This Giant Was Too "Out There" for D&D 5E

hello and welcome to monster of the week the only show on the internet filmed live on location from the Bottom of the Sea today we're taking a literal Deep dive down to the ocean floor to uncover yet another species of giant that was forgotten and left behind in past editions of Dungeons and Dragons we're going to go over everything there is to know about these easygoing ocean dwellers including their lore and ecology as well as some plot Hooks and story ideas for how you might use them in a DND campaign then as always we'll convert them from second to ition ad and into two fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons so you can bust them out at all your 5e Island Adventures I don't think it's any secret that I'm a big fan of Giants and the reef Giants have quickly become one of my favorites they have a really fun backstory a ton of plot hook potential and can fulfill the role of just about any NPC that you want to fit them into but before we get all wrapped up in giant lore I want to give a massive shout out to this week's sponsor The Seekers guide to enchanting emporiums The Seekers guide to enchanting emporiums is a brand new 250 page fifth edition compatible supplement all about spending that money gone are the days of piling up mountains of gold with nothing to spend it on this vibrantly Illustrated Anthology contains over 15 unique Magic item shops and wandering Merchants designed to be a perfect fit in your campaign each shop is filled with life and wonder guaranteed to make your next fantasy shopping trip an adventure literally see these shops are designed to be so much more than just a place to spend your gold each one is built from the ground up to be a full-on adventure location if that's what you want it to be every local is populated by a host of Proprietors staff and even other customers each with their own backstory and a wealth of role playing prompts for the dungeon master and of course there are a ton of new magic items in this book to stock the shelves so if that all sounds as exciting to you as it does to me definitely check out the link in the PIN comment in the description down below and investigate the kickstarter for yourself so once again thank you so much to The Seekers guide to enchanting emporiums for bringing us here to talk about this giant topic so hopefully you've got a cool drink in your hand preferably one garnished with some kind of fruit because it's time to take a tropical vacation to the Sea of stars and see exactly what this week's monster is up [Music] to Reef Giants first appeared in the Monstrous compendium aladim appendix for second edition Dungeons and Dragons as the title would suggest this book was filled with monsters from the aladim campaign setting among them a few new Giants would appear such as the desert giant the jungle Giant and today's monster The Reef giant the very first bit of text we see about this creature goes on to explain that they are the loners of giant kind and that they live in well-appointed mansions which appear to be mere Huts from the outside so naturally I needed to know more but I'm getting way ahead of myself so let's dial it back a little bit and start from the beginning Reef Giants are massive one might even say giant humanoid creatures they have Bron skin stark white hair and subtle but visible fins around their neck or ears in terms of clothing they Adorn themselves in relatively simple garments made from animal skins however in the water they're usually Buck ass naked aside from a tool belt for carrying supplies now the second and final time these Giants would ever appear is in the second edition monstrous manual their stats here are totally unchanged but they did at least put a speedo on our boy so that's nice now overall Reef Giants tend to be pretty self-sufficient they are scavengers by Nature who Survive by fishing and forging the coral reef where they make their home for anything they can eat as you can imagine there is a ton of variety in the food enjoyed by a reef giant given the biodiversity of their home environment so each giant is bound to have a long list of likes and dislikes when it comes to what they eat they can net entire schools of fish in one Fell Swoop and due to their massive strength a reef giant can swim for hours at a time before tiring this is great for them because on any given day they're not just hunting for food but also for Treasure pearls sponges corals and any other sunken booty all rank among the items a reef giant is after whenever it dives into the ocean for the day now a lot of this stuff may not be exceptionally useful to the giant itself but if it can manage to bring a massive deep sea Hall to the market of a nearby City there is potential to earn a heap of gold and with that gold the giant is able to find access to all sorts of stuff it doesn't normally have access to Metal Goods herd animals and construction materials are usually at the top of the list for a reef giant but who knows what they might spend all that gold on maybe they just get really into collecting Gundams or something now a lot of the time the giant doesn't even have to do the trading themselves but rather they set up an agreement with a Merchants Guild where they simply trade goods for goods cutting out the gold Al together something also mentioned which is just a tiny little detail but a detail I love is that Reef Giants are particularly fond of sweets they just really enjoy baked goods like pies or cakes and candies so often sweets are one of the things they take extra time to try and barter for if given the chance but their taste in food is not the only thing decadent about the reef giant though we'll Circle back to that in a second they are amphibious creatures of course so they can choose to live under the sea on a small island or in most cases a combination of both and while you may expect them to live in a simple dwelling maybe even just sleeping under the stars you'd be wrong I mean unless you were paying attention to the thing I said