D&D: ‘Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants’ – First Impressions
Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants is out now. With new feats, a new subclass, and a whole lot of lore, here are our first impressions.
Giants loom large in D&D’s latest book, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. This 192-page book contains Giant and Giant accessories. While it’s a bit thin on player-facing options, with just one new subclass, two backgrounds, and a handful of feats, it offers DMs several new takes on how giants might fit into their worlds.
The book does feel like it’s aimed much more at DMs. With pages of lore and lairs and 71 new monster stat blocks, as well as a giant-sized handful of new magic items, there’s a lot for DMs to play around with. And there’s a distinct “mythological” feel that pervades the new lore entries and monsters.
These aren’t just Giants, they’re the beings that could potentially be holding up the pillars of the world. It’s up to you to figure out if that’s true, though.
Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants – Wide Lore, But Bring Your Own Depth
This book is all about Giants, and it does them a great service by offering the DM and players tools to contextualize them in their own campaign worlds. If you’ve played through Storm King’s Thunder, you know all about the Ordning and its role as the hierarchy that most giants live their lives by.
Bigby’s doesn’t retread that old ground, but instead offers a look at the many facets of giant life. Everything from giant religion to their ancient history gets touched on in the book. Though reading through, it’s clear the book is trying to thread a very difficult needle set up by D&D’s move away from a single campaign setting.
With the advent of One D&D, and WotC’s desire to make D&D into its own “multiverse” that can easily support a ton of movie and TV tie-ins, as well as big adventures and metaplots (lookin’ at you Vecna 2024), suddenly all choices have to be possible. Everything needs to be open. Which isn’t bad.
But that approach does, at times, weaken this book’s goal of being “the definitive lore for giants.” Take this passage about the Giant’s All-Father, Annam from Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants.
Annam is a complicated figure, depicted in a variety of ways in myths told across countless worlds of the Material Plane. In some myths, he is the creator of worlds, and other gods merely populated the worlds Annam made with peoples of their own creation. In other myths Annam worked with other gods to create worlds together. Diancastra’s Saga, told in part in the introduction to this book describes Annam gathering the shattered fragments of the First World and spreading them across the Material Plane.
It’s up to the DM to decide what is actually the case. Which is what most DMs would do anyway, but there’s less of a jumping-off point. Similarly, talking about ancient giants’ role in the world, there are plenty of options, none of which is a “canon interpretation”. But for DMs looking to get different kinds of inspiration, there’s a plethora to pick from.
The writing is lovely. You can get lost in it. There are a lot of story seeds waiting to take hold and inspire you. And with the new adventure design tools, it’s easier to play with them—but it does mean the burden of blazing that trail is shouldered a little more heavily onto the DM.
Lots of Adventure Tools
One thing the book does pretty well though is provide DMs with tools for creating adventures on the fly. And for situating giants in their own campaigns. While it’s true that there’s no “one true interpretation” there’s a lot of more “active lore” for DMs to play with in the form of tools and tables for building communities of giants or seeding adventure ideas with giant-sized plot hooks.
There are adventure seeds for dealing with the gods, for dealing with the various social structures of the giants, for uncovering the magical runes that giants use to tap into the magic of the cosmos itself. The list goes on.
And with 71 new monsters, there’s a wide range of tools to pick from. We’ve talked a little about how this book presents climactic “boss fight” style monsters in a challenging new way (you actually fight two, back to back), though there’s still room to grow there.
Giant Tools For Normal-Sized Players
What about players though? Many were comparing this book to Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons. And there the comparison is unfortunate because there’s just not as much for players in this book. Not only is it 192 pages compared to Fizban’s 224, but there’s less there. Where Fizban’s had new subspecies for Dragonborn, as well as two new subclasses, and a host of feats, there’s just the one for Barbarians.
And as far as that goes, the Path of the Giant is an interesting one, for sure. It fixes thrown weapons and Barbarians, though this feels like it should just be an errata, and gives them some new toys to play with.
Outside of that, there’s a handful of feats, which do explore some interesting design territory. They’re honestly one of the best things about the new book. And I hope that WotC keeps exploring with feat trees like this. They’re an interesting way to expand on what your character can do without taking a whole new class or subclass.
And here one feels the sting of Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants being the first book released post-WotC price-hike. Players have noted they’re paying more for less. This book is priced at $69.95 compared to Fizban’s original price of $49.95. And that may be a hard pill for some to swallow.
Still, in the end, the book is fun, and if you’re looking for new monsters or new ways to use giants in your campaign, might be worth checking out.
Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants is out now!
