Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 154 - Monster Series - Giants

Episode Date: December 11, 2022

Giants.  They're all tall and they have reach.  Prep work done for an adventure, right?  Hold your throwing stone, my DM friend.  The different species of giants have very different tactics, capabilities, and motivations.  This week Jeremy talks all about the differences and what makes them tick. #DnD #DungeonsandDragons #Pathfinder #DMTips Resources: Resigned:  How to Know When It’s Time to Go: https://www.amazon.com/Resigned-Know-Truths-Stigma-Quitting-ebook/dp/B0BLP2LCQJ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1AO4TAC6LM4AO&keywords=resigned   The Monsters Know What They’re Doing:  https://www.themonstersknow.com/giant-tactics/   Extra Credits:  The Viking Expansion:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxItyrp55g8&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5D16-gw3aGKjuC_iW7R16mF

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Giants in 5th edition have the Ordning, which is a caste structure based on social class and is highly, highly organized. From a 50,000 foot view, the ancestries of giants are ranked according to status, with storm giants at the top, followed by cloud, fire, frost, stone, hill, and then finally the giant kin I mentioned earlier. and then finally the giant can I mentioned earlier. Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 154, continuing the Monster Series, this time all about giants. Before I get started, I once again want to thank this week's real sponsor, the book Resigned, how to know when it's time to go.

This book is about taking responsibility for your career and getting out of a bad work situation. Resigning from a job is a difficult and emotional process, and there is a right and wrong way to handle it. This book is a guide to quitting your job with class and keeping your dignity and sanity intact. Resigned, How to Know When It's Time to Go, available on Amazon.com in print and Kindle format. It'd make a great gift for anybody who's considering a career change. And really, aren't we all? I also want to thank

this week's fake sponsor, Scarecrows. When it comes to keeping birds away, Scarecrows really are outstanding in their field. If you like this podcast, please consider leaving a rating and maybe even a review wherever you found it. Reviews and ratings help others find the podcast who may be looking for one like it. If you wouldn't mind taking a few minutes to provide those, I would greatly appreciate it. I also want to thank the donor who requested to remain anonymous, but whose donation pushed us over the edge to cover all the costs for this year. Thank you so much. You are very generous and too kind. You may not know this, but I'm actually a fairly tall guy.

I'm 6'3", and being tall has its advantages. My wife rarely loses me in a crowd. I can change a lot of light bulbs without needing a stepladder. And it's extremely rare that I have to sit in the back seats of a vehicle because people just naturally let me sit in the front on the shotgun seat. But there are drawbacks. Riding in an airplane is equivalent to being locked in a medieval torture device for three hours. Buying clothes is an

absolute nightmare. And I'm tall enough for knee problems, but not tall enough to make millions in the NBA. Plus my jump shot sucks. And my dribbling sucks. I can still set you a mean pick, though. There's one guy from my local gym that still hasn't returned from the shadow fell after my last pick. How the hell did I get... You know what? Fuck it. Let's start over. There's one guy from my local gym that still hasn't returned from the shadow fell after my last pick. How the hell did I get... You know what? Fuck it. Let's start over. Giants are stupidly tall. I mean, ridiculously tall. Depending on your game system, the short ones might only be about 12 feet tall,

while the biggest can tower up to 40 feet or even more. Can you imagine trying to find pants? I mean, the shortest one would probably have, I don't know, a 66-inch inseam. Not to mention waist size. I'm sorry, y'all. I've been doing some pants shopping lately. Let's run this back one more time. Giants are a species of humanoid that are, as their name suggests, extremely tall and extremely heavy. They tend to live in remote areas of the world and are formidable opponents for your heroes, especially in the intermediate levels of character advancement. For the purposes of this episode, I'm excluding Trolls, Ogres, Formians, and Ettans from the discussion. I know, I know, 5e considers most of them giant kin, but they're not really giants. They're smaller and a little bit different,

and at best they're, I want to call it it giant adjacent. Same for cyclopes. They have their own culture, especially in the Pathfinder world, and deserve an episode all their own one of these days. I would be remiss if I didn't once again link to the wonderful blog The Monsters Know What They're Doing by Keith Amon, and you'll find a link in the resources for this episode. So let's talk about what giants have in common. They're tall. Hill giants average around 16 feet tall, while storm giants clock in about 26. All giants have a ranged attack, usually a number of rocks that they carry with them in a pouch or sack. 5e and Pathfinder giants are a little different, but there's an interesting common lore between the two game systems. On both Galarian and Faerun,

giants used to rule large kingdoms and were much more numerous and powerful than they are now. Their kingdoms collapsed for various, or in some cases, unknown reasons. They now live in isolated tribes, and the monuments that they built are mostly in the obscure and lost areas of the world. For now, let's start with giants in 5e. For now, let's start with giants in 5e. Each of the main giant races, the cloud, fire, frost, hill, stone, and storm, are related by common elements of history, religion, and culture. They view one another as kindred, keeping any inherent animosity over territory and ambition generally to a minimum.

