hello everyone today we're talking about Giants they're a big deal in D and D that's the pun uh don't worry there'll be more Giants have such specific lore in DND D but we also have a kind of nice eclectic blend of them as well and uh there's just such such a nice fantasy Trope of that something way bigger than yourself that is kind of like you but not uh tell me about what's new for Giants in D&D we Revisited all of the classic Giants and wanted to make sure that they truly as we did with
every creature in the book hitting for their weight class and that's especially important for these gigantic creatures that are meant to feel Mighty our Giants in 2014 had a particular issue in their design where many of them the moment they used their if they had a ranged attack often they would actually fall off their their challenge rating and in actuality be lower than the listed challenge rating so one of the things that we were very focused on with giants is making sure as we redesigned each of their stat blocks that whether they're hurling Mighty Boulders
or pummeling you up close they are going to truly feel Mighty we also wanted to integrate in more of the elemental feel into each of the giant types I mean when you have fire in your name Frost Stone storm cloud we wanted more of that to come through rather than it existing uh primarily in the story text and so as people uh return to these Giants that have been in the game since the first edition monster manual you're going to see that there really is a lot of storess in the storm giant there there are
truly clouds when the cloud Giant uh frostiness in the frost Giant and so on we really wanted their identities to come fully to life what what is the appeal of giants like what's so exciting about that well I mean one of the awesome things about D and D's Giants is that over 50 years of DN each one of them has really taken on a life of their own an appearance of their own sure these creatures are so rooted in World mythology but T's Giants aren't like any other giants like for example the cloud Giants have
always going back to first edition had like fangs so like these are elements that like little neat things that we wanted to pick up that you're going to see in the art but also an evolution of the way that they've been presented and things that make sense for these creatures that live in such specific uh environments biom so on and so forth like for example one of the things that I absolutely love is the new new art for the Stone Giant we've always seen them as these tall gray humanoid figures but not all stone is
gray so we really wanted to like take something that was fundamental to the stone giants and show some of the variations so now when you have stone giants that are in their natural environment you can see that they're they have the potential to blend in with that specific environment which means that you might have like the stone Giants that you see depicted in the monster manual with these like Limestone striations running through them just to show some of the things that you can do with these these Giants to make them feel more specific to an
environment or your campaign yeah I also I've always loved Dean D's Giants are so different than what you would see in like a movie or different stories is because they're so specific like the way the stone giants see the world they see the outside world outside their cave as the dreaming elements like that make me so happy uh you know cloud tend to be a little bit more trixy D and D's Giants also as you know when you go to the the earliest days of the DND Multiverse Giants and Dragons had a famous rivalry and
they map to different elements just as particularly the chromatic dragons do right and so the the DN Giants feel like distant mythological cousins to D and D's dragons and indeed they spent the early days of the Multiverse Waring with each other and Giants also represent in many ways a hold over of A Lost Civilization this is something that we explore in Big B presents glory of the Giants of you know they were they were once the prominent peoples on many DND worlds and have retreated to their various reclusive uh environments and you know perhaps they
will rise again uh or perhaps these these Titanic people will continue to be strangely inconspicuous and i' I've kind of I've always loved that dichotomy of D and D Giants of the tallest the tallest people are the ones you are the ones you often are least likely to meet uh and part of that is you know after millenni of wars and their civilizations falling they have almost retired to sort of tend to their wounds get their energy back so I as a dungeon master in particular often view Giants as those ones like keep an eye
on them you know either they might be up in their cloud castle or in the ocean or deep in a volcano and seem to be keeping to themselves but just be careful because as as we explore in the adventure storm Kings Thunder when they do Rouse themselves when they do suddenly reappear on the world stage the Earth literally shakes and so they are they are creatures that it's like don't don't ignore them for too long uh and they might show up as a great Ally uh but they could also show up as one of your
most dreaded foes now it's not just the typical giant that you find the Giants like you know the storm giant Stone Giant Hill giant but we also have other other creatures like the Eden as part of this the two-headed giant um we've got Cyclops and we've got more than one uh same thing with the ogre we have more than one ogre in here and troll we have more than one troll can you tell me a little bit about these so we uh as as we have with some of the other groups in the book we
looked for opportunities for expanding the family and so as you mentioned one of the little families we expanded was the Cyclops family uh we already had in the 2014 Monster manual kind of a a Bruiser Cyclops uh in the in the story for the Cyclops we talked that some of them have you know the powers of of soothsayers you know they can see the future they have divinatory magic and we wanted to actually bring that more into the monster manual and so we introduced a spellcasting uh Cyclops to be a companion to the more Bruiser
