A to Z of Adventure! G is for Giants

G is for Giants.

Ah. Few adventures get my geek nostalgia into overload quite like the Giants series.  The opening act of the great GDQ series.  G1-3 Against the Giants

The premise is simple.  Giants are making forays into human-occupied settlements and raiding.  The adventurers must find out why and stop them.
Raids by hill giants lead to encampments of frost and then fire giants.  Each controlling the weaker till finally it is discovered that all are being controlled by the evil drow of the D series.

The original adventures were:

• G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief
• G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl
• G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King

There are even some stone and cloud giants thrown into the mix, but no Storm Giants that I recall.

I always wondered though, what were the Stone, Cloud and Storm giants doing while their kin were being played by the drow?  Well many years later (and now some years ago) more Giant adventures were written by fan R.C. Pinnel.  These new adventures rounded out the other Giant kin.

• G4 Sanctum of the Stone Giant Lord
• G5 Curse of the Cloud Giant Queen
• G6 Forge of the Formian Smith Lord
• G7 Giants in the Deep
• G8 Manor of the Mountain Giant King
• G9 Secret of the Swamp Giant Steward
• The Verbeeg Valley

They turn an opening chord of a concert into a Spinal Tap guitar solo!
All together the adventure is over 100 pages.  This is a bit more than I wanted to be honest.  The Giants are tied up pretty close to the Drow of the next series. So for me the Giants are just the pawns of the Drow.  The Stone and Mountain giants I can see.  Maybe even the Cloud, if they are more on the evil side.  I have not read all the adventures yet, but maybe the Cloud Giant queen has something to do with the Sun being blocked out in my adventure.  Plus I have an awesome female cloud Giant mini I could use.

l-r Hill, Frost, Fire, Storm, Stone and Cloud

The really nice thing about running these classics so many years later is all the material out there to support them.  For a while there WotC was publishing maps for the Giants series (among others).

Plus there has been at least two waves of minis that support the Giants.

Linking the A Series to the GDQ
The G modules introduce the Drow as the "big bad" and one of those big bad drow is list as "EHP" or "Evil High Priestess".  Her name is given as "Eclavdra" and I talked about her on D Day.  Her protégé is the drow priestess Edralve in the A series.  In my campaign Eclavdra and Edralve represent the drow interests in the Slave Lords.  Both were clerics of Lolth but have become warlocks of Tharizdûn; whom they know of as the Elder Elemental Eye.

Eclavdra is one of the big NPCs of the Greyhawk world and I think I'll need to dedicate a full post to her one day.

Links

• The Original Against The Giants, G123
• G4-9, offered for free on Google Drive
• Map a Week from Wizards of the Coast
• Against the Giants -- May 2006
• Against the Giants -- July 2006
• Crumbling Hall of the Frost Giant Jarl

So lots of great stuff out there. I might need to print these all out and get them into a binder or something.