Bigby Presents: Glory of Giants (Dungeons & Dragons Expansion Book)

Product Information

Dungeon Masters will gain inspiration for bringing giants to life, from maps of giant-built sites and big new monsters to tremendous treasures and intriguing trinkets in a giant's bag! This could be used to safely move allies or reposition enemies, with the possibility to deal damage by tossing a foe onto a space that doesn't support them. Glory of the Giants amply succeeds at being a GM-focused book that fleshes out the history and social structure of the giants, providing tools to help the DM make better giant-focused adventures and also more reasons for the DM to want to create more giant-focused adventures.

Adds giant-themed player character options where adventurers can evoke the glory of giants with 1 new barbarian subclass, explore the vast world of giants with 2 new backgrounds, and unlock 8 new feats to unleash runic magic and wield elemental power. All updates are being done with care to make sure anything from fifth edition will continue to be fully playable.As you might guess from the length, these enclaves are presented as sources of ideas, rather than complete encounters.

Chapter 4: Giant Enclaves: The material presented here offers background information on a variety of giant-themed locations, including several maps and adventure ideas. Here Bigby and the demigod Diancastra, child of the giants’ All-Father, Annam, unveil the secrets of Annam’s mighty descendants. Some of these force saving throws upon enemies to inflict conditions or various disadvantages, while others stick to the basic damage. Also, for reasons unclear to me, there’s a Cheshire cat (don’t get me wrong, it’s neat, I’m just not sure why this is the book it showed up in).Dungeon Masters will gain inspiration for bringing giants to life, from maps of giant-built sites and big new monsters to tremendous treasures and intriguing trinkets in a giant’s bag! Depending on the player and dungeon master, a barbarian transformed through rage can either maintain their fundamental appearance at a larger scale or change into a giant-like or even Elemental form. Glory of the Giants leaves me wanting to break out some of those pretty giant-sized miniatures I’ve got sitting on my shelf and get them back into the game. Mountain Giants: Incredibly strong and known for their cruelty, these creatures dwell in the remote depths of the mountains.

Hill Giants: Arguably, the weakest and least intelligent giants, they can be quick to anger and often roam the wilds. Most notably, many of these types of giants were front and center as the primary antagonists in the 2016 campaign book The Storm King’s Thunder. The book offers advice on how to connect a character using any of these options to the lore of the giants, whether to draw a direct line of ancestry, draw power from an artifact, or worship the gods of the giants. Following in footsteps of Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons is Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants, although I suppose that given their ancient rivalry the giants might prefer to think of themselves as making even bigger footsteps over the footsteps of the dragons. However, with a big focus on high-level encounters and not a lot of new stuff for players, I'm not sure how much wide appeal it's going to have.

With a new subclass as well as several new backgrounds and feats, Glory of the Giants makes it easy to build characters that are larger-than-life in memorability even if not in stature. So I think that Glory of the Giants has to rise or fall on its value to the DM, and on that front I think it succeeds more than I was anticipating. Explore the wondrous realms of giants with this supplement for the world's greatest roleplaying game. Each of the classic giant types has a couple of variations – some sort of corrupted iteration (such as a fire giant of evil fire or a stalker of Baphomet), an undead version (such as the barrowghast), a fancier version (such as the hill giant avalancher), and a ‘hulk’ (descendents of giants who have become elementals).