of Norse mythology, or Jotnar (Jotunn, singular) as they are properly called. So basically… these are not really ‘giants’ at all. That’s a sort of mistranslation, as being a jotunn did not necessarily denote great size and the root of the word seems to denote eating or gluttony.

The Jotnar are, if anything ‘anti-gods’. Not quite demons, they are in opposition to the Norse gods, perhaps chaotic, in opposition to the ‘order’ the gods bring, but that’s a little over simplistic. The Norse gods don’t seem that ordered or lawful to me, but then I’m not an early medieval Scandinavian. Jotnar are more similar to the Titans of Greek mythology and there’s a good reason for it, but that’s for another post…

Jotnar do all kinds of crazy things, like have stone heads, turn into horses, give birth to monsters. Pretty out there stuff and a license if i ever saw one, to get super creative with giants.

Creatures Of The Supernatural

Last, but certainly not least, we cannot forget the Nephilim.

The cut-to-the-chase version of the Nephilim story is this: Angels saw how hot mortal women were and decided to come down to earth to get some. They seduced the women and ‘begat’ children. Who were giants. Nephilim.

There is some debate about the meaning of that word. I’ve seen it translated as meaning ‘fallen’, from the Greek. That doesn’t especially make sense to me but apparently it could also mean ‘giant’ in Aramaic, so I’m guessing that’s probably on the money. Anyway, what works for me here is the connection between giants and the mystical. They are not just a random, mortal breed of human-like thing, they are the offspring of a forbidden supernatural relationship.

How cool is that for world building!

Demonic Offspring

It gets better (at least, in terms of an engaging story, not in terms of the humanitarian treatment of ‘other’…).

God was so annoyed by the whole situation, not to mention that the Nephilim had started eating people and stealing food and acting like all carry on, that he had a flood to get rid of them. And that is why there was a flood. Only the Nephilim don’t die. They drown, yes, and they die physically, but their spirits linger. Nowhere to go, you see. So they hang around on post-diluvial earth, causing trouble, and because they have no proper place and they don’t know what to do with themselves, one of the things they do is put themselves inside other people…

In other words, they become demons.

When a person in the biblical world (according to this version of the story), gets possessed by a demon, that’s the displaced spirit of a dead giant-offspring of a rebellious angel. Which explains why demons might be in your world, without being summoned. It connects lore and current world issues, and it makes demons, giants and angels ALL more interesting, in my opinion.

I mean, you know, it’s your game. Do what you like…

I’m not saying you have to accept this as ‘gospel’ (no pun intended), and I’m genuinely not trying to sway anyone’s religious beliefs here. I’m saying this is what happens in one of the versions of this story. And I think it’s cool because it means things can be tied together by players or by you.

When player characters meet a giant, that’s a little piece of world lore, stomping around. And when they meet someone who has been possessed, likewise. It’s probably been done in fiction somewhere. Some of these themes definitely appear in John Gwynne’s Of Blood And Bone trilogy (which is awesome, by the way, and you should read it).

Magic Skulls

I love me a magic skull. And another way of making giants more intrinsic to your world is to tie them to more magical ingredients. Giants need to be more mystical. And what better way to make stuff mystical than to make it about… skulls!

What if giant skulls are magical and can empower magical spells? In whatever genre. Or can be used to animate the undead, because they bridge the gap between the natural and supernatural worlds? Or if giant-size femurs just make better magic staffs because they channel arcane power more readily? Maybe giant bone dust, not chalk, is what needs to be used to draw a pentagon. Or if the teeth, when sown, and the correct incantation uttered, become animated skeletons?

There is a ton of material on the internet about giant-related folklore and a lot of different directions you can take it in. Ultimately, it’s your game and it’s your world (I may have mentioned that…). But we all shouldn’t miss out on the possibilities for making giants much cooler than they sometimes are, by being trapped in ideas presented in published material when there are so many cool stories that were once told by our ancestors.

And if you’ve done anything cool with giants in your campaign, I would genuinely love to know. Because new ideas are always priceless. How do giants work in your world? How do your players interact with them? How often do they come up?