Thanks for the mention! And to tie it in with our current subject, I'll be starting on my cloud giant variants once I get back home to my books here in a few days...
No worries - they make an obvious resource to mention at this stage!
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One side effect of this thread structure is that the entries that people want to mention are not always the one under current discussion. We’ve had scattered commentary about the Devourer and Bodak since we did them, for example, while the
Fire Giant Dreadnought first sparked debate back on page 6, with confusion over how its shield ability works. This fella is all about the shields, as the Volo’s art makes clear:
Since I’m struggling to find any relevant pictures, here is the one from the book. It is… okay. I mean, the detail is good, but it just really doesn’t excite me as much as a 20-foot tall melee monster should. The pose is terribly static, and the armour texture is not very crisp. Oh well.
The Fire Giants are all about the foundry - they really love their metallurgy and blacksmithing. This requires both strength, to be able to manipulate the materials, and intelligence, to know when and how to do so. The Dreadnoughts are the Giants who have extra brawn but less brains, and thus get relegated to pushing stuff around. [1] Happily however, their immense strength allows them to claim a somewhat good place in the Ordning, unlike their peers who lack both brawn and brains. The main thing that this entry makes me wonder is what a Fire Giant with brains but not brawn would look like; some kind of a fire wizard? If we ever get an Alchemist or Artificer class then I would imagine a Fire Giant could be given abilities from it to make a pretty interesting entry.
The flavour section for these guys is really short. They push stuff around the foundry with their shields, which seems a bit impractical but sure. They are used to send a strong message by accompanying delegations. When faced with enemies, they pour coals into their shields (a detail that I think could have been used to spice up the image) and then smash people into paste. That’s kind of it. Unless your game involves a lot more Fire Giant social tensions than I think it likely will, you will get most use out of these guys as a combat encounter.
Speaking of combat, let’s discuss its stats. The Dreadnought is brutally simple, to be honest. It gets a few more HP, and +3 AC, compared to a normal Fire Giant. The +3 is a bit odd, but I guess that diminishing returns applies to shields, and presumably if it stows a shield to toss a boulder then it goes down to +2. It can pick three options on its turn: to hit someone with a shield, doing a fair amount of damage but not all that much more than a normal Fire Giant; to toss a boulder, for the same damage as a Fire Giant, or a
Shield Charge, which is the real highlight here. The reason that I am mentioning the Fire Giant so much here is because the Dreadnought is a whopping FIVE levels of CR higher than its kin, but the statblock doesn’t really support that in many areas. The
Shield Charge, however, makes the difference: the Dreadnought can go 30ft in a straight line, getting a free attack on every non-giant whose space it enters, and if they fail a strength saving throw it will push them the rest of the way. That sounds a lot of fun, but be prepared for to reorganise the combat spacing of people at the end of the move! If the victims really fail the roll, they will get knocked prone and then take bonus damage.
This is all great fun, but unfortunately I’m not sure that Fire Giants have much ability to take advantage of battlefield control tactics like those. Some friendly Hell Hounds might be able to bound up and breathe fire, I guess, but the Giants themselves are basically just big Fighters, and they are superior in melee. The Dreadnought doesn’t have the speed or teleportation powers to reliably use this ability to bring the party back-line into melee either. It seems to me that this will turn out the same way as a bad Reinhart charge in
Overwatch: he’ll drive loads of people before him, and then get instantly murdered by them all before they turn to take on his allies. Of course, a bad guy who confidently charges in - with a really impressive mechanic for doing so - and then gets cut down by the party will probably be extremely satisfying for the group Barbarian to deal with, so your players will probably enjoy it!
[1] In game terms, +2 STR and -2 INT - or 25->27 and 10->8, respectively. That difference is pretty minor to be honest, but I guess that they don’t have a lot of room to work with in the stat ranges, and INT especially is one of those stats that matters a lot more in stories than in gaming.