Giants in Two Adventures

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Giants in mythology are strength incarnate. They are you, but beefier. You cannot defeat them. Goliath is an enormous man, as strong as an army. If Goliath is in a straight fight, Goliath is going to win it. They might be clever, too, but cleverness is not their defining feature (rather, it’s often their downfall). Fighting a giant is nothing like fighting a lich or a dragon. They don’t have fancy spells or flaming breath to make things interesting. It’s more like standing up to a cavalry charge, or an elephant. It’s ridiculous. It’s overwhelming. Suddenly you are faced with the awful reality that you are really damn small, and size turns out to matter a lot. Nobody would blame you if you ran away at this point. Historically, many have. 

In many RPGs, fighting a giant doesn’t go like that. You roll initiative, the giant rolls initiative, and you start beating each other up. The one who runs out of hit points first loses. It’s a problem I’ve heard quite a few game masters bring up: you want to drive home the fact that a giant is… well, gigantic. Instead, it ends up coming across like a human with way too many hit points. Dael Kingsmill brought it up again recently in her video on out fi-fo-fumming friends. Watching that made me think of the giants in my games - they’ve been coming up a lot lately. In my bi-weekly game, the players answered a duke’s call to slay a giant that had been terrorising the countryside. They knew they had to prepare, and set out to find the monster with a plan in mind. I also run the occasional session for two friends where they try to navigate the inhospitable terrain of elven society. They were 1st level when they ran into a stone giant - hardly in any shape to stand up to it, so they had to find another way around the hulking rock-man. We’re talking about the first scenario today, and we’ll get back to the second in the sequel.

Aggenar Beinderbrecher

I knew my bi-weekly group was going to fight a giant well before they actually met it. They were prisoners being brought to the local duke to be judged for a crime one of them had committed. Imprisoned with them was a local folk hero. The peasantry wasn’t just going to sit by and watch their defender be carted off to the executioner’s block. They got their strongest men and women together and prepared an ambush. Flails were weaponised, pitchforks were sharpened… it was hopeless. The five of them couldn’t face the city guard and expect to live! Not without backup. They contacted a giant who lived nearby - a tyrant by the name of Aggenar Beinderbrecher. They’d heard the stories of his rampages through the countryside, and knew he was fond of hoarding treasures, so they offered him one. “There is a cave, filled with piles of gold. We’ll tell you where if you help us waylay some travelers” Aggenar accepted, and so the ambush-party was complete. 

It was a good setup for an encounter. Aggenar knew whom he was not supposed to attack. Cruel as he was, though, he would make sure to polymorph everyone else into bloody pulp with his fists and feet. That included the players. All sense of restraint would go out the window when Aggenar discovered the peasants were lying, of course. There was no cave. There was no gold. 

I wanted Aggenar to be a truly terrifying threat. This was a giant who had terrorised the Çlajën duchy for years. To live up to that backstory, he’d have to be more than a big bag of hit points. I remembered seeing a video by shadiversity on the equipment a giant would use. He mentions a giant could wear really REALLY resilient armour. A human can only wrap themselves in so many inches of padding before it begins to impede their movement, but giants have greater strength and a lot more surface area. Scale the thickness of your gambeson up to match the giant’s proportions, and you get a suit of armour that’s pretty much invincible to the swords and axes of your average adventuring party. They’re going to need to find ways to get around his defences. To spice up the encounter using this fact and some additional powers, I put together 

 Emma’s 5 Truths of Fighting Aggenar Beinderbrecher:

1. Aggenar is immune to bludgeoning, piercing, slashing, and most other damage. It just won’t get all the way through his armour. He’s clad in protective gear from head to toe - there’s no way to get a sword through the gaps initially.

2. Aggenar hates fire and acid. Both burn straight through his armour. Think of all the hard work that went into it! He takes increased damage from both sources. Every time you deal fire damage or acid damage to Aggenar, you wear his armour down. The GM increases a secret counter. When the counter reaches an arbitrary number (I used 5), Aggenar’s armour is severely damaged. He loses all damage immunities it gave him.

3. There are probably other ways to damage him. I originally called this rule “Aggenar does not wear a gas mask.” Some things break the giant’s invulnerability. If Aggenar falls off a cliff, he is not resistant to bludgeoning damage that the fall deals. (In fact, he explodes). If you cast magic at him, the nature of the spell determines whether or not it can get through. Missiles of magical energy might bounce off just as harmlessly as an arrow. A poisonous gas, however, is going to choke him like any other animal. If your spell targets the soul or the mind, a few layers of fabric won’t stop it one bit! 

4. He will kill you before you find them. My bi-weekly group plays 5e. They are 2nd level. Aggenar is a CR12 Frost Giant. He hits hard. This guy deals enough damage to bring the average PC to 0 hit points in one round with a decent damage roll. You need to control him or outnumber him if you want to stand a chance. Having a way to bring PCs back from the brink during combat also helps. If you play a system where 0HP means dead, consider adjusting this rule a bit.

5. Aggenar can regenerate. The meaning of this rule is two-fold. On a long term, Aggenar can repair his armour. Or rather, the family of armourers he enslaved can. He keeps them in his cave, and lugs them around in a sack when he goes on expeditions. If he escapes a confrontation with the players, he’ll come back all shiny. Unless the players find him again shortly after, of course. He’ll try to avoid confrontations while his armour is being repaired, but that stuff takes time.

