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:

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Like I said before, a Giant-focused monster book would have the exact opposite problem of Fizban's. Fizban's had too many Dragons to choose from past editions to translate to D&D 5e. They couldn't do all of them. Giants would have to stretch a lot in order to fill up a book of the same format. Or the book wouldn't just be about Giants and would also focus on elementals, in which case it wouldn't actually be a Giant-focused monster book.

That is if they only focused on creatures with the Giant tag in their statblock. Even Fizban has non-dragon, yet dragon-related creatures in it.

Giants could have gigantic mounts: sleipnnir, eagle mounts, pegasi-dragged chariots, awakened clouds.
There could be, in said book, more giant creatures living close to Giant Halls, like giant hell hounds or giant polar bear etc

This should be a good opportunity to flesh out the lacking Titan tag from the MM. We could have Empyrean based on various divine domains. Or Then we had elemental titans, who are pretty much the Giant equivalent of elder wyrms. Something like: Pyroclastic Lord, Thundering Warlord, Quake Shaman, Rimequeen etc, CR 20+ nearly divine elemental humanoids.

Then you could add some things like Hundred-Handed Ones, Cyclops Artificer, Psionic Formorian, some spellcaster for the classic giants.

Dragonix, the creator of the Expanded Monster Manuals 1-2-3 has 100+ giant-type creatures in his books. I'm pretty sure WotC could make at least one book on the subject of giants if they cared enough to make them something more than huge bruisers.

 

[JEB]

athachs

Wow, I forgot all about those. (So did Wizards, it seems, haven't been seen since the 3E core books.)

And merrow are mutated merfolk, not Giantkin.

In older editions, they were just sea ogres. I suppose they aren't officially giants in 5E, but with old 5E lore going out the window, they could easily change that...

Not really a giant, more of a Hobgoblin-Ghoul than a Giant. No reason why it would appear in this kind of book.

Thouls are part-troll, and therefore part-giant. They are also bizarrely awesome, IMHO.

 

[Parmandur]

Thouls are part-troll, and therefore part-giant. They are also bizarrely awesome, IMHO.

They are uniquely D&D IP creatures, clearly Giants, and no weirder than some of the Dragons in Fizban's.

 

[JEB]

They are uniquely D&D IP creatures, clearly Giants, and no weirder than some of the Dragons in Fizban's.

Though they did appear in the third-party Blackmoor books for 3E and 4E, so I dunno if that complicates things rights-wise. (Probably not.)

 

[Parmandur]

Though they did appear in the third-party Blackmoor books for 3E and 4E, so I dunno if that complicates things rights-wise. (Probably not.)

Well, guess that means they are public domain, then, but still...definitely a D&D-ism.

 

[Maxperson]

All already in D&D 5e.

Are these really beloved enough to bring back? A ton of these are very specific variants of the True Giants. Fizban's didn't bring back Yellow Dragons, Brown Dragons, Mercury Dragons, and others similar to those. I feel like this would be the equivalent of doing that.

Already in 5e.

Granted. Those could be good.

Already in the 5e Monster Manual. And merrow are mutated merfolk, not Giantkin.

Not a Giant, but a 4-armed Gorilla.

Very setting-specific. Are they really going to put something like these in a Fizban's-style monster book?

This is just 29 versions of the Troll. D&D 5e already has some of those. And the rest . . . are just too much.

Not really a giant, more of a Hobgoblin-Ghoul than a Giant. No reason why it would appear in this kind of book.

I get that there have been a lot of random variants of Trolls and the True Giants in D&D's history. Dragons had even more, and barely any of them made it into Fizban's. I don't think that they'd spend a whole book filled with a bunch of trolls and true-giant variants that no one was asking for.

The trolls are 29 versions of troll, just like the giants in the PHB are 6 versions of giant. While technically true, they had other interesting abilities that made them different. A good number of the giant and troll variants were fun and worth bringing back.

You also mentioned that Fizban's had 70 stat blocks. How many of those were just 3 versions of the same dragon at different ages? A good number of them. They could put in a mountain giant, a mountain giant berserker, and a mountain giant shaman. Poof you suddenly have just as many stat blocks as Fizban's and with more variation since those giant variants will have significantly different abilities, rather than mostly more of the same like dragons that increase in age.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Thank you for a thoughtful and analytical speculation post! do think that this could be possibly for a Setting, but disagree that the "First World" is what that would be, though it would connect as other Settings do. It would be something new.