That being said, as stated in the Monster Manual on page 149, it isn't considered evil to disrespect or even betray a giant of another type. It's merely rude. Giants in 5th edition have the Ordning, which is a caste structure based on social class and is highly, highly organized. From a 50,000 foot view, the ancestries of giants are ranked according to status, with storm giants at the top, followed by cloud, fire, frost, stone, hill, and then finally the giant kin I mentioned earlier. Further, giants are also placed into ranks and castes within its own ancestry or tribe. The skills and capabilities make giants rise or fall in this strict hierarchy varies from giant type to giant type. But whatever they are, giants make it their life's mission to get better at it. No matter what, the hierarchy between ancestries trumps that of hierarchy within an ancestry.

So the lowest stone giant is still higher in the ordning than a hill giant chief. It doesn't seem fair, but that's the system that works for the giant. A giant knows which other giants are inferior and superior to it within its own ancestry, and one of the advantages of this system is that a giant always knows where they stand. It's tempting to lump all the giants together because they're all tall and have big weapons and hurl stones. That really is a disservice to all the different giants, because they really are very different from one another. So let's go from smallest to largest. Hill Giants.

Hill Giants are pretty consistent between 5th edition and 2nd edition Pathfinder. They are chaotic evil. They are large humanoids. They are the shortest, dumbest, and basically just have good strength and constitution scores. In short, they are selfish, dim-witted brutes. Stupid, and that's part of what makes them deadly. They are a primitive culture, and they don't build cities on their own, given their intelligence school, or I doubt they even could if they wanted to.

If you find hill giants in a city, it's either because they found it abandoned or killed everything leaving in it. You can bet your last copper piece they didn't actually put the stones together to build it. Hill giants don't really understand ordaining, but they're naturally slotted by size anyway. Anything smaller than you is a victim. Anything bigger than you means you better bow to their wishes. They will push or trick one of their own kind to try to get the best loot or the best food. Like everything else in a hill giant's life, they keep the ordnance simple. In 5th edition, by the way, when I mentioned food, they are described as

willing to eat anything that's not poisonous. They will go to an area and consume all the livestock and the crops on a farm before maybe eating the family and then moving on when there's nothing left. They don't store food for later. They don't think about tomorrow. They don't conserve things and they don't plant or harvest. Some of these monsters have even been seen sitting there eating mud when there's nothing else around. Hill giants have no culture of their own,

and they've even been seen trying to mimic cultures of smaller creatures around them, like attempting to live in trees like elves or underground like dwarves. Hill giants in conversation are blunt and direct, and also same is true in combat. They don't use a lot of tactics and snares and tricks. They're not a deceptive because they're not really smart enough to be deceptive. Their average intelligence is 5 in 5th edition, and an intelligence modifier of minus 2 in Pathfinder 2e means they have about a 5 or 6 intelligence. But if they feel like they're being made fun of or taken advantage of, they will rage and destroy until their rage subsides. So suppose you want to include hill giants in your adventures,

and you need some ideas for how you could include them. Well, suppose a group of hill giants have arrived and are camping nearby. They've started making raids into civilized lands for food, and the local magistrate has hired the PCs to take them out. Maybe parts of a forest keep getting destroyed and nobody knows why. Come to find out the hill giants are trying to build a house and they keep damaging the raw material while harvesting it or trying to build walls of the house and it all just keeps falling down. Or maybe a family that lives in a remote farmhouse hasn't been seen in town for a little while.

After some investigating, you find out they've been captured by hill giants for food and the giants are spending all their time eating the crops and the livestock before moving on to the family. Okay, let's move on to a different type of giant, something a bit bigger. Fire giants. Fire giants are lawful evil master crafters. They wear plate armor and they're extremely difficult to kill. Their armor class is 18 in 5e. They treat skill and metalwork with similar reverence as stone giants and stone carving.

