Since the release of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide - a book I think wildly improves on its 2014 antecedent, except in places where the I was really hoping for more "here's how to design a monster" kind of content - I have been obsessed with a certain magic item.
Now, to be fair, this item has precedent. In Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, you can find a Scroll of Tarrasque Summoning. I've only read through, not run or played the adventure, so I'm a little hazy on where you get it and what you might use it for (though I think the former is in one of the highest-level areas of the adventure). Still, it does what it says it does: it's a one-time use item that summons the Tarrasque, which we all know is the highest-CR monster in all of 5th Edition (though it shares that spot with the Aspects of Bahamut and Tiamat, found in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons).
Essentially, you can summon Godzilla.
Now, that's fun for an adventure - it's a great "grand finale" option to, for example, unleash it upon the adventure's big bad, who is literally a god (I need to look at her three stat blocks again to get a sense of just how nasty of a fight she is, but I suspect it's pretty damn tough). But then they just had to put what is effectively this item and several others in the DMG.
Titan is a creature subtype, similar to how some humanoid stat blocks will specify that they are, say, elves or warlocks. Thus, items or spells that have functionality for certain types of creatures can look for that tag.
The 2014 DMG had a couple of Titans, though I think there were only three (if memory serves): the Tarrasque, the Kraken, and the Empyrean.
Interestingly, at least in the 2014 DMG, Titans are listed as one of the kind of "ranks" of deities, generally being listed as direct creations of the gods, to serve as their lieutenants or servants. The lore behind Krakens certainly backed this up - essentially presenting them as weapons created by the gods in the earliest ages of the world that were then left behind and have kind of gone rogue. The Tarrasque is generally considered a singular figure (though Spelljammer in earlier editions did have a "planet of tarrasques.")
Titans, instead, in my mind, represent the creatures so vast that their appearance is a historical event. They're more or less designed to be campaign end-bosses, though I'd also argue that in some cases, there's not a ton of individual agency and will there. Beings like the Tarrasque function more like an embodiment of primordial power.
Thanks to the order in which they were published, and the appearance of this item, we now have the names of new Titans to be found in the 2025 Monster Manual.
As before, we have the Tarrasque, Kraken, and Empyrean. Joining them, though, we have the Animal Lord, Blob of Annihilation, Colossus, and Elemental Cataclysm.
Now, among these, we have a few details:
The Animal Lord got a full preview by the Dungeon Dudes, so technically if you broke down that video, you could run one of these now. These are Celestials from The Beastlands, taking the form of kind of humanoid animals. As a note, I have a figure in my setting called The Feral Gentleman, who is an archfey that is responsible for all lycanthropy in the world. His backstory is that he was originally one of the two beloved hunting hounds of the God of the Hunt, before becoming trapped on that world. While he'd likely be a Fey creature, this stat block would otherwise work quite well to represent him. Interestingly, by default the Animal Lords are only Medium-sized, though they can change size. I believe the rest of the Titans are at least Huge, and most Gargantuan.
The Blob of Annihilation we have fewer details on, but this is a Gargantuan ooze. The art depicts these oozes as having a massive skull in them, and I believe I read somewhere that the skull is that of a dead god. So... that's pretty hardcore. The Blob of Annihilation is also portrayed as really taking advantage of "Gargantuan" meaning "20x20 feet and up," with most art depicting it as the size of a town or even city (there's one piece in the DMG that shows a blob assaulting Sharn in Eberron, and it's as tall as that city's skyscrapers.
The Colossus we know is a massive construct. I almost wonder if it'll be similar to the Warforged Colossus from Eberron Rising From the Last War, which is CR 25 and is a pretty powerful monster (I actually used one of these earlier in my Ravnica campaign, re-skinned as a Darksteel Colossus, giving it adamantine-style crit immunity, but I had Aurelia, the Boros guildmaster, basically tank it for the party to make it a fair fight). I have a region of my world filled with ancient constructs that have been autonomously fighting for thousands of years, and this could very easily be one of the most powerful among those.
The Elemental Cataclysm is, I think, the one we've gotten the least actual info about, but from the name its creature type is pretty obvious. Given that Elementals represent the primal forces of nature, there kind of no upper limit on how big and powerful an elemental can be. I imagine there will be four versions of this, unless it represents a conflux of all four elements.
So, then we have the following question: when would you ever in your right mind give this item to your party?
Notably, this item does not make the creature friendly to the party - it will attack anything in sight. That does, however, also potentially include the party's adversaries. But it also has a one-mile range.
Thus, I think the most obvious way to use it is to allow the party to use it as a kind of intense siege weapon. Perhaps the big bad has a massive fortification that is utterly impenetrable by mere mortals. Or perhaps they have an enormous army that is an order of magnitude more than what the party can reasonably hope to fight, and the party needs to clear them out. Perhaps this would be to lift a siege - you could almost imagine Aragorn's army of the dead as an equivalent power to a Titan, unleashed upon Sauron's orcish legions (yes, I know that the Tolkien nerds always specify that the ghost-army doesn't actually kill any orcs, but sends them into a panic, allowing the living forces to rout them).
If you see 100,000 enemy soldiers marching on Emon or Waterdeep or Greyhawk, it might not be a bad idea to drop a Titan on top of them - which will at the very least soften them up.
Another alternative is that fighting the Titan is something the party needs to do - the item allows them to summon the Titan to a location where they can stand against it.
And, of course, you can always have your villains use it. While nothing like this item existed in 2015, when I ran my first session of D&D, I started off my original campaign by having the big bad - who claimed to be a wandering prophet but was actually a preserved member of an ancient conspiracy that destroyed the nigh-utopian advanced civilization that had existed in a forgotten era - summon the Tarrasque to herald the culmination of the conspiracy's works, sending it to destroy the city that the continent-spanning empire had just sunk great strategic resources into re-taking in the midst of a civil war.
The kind of "joke" of it was just to have the very scariest monster in the Monster Manual show up in the very first session of the campaign, in which the party was just three 1st level characters. (I never even entertained the thought of having them actually fight it - but it forced them to flee the chaos in the city as the Tarrasque rampaged "in the background.")
But this item, of course, has a ton of potential when given to a villain. Some Titans work pretty well as big-bads on their own. Krakens are deviously intelligent, and Empyreans can be as well. But I think in a lot of cases these are perhaps a little more along the lines of a big climactic foe that is more of a tool of the villain than the primary villain itself. And again, that makes it work out quite well for a villain to get their hands on one of these items.
You could even have the party race a villain to secure one of these - or it could be more of a McGuffin - maybe the party gets their hands on it and finds out how powerful it is, but need to ensure that no one gets to use it, and then a bunch of people come after them for it. (And here, making it clear that the Blog of Annihilation that they summon isn't just going to stop being a problem if they take it to some remote location, so they won't just use the scroll immediately to make sure that it can't fall into the wrong hands - that said, this is a scenario in which you, as the DM, could very easily make this a teachable moment, and have the party deal with the consequences if they summon such a being.)
Interestingly, many years ago I considered homebrewing a magic item - I think a Shield - which was especially effective against Titans. Thus, it's nice to see that category expanding.
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