earlier about them living in mansion homes because these giants live in Straight Up luxury when establishing their new home every Reef giant takes on the task of constructing a home that would make even the most affluent hosts on MTV Cribs blush whether they choose to build underwater or on land or some combination of the two every Reef giant home is not only massive even by giant standards but also constructed with the utmost ideals of comfort in mind the outside is always concealed well to appear merely as part of the surrounding landscape in order to throw off looters or God's forbid adventurers but inside it's a whole different story their mansion is always stocked with Furniture art Oddities and Decor all collected by The Reef giant over a tremendously long life of treasure hunting so while the reef giant may turn a great profit at the market with the things it finds it always keeps the best stuff for itself to the Reef giant every trinket no matter how big or small tells the story of a great day scouring the sea floor for bobbles all of this to say every Reef giant home is bound to be impressive at least for the few creatures that ever see it because as I mentioned Reef Giants are loners once they reach the age of maturity they venture out into the ocean to do their own thing sometimes for the entirety of their 600-year lifespan however there is always the possibility either through intention or coincidence that two Reef Giants meet and fall in love when a pair of reef Giants decides to mate they do so for life living together in a tropical Paradise of their own making should they ever have children those children will of course stay with their parents until it's time for them to venture out and find a Home of Their Own with one exception in Reef giant tradition it is often the eldest daughter of any giant family who finds themselves in a somewhat unique position rather than leave her Giant's Mansion After High School she she instead remains behind to care for her parents as they age after all eventually age catches up with all of us even Giants and they're not going to be out there hunting for treasure at 590 years old so they rely on their eldest daughter to do that for them which might seem like kind of a bum deal at first but this labor is not without its reward once her parents pass on to the next to life the eldest daughter inherits everything that belonged to both her parents including the Mansion she was was raised in this is obviously a tremendous amount of wealth but if she happens to be the eldest daughter of another one-time eldest daughter you can see how this starts to add up because of this there are a select few Reef Giants out there who have mansions and hordes of wealth that date back multiple generations and potentially thousands of years so a reef giant with all this wealth and privilege finds herself with the world at her fingertips and hundreds of years to enjoy it but his word spreads Among The Reef Giants that the eldest daughter of a wealthy family has just become the official Mistress of the Mansion something really interesting happens predictably dozens of suitors from the surrounding area will immediately begin vying for the attention of the most eligible Bachelorette on the sea floor and what this Bachelorette decides to do is entirely up to her because while the reef Giants do have this established cultural norm of the eldest daughter being the one to look after her parents and then being the inheritor of all their wealth there's no tradition or really any protocol stting that she has to get married in some cases she may be completely uninterested in finding a partner or maybe even already have a love interest in which case the issue is pretty well resolved however some Reef Giants of course see this as an opportunity after all they've basically just become the most desirable individual among their species for miles around so they can pick and choose who they will even entertain as a possible match which is where the competition truly begins I picked Ken griffy Jr in game showes fashion any suitors who wish to put their name forward will do their utmost to not only prove themselves to the mistress but also to undermine their competition what ensues is a grand drama involving competitive fishing diving surfing and anything else the lady of the house might put forward as an opportunity for a Suitor to test their medal the exact nature of this competition and to what degree success is weighed in favor or against specific parties obviously depends on the individual Reef giant mistress in question but the fact that all of this is just common practice in Reef giant Society is not only hilarious to me but also a situation Rife with plot hooks but we'll get to that in due time for now let's take a break from Reef giant courtship rituals and talk about what kind of abilities these guys actually have for as long as there have been Giants in DND there have been some Staples that apply to all of them for the most part they're big and they hit like a truck and our Reef giant is no exception clocking in at cr10 The Reef giant sits comfortably between cloud and storm Giants in terms of established power levels and in terms of stats they're set up the way that you'd expect most Giants to be set up they have an absurdly high strength score and great Constitution along with a solid wisdom and Charisma to boot due to the fact that they spend so much time in the deepest parts of the ocean they are also straight up immune to cold damage and they have dark vision they've also got a swim speed of 60 ft and the amphibious trait I feel like those are both things you would assume but it's worth mentioning as far as Weapons The Reef giant makes use of a classic weapon combo you don't often see in Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition that being the net and Trident using their multi-attack they can make an attack with their net which if it hits restrains the creature they're attacking and then they can make two Trident attacks this is especially brutal