Their ordining is set by their metalworking skill, which requires brains and brawn in equal measure. Fire giants are, of course, immune to fire damage. Duh. They tend to create their homes where the heat is too oppressive for most creatures, around lava, deep and active volcanoes. They can even be found living on the elemental plane of fire just fine. They like their homes hot enough to make the walls glow from the heat. Individually and as a society, they are ruthless and militaristic. From the time they can walk, they are fitted in plate armor and taught how to fight and wage war. In combat, they are extremely organized. Encounters with fire giants should be like encountering a well-drilled military group.

They know their roles, they know how to maximize their efficiency, and they know how to work together. This makes fire giants an extremely dangerous opponent. The good news is that if you lose to fire giants, they tend to take captives when conquering, and they need people to work their fields, mines, and the cooler parts of their homes. One change with Pathfinder is that fire giants sort themselves in martial hierarchies, with a strict emphasis on following the orders of one superior, no matter if you are accountable to a lowly soldier or report to a powerful officer. Also, to a fire giant, quote, death is the flame in which the future is forged.

Most are covered in scars and refuse to conceal or obstruct them, as each jagged mark serves as a reminder of a valuable lesson they learned in battle. So what are some encounter ideas with fire giants? Maybe the party comes across a group of giants scouting out a valuable and rich ore vein. Unfortunately, that vein is currently being mined by an entire dwarven kingdom, and that sets up a conflict. Maybe the fire giants are looking to trade gems for valuable ores. The fire giant trader unfortunately plans on murdering the other party, so the PCs have to keep that party alive after the trade is made. Maybe the PCs need something forged, armor, weapon, a key, whatever, and they're sent to

the best smith in the region, a fire giant who has unusual requests for payment, because she is fey-touched. She requests a song, a shadow, and a soul for the work to be done. Alright, let's move up to stone giants. Stone giants are true neutral. They have the stone-catching ability, which requires a DC 10 deck save to catch a stone that's thrown at them, and they're going to make that save more often than not. Stone giants are

the only giant ancestry with dark vision. Well, that's generally because they live in secluded caves. Stone giants have holy places far from everyone and everything else where darkness reigns supreme. Stone giants are artisans, but they prefer to keep their art hidden, carving beautiful things into the stone and only sharing it with other stone giants generally. Those that meet these stone giants outside of their home know nothing about this artistic nature. Stone giants, as an entire ancestry, call the surface world the dreaming world beneath the sky, and they behave like the surface world is almost like a dream. They treat it the way we do when we realize we're

in dreams, like nothing is real. They make little account for their actions and never really fully trust what they see or hear under the sky. A promise made above ground need not be kept below it. Insults made above ground can be made without apology later, and killing prey or sentient beings is no cause for guilt, because it's a dream world to them. Stone giant ordning is by artistic and rock-throwing capabilities. They indulge in stone carving as the greatest of skills, but they've also been known to paint intricate, sprawling murals across cavern walls, drawing shapes out of raw stone. The giants appoint the tribe's best carvers as their leaders, shamans, and prophets. Stone giants are extremely graceful despite their size, and they are accomplished rock throwers.

These talented rock throwers are granted positions of high rank in the giant's ordning. They are constantly testing and demonstrating their ability to hurl and catch enormous boulders. Such giants, by the way, take the front ranks when a tribe has cause to defend its home or attack its enemies. However, even in combat, artistry is key. A stone giant hurling a rock performs not just a feat of brute strength, but also one of stunning athleticism and poise. Stone giants lacking in athletic grace or artistic skill dwell on the fringes of their society, serving as the tribe's outlying guardians and far-wandering hunters.

When trespassers strayed too far into the mountain territory of a stone giant clan, those guardians greet them with hurled rocks and showers of splintered stone. Survivors of such encounters spread tales of stone giant violence, never realizing how little those brutes dwelling in the unreal dreaming world resemble their quiet and artistic kin dwelling down below. Here's some ideas for some stone giant encounters. The party finds a lost and exiled member of a stone giant clan who's wandering the planet. They are in search of someone who can help their carving and rock throwing skills. This easily could be a combat encounter where the giant practices chucking boulders at the party,

or they could help to connect the giant with a master stone carver somewhere. Maybe while adventuring in a deep cave, a wall comes crashing down, revealing a new stone giant settlement just being established. The occupants are political or religious exiles and are looking to make a new home. Or how about a body of a stone giant comes sliding down a mountain and destroys a remote logging village? What could have killed it? Where did it come from? And the adventure revolves around that. By the way, in Pathfinder 2e, there is one slight difference.

