D&D 5E Goliaths WebDM Misses the Mark, but Sparks My Curiosity

[doctorbadwolf]

They seemed more common. There are probably several reasons for this.

1) They were more mechanically appealing. (Ability Scores were more important and for a while I think they were the only way to get bonuses to Str and Con which were important for certain types of Fighter or Barbarians)
2) They were more front and centre. They appeared in Players Handbook 2 alongside classic races like Half-Orcs and Gnomes and classes like Barbarians and Druids.
3) The default setting was the Nentir Vale so everything was new. There was no long history of the setting without Goliaths.

I think the second two are the big ones, personally. IME, people play the crap outta races that aren’t mechanically powerful as long as they are interesting in some other way.

 

[gyor]

Goliath

Goliaths are a race of stony-skinned humanoids. Their populations are scattered across mountainous regions of many continents on Eberron. Garguns are their feral kin, which dwell in the Frostfell. Goliaths are thought to dwell in the Titan's Teeth Mountains in the interior of Xen'drik.

eberron.fandom.com

Goliaths have been Eberron since the beginning of the setting.

 

[Don Durito]

Desert works. It fits in with my Aiel Wheel of Time riff from earlier in the thread.

Really it works well if they live in more than one place and have more than one culture so as to find the whole fantasy monoculture thing.

I could also see them working well as nomads of the tundra.

 

[gyor]

Goliath Culture and preferred life styles I think were designed specifically so you could dump them into a preexisting setting without them being disruptive to the setting, they are isolated, but not hostile, they build no great empires, or cities, nor do they have large populations so their foot print is miniumal, but they have enough culture and history so someone could play one. They alone with other new races were designed for plug in and play in any setting. It's why they were able to add them to Eberron, FR, and Nentir Vale without disrupting the settings at all. No retconning required because most are isolated in the mountains so that is why they are rarely if at all mentioned most of the time, outside Goliath PCs.

 

[Garthanos]

I’ve used them as seafarers in one world, but I never thought of the desert. That’s interesting. They could live in cities like Petra, and live off the dangerous desert fauna of a dnd world.

Rather than cold and altitude, they need less water, and are unbothered by the sun (unless you want them covered in flowing layers) or extreme heat.

It might help flesh out the cultures of my desert along with the subterranean semi-nomadic nocturnal drow.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant had Giant Seafarers

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant had Giant Seafarers

Never read it. The whole premise is just so bizarre in ways I’m not into

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant had Giant Seafarers

Yup, thought of that straight away.

 

[Garthanos]

Never read it. The whole premise is just so bizarre in ways I’m not into

A man's body and mind ARE the fantasy world of his internalized vision quest is rather the premise. That he and gradually it are dark and twisted because of his leprosy and the loss of sense of self and so on and so forth Every act of denying its reality is as dangerous and wrong as denying the reality of his disease in the real world (even though such denial is natural). The magic makes this largely internal reality.... real for not only him but for others similar to passing along a disease and that makes it even more horrid. OK yeah bizzare would be a good descriptor.

 

[Manbearcat]

In all the 4e games/levels (7 games and about 90 levels worth) I ran, I saw a single Goliath for a small-premise, 4 session game (basically downtime between a Torchbearer game).

 

[Fenris-77]

You could slot Goliaths in anywhere really. The reclusive giant is such a common mythological figure that there's a lot of latitude. They'd work as hill dwellers with a light Celtic reskin too (or seafarers, the Fomorians fill that gap too). They'd work as a stand in for the Cyclops of Greek myth with some artificer love and a penchant for lava adjacent dwellings. You could even go more of a Sasquatch route if you wanted.