Ogres and Giants and Trolls ... Oh My!

Pretty much every FRPG treats their ogres, giants and trolls differently.  In some cases, the giants turn into 20’ tall beings.  In some they are 40’ tall.  And there are even some where the giants can be over 100’ tall.  While I find it funny in a cute cartoon when the giant rolls into town eating an entire wagonload of pumpkins and using a cottage as a stool, I don’t think that is useful in a FRPG.  Why?  Because if the giant is twenty times bigger than the PCs, then a sword turns into bee sting, and unless you’re allergic, you cannot die from bee stings.

In Legend Quest, we do things differently than in other games, but as we’ve just suggested, we think that’s actually pretty normal.  While we do include orcs, a thoroughly Tolkien race, for most other races, we try to adhere more closely to what we consider to be the original myths and tales.  Often that means we are trying to follow Norse mythology.  Why?  Mainly because it’s one that we know reasonably well.  Hey, play to your strengths!

What do we mean?  Well, dwarves and trolls are related.  Dwarves are considered the “normal” sized ones, and the trolls are giant dwarves.  Every racial group has different sized folk.  Among the Race of Men, halflings are the small fries, humans are “normal” (completely subjective, we know), and giants are the giant sized ones.  You don’t have to agree with us, at least not yet, but this should be pretty easy to understand.  Among the goblins, goblins are little, orcs normal, and ogres giant.  The firbolgs and formorians are the giant elves (actually giant kobolds, but they are all related, so let’s not open that can of worms right now).

But what does “giant” mean?  Well the giants are 8’-10’ tall and weigh up to 600ish lbs.  Ogres are a little shorter at 7’6”-9’ and weighing in around 400-500lbs.  Trolls are right on par with the giants, despite their stockier appearance.  The giants really are the physically superior race, though even they cannot compete with the titans who are 10’-12’ tall, can weigh up to 1,200lbs and are not only physically vastly stronger than any of the others, but also mentally better.

OK, but what’s the big deal?  By making the giants only a couple of feet taller than the humans, they can be a serious threat without being impossible to kill, or at least impossible in reality but not in the game rules.  Even the titans at twice the height of a human would still see a long sword as a threat.  That cannot be said for a giant that would be in excess of 40’ tall.

So for once, we’re not criticizing that original die-20 game!  That’s unusual!  But let’s look at their portrayal of these guys for a moment.  They have many races of giants, which to most inspections appear to follow the Norse myths.  Why do we have such a different opinion?  Because to the writers of Legend Quest and Fletnern, the fire giants and frost giants weren’t mortal creatures.  They were the inhabitants of other worlds, worlds that we see as primarily “hells”.  So while we do have “giants” that are mortal and dwell alongside humans, the “fire giants, frost giants, and storm giants” are more like angels, or demons.  Point of fact, they often find their way into Fletnern campaigns not as “giants” but instead as elementals - elemental spirits who take on the form of giant-sized humans in order to make themselves known to the mortals.  (This also makes them quite magical, literally.)

We can admit that elves, dwarves, and a whole bunch of other creatures in myth and legend are also immortal or in some manner other worldly, so we seem to be a bit hypocritical.  We’re not trying to argue both sides of the argument, just saying what worked for us.

In so many games, the trolls have now become rubbery skinned, regenerating monsters.  I forget which author wrote his trolls that way, but it certainly wasn’t Tolkien.  His turned to stone in the sunlight.  Without any malice towards other games, we have our trolls as giant dwarves.  It helps the history.

Their ogres are sized more closely to our giants but weigh quite a bit more.  Our problem with them is that they are just so stupid.  Stupid doesn’t survive in the world, no matter how big it might be.  OK, it can survive if it can breed to huge numbers, but it doesn’t survive as a predator.  The way they are treated (and hill giants too), they really don’t have a right to exist.  Why didn’t some crusade wipe them out centuries ago?  After all, a well-organized army with archers and siege weapons (not to mention magic) should be able to destroy all the ogres that exist.  It’s not like an intelligent ogre general is going to rise from those ranks and lead them as a united force.  They are too stupid and evil to band together, even in the face of annihilation.

How much of this matters?  Well, if you have giants that are 50’+ tall - how do they function in the world?  How do they gather enough food to survive?  They almost have to be loners.  They cannot effectively be killed by humans, and that type of immortality should put them beyond the ability of all but the best adventuring parties.  The idea of a giant king, even less three of them, with many followers doesn’t work.  OK, so we’re being too practical again, but that is our style.

One of the other major differences is that we don’t have our giants being that stupid.  Admittedly, the “average” one of these creatures would be on the border of “moron” when we used that word, but their reasonably intelligent folks are probably on par with an average human.  As you will soon see in The Lost City of Ballogfar, while most of the ogres of Fletnern live primitively now, they once ruled a mighty empire.  They were able to manage the administration as well as develop lines of necromancy that have not yet been matched.

The giants wanted to live peacefully and those few that are left live as farmers and shepherds.  When they were more numerous, they crafted beautiful artworks in their cities, massive stone sculptures that took generations to complete.  This isn’t to say you would want to meet one on the battlefield, but they did enough of that when slaves of the titans, and they knew enough to crave peace.

The trolls are smart enough to know that they aren’t smart.  While most of them live as predators, hunting and raiding, some of them are looking to gain the knowledge of those things that have been keeping them from success all these generations - things like magic and the smelting of steel.  Knowing you aren’t the brightest bulb on the block but looking for a means to fix that shows some manner of intelligence after all.

Is there a point?  Yes - however you decide to depict the giant races, we think you need to put enough thought into it that you allow the players a willful suspension of disbelief.  That giant that eats a wagon load of pumpkins and uses a house for a stool - where exactly is he getting wagonloads of pumpkins all the time?  Anywhere he can get that much food, he would have a bounty on his head, though the giant slayers coming after him would probably be a bit better than the one we saw in that particular cartoon.

We’ll give you one cheat that we use for a lot of our giant towns.  How can you feed these folks?  Send them after the biggest prey there is - whales.  Whaling giants gives you that suspension of disbelief.  How do you explain your giants?

This post was written as part of the recently released Carnage Amongst the Depraved aka All About Big Stupid Monsters, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with those monsters that are typically huge, super strong, but also not so bright, and how this will affect their actions and tactics, as well as other game mastering tricks, but within a fully defined mission showing both the stats for point-based characters (like in Legend Quest) and class-based characters like in most of the die-20 games.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 59 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.