Stone giants don't actively invite confrontation or strife. They are by and large a peaceful people who seek wisdom through exploration of nature and long meditations on the elements of the natural world. The elders of stone giant tribes are the wisest of the stone giants, and they use their charisma and druidic magic to lead their tribes to prosperity and harmony with nature. Let's move on to frost giants. Frost giants, neutral evil, wearing patchwork armor. They're not the crafters that Fire Giants are. They make do with whatever they can get. An entire cow hide to serve as a shoulder covering,

adventurer shields being fashioned into loose scale mail, and maybe the prow of a ship that happens to fit as a thigh cover. They're Frost Giants, so of course they're immune to cold damage, and they're typically found in frigid environments. Frost giants are pretty easy to understand. The easiest way to describe their attitude is, why grow and tend when you can steal? They are raiders, vikings, reavers, stealing what others have created. When raiding, by the way, they focus on alcohol and metals to make weapons.

Raiding, by the way, they focus on alcohol and metals to make weapons. Generally, they're not all that interested in gold or precious jewels, which is interesting because that's the opposite of what we understand about traditional Viking lore. It just so happened while I was researching this episode, I watched an episode of a YouTube channel called Extra Credits about Viking expansion. Between the 8th and 10th centuries, Vikings spread from Europe all the way to North America. One of the things that drew Vikings to other occupied lands like England and France was the rise of complex trade, and the monetary systems, which meant valuable and malleable metals, were available and very portable in these settled lands.

Anyway, I'll put a link to the video series in the resources. It's a great channel for quick lessons about gaming design, history, literature, and lots of other topics. Anyway, the exception for frost giants to why make when you can steal are bone carving and leatherworking. These are both very valued skills in frost giant society. They tend to make their clothing from the skins and bones of beasts and carve bone or ivory into jewelry and the handles of weapons and tools. As I mentioned, they reuse the weapons and armor of their smaller foes, stringing shields into scale armor and maybe lashing sword blades into enormous wooden halves to make a giant spear. The greatest battle trophies come from conquered dragons, though, and the greatest frost giant Jarls wear armor of dragon scales or wield picks or mauls made of dragon's teeth and claws. As you can imagine, there's not a lot of subtlety

to frost giant culture. Their ordning is by brute strength alone. One thing mentioned specifically in Pathfinder 2e, by the way, is that frost giants range from extremely territorial hunters who claim an expanse of tundra and defend it at all costs, to nomadic hordes that roam icy slopes in search of settlements to conquer. So suppose you want an adventure with frost giants. Here are a few ideas. Let's start with the obvious. Frost giants are raiding humanoid settlements up and down the coast, and the PCs are tasked with setting up a defense. Gary Gygax, yes, that Gary Gygax, once wrote an adventure called Against the Giants, where the PCs have to venture into a stronghold of a frost giant Jarl to slay him. The harder way was a frontal assault, but it also included a way of stealth and sneaking and getting in without

being noticed. It's a great adventure. Go find it if you can. Against the Giants is what it's called. Or a third idea for an adventure. The PCs have recovered an artifact of giant lore, and the Frost Giants are willing to negotiate to get it. What does it do? Is it more dangerous to piss off the Giants and have them attack to get it? Or is it more dangerous to actually trade it to them

and let them use the artifact, whatever it happens to be? All right, let's move to cloud giants. In Pathfinder, these giants are described as true neutral, which is fine, but 5th edition is far more interesting because the alignment is described as 50-50 neutral good to neutral evil. The 5th edition description doesn't go into detail about the reason for the split. It just says that some are more deceitful and others are more intellectual. That, by the way, does make me wonder if there's a philosophical war going on in the cloud giant ranks, whether to live at peace with others or to conquer, enslave, and destroy. Cloud giants are the first ancestry of giant with innate spellcasting.

