Bigby Presents: Glory to the Giants Review

A clever writer would describe the latest Dungeons & Dragons supplement Bigby Presents: Glory to the Giants as a huge undertaking! Or maybe a colossal accomplishment? Maybe even a titanic endeavour!

Alas, dear readers, you’re stuck instead with me.

Bigby Presents: Glory to the Giants, released in game stores and wherever you find fine books yesterday, gives you a host of information on one of D&D’s most iconic antagonists: giants.

Throughout the multiverse, giants stand tall as one of the most recognizable (formidable) enemies an adventuring party can face. Blessed with immense strength and size, each lineage possesses its own unique abilities and traits, making every encounter with a giant wholly different.

The new book includes a wealth of information on giantkind’s rich and complex history, and whether you want to delve deep into their secrets or fallen empires, or just enhance a character with a little giant juice in the form of new character options, Bigby Presents: Glory to the Giants has you covered.

What you’re getting

The book includes a prologue, six chapters and 192 pages, and a pair of appendices that include concept art and adventure hooks. The book isn’t particularly weighty, but there are some cool things included, especially related to character-building.

Chapter 1 – Character Creation (including new feats and a new Barbarian subclass)

Chapter 2 – Giants in Play (background on giants like how to roleplay them, social structures and everything you’d need to build a robust and vibrant world)

Chapter 3 – Giant Adventures (how to build giant encounters, including lots of random tables DMs can use to add some large-sized spice to their games)

Chapter 4 – Giant Enclaves (18 giant enclaves from legend, including details and maps to help DMs get the description just right)

Chapter 5 – Giant Treasures (you get a look inside the bags of different kinds of giants and discover the types of treasure you might find – just remember that saying about one person’s treasure being another’s trash before rifling around in there – as well as some pages of new magic items you can introduce to your games)

Chapter 6 – Bestiary (different kinds of giants, specific giants with class roles, and creature lists to help you plot out your oversized capers)

Appendices – Concept Art and Giant Related Adventure Hooks

The Details

For the majority of players, Chapter 1 is the biggest deal – the player options. Most aren’t DMs, so they won’t find the latter chapters as useful, so D&D made a real effort to add some interesting stuff here.

Bigby Presents: Glory to the Giants includes one new subclass for Barbarians called Path of the Giant, walked by “barbarians who…draw on the same primal strength as giants.” As thematic subclasses go, this one feels like a real winner.

The subclass benefits are neat: while raging a barbarian’s size increases and can learn the giant language as an inherent benefit. It also gives them the ability to add some elemental damage to their weapons, akin to the primordial energy from which giants draw their strength, fire, ice, etc.

Also very cool, at higher levels they can make strength checks to throw enemies and allies on the battlefield (or in the bathroom, kitchen etc. use it however you like, I’m not your mom).

The level 14 ability enhances the abilities that came before, allowing characters to become huge (if they want) and adding extra damage to their elemental weapon damage.

It’s a very thematic, fun-sounding subclass – the D&D design team clearly had fun with this one, as it feels like a lot of love was invested in building this one out.

The book also includes a pair of new backgrounds, including giant foundling and rune carver, each of which is flavour rich.

The new feats are also neat, each giantish lineage (frost, fire, stone etc) has a unique feat that boosts an ability score and provides a power of some kind, while the Rune Shaper feat allows a player to use a limited pool of rune magic each day.

The remaining chapters are as described above, each primarily helping DMs build a world where giants exist in the natural order and have their own unique ecosystem. The Bestiary is the largest single chapter of the book at nearly 70 pages, so players and DMs are getting a lot of fun monsters to explore.

The book includes new giant types, giants with classes (death giant shrouded one, for example, a death giant with wizard abilities, as if DMs needed more ability to haunt their players’ dreams) some fun troll stuff, and more.

Should you buy it

It seems obvious if you’re a DM who loves giants, that Bigby Presents: Glory to the Giants is a book you should own. There’s plenty of lore and background information that you can use to power a giant campaign for YEARS.

If you’re a player, the book might be less useful for you. The player options are generally focused on martial characters, so it may not have as much utility as previous manuals have had. The Barbarian subclass is enjoyable and well thought out, and the feats would be really good for a martial focused character, if that’s what you’re playing.

Now if you’re a completionist, you can’t go wrong with Bigby Presents: Glory to the Giants because you’ve got Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, so you can’t hate on Bigby, right?

Overall, the art is slick and will inspire a thousand campaign ideas. Do yourself a favour and thumb to the back, and check out the concept art in Appendix A – you won’t be sorry.

Hopefully, this review has been a mammoth help for you, and not an enormous letdown!

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All images owned by Wizards of the Coast and used with permission

A copy of Bigby Presents: Glory to the Giants was provided for this review