Cyclops and now that means with those two a DM can sort of create this uh Dynamic of you know the Cyclops who you know with their single eye is peering into the future while another with their single eye is very singularly hunting you down or perhaps standing beside you uh in battle against some greater foe it was also an opportunity with the Cyclops to help distinguish them from Hill Giants which are very close in CR and are another example of just like it's a big guy they often have a club they're coming after you giving
the cyclopses a little more of those oracular abilities some really fun ways to like play even with the dice to make it feel like they like that they know what's coming really helps give them their own place and make them feel like their own Critters feels like a little bit of a crawl reference or is it older than that that that that concept of Cyclops being able to see into the future that it's older than that yeah okay I I figured it probably was yeah CR basically we and croll were dipping into the same mythological
cauldron fig yeah I didn't think that would be unique to Kow though I love Kow and Lam n's very small part in that uh we have the new ogre what is this ogre about the ogre we made sure this was is one of the creatures the ogre is still just very much doing what an ogre needs to do which is in many ways be a giant lump of hit points that hits you for a big lump of damage and that is the ogre continues to do the ogre's job um really are we viewed the ogre
as many in many ways your intro giant uh because in most D and campaigns the first member of the Giant you meet is the and we preserved the ogre Simplicity but then also uh wanted to make sure we were differentiating the other Giants more from the yogurt because when we were evaluating the 2014 Giant family we felt that Not only was the Cyclops too close to the hill giant but the hill giant was too close to the ogre and so where you're going to really see new differentiation is especially in the hill Giant and in
the Cyclops uh because the hill giant Now isn't just a bigger ogre uh but is smashing you with a tree uh and is lobbing trash I will say with air quotes that can poison you and we will leave it up to the DM to describe whatp of trash what is the hill giant Hill giant throwing there a lot of disc discussion about this in like the late days of putting this book together great great poo throwing ogre I mean no one said that no one said that no one said that no one said that uh
has there been changes to the forming speaking of Cyclops like creatures yeah so the fian got not only the mathematical tuneup that all of our Giants got ensuring again that they are they are as as reded as they should be for their CR but we also uh we did some tinkering with their hexing ability and so you're going to see that they feel even more sort of magical than they did before uh because they were another one that we needed to differentiate from the ogre the hill Giant and the Cyclops uh because they also uh
before were just sort of a bruis with a Twist and so what we did is we just we made sure there were a few more twists the formans were also a creature where narratively they've always had this story where in the past they've create they've participated in some crime and they've been cursed by Anam the the father of the Giants um but what form that curse has taken whether it's their current shape or or whether it's other elements um we wanted to play with that in make it a little more magical and frankly a little
grosser and a little more up to particular DM so you can have for morans that are suffering from a uh from a variety of curses so there's even a little table in there now of how are your uh fomorians cursed with things like colorful wandering pules or patches of wriggling hair like unnatural things that hope set DMS down some uh particularly grotesque paths perfect disgusting I always enjoy Edens I always like myself a good Eden so that's always a fun thing to play with uh troll limb is in this yes so I have questions in
in the in the 2014 Monster manual we had an option uh the loathsome limb option that was a call back to the original inspiration for the troll in D and D which is the troll in the novel three hearts and three lions and what we decided this time is to take that loathsome limb option and integrate it directly into the troll and so now what that means is there's a chance that when you're fighting a troll you will Lop off a piece of the troll and we now have a complete stat block for troll pieces
it's just called troll l limb that can be used to represent various parts of the troll that are getting lopped off and then this troll limb has the chance of then regenerating into more full-size trolls so we've really leaned hard into the core horror of the troll uh which again comes from the creatures original inspiration you know me I'm trying to think of how to farm it already like just cutting off troll limbs growing new trolls troll burgers troll steak it's just like the dead head tree from Ben Ron's guy like it's easy Lumber this
is good like troll hot dogs is an easy win I I'm I'm not sure you want to eat meat that regenerates yes it may birth yes that that that can because as you will see with the troll limb that you know given enough time it could turn into a full-size troll I'm I'm always really excited especially with with de Beyond it makes it so easy to look through all these different types of monsters but my only issue is with the Giants because of the online trolls oh my God I didn't get my protective spell up
in time again you got to get that Shield up I know yeah your reaction was slow it was too slow yeah y I was very proud of that psychic damage again I have a wife who loves me very much cuz I test these I look for the worst look so now I know I need to go to her to War what he going to say so we can get our we can get we can get our abjuration up in I feel like we're not going to get a lot of sympathy well that was Giants uh
giant yeah always a soft Spar my heart for all things Giants and I I I do like it feels like they're very much more in tuned even with with the Goliath as much as the G are more in tune with what these giant types are now it feels all more connected and more holistic I like it I love it thank you so much for watching this video we will have a ton more videos all about the different monsters in the new monster manual you can purchase the brand new monster manual and all three of the
core 2024 core Rule books by clicking on the link in this video description I'm to kenrik thank you so much for watching