They can cast spells like fog, cloud, light, gaseous form, and fly. These combined do a good job of enabling movement for the cloud giant and masking that movement when they need to. What I'm saying is that cloud giants will use spells to retreat if they need to. They are smart and enormous, but that has resulted in a haughty superiority complex. Since the only giants that are bigger than them are storm giants, and they are generally distant from the world, cloud giants consider themselves the rulers of giant kind, only taking a back seat in the rare cases when a storm giant gets involved. They look at the smaller races and humanoids and even other

giants as pawns to be used, underlings to demand tribute from, or at best, maybe henchmen. And make no mistake, cloud giants are all about tribute, not just the verbal kind, but money, wealth, people, anything of value. Cloud giants will use their henchmen, usually other giants, to collect taxes they feel they're owed for their benevolence of not squashing the smaller species. They tend to live on mountain summits and solid clouds where they can build castles and float around. Cloud giants have been known to keep extraordinary gardens. Grapes as big as apples grow there, along with apples the size of pumpkins and pumpkins the size of a small house. There are legends of errant seeds

falling to earth from these gardens and growing gigantic produce and producing magic beans. Cloud giants keep griffins, peritons, and wyverns as their own flying beasts of prey. Such creatures also patrol the cloud giant's gardens by night along with trained predators such as owlbears and lions. The cloud giants' rank in the ordning is all about how much wealth and power they have. They are all about accumulating treasure, displaying wealth in what it wears, and being able to bestow stupidly valuable gifts to other cloud giants. If you've got it, cloud giants will definitely flaunt it. Their homes are ridiculously beautiful and wondrous. They're all about creating treasures that will make their household more opulent and

luxurious. Interestingly, they tend to not steal from one another though, and they don't tend to fight each other for valuables. Instead, they gamble, and they will gamble on anything and everything, from individual combat to flying races to wars between humanoid nations. Fixing wagers by interfering in a conflict causes a loss of the bet, but such deceit is really considered only to be cheating if it's discovered. In Pathfinder 2e, alignment differences are clarified just a little bit. It says that cloud giants are morally diverse. A handful are neutral, but of the others, roughly half are good while the other half are

evil. Good cloud giants are often civic-minded builders of roads and settlements and are interested in trading goods as well as cultural innovations with other species. It's not uncommon for such giants to approach their neighbors with diplomacy and build strong relationships with those that live around them. Conversely, evil cloud giants are often isolationist and xenophobic. They prefer hidden mountain valleys and settlements in the caves and among the crags of lonely peaks. They raid for what they want and treat other creatures as inconsequential insects. These opposing philosophies can generate a great deal of strife among neighboring cloud giant communities

because the raiding of their evil cousins to take what they want can many times destroy trade deals made by their peaceful cousins. Legends persist of floating cities ruled by magically gifted cloud giant queens and kings. While most cloud giants plainly state that such claims are absolute fantasy, others are very tight-lipped or maybe even evasive when asked to answer that question. So some ideas for some cloud giant adventures. A cloud giant has bet that the PCs can defeat something. A monster, another group of adventurers, a hundred captured goblins all wearing adamantine teeth,

or that the PCs can reach a certain objective before a time limit runs out. The cloud giant speaks to them and offers them a substantial amount of riches so they succeed, or maybe even a substantial amount of riches if they voluntarily fail. A cloud giant plummets to earth, having inadvertently entered an anti-magic field while in gaseous form. It's unconscious but alive, and when it comes to, it asks the PCs for help to find the source of the anti-magic field. Or maybe a pumpkin just fell out of a strange hovering cloud and landed in the middle of a city, crushing two buildings, a fountain, and causing an alarming number of deaths. The local regent asks the PCs to quote, take care of it, end quote. So moving on to storm giants. Storm giants are chaotic good.

They have the best ability scores and saving throws of any of the giants. They're immune to electricity damage and in fifth edition are also immune to thunder and resistant to cold. Storm giants can breathe air and water. They also have innate spellcasting like cloud giants do. They can cast chain lightning, control weather, they can levitate, and freedom of movement in 2nd edition. They can fight using their rocks

and their ranged attack roll is lethal for their challenge level, but they are just as deadly in melee with a huge greatsword making sweeping attacks against multiple foes around them. It wouldn't be uncommon to see them wade into a group of PCs to try to take down as many as possible with just a few swings. And if that's not good enough, they also have a lightning strike, that they're immune to the damage from, by the way, that does 12d8 damage in 5th edition. Yowza! Storm Giants, by the way, are different between 5th edition and Pathfinder 2nd edition. In 5e, they are aloof and distant from the world.

