Fire Giant Dreadnoughts in VOLO's GUIDE TO MONSTERS

WotC posted this image a couple of days ago, along with a brief note that that Volo's Guide to Monsters has "quite an extensive entry" on Fire Giant Dreadnoughts. Spiky! Also check out yesterday's Giant Lore preview, and the preface - there's a bit of a giant-based focus o the previews, which is likely because Storm King's Thunder is the current storyline. The book hits stores on November 15th (November 4th in preferred stores).

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[The_Gneech]

It's not the best piece of D&D art ever, but arguments about the feasibility of the giant's armor seem strange to me. Giants are OTT fairy-tale (or Marvel Universe) monsters to begin with, nothing about them makes "sense."

My read on the piece is that this is a very specialized soldier whose job is to hold and/or advance a line, probably as part of a massive wall of other such soldiers. The pose suggests he's standing at attention waiting for orders.

I agree that a character standing around floating in space with no context is dull composition, unless it's intended as a portrait of "This is what this guy looks like." Cover or spread-worthy? Not really. Fine as a bit of filler art.

-The Gneech

 

[Barachiel]

What weight? Magically enchanted. Done. Moving on.

The only thing I agree with is the braid.

The rest to me says BAMF and, well, that's the idea of warriors these days. Gotta look and move as flashy as a spellcaster throwing visual spells in order to get attention. Played any RPGs lately? Watched any anime? No one cares about whether it's "realistic" or not, the "cool factor" is what matters now.

Change can be a good thing sometimes, conservatism is more often the enemy of good change than it is a stalwart against bad changes.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Oh, don't ask questions like that. It's just going to make it worse. Granted, if the shields are made of glass, they do weigh a good deal less - but then you have a shield made of glass. Also, it seems to be made of the same stuff as the boots and likely the armor. But, what is that hauberk or gambeson or breastplate (or whatever it is) made out of? Iron, as it appears if you look at the top of it, or some sort of cloth, like it appears if you look at the bottom? And why does it need to be belted? The belt doesn't support anything. It doesn't close anything. And why did this giant that just decked himself out in 20000 lbs of whatever, feel that his braid had to flip out in front of his head so badly, he was willing to cut a gaping hole in his neck protection to let it dangle down. And for that matter, exactly what is the braid attached to?

Also, the giant is splay-footed. If that's her normal posture she probably can't even keep her balance. Those aren't shields, those are crutches!

 

[unknowable]

What weight? Magically enchanted. Done. Moving on.

The only thing I agree with is the braid.

The rest to me says BAMF and, well, that's the idea of warriors these days. Gotta look and move as flashy as a spellcaster throwing visual spells in order to get attention. Played any RPGs lately? Watched any anime? No one cares about whether it's "realistic" or not, the "cool factor" is what matters now.

Change can be a good thing sometimes, conservatism is more often the enemy of good change than it is a stalwart against bad changes.

Eh this hasn't ever been a new thing.
I mean crap, bucklers that STRAP onto arms are just stupid, 5e actually has good weights for most of it's equipment vs 3.5 for instance, but also has god awful weight on that chainmail.

The way armor works, the way you recover after a rest and so on.

And people saying that magic isn't a good enough explanation, why the hell not? We have all sorts of extremely odd and powerful magical items available to us and fire giants are steeped in lore based around magical weapon and armour construction.

I am fine with people running a realistic game, and you can do things to make it more realistic with 5e... But this is the least of a person's problems if they want to do this.

 

[Celebrim]

To clarify, he said Obsidian and though it looks somewhat like glass it is most definitely not glass

Obsidian - as a relatively pure SiO2, is basically glass and is certainly a type of glass. The physical properties of obsidian - density, tensile strength, hardness, etc. - aren't that different than what a glass bottle is made out of.

 

[John R Davis]

Please don't start making the art pathfinder stupid style

 

[dave2008]

Obsidian - as a relatively pure SiO2, is basically glass and is certainly a type of glass. The physical properties of obsidian - density, tensile strength, hardness, etc. - aren't that different than what a glass bottle is made out of.

Thank you for the clarification I didn't realize obsidian was mostly silica.

 

[Celebrim]

The problem with this argument is that it presupposes that fire giants themselves are inherently physically and biologically plausible, which they aren't. A fire giant, or any giant for that matter, even without armor, should have their own legs shatter under the stress of their own weight (they obviously have human-type leg bones and not the elephant-like leg bones they would need to carry their own weight).

