Giants have been a mainstay of Dungeons & Dragons throughout the game’s history. They’re featured in some of the earliest adventures and loomed large over the popular and sprawling adventure Storm King’s Thunder in fifth edition. Now with Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, giants are getting some big-time attention. This sourcebook delves into their societies, ancient histories, and the lore surrounding them. 

Let’s talk about some of the reasons why giants can be an incredibly exciting part of your D&D game!

• How Giants Can Shake Up Your Game
• Tall Tales to Inspire You

How Giants Can Shake Up Your Game

While giants are powerful monsters to pit against your party in combat, they can bring so much more to your table than simple brutish foes. Here are just a few ways that giants can majorly raise the stakes of your game.

Raising the Stakes by Increasing the Size

Dealing with giants isn’t just about the beings themselves but also the world around them. Thrusting Medium-sized characters into a realm of giants means they’ll find themselves dealing with a bevy of encounters that all heighten the threat simply via scale. What might be a harmless pet to a giant could be a behemoth for a party to pacify. And it’s not just combat encounters. What if your players are tasked with stealing a bauble or treasure from a giant? How do you pull off a heist when the target might be too big to slip into a pouch or even a bag of holding and slip away?

The immense threat of fighting giants and other massive monsters can be grueling even for some of the toughest adventurers. It can stretch resources thin, and it can be taxing on spell slots and hit dice. Not to mention the sheer increase of difficulty in moving through an enclave where the door handles are double your height and going up a few steps requires rock climbing gear. Sending adventurers on a prolonged journey through the realm of giants means they’ll have to find lots of interesting ways to work around their minuscule measurements. Setting traps for enemies, enlisting allies for aid, outsmarting foes, and overcoming obstacles can be fun and interesting challenges for your party.

Dinosaurs!

Dinosaurs and other megafauna captivate the inner 6-year-old in many of us. There’s just a special kind of glee that comes with thinking about almost any animal and saying, “But what if big, though?” The bestiary of Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants promises over 70 new stat blocks of giant monsters, including new dinosaurs and giant beasts such as the giant lynx, giant oxen, and perhaps most terrifying of all, the giant goose! Whether it’s the animals in a giant enclave or the free-roaming threats of a lost world, these kaiju critters are ready to amplify your encounter's challenge rating and fun.

Strangers in a Familiar Land

One of the most interesting things about giants is that their enclaves and their primordial kingdoms aren’t set in some distant elemental plane or the reaches of the Feywild. They’re beings of the Material Plane. This is the realm in which most D&D heroes typically inhabit, yet, in most campaigns, giants and their history are hidden within the world. Whether you’re running a game set in the Forgotten Realms, one of D&D’s other popular settings, or even running a homebrew setting of your own, the infusion of a lost world full of lore is a fantastic hook to send your heroes in search of uncovering just what else about their world they didn’t know. This deep dive into giant lore can also serve as a supplement to your Storm King’s Thunder campaign, by fleshing out the game’s NPCs and the lore surrounding them. 

The Danger of Giant Battles

Let’s face it, what makes giants so scary is that they’re, well, giant. When beings that can grow as big as mountains get violent, they present astoundingly catastrophic threats to us wee folk. A giant can casually cause devastating damage to a town or settlement simply by cutting through en route to their lunch destination. A skirmish between a giant and a dragon might seem little more than a sparring match to them but could be downright apocalyptic to mundane-sized mortals whose homes became a defacto battlefield. Telling stories where heroes have to defeat or reason with a being who may not have noticed or cared how much destruction they caused can be an excellent change of pace from purely malevolent weavers of magic or other forces.

Challenging Adventures for High-Level Heroes

Because of their history in the game, players in most D&D campaigns have been trained to recognize that encounters with giants can be campaign-defining or adventure-ending events. With Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, you can entice your players by building a whole epic campaign around these encounters and moments. 

A battle against a giant can often carry a challenge rating appropriate for a party of 11th-level or higher. If you’re coming to the end of a campaign that has seen your players through the earlier and mid-tier character levels and want to throw something at them that could be more of a challenge, having them explore the enclaves of some big unfriendly giants could be exactly the level of danger your heroes are now primed to deal with. 

Tall Tales to Inspire You

If you’re looking for some pop culture inspirations for describing lands of the giants, we’ve got a handful of sources to help you get your mind in the right place for imagining these big, big stories.

Kong: Skull Island 

You’ll pull plenty of inspiration from the Jurassic Park films for sure, but if you really want to dive into the vibe of adventurers scrambling for their lives across an unexplored, hidden land where everything is big and wants to kill them, Kong: Skull Island is an excellent resource. This movie, and really almost any kaiju movie, is a great resource for understanding how a giant-sized version of a beast can turn a random encounter into an epic battle.

Super Mario Bros 3. - Giant Land 

One of the most memorable parts of this classic video game is Giant Land, where many of the obstacles that players have been facing throughout the game have become enormous. A great resource for having some playful freedoms with size ratios for your giant versions of things, but also for seeing how changing the scale of an enemy can dramatically change the threat level. 

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids 

This 1989 classic is stuffed full of examples in which the typically mundane and banal things in life can become a significant danger or obstacle when made gigantic. An excellent depiction of how a simple task like crossing the backyard can become an elaborate dungeon crawl.

Gulliver’s Travels

This literary classic is a great resource for roleplaying the interactions between characters across such a disparate size spectrum. See Gulliver’s encounters with the Brobdingnagians to help convey the differences your players might encounter in a developed giant society, but also his time in Lilliput when he’s the giant, to help you visualize how even the least brutish, most posh giant NPC you have could still make your players’ characters terrified. 

Big Things on the Horizon

We’ve only scratched the surface of all the reasons you should be looking up to giants as cornerstones to your campaign. From huge character options to a giant-sized bestiary and a whole lot of previously unexplored lore, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants is bound to shake up your adventures!

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.