Giant Foundling 5e
Though you aren’t a Giant, you grew up among giants. Maybe you were an orphan taken in by a sympathetic family of stone giants who raised you as one of their own. Or perhaps you lived in a lost prehistoric pocket of the world, surrounded by giants and fearsome behemoths or hulking dinosaurs.
Something about your environment—perhaps the food or water that sustained you, elemental magic inherent in the site of your home, or some verdant blessing of growth placed on you—caused you to grow to a remarkable size for your kind. With the aid of this magic, you have learned how to embody the might of giants. You are used to moving through a world much bigger than you, and that is reflected in your skills, attitude, and perspective on life.
Source: Bigby Presents - Glory of the Giants
Skill Proficiencies: Intimidation, Survival
Languages: Giant and one other language of your choice
Equipment: A backpack, a set of traveler’s clothes, a small stone or sprig that reminds you of home, and a pouch containing 10 gp.
Origin Stories
How you came to live among colossal creatures is up to you to determine, but the Foundling Origin table suggests a variety of possibilities.
Foundling Origin
| d6 | Origin |
|---|---|
| 1 | You were found as a baby by a family of nomadic giants who raised you as one of their own. |
| 2 | A family of stone giants rescued you when you fell into a mountain chasm, and you have lived with them underground ever since. |
| 3 | You were lost or abandoned as a child in a jungle that teemed with ravenous dinosaurs. There, you found an equally lost frost giant; together, you survived. |
| 4 | Your farm was crushed and your family killed in a battle between warring groups of giants. Racked with guilt over the destruction, a sympathetic giant soldier promised to care for you. |
| 5 | After you had a series of strange dreams as a child, your superstitious parents sent you to study with a powerful but aloof storm giant oracle. |
| 6 | While playing hide-and-seek with your friends, you stumbled into the castle of a cloud giant, who immediately adopted you. |
Feature: Strike of the Giants
You gain the Strike of the Giants feat.
Building a Giant Foundling Character
Your life among giants has given you a unique perspective. Though you are unusually large for your kind, you’re no larger than a giant child, so you might be very mindful of your size.
Suggested Characteristics. The Giant Foundling Personality Traits table suggests a variety of traits you might adopt for your character.
Giant Foundling Personality Traits
| d6 | Personality Trait |
|---|---|
| 1 | What I lack in stature, I make up for with sheer spite. |
| 2 | I insist on being taken seriously as a full-grown adult. Nobody talks down to me! |
| 3 | Crowded spaces make me uncomfortable. I’d much rather be in a wide-open field than a bustling tavern. |
| 4 | I embrace my shorter stature. It helps me stay unnoticed—and underestimated. |
| 5 | Every avalanche begins as a single pebble. |
| 6 | The world always feels too big, and I’m afraid I’ll never find my place in it. |
Giant Foundling Characters
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
There is something heartwarming about found-family stories- Giant Foundlings are this archetype in essence. You’re picked up (literally) by a larger than life entity who raises you as one of their own, and it comes out in some unique fashions.
You could lean into the “fish out of water” tropes and make characters who strive to fit in despite their inability to physically complete the day to day activities of their giant family. Alternatively, you could push back against this code, striving to showcase your independence and value as an individual through what makes you not a giant. You’ve got no shortage of options when it comes to background building with Giant Foundling- what kinds of classes and species want this, though?
Skills
Intimidation and Survival immediately push this into the “survivalist” camp, being something many brutes like barbarians or paladins may want. Playing something like a wizard may offer opportunities to break character type, but given how common Survival is as a skill among the wilderness exploring classes (druid/ranger/barbarian) you may find it tough to get a lot of use out of it. Intimidation suffers from a similar problem; a lot of problems you’d seek to solve socially can be done with any number of the Charisma skills. Characters that tend to want intimidation can get it through their class, and most of those cases won’t come with a high Charisma to make you a default negotiator.
Other Proficiencies
There are no tools to speak of with this background which is a shame. Somebody raised by giants I’d assume would be in a unique position to aid in fine tinkering and sculpting with their comparatively diminutive size. One artisan’s tool proficiency isn’t that much to ask, but alas, instead you can speak Giant and a language of your choice, which hardly will impact most games.
Equipment
On top of lacking artisan’s tools, they get one of the most generic and bland equipment sets I’ve ever seen. Yeah, the small rock or sprig is cute, but at the end of the day you’re bringing traveler's clothes, a backpack, and a measly ten gold. Fortunately, you’re getting a pretty meaty feature for a background to make up for these lackluster base options.
Feature
Strike of the Giants as a background feature is excellent, while as a feat you’d have to invest in is mediocre. It empowers only weapon attacks, but it can be ranged or melee (assuming the ranged weapon is thrown), making this a feat a lot of martial or hybrid characters are going to be able to readily use.
Of the options, Fire is the highest raw damage, but I’d regularly take the other flexible options over it with Cloud standing out as the coolest mode. I can see a rogue giant foundling using Cloud Strike to phenomenal effect.
The other options all benefit different classes; Hill Strike goes well on basically every melee ranged multi-attacker, namely monk. Storm fits well on protectors looking to disable enemy attacks, being a home run on paladins, clerics, and protective fighters. Frost makes ranged attacks able to prevent enemies from engaging, which is pretty sweet on rangers and other ranged weapon attackers. The thrown weapon builds may still not come together that well, which is a major issue, but you can probably cobble together some kind of build with it.
The upgrades are another thing to consider, as each strike has its own secondary feat it unlocks for you. Of the upgrade feats, I would only recommend Ember of the Fire Giant, Guile of the Cloud Giant, and maybe Keenness of the Stone Giant if you’ve got a free bonus action.
Bonus Table
I adore bonus personality trait tables as a general rule, as they help inspire ideas to mold your character into something all your own. This table is deeply personal- it's about world perception affected by being an underdog or existing in a space which you’ve never really fit. It isn’t particularly deep, but there are some great jumping-in points to get a character with clear motivations and goals ready to rumble as soon as you sit down to start playing with this background.
All Together
Strike of the Giants basically is why you’d take this, and in games where you’re starting with feats, this can be a fantastic pick. It will struggle until there are official, consistent rules reworking the base backgrounds to all offer feats of roughly equal stature, as this thing isn’t anywhere close to heavy hitters like Crossbow Expert, Lucky, or any of the bonus spell feats.
If you love the thematics and want Strike, I’d recommend this, even if the rest of it is a bit lackluster.
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