I ran across this blog post describing a campaign concept called “The Book of Giants”, of Nephilim and witch-wives and a world populated with dangerous giants. I like it; I once wrote a Living Greyhawk scenario called “Giants In The Earth” so I am familiar with the source myth.
I had actually been mulling over a new campaign with giants as the primary opponent and predominant/ruling populace. My concept has a little less angel witch sex but I think it still has legs. I like constraining campaigns to focus on a set of concepts – sure, PCs can’t play any crazy option they can think of, but they also have a much better idea of what’s going to come up so they can pick options that would have a guaranteed chance to shine. Let’s see what you think!
Campaign Concept
All civilized lands are ruled by the titans, who style themselves the gods that walk the earth. (They were the children of the gods, and rebelled against them and they are all now destroyed or hidden away or forgotten.) Their empires are inhabited by all sorts of giants as the primary populace. Humans are simply a slave race to the giants and are lesser beings that live in their shadow. They are used for labor, crafts, entertainment, and so on; not taken seriously as a threat. The tech level and society is most analogous to ancient Greece with the titans considering themselves the Olympians.
The first plot arc is to survive servitude and get free. Naturally the giants delegate down tasks like slave wrangling to the smaller giants, but even a hill giant for a group of first level humans is an intractable opponent. They have to build up arms caches, make plans, and take advantage of the giants’ complacency and hubris to make their escape.
Then the second plot arc is to go find places to hide and allies. There’s a couple major factions to join up with that lurk in places inaccessible to the giants. First, escapees living in the thick forests. There’s a cabal of mages here that consider themselves in charge, and of course a bunch of druids and rangers and fae. They focus on rediscovering ancient magic as the way to gain enough power to survive and thrive and try to teach as many people magic as possible. Second, underground caves with dwarves and artificers where there’s a lot of building golems and automatons to be able to fight for you. Most humans haven’t seen a dwarf up till now; they refuse to live as slaves and either fight or just sit down and die so they’re not seen in giant lands.
The third plot arc, of course, is to take the fight to the giants and free humanity – at first guerilla style and then as levels rise and armies assemble, direct action.
There’s no other humanoids – humans *are* the humanoids and giants are the humans, effectively. Every giant animal and insect in the books are the primary threat; they’re everywhere as the ecology is scaled to giant size. While there are umber hulks and some other aberrations underground the focus is really on giant animals/magical beasts, there’s no outsiders or undead (except for some run by a hag coven with three nightspawn that operate in the mountains). This allows PCs to not have to worry about a large number of opponent types to focus on the campaign thematic ones. It won’t get boring, there are 30+ types of true giants in Pathfinder and so, so many animals that are either giant or dire already or can be quickly made so. (This has the bonus of some real live zoology learning for everyone.)
Religion is banned by the giants, but a priestess has rediscovered a lost god of the humans, a couatl type deity, making PC worship effectively monotheistic. There’s no “churches,” it’s more of a hidden and evangelistic enterprise among the humans, focusing a bit on the liberation theology angle.
While you can make heavy armor in the later game, the nature of the world strongly prefers light, mobile, ranged, and hit-and-run type combat against an inevitably larger and stronger foe. While some folks can learn and steal wizard type magic from the giants, sorcerers are more common at lower levels, and then as levels increase people can learn magic from the wizard cabal or the fae.
Now, I’m torn as to whether this is enough – I also have the idea for a larger destabilizing force, an ethereal invasion of xill that is converting some of the landscape to wasteland. This would distract the giants with a larger threat to allow the alliance of human rebel groups to grow. Living plants and certain metals would be proof against ethereal travel so the humans could protect themselves to some degree, though once they venture forth, the terrifying sudden appearance of an ethereal murder machine would become a common threat. This would add a weirder layer to the campaign so it’s not just giants and animals and rebels.
Thoughts welcome – does it sound fun as a player? I know PCs don’t like being captives, but I am hoping that if starting as a slave is clearly part of the premise and getting free is the whole point, it could be a cool vibe people could get into…
Geek Related 