They are described as thoughtful seers that live in places far removed from mortal civilization. as thoughtful seers that live in places far removed from mortal civilization. They're benevolent and wise, unless angered, in response to which the fury of a storm giant can affect the fate of thousands. They're described as distant prophet kings and detached oracles, living in cloud-top castles so high that flying dragons look like specks below them. Or they live on mountain peaks that pierce the clouds or maybe even far below the sea in palaces that are covered with algae and coral. Still in 5e, they recall the glory of ancient giant empires forged by the god Anam and they want to see that glory restored. They remain distant watching the starry heavens and the ocean's depths for signs, symbols, and omens of Anam's favor. They have a wide and long-lived perspective, watching empires

rise and fall to natural disasters, hubris, or corruption, and can find the patterns hidden to most mortals. Because of this, they are lore masters and sagacious advisors to those who will seek their aid and risk their wrath, provided they provide proper deference and tribute to the giant. Those that seek their wisdom should speak and act respectfully, however, for Storm Giant roused to anger is a force of utter destruction. Moving to Pathfinder 2e, Storm Giants are generally benevolent stewards of sea and sky. Their mood, however, is as shifting as the weather and the tide. When they're roused to anger, they can cause wide swaths of destruction. One last giant I want to talk about that's unique to

Pathfinder is the rune giant. I love their backstory. Rune Giants were magically crafted and bred by ancient wizards to expressly have power over other giants. They have runes etched, painted, or even carved into their skin that give them the ability to command and magically control other giants. The Rune Giants themselves serve the Rune Lords, an ancient, powerful group of magic users focusing on one particular school of magic above all others, and they ruled the ancient nation of Thassilon. Damn, runelords really need an episode all their own, but I've done a crap ton of Pathfinder lore episodes. You know what, if you're interested in a runelord episode, please let me know because I would love to write it. Rune giants commanded entire armies of giants on behalf of the runelords. In the eons since these empires collapsed, though, rune giants have persisted as a people of their own,

but to most of the outside world, they're little more than fabled horrors, sometimes whispered late at night by superstitious giants. Rune giants usually dwell in the most remote and rugged of towering mountain ranges, but they can also be found in immense ruins atop lost islands, glacial valleys, or even more remote or magical regions. Rune Giants' striking charcoal flesh is decorated by dozens of runes, which are potent manifestations of their eldritch powers. Eldritch powers. Rune Giants are strong and have high constitution like most Giants, but they also have very high mental stats, with a wisdom around 22 and a charisma around 18. They typically wear magical splint mail and wield a magical greatsword and longspear, but per usual, I always recommend specking out smart opponents with weapons and armor that make sense for them. They're immune to fire damage and can cast a ton of different spells. They imbue their weapons with magical abilities and even flash their runes

like headlights to dazzle or blind opponents for a time. As far as adventure ideas for rune giants, they're CL16 creatures and they serve as great big bads for a campaign. Suddenly some lesser giants that had been peaceful to neighboring communities, or at least ignored them, start raiding these civilized lands and come to find out they're being mentally commanded to do so by a rune giant. Or maybe a lone rune giant's looking for another of its kind and asks the PCs to carry a message to the only other rune giant he knows that lives in the next big mountain range.

to the only other rune giant he knows that lives in the next big mountain range. Or maybe two rune giants are quarreling over a mountain village, and the PCs have been asked to protect the town and stop the fighting between the two, through combat or other ways. There are a ton of giants that are referenced in various versions of the game systems that I haven't even touched on. Wood giants, moss giants, ooze giants, slag, jungle, river, ocean, marsh, taiga, fog giants, oni, so many different types of giants that I didn't have time to get to but we're 30 minutes in. Many giant types have cultures all their own,

creating cities, carving them out of ice and snow, and some are little more than brutish baddies. Treat more powerful giants as intelligent, thoughtful opponents that use the terrain and their size to their advantage, and I'll bet you and your players would have fun doing it. I'm going to put a goal out on Patreon this week to try to get the 2023 costs of podcasts paid for. Thank you again for everyone who has donated in the past and kept this podcast alive. I'm planning episodes well into 2023 now and have plans for more interviews, more topics,

and hopefully some good advice that I learned along the way. Tune in next week, by the way, when we'll talk about how to properly scale monsters in 5e and Pathfinder 2e. I've never tried this crunchy of an episode before for my DM and GM brethren out there, so you'll need to tell me if you enjoy these hardcore rule discussions like this.

Once again, I want to thank this week's real honest-to-goodness sponsor, the book Resigned, how to know when it's time to go. Check it out on Amazon.com today. Also, before I go, I want to thank this week's other sponsor, Scarecrows.

Scarecrows really are uptight about a lot of things. They kind of do have a stick up their butt. This has been episode 154, continuing the Monster Series, this time about giants. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game

is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers. best game.