On the short term, Aggenar can regenerate hit points. This was not in my original design. It was a figment of the Frost Giant template I was using, which was specifically for a giant that had eaten a troll, but it worked so well I’m including it here. Aggenar can’t regenerate if he has taken fire or acid damage since his last turn, so the players needed to control his movements and coordinate their actions to keep him consistently aflame. Maybe, in your setting, giants eat trolls as a ritual of adulthood - consume your lesser cousins to assert yourself as the dominant species. Giants in my setting are practically everlasting gods-that-walk-the-earth. I’m considering making regeneration an ability they all share, an explanation for their long lifespans. Still, I think the other 4 rules are interesting in their own right without this one.


Aggenar came crashing out of the forest halfway through the battle. I made sure to foreshadow his arrival all the way from the first round, and the players spent the initial half of combat mostly trying to figure out what tree-breaking thing was approaching them so rapidly. They had a bit of an “oh shit” moment when they discovered the enormous man was invulnerable to their weapons, but they figured out his weaknesses quite quickly. Someone Banished the giant to a different plane of existence, allowing everyone to escape, but they saw him reappear in the distance after a few minutes of travel. They crept away quietly, escaping his notice for now. 

Later, the players were present as duke Volker von Çlajën placed a bounty on Aggenar’s head, finally tired of the damage the giant had done. They could use some money, and they thought they knew how to kill him. Well-equipped, they set out to become heroes.

Giantslayers on the Prowl

The slaying of Aggenar Beinderbrecher commenced thusly… 
Our five heroes have tracked the giant to his lair. They are:

1. Baroness Giseha von Skozig, an orcish fighter. She hates monsters that terrorise the Good People even more than she hates heathens. Probably. We haven’t asked her.

2. Bubbles, a half-djinn alchemist. She mostly wants to kill the giant because its insides seem fascinating to study. Also her friends really want to kill it, and she’ll gladly help.

3. Giggle, once a fugitive from the crown. She is a hyena-folk barbarian, and her barbaric rage takes the form of blood-frenzied laughter. Lady Giseha oversees her service as the king’s ward now. The whole situation is very political and too much to get into here.  

4. Orpheus, servant of something deep below. Nobody knows exactly why he’s here, but he serves lady Giseha dutifully. 

5. Vyluni, the party’s spiritual advisor. She has no magic, but her first-estate education benefits everyone’s physical and spiritual health (although some would deny this).

The battlefield is a clearing at the foot of a chalky cliff. A waterfall hides the entrance to Aggenar’s lair, and shrubs dot the meadow. Bubbles speaks to the waterfall and compels it to move aside slightly. It obeys, revealing a hulking humanoid shadow deeper in the cave. Orpheus peeks over her shoulder. Someone shouts from a bush: “Milord, they are here!” A man covered in dirt, too much hair, and ragged clothes. This is one of Aggenar’s armourers, posted as a guard. Aggenar bursts through the waterfall, surprising most of the party. Bubbles dives out of the giant’s path, but Orpheus is smacked into the cliff face by his club. Aggenar smashes him into the wall a second time, but it was unnecessary - Orpheus had already gone limp. Bubbles covers the grass between her foe’s feet in lamp oil, and the others set it alight. Aggenar beats around himself furiously, and hits Sister Vyluni. She goes down. Giseha rushes to her side and tries to stop the bleeding. Well away from the fight, we see Aggenar’s servant pour a dark red potion into Orpheus’ mouth. 

Giggle looks at the giant’s slitted helmet and has a Bad Idea. She grins. Vyluni opens her eyes again to watch in horror as the barbarian wades into the burning oil and begins to scale the giant. She’s still grinning when she reaches the top, or maybe it just looks like that, because she is clamping a flask of oil between her teeth. She reaches Aggenar’s helmet, and pours the contents of the flask down the visor. He is rather unhappy with this development, as the flames now begin to spread to his chest. Vyluni sits up and fires a crossbow bolt at him. A vial of acid is tied to the quarrel, and it begins to dissolve a patch of fabric upon impact. Orpheus gets up, healed by the magical potion he was given, and engages in rather late retaliation. His blade turns radioactive and burns straight through cloth and leather. 

Aggenar’s armour is broken. He is low on health. He decides to flee through the waterfall, which will douse him and allow his regeneration ability to kick in. Giseha discerns his intentions and sprinkles caltrops in his path. His boots are now so torn that they don’t protect his soles anymore. The caltrops stop Aggenar in his tracks. He can’t move anymore on this turn, but he uses the time to make a rock-throw attack. There are no big rocks nearby, but there is a hyena-folk sitting on the giant’s shoulder. He slam-dunks Giggle right onto lady Giseha, and the two collide with terrible force. Giseha has only 1 hit point remaining. Giggle’s frenzy was able to break her fall, so she’s still kind of alright. She rights herself, picks up her glaive, and laughs as she saws Aggenar’s hamstring in twain. He howls in pain as he keels over backwards - right back into the burning oil. He immediately crawls out, spasming and panicking, but Giggle holds him back with her glaive. Lady Giseha approaches, her face a mask of grim determination, and executes the giant. Her blade severs an artery in his neck, and he stops moving in seconds. Aggenar Beinderbrecher lies dead. 


I was quite pleased with this outcome. The players brought plenty of fire and acid, having earlier discovered the giant’s weakness. They planned well, and improvised better. Giseha’s player loved using the caltrops - finally they were useful for something! The moment where Giggle scaled Aggenar was very Shadow of the Colossus. I’d say that’s about as good as these encounters get.


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