The latest offering for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, is a surprisingly applicable education in underappreciated creatures.
While a massive number of players are currently embroiled in everything Baldur’s Gate 3 has to offer, the tabletop RPG that powers its gameplay has kicked off a busy fall season of publications with a sourcebook that took me by surprise—no small feat, given the size of the creatures it highlights.
Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants falls into the category of RPG supplements that drills down into a particular archetype. When I got into Dungeons & Dragons around 2011, in the days of Fourth Edition, these were the sort of books that really piqued my interest at first. Tomes like the Draconomicon or Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead were fascinating because they introduced so many options and variations on their given theme.
Fifth Edition has avoided focusing on these type-specific guides as much as the last edition, opting for more setting books and premade campaigns. In 2021 we got the token dragon-centric offering, Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons, and now Wizards turns our attention to a less likely well of inspiration: giants.
Before cracking Glory of the Giants‘ spine, I was largely unaware of giants’ role in the larger pantheon of Dungeons & Dragons creatures. The introductory chapter was illuminating, relating the overarching lore behind giantkind and the hierarchy of their variants, as well as their places in prominent D&D settings like the Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance.
The first chapter introduces a subclass for Barbarians who want to channel their inner Reed Richards or Kamala Khan and embiggen themselves while raging. Other characters can find ways to tie giant heritage into their backstories with background and feat options. For instance, the intriguing Rune Carver origin offers the Rune Shaper feat, allowing access to certain useful spells. Martial classes, meanwhile, can hit with the force (and magic) of elemental giants if they choose.
In chapter 2, Dungeon Masters will start tapping into Glory of the Giants‘ vast hoard of adventure hook tables. These charts pepper the rest of the book, facilitating the generation of settlements, NPC temperaments, encounter groups, the contents of certain giants’ pouches, and much more. Most of these ideas give a DM just enough to work with, sparking the story engine. This refined approach is ideal for a quick reference, and as we move toward next year’s rules update, I’d like to see more of it.
In the same vein, the fourth chapter details some of the environments where players might encounter the different versions of giants and other associated creatures. Again, Glory of the Giants presents a subtle shift in design philosophies here with the environmental maps. Fifth Edition’s sourcebooks have featured some beautiful maps, but the somewhat scaled-back aesthetic employed here has broader applications and is easier to adapt to one’s own campaigns.
After a quick stop for the requisite chapter of loot tables and magic items, Glory of the Giants devotes the last third of its pages to a surprisingly diverse bestiary. This was the aspect that seemed less applicable to me beforehand, but I was once again pleasantly surprised to see the assortment of monsters detailed.
Yes, a lot of the stat blocks are “[insert element here] giant,” but they also detail the other kind of giants—those that are literally classified as capital-G “Giants” by creature type. So, you’ll find offshoots of the giant races like fomorians, ogres, and firbolgs, to the newly introduced death giants, to a variety of slime monster that dwells in giants’ coin purses, to gargantuan crabs, to… straight-up dinosaurs. The cycle of multi-phase “Scions of Giants’ Gods”—one for each main genus of giant, encountered first in a cocoon-like state then as a full endboss-level threat—was particularly inspiring to me.
At 192 pages and a new, slightly higher MSRP, Glory of the Giants does feel a little thin. However, it proved to be an intriguing source of inspiration. I put the book down with a dozen ideas for an upcoming campaign and a new appreciation for another corner of the lore—what more can a DM ask for from a sourcebook? Once again, there are subtle signs of where Dungeons & Dragons may be headed for the “One D&D” update next year, and they’re promising.
