D&D 5E New Unearthed Arcana Today: Giant Themed Class Options and Feats

A new Unearthed Arcana dropped today, focusing on giant-themed player options. "In today’s Unearthed Arcana, we explore character options related to the magic and majesty of giants. This playtest document presents the Path of the Giant barbarian subclass, the Circle of the Primeval druid subclass, the Runecrafter wizard subclass, and a collection of new feats, all for use in Dungeons & Dragons."

Giant Options | Unearthed Arcana | Dungeons & Dragons

Explore character options related to the magic and majesty of giants! This playtest document presents new subclasses for the barbarian, druid, and wizard, and a collection of new feats, all for use in Dungeons & Dragons.

dnd.wizards.com

New Class options:

• Barbarian: Path of the Giant
• Druid: Circle of the Primeval
• Wizard: Runecrafter Tradition

New Feats:

• Elemental Touched
• Ember of the Fire Giant
• Fury of the Frost Giant
• Guile of the Cloud Giant
• Keeness of the Stone Giant
• Outsized Might
• Rune Carver Apprentice
• Rune Carvwr Adept
• Soul of the Storm Giant
• Vigor of the Hill Giant

WotC's Jeremy Crawford talks Barbarian Path of the Giant here:

 

[Parmandur]

Technically speaking, Archaeopteryx is nothing special, just in that muddy area between. If you were in the Cretaceous, you could not tell the difference between the 'birds' and the 'dinosaurs'. We have ones that pre-date it. Birds are just a line of dinosaurs, so there's no cut-off point for what makes one the other, and any cut-off is completely arbitery

Which lets us play our favourite game, BIRD OR NON-AVIAN DINOSAUR (Spoilered to save your screen size)

View attachment 249927
Bird, or dinosaur?

View attachment 249928
Bird, or dinosaur?

View attachment 249929
Bird, or dinosaur?
Guess all three, win a prize*!

*(the prize is knowledge)

The answer to all three is "yes."

 

[Parmandur]

Yes.

People were talking about rolling and cheating.

I mean, cheating at character generation feels like cheating at Solitaire to me, practically speaking. It's taking away from what makes the process fun.

 

[James Gasik]

I hope everyone knows I was joking, lol. It's a fantasy game, so we don't care about taxonomies! If it looks like a rabbit on a tree stump, it's obviously an aberration...wait.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I hope everyone knows I was joking, lol. It's a fantasy game, so we don't care about taxonomies! If it looks like a rabbit on a tree stump, it's obviously an aberration...wait.

It would actually be funny to give a non D&D playing biologist a copy of the MM and say "Here, make taxonomic order out of all this!"

 

[James Gasik]

It would actually be funny to give a non D&D playing biologist a copy of the MM and say "Here, make taxonomic order out of all this!"

You're a very cruel person. Assuming you are a person, and not a sentient artifact or human-hating artificial intelligence.

 

[Demetrios1453]

So, kind of going back a bit on the subject...

Fizban's has 20 different dragon types that get deep dives, making up the core of the book. Can we do something similar with giants?

Currently, 5e has:

6 "classic" giant types: Hill, stone, frost, fire, cloud, and storm.
5 giant-kin: Cyclopes, ettins, fomorians from MM; firbolgs and verbeegs from more recent books.
4 "other" giant types: Ogres, oni, and trolls from the MM; goliaths from other books.
1 non-classic giant: Fog (from Mordenkainen's Fiendish Folio on D&DB)

That's 16 right there, even if it's cheating a little to add firbolgs and goliaths (which, as PC races, are still considered humanoid; but then again, so are dragonborn, and they got coverage in Fizban's). It would be easy to add in a few more non-classic giants from previous editions (such as jungle, mountain, and ocean; as well as voadkyn as a giant-kin). to get us up to 20. Once we have that, the book could easily parallel what we got in Fizban's, with a player option section focused on firbolgs and goliaths, giant creation myths that could compare/contrast with the draconic ones given in Fizban's, the section focusing on each individual giant type (and they could just lift the giant lairs from SKT wholesale if they wanted), and a bestiary with the giants updated from previous editions, as well as giant variants from those that are already have been updated (and, there is plenty of room for variants; I have a whole thread here where I created a couple dozen or so variants for 5e, not to mention @Nixlord's MME books on the DM's Guild ). And, given what else is in this UA, more dinosaurs! Everything is cooler with more dinosaurs!

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I wonder about to use certaing prehistoric gliding lizards as wizards' familiars:

Xianglong - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Icarosaurus - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Kuehneosaurus - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Coelurosauravus - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I wonder about to use certaing prehistoric gliding lizards as wizards' familiars

I've use the flying snake from the basic rules as a non-standard familiar.

And the pseudodragon warlock familiar is a flying lizard.

 

[James Gasik]

Yeah it's fantasy, we can have dinosaurs look like whatever we want. You know, like how the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park don't look like real dinos- just what people think dinos ought to look like!

 

[Azzy]

“Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.”

"Character is what you are in the dark."