because if that net attack connects not only will you have to spend your next turn trying to break out of the net but the two follow-up Trident strikes will have advantage on the attack rule which is a little scary it also has a rock attack of course for when it just needs to crush someone with Boulder it's a pretty simple but effective way to just kill someone with a rock from far away but the reef Giant's truly lethal move is something called Whirlpool not that kind of Whirlpool this kind of Whirlpool this move can only be used by the Giant when it's in a body of water such as I don't know the ocean any creatures within 60 ft of it are dragged 15 ft closer and take 4 D6 budgeting damage then they have to make a strength saving throw however if you fail the save by five or more not only do you take the full amount of damage but you also start to drown once you run out of air assuming you need to breathe you can remain conscious for a number of rounds equal to your Constitution modifier that means if you have a 14 con you get two rounds before dropping to zero hit points you do always get at least one round to act here so in the event that your con is a negative number or a zero you will still have those precious six seconds to to do something also stop building characters with negative Constitution modifiers you know who you are but if we get to the point where drowning in a whirlpool and being stabbed repeatedly by a trident doesn't stop the reef Giant's enemy it also has a few spells up its sleeves I guess it doesn't have sleeves they're mostly just Speedo bikini kind of guys but it's got magic at will they can do things like create or destroy water shape water water breathing and water walk not incredibly useful in combat but I suppose water breathing could be used to save a drowning Ally three times per day it's got fog Cloud Misty step and Wall of water all of which are potentially very useful in combat if not somewhat circumstantial and once per day it can cast control weather which may not be a combat spell but if the giant knows it's going to be engaging in battle if it has time to kind of set up the environment in a way that suits it that's always nice all in all a really solid stat block with a few circumstantial combat tricks that is bound to keep the enemy on their toes I feel like this is fairly obvious but the reef giant does thrive in battle when it can get itself and its opponent in the water its use of a trident as well is not just a flavorful thing Trident are one of the few weapons that don't suffer any penalties when used in underwater combat so it makes sense while not always realistic if a reef giant does find itself in a fight its number one priority should always be trying to get everyone submerged because that's where this creature goes from dangerous to deadly but at the end of the day I think this creature's biggest strength and where it truly shines is in its plot hook potential so let's move on from talking about combat and mechanics and explore a few so there are tons of ways you can use a reef giant to tell a story I love how diers this creature is because you can truly make it as dire or as comedic as you want it to be first and foremost I really like the idea of a reef giant running an oddies shop in a port town maybe the giant themselves aren't even running the storefront but they have a human friend who does the wheeling and dealing and the giant brings in Daily huls of new Goods to stock the shelves that could fit into your story in lots of different ways but at the very least having an interesting shop in town where players can go and talk to the OWN owner and spend their gold is always going to be a win with the folks at a table now I apologize in advance for this next one but the dad in my soul won't let me not say it so I propose you have a reef giant running a dive bar get it like like a dive bar because it but seriously puns aside having a reef giant just low-key running a drinking establishment in an air bubble Under the Sea for sentient creatures down there would be great speaking of which there are a lot of creatures who don't love Reef Giants specifically merfolk and tritons they often view the reef Giants plundering of the ocean as either an infringement on their territory or just bad for the environment so they tend to dislike or actively hate Reef Giants but that can be a great point of contention for the dungeon master the players might be hired by some tritons to go take out a reef giant only to find themselves working through its Mansion like some kind of mini dungeon or maybe they just stumble upon the Mansion of a re LEF giant who died alone some time ago and since then all manner of less friendly sea creatures have taken up residence in the mans only by finding the Giant's bones and performing a proper funeral can they put the soul to rest and maybe loot a few items on the way out speaking of which maybe the actual Adventure is the Players trying to attain some kind of item that is in a reef Giant's Mansion say you had a ship crossing the ocean carrying all manner of treasure and among the goods was a specific magic item of tremendous power unfortunately that ship was lost at sea believed to have gone down in a kraken attack well that sucks for everyone on board for the reef giant a shipwreck is a potential jackpot find not knowing what it was maybe the reef giant took this object of immense power and simply hung it up like a decoration in his Mansion now after much detective work the party has track it down and has to either convince The Reef giant to part with it or plan a heist I don't know about you but an underwater Mansion Heist stealing from a giant sounds like an awesome adventure there is also another facet of reef giant culture that we haven't really talked about yet and that is their pensant for sailing they know the sea extremely well and can make incredible Sailors if they can find a ship large enough to accommodate them but a reef giant sailing the high seas either as Captain or even just a member of the crew could