Giant

This article related to Dungeons & Dragons is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it

In general a guy who is somewhat larger than average by means besides obesity is stronger than a normal sized human and more dangerous in a scrap, either unarmed or armed with melee weapons. On the same note larger animals are more dangerous individually than smaller animals. Really tall humans that are more than 2 meters tall usually have major health concerns, which get more and more pronounced as height increases. Individuals more than 2.3 meters tall often have to walk with canes. Never the less, these fine details of medicine were not well known in the Bronze Age and people loved to embellish and embellish on embellishments in storytelling. As such it is little surprise that Giants, people who are of a much greater scale than normal Humans, are so common in mythology.

Mythological Giants

The Cyclopes are a type of giants from Greek mythology which have one eye (hence the name). The first ones were mighty proto-deities who forged the weapons of the gods in their war against the titans. Later ones were inbred hillbilly shepherds on a islands in the Aegean. One of them, Polyphemus, was a son of Poseidon, and had a famous run-in with Odysseus.

Norse giants, meanwhile, are the embodiments of powerful elemental forces. From the frost giants of Niflheim, to the fire giants of Muspelheim, the giants fought, slept with, and occasionally married the Norse pantheon as part of the endless struggle of civilization against nature. Notably, Loki, the trickster, was a giant sworn as Odin's brother and ally. And, of course, all creation ultimately ends in a final mighty battle between giants and gods, Ragnarok, in which the fire giant king Surtr ultimately emerges triumphant and burns all of Yggdrasil to a cinder.

Finally, there are the giants of Medieval Europe. Some were stupid, savage brutes, threats to knightly adventurers because of their incredible strength, while others were sophisticated beings that lived in the clouds, though no less evil. Both liked their human flesh, though the smarter ones cooked it first.

Giants in D&D

In Dungeons and Dragons "giant" can designate a subtype of monsters going from trolls, ogres and various Oni all the way up to the "true" giants. They draw from all of the mythologies above, by designating various types of (Whatever) Giant to split them based on habitat. Certain types of giants live in certain areas or have special abilties. For example, the Forest, Frost, Hill, Jungle, Mountain and Ocean Giants all live from where you expect them to. In one cases this is less clear (Fog, Stone and Sun Giants) or almost impossible to tell (Death and Eldritch Giants). Between the books there are often dozens of different giants available, with 3.5e having a staggering 22 different types of "true" giants and a host of others with the creature type.

The six "classic" flavors of giant (the most common ones, the way there're five "classic" colors of chromatic and metallic dragon each) are, arranged according to size:

• Hill giants; savage, stupid monsters who attack other races to sate their immense appetites
• Fire giants; militaristic, heavily-armored soldiers who act kind of like big, evil dwarves, with their mastery of smithwork and penchant for slavery
• Stone giants; master artisans who live underground quietly keeping to themselves, and are much faster than they look
• Frost giants; Norse-inspired raiders who live in the frozen north, taming huge monsters to accompany them on their quest for plunder
• Cloud giants; who live in sky-castles, have magical powers, and tend to be witty sophisticates, notable for their ideological split between those who're Good-aligned and Evil-aligned
• Storm giants; benevolent but distant sages who are experts at seeing into the future, and have not only even moar magical powers but the ability to chuck bolts of fucking lightning at things that annoy them

Giants tend to be in the mid to high range of monsters, starting as early as CR 7 for the Hill Giant all the way up to 26 for the Mountain Giant, and that's pre-class levels. Giants are very much a mixed bag, being anywhere on the range from bullies to militant assholes to dicks sitting in the clouds and doing nothing. This can make them decent enemies, aloof sages, or a nice way to make players feel like they're hot shit before delivering the smackdown. Like dragons, each of their subraces tends to have a "racial alignment" to them.

They are often of the Large or Huge size categories and are all experts at the art of throwing boulder, which do a shitload of damage thanks to their immense size. Most settings have them as remnants of an ancient giant empire that has since slipped into sad decline, and they tend to be bitter rivals of dragons. Notably, even when they have ideological/alignment-based disagreements, giants tend to get along among themselves, with bigger giants looking after smaller ones and smaller ones in turn mostly doing what bigger ones say.

A 5e module, Storm King's Thunder, is heavily giant-centric, and has put them into the spotlight after years in the margins.

Giants in modern fantasy

In A Song of Ice and Fire, giants are huge hairy dim witted hominids about three to four meters tall that live north of the wall. Even so thats peanuts by the standards of most giants.