Don't forget Orcs! This would be the perfect place to fully rehabilitate the D&D Orc.

Another possibility: the NPC party in Netherdeep included a kindly Ogre, and Ogres have been de-brutified in some Settings like Exandria and Eberron. In addition, the Barbarian Path of the Giant growth feature goes out of it's way to state that it happens if the PC isn't already Large: now, yhis might be just to nip some corner case combos, but...wouldn't a Fizban's Treasury of Hiants be a perfect place for some straight up Large Race options?

This section would largely work the same for either a "GiantLance" or "Fizban's" style book, and is literally the only section which we know anything about...

How about Runes, or Elemental Magic? Similar to what we see in this UA? Primordial magic.

Yup, and Giantkin, like orcs, pretty well. There are all these Giant connections hinted at in the Monster Manual that haven't been developed...yet.

Yeah, but you could see rolling charts and Adventure building material.

Titanonomicon. Tie in notnjust Giants, but Giantkin like Ogrea, Trolls, Orcs, provide Adventure material (Wyatt is obsessed with sprinkling his products with new maps, actually, because he says that he isn't good at coming up with them himself and wants to help others in that predicament). Not as rich as Dragona, but maybe able to plum deeper per type as a result.

Definitely possible.

Dragons are the tip-top of IP identity, but Giants are enough to sustain a similar book.

Thanks!

• Orcs... I really don't know what connects orcs and giants. I think the hill giants may use orcs as slaves, that's all I remember.
• It would be great to see Large PCs, but I've seen ZeeBashew's explainer on why that is improbable. Lots of rule-y reasons.
• Orcs aren't giantkin AFAIK.
• Agreed that giants can make their own book, but it's not as home-run a concept as dragons are.

 

[Parmandur]

Thanks!

• Orcs... I really don't know what connects orcs and giants. I think the hill giants may use orcs as slaves, that's all I remember.
• It would be great to see Large PCs, but I've seen ZeeBashew's explainer on why that is improbable. Lots of rule-y reasons.
• Orcs aren't giantkin AFAIK.
• Agreed that giants can make their own book, but it's not as home-run a concept as dragons are.

Nothing is as homerum a concept as dragons!

Orcs were originally categorized as Giant related creatures in several spots, from Chainmail through AD&D. If they want to revamp Orcs as they are doing with Goblinoids, going back to the sources and playing them up as Giant related and tied to Primordial things like Druidism is a good way to go.

 

[Stoutstien]

Mixed feelings on this UA. The overall flavor is stretched precariously thin. Most would be served as generic options.

The barbarian is ok. Rage on thrown melee weapons should be something all barbs get and the rest is just ok. Strangely not synergistic with reach and size increase on the same subclass. That's an achievement. The 30 foot uppercut doesn't have a save to avoid prone which is nice.
Probably a better generic option than zerker. 5/10

The druid is weird. The last thing the class really needed was another easy to maintain bag of HP to toss on the battle map. At twice a SR and tons on additional defensive features is a good bag of HP. Here is a huge wall of flesh to eat attacks...that's it. 5/10.

The wizard is both weak and broken all at once. It boils down to here an attack buff or THP for an ally that scales too well. Alternatively you can zoom out of trouble. Then a reaction based fail save skipper. The wizard chassis doesn't have the room for a good rune caster subclass. Too bad there isn't a crafting focused class they could use.....1/10.

Feats. mixed feelings but overall more thin flavoring slapped onto some options that are mostly ok. I see lots of sticky stuff for melee types and mobility for anyone. The rune crafting feat(s) I'm ok with even as a sort of chain. Rather see it on a subclass but it's probably on par with MI + ritual caster.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Nothing is as homerum a concept as dragons!

I think Undead are. Maybe even Aberrations or Fiends. A Demonomicon or Undead monster book would be really easy to fill up with ideas from previous editions. Aberrations would be easy to just invent even more alien creatures that are invading the Material Plane from the Far Realm.