make for a really fun NPC to play no matter the role they end up in maybe they're even a traveling Merchant sailing the Seas with all their rare finds on a ship barely big enough to contain them in their horde but if you happen to spot them and pull up with a boat of your own you might have a chance to buy some cool stuff now another thing I want to talk about and something I think is worth considering for those of us in a more High fantasy forgotten realm style campaign is where the reef giant fits in with the concept of the ording I bring this up in literally every giant video I do because in my opinion it's a very important thing to consider for those unaware crash course the ording is a system of organization that Giants use to determine who's in charge it's basically a cast system with Hill Giants at the bottom and storm Giants at the top which also coincides with the power level of each giant respectively in the alade setting the ording isn't really a thing or at least it's not mentioned in their Source material so we're just kind of left to invent our own Lord there personally I love the idea that they were supposed to fit somewhere between Cloud Giants and storm Giants since it's reflective of their power but being loners they just dipped from the ording entirely deciding they wanted nothing to do with the other Giants and their politics not only does that seem fitting to me but I also think it's yet another opportunity for controversy that a DM can twist into a plot hook of some kind since storm Giants do sometimes live in the depths of the sea perhaps there is a conflict between a storm Giant and a reef giant which the party gets embroiled in lastly I want to talk about the thing that made me decide to do a video about this creature in the first place and that is the fact that you can just run a reef giant encounter like it's an episode of The Bachelorette I feel like you're here to make out with a bunch of dudes on TV maybe the party gets intermingled in a reef giant courtship ritual where a bunch of Giants are all vying for the hand of a newly eligible Bachelorette with a ton of money there are a lot of different ways you could tackle this maybe the party is working with the mistress to help her narrow down the selection by spying on all the other Giants or even testing them in some way with the promise of a reward if they help her find a suitable mate or perhaps the party is friends with a reef giant who is requesting that the party help them in these courtship games maybe he needs a dope magic surfboard to help him win the surfing competition and offers to pay the party if they can find it but when they do find it it turns out that it's been cursed by another one of the reef Giants trying to sabotage their boy so they have to bring the magic surfboard to a temple to get it cleansed and then run it back to the beach just in time for the contest there are a lot of things you could do here but just having a reef giant courtship contest as the backdrop of any kind of small Adventure honestly sounds like a really light-hearted and fun opportunity for a game but however you choose to use this monster if you do want to use it as always Linked In the description down below is a Google Document which contains all the stats lore and information about this creature that you will need to successfully run it at your fifth edition game table and of course if you are one of my lovely patrons over on the dungeon dad patreon page you can find the dungeon dad patreon style stab block which contains all the same information just presented in a nicely formatted highres PDF with the new updated artwork done this week by the lovely Tam so massive shout out to all you patrons out there watching for helping me do what I do here I literally couldn't do it without you and a tremendous shout out goes out to our randomly selected patron of the week this week's randomly selected Patron is evil Chan thank you so much for your support no matter which side of the alignment Spectrum you wind up on and thank you for watching if you like what I'm doing here and you want to see more content like this please leave a like leave a comment consider subscribing to the Channel all that stuff is free and helps me out tremendously and of course if there's a monster from an older version of DnD or some other tabletop game such as Pathfinder numera whatever let me know in the comments down below what creature you'd like to see and who knows you might see it show up on an episode of Monster of the week if you want to get extra involved with the dungeon Community you can find a link to our Discord in the description down there as well where we have a monster suggestions Channel and all kinds of other channels with all kinds of cool stuff such as Homebrew monster contest chatting about DND posting memes Discord and of course the link to my patreon's down there as well so if you're not already subscribed to me on patreon and you feel like throwing some financial support my way I definitely encourage you to at least check it out it's three bucks a month if you got the three bucks to spare helps me keep all my hot lights turned on anyways enough plug myself and all my socials and all that I hope you enjoyed this video it was super fun to talk about and I just love these guys I want to write a campaign all around Reef Giants because I think they're just neat but anyways that's all I got for you this week as always stick around to the last like 10 seconds or whatever it is for a preview of what's coming next week it's going to be a weird one and I'll see you then bye for [Music] now is this even a real creature you're serious all [Music] right perhaps the most useless monster to ever graze the pages of a DND D book appears an egg-shaped MK with tentacles for hair but wait there seems to be some hidden secret behind its eyes next episode wingless Wonder tune in next time for lots more fan service V

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Id: wy5wl7qriFQ

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023