New Monsters: Death Giants
PDF Link | D&D Beyond Links: Death Giant, Death Giant Soulbreaker, Death Giant Bone King, Giant Skeleton, Giant Zombie, Detect Souls
If you played previous editions of D&D, especially 3rd or 4th edition, you may recognize the enemies in this preview of The Impermissicon, the upcoming homebrew compendium filled with forbidden magic and lore. Death giants were a part of the official game in those previous editions, but haven’t been included in the current edition. Despite that, they make excellent foes to fill high-level adventures in the Shadowfell and elsewhere, so we’ve redesigned their statistics from previous editions to fit in with the design of 5th edition, and updated their old lore to reflect more modern sensibilities by having the “ash giants” that were transformed into death giants be a self-selected nation rather than a race of its own.
Death giants are designed as an epic-level threat used to populate adventures and campaigns. They are more powerful than the other giants that player characters can face in D&D, and they have a variety of potent abilities that make each rank-and-file death giant a threat even to high level characters. For example, they have innate spells for when weapon attacks don’t work or when ranged damage or area damage is needed. They also threaten semi-permanent death for PCs that can normally resurrect each other with ease, since a death giant can escape with the soul of a slain PC, preventing their resurrection. They can grant themselves immunity to many spells and abilities that don’t work against undead, and their Shrieking Souls ability can easily fragment a party of PCs and change the course of a battle.
A single death giant can be a great addition to a battle with a lich, mummy lord, death knight, death hag, or other necromantic villains, either fighting as a mercenary or defending its own personal interests. A pair of death giants can be a dangerous random encounter for any high-level adventuring group travelling across the planes. However, a DM can also use even more powerful death giants, such as soulbreakers or bone kings, or use the death giants statistics to build custom death giant NPCs, and create an epic-level adventure that consists primarily of battling the death giants and thwarting their ambitions, or interweave such a story with other epic-level undead threats, such as Orcus or one of the classic archliches.
This preview also features additional content from the compendium that are referenced in the death giants’ stat blocks, such as statistics for giant skeletons and giant zombies, which can be created by the bone king or its lair actions. The detect souls spell is listed in one of the traits of the soulbreaker; it’s one of the new soul magic spells found in the compendium, along with a few spells we’ve already previewed, which the soulbreaker can also cast. The other new spells on these spell lists that have already been previewed are blackout, delude, desolation, ego shock, shadow lance, and weakening smite. Finally, this preview also shows the bone king’s mythic trait and actions. The bone king is just one of three different mythic monsters that will appear in the compendium when it releases!
PDF Link | D&D Beyond Links: Death Giant, Death Giant Soulbreaker, Death Giant Bone King, Giant Skeleton, Giant Zombie, Detect Souls