If you are going to try to engage me in an argument on 'realism', at least get your facts straight. Fire giants are only 12' tall. There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't scale up the frame of a silverback gorilla to produce an upright posture in a 12' tall creature. That's not even improbable much less impossible. Giant sloths and other prehistoric creatures show evidence of being able to assume an upright posture in 5 ton, 12' tall creature, able to reach upward 17'. I mean that's pretty much exactly fire giant size, except that fire giants are less heavy. And fire giants in particular have a stocky shape that gives their legs plenty of room for oversized bones to hold them up.

And, given that fire giants are fire-based creatures, this problem would be massively exacerbated, meaning that any reality-based fire giant would rapidly overheat and die. For a fire giant to even exist we would have to presuppose a non-standard biology, and, once that becomes a given, any questions on physical limitations goes out the window. So, until we have a detailed examination of fire giant biology that would contradict it, we have to assume that fire giants are able to carry the weight of that armor and those shields...

Now you are just get nonsensical. We don't have to assume anything. We don't have to have questions about the physical limitations. Fire giants have a strength score for crying out loud. That's why I said that even if you don't approach this from a realism standpoint, even if you just approach this from a game rules standpoint, the math doesn't add up. What I can guarantee you didn't happen, is that the designers didn't work backward from this picture to figure out how high that strength score needed to be to carry all the crap that the creature in the painting was being loaded down with. And for another thing, let's even assume that in fact this giant as a 42 Strength or whatever it would take to have that sort of carrying capacity in a large sized creature. Why in the heck if you are that strong would you bother with this sort of configuration? Again, if two tower shields as a battering ram makes an effective battlefield weapon, why hasn't anyone ever adopted it? Certainly there have been humans strong enough to carry two 30 or 40 pound shields. Why didn't some ancient civilization make this a thing? And the answer is, because it doesn't work very well even on its own terms. It doesn't make you particularly more of a battering ram than having one shield. It doesn't make you any more capable of bashing down and through foes, and in fact it makes you less capable. The guy with one shield, takes your charge on his shield, and stabs you with his spear in your immobile, unvisored, exposed face.

Nor do I think this is even a particularly effective anti-human strategy. Because humans would certainly know they can't go shield wall to shield wall and win a shoving match with something that has 40 times their strength and 10 times their mass. Humans are going to skirmish whenever possible, which means you need mobility and the ability to engage at range. And this giant has given up mobility, given up reach, and given up one of giantkin's most effective weapons - their uncanny ability to throw rocks accurately at long range.

 

[Celebrim]

Also, the giant is splay-footed. If that's her normal posture she probably can't even keep her balance. Those aren't shields, those are crutches!

That was my immediate impression. Normally, when I hold a shield, I'm balancing the weight of it with my body behind it - one foot forward, the other back, in a fencing type posture. And normally shields are made of something that is relatively light weight. You don't make solid disks of steel and use them as a shield. Typically you are going to make a tower shield out of thin wood, covered with leather or strong cloth, and then edged in thin steel or bronze with a thin steel boss in the middle. This shield on the other hand is made like a modern snow plow. As I said, each looks to weigh about 8000 lbs. Even if you had magic to half the weight of the shields, it would still be too much. Imagine the posture these shields imply, with both shields out in front of you locked together, and you realize that it's just too awkward to carry any large fraction of your weight in front of you like that no matter how strong you are. You can't balance the weight by rotating your body. You'd have to have a splayed posture and take mincing little baby steps to move. You'd be continually on the verge of toppling forward, and the heavier the shield is relative to your own body weight the worse it would be. Even with magic reducing the weight by half, each of the shields weigh more than the giant does. Imagine carrying two 250 lb shields in front of you. Even if you are some super strong person that can carry 500 lbs, you can't move quickly in that posture.

Again, the take away I got immediately from this picture was pity. Crutches indeed.

 

[Celebrim]

And another thing that bothers me about this picture, is it is pretty obviously directly inspired by the orc armor in Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' movies. It's the same wavy spiky unfinished iron overall appearance. Now, in the movies, the whole thing behind the wavy unfinished appearance is that the orcs are lazy, and they don't care. They make crude but effective weapons because they aren't particularly good smiths, and even if they are, they don't care, and give a crap about anything but killing. Fine.

Now, I don't know what anyone else thinks, but that's never been the take I've had on fire giant smithcraft. I've always pictured fire giants as master smiths, they love their work, and produce fabulously superhumanly well crafted metal work. Why in the world would they go with this unpolished, unfinished, hasty looking, rough work? Why would fire giants use roughly casted slabs of pig iron to make their armor? Why would we go for fire giants as just bestial uncaring brutes wearing stuff that looks like it was made by orcs? Couldn't we be going for intelligent, skillful, and also cruel?