While I haven't read through the whole book yet, I picked up Glory of the Giants, or "Bigby's" as I'm sure I'll refer to it in the future. Something of a companion piece to Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, this is a sort of monster book, lore book, and overall examination of a particular kind of creature, namely Giants.
I will quickly note here that this is focusing on the "true giants" more than lesser giants like Trolls and Ogres, though we get some new (and horrifying) troll stat blocks and a bit of kind of speculative lore about their creation. But the main focus here is on the six main giant types, along with Fomorians (revealed here to be the offspring/creations of a disowned giant deity who was the twin of Grolontor) and the Death Giants - a group of former cloud giants who went to the Shadowfell to serve the Raven Queen.
As with most of the 5E books, there are fun little commentary notes through the book. In this case, it's a sort of dialogue between Bigby and Diancastra, the latter of whom is one of the three daughters of Annam.
I don't know if they were established in earlier lore, but while each of the main giant lines has a patriarchal deity (including the Fomorians, who have Karontor) who are sons of Annam, the daughters of Annam are more broadly revered by giant-kind and their people. While there's divine family drama like Greek myth, the characterization of Diancastra at least is a bit more Norse - she's a goddesss, but also someone who can hang out and go on adventures with Bigby.
There are some notions - not so much canon as a kind of suggestion for DMs doing world-building - that Annam was the one who took the fragments of the shattered First World (as introduced in Fizban's as the creation of Bahamut and Tiamat) and created the many worlds of the Prime Material Plane. Giants, then, built massive empires on many of these worlds, but that was all in the long past. The "Glory" of the Giants is a faded one, and one that they lament losing, while a small minority look to it as something they might reclaim - that these past several aeons are more of an interregnum between golden ages for their kind.
Like dragons, of course, Giants vary significantly in alignment and outlook, and while the book acknowledges that the individual giant deities have their alignments, and those shape the giants of their kinds, there's nothing inherent to being, say, a Fire Giant, that makes you lawful evil.
The book gives you ways to create giant-themed characters, whether they use giant magic (the Path of the Giant Barbarian is the book's only subclass, but it looks like a very fun one - even if it steps on the toes of the Rune Knight Fighter in terms of being able to get real big in combat). There are also backgrounds that come with new feats - though depending on how the 2024 core rules handle backgrounds, I'll hold off on deciding how exciting I find these. The feats are interesting.
There are tables and chapters dedicated to building giant-themed encounters, adventures, and campaigns, and I think like Fizban's there is a section (that I haven't gotten to yet) with adventure locations themed around giants.
Of course, there's also new treasure. And, of course, there's the bestiary.
The bestiary here provides a ton of giant variants. There are also some themes that run through it - there are several examples of giants corrupted into demons (and one devil) such as Stone Giants whose appreciation for Baphomet's labyrinths led them down the road to corruption, or Hill Giants who find kinship in Yeenoghu's hunger and become nasty lamprey-mouthed filter-feeders. There are also examples of giants of various kinds serving cults of elemental evil. One interesting oddity is the Fensir, which are trolls who have gone to the outer plane of Ysgard and for the most part transformed into far more humanoid-looking beings, albeit ones who are petrified if touched by sunlight. Death Giants serve the Raven Queen and make use of the Rune of Death. We also get some variations on Fomorians, along with some of their number who remained in the Feywild while their kin were cursed, and have retained their original, untwisted form (making them kind of elf-giants).
Another note here is that the giant stat blocks are consistently high-CR. The recommendation is that a lot of the adventure hooks and encounters they suggest are built with tier 3 characters in mind. This does mean that you might find if you're running a lower-level campaign, some of these monsters might be hard to use in a straight fight.
But while I don't know that I'd call these "action-oriented monsters" in quite the MCDM way - like those I've been reading about in Flee, Mortals! - there does seem to be in most cases an attempt to make the monsters more interesting than just "this one has multiattack and the individual attacks hit like a truck" to make the CR appropriate.
One of the running "cycles" of creature in the book are giants using rune magic. These giants carry an object with a rune on it, and by destroying the rune, a party can deny the giant the chance to use some of its runic abilities. For example, the Hill Giant Avalancher has a Hill Rune that gives them a "Stone Avalanche" action, that lets them rain down rocks in a 20-foot-radius cylinder, dealing a fireball's worth of bludgeoning damage (dex save for half). They also have a reaction that can deal damage to a foe that has struck them and knock them back. If the runic item is destroyed, they lose those abilities, and must rely on their hefty, thunder-infused greatclub or magical stone bolas - neither of which are going to put out as much damage as that stone avalanche ability.
There are also a ton of giant animals, but if you're excited about using Wild Shape or Polymorph for these, one little asterisk - the Giant Ox (basically Babe the Blue Ox from the tale of Paul Bunyan) is technically Fey. Likewise, a lot of the massive dinosaurs are listed as monstrosities - charged, as they seem to be, with elemental magic.
Though, as a side note, one is reminded here that gargantuan is not a bounded range of creature sizes. The Ceratops is described as being 200 feet long! While you might rule that the main bulk of the creature isn't quite so large, and thus would fit in a smaller space on a grid map, I'd still say you could make a 30 by 30 space on a battlemap for this thing. The Regisaur is described as being large enough to swallow a giant whole, which... is pretty freaking huge.
In Fizban's, we got two CR 30 stat blocks for the avatars of Bahamut and Tiamat, along with Greatwyrms that were not too far behind. While there's no stat block for the various giant deities here, there are epic encounters reminiscent of the Greatwyrms, known as the Scions. These are meant to represent the direct children of the various giant gods. Each begins slumbering in an elemental cradle - a kind of living embodiment of the elements over which that kind of giant has mastery. And so, you have to fight the elemental first - killing it then frees the Scion (and depending on how your DM wants to run it, they either thank you for freeing them or attack you for interrupting their slumber). Essentially, these are like mythic encounters, but dividing each phase into its own separate stat block. The highest CR of these is the Cradle of the Storm Scion/Scion of Stronmaus, which are each CR 27 creatures (they also have 11 legendary resistances between the two of them, which is kind of insane - basically, they should succeed on every saving throw. Here I find myself sympathizing more with the players and liking FM's "legendary resistance with a cost" design).
Notably, though, these don't have legendary actions, so I'd recommend using other creatures in these fights. The Scions empower their respective giants - the Storm one gives nearby Storm Giants a +8 (!) to both attack and damage rolls within 1000 feet. So... build carefully, because this would give the CR 20 Storm Giant Tempest Caller a +23 to hit (what is this, Starfinder?)
Anyway, I like this book so far. I kind of like this sort of broadly-usable sourcebook. Even if you have a homebrew world you run your campaigns in, you can take a lot from this. In my futuristic Spelljammer version of my own world (pushing a bit more of a sci-fi angle) there's a world called Garvox where the giant empire never fell, and this book is chock full of really useful stuff if I ever run a campaign dealing with the Garvox Imperium (which is, at best, a Lawful Neutral empire that skews evil with its notions that it needs to spread the order it represents to all other worlds, and has tried to export the giant caste system to the small folk).
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