Episode Transcript
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Giants are striding their way into Dand D five V in this newest edition
from Wizards of the Coast. Ina similar vein to Fitzman's Treasury of Dragons
from a couple years back, Gloryof the Giants is primarily a lore book
centered around the giant folk and theirordinigg, but with quite a bit more
mechanical oomph than what we got thelast time around. Does all of it
really add up into something worth buying? Though? Well? Kind of.
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If having giants in your next campaignor learning about the ordining is important to
you, stick around for today's video. Watzi has only shrunk this offering once
again, but they've also raised theprice, making Glory of the Giants both
the smallest and the most expensive officialD and D content on offer, which
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is not a great start. Earlyon in five ye's history books commonly clocked
in at about two hundred and fiftysix pages and sold for forty nine ninety
nine. Big Bee is a whoppingsixty four pages shorter at one hundred and
ninety two pages, and the MSRPis officially all the way up to sixty
nine ninety five. Granted, youcan still find digital versions of the book
for twenty nine ninety nine, butthat physical copy price just seems ridiculous to
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me, considering previously offered slim volumesstill only ran about thirty bucks for a
physical copy. To get off thatsoapbox for a minute. The actual content
is mostly aimed towards dungeon masters,with a little bit of player content sprinkled
in. It's a bit more mechanicalcontent heavy than Fitzbands grant you, but
Lare still occupies most of the pagesWhen it comes to what's on offer in
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the book, we of course havea bunch of lore giants and the Forgotten
Realms have a deep and detailed historyfilled with gods and divine dramas that spill
into the lives of their Titanic descendants. If you played Storbm King's Thunder,
you'll already know quite a bit aboutthis. From the grand hierarchy of giants
called the Ordining to the giant offshootslike trolls and ogres. Here we frame
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the lore as the titular Big Bee'sconversations and musings with the giant goddess dian
Castra. We also get a fewsnippets of Giant lore outside the Forgotten realms,
but the Lion's share goes towards ourestablished canon. I do appreciate how
much of the Law is oriented towardshow it relates towards potential adventurers rather than
just lists of facts and dates.I think it beats out Fitspins in that
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regard, as each chunk of thelore serves a purpose, and I can
see most of it coming up ina game. I would even say a
lot of the stuff in here couldbe easily injected into a one shot if
you really wanted to fill that outwith some background lore and environmental storytelling.
We also, of course have Pathof the Giant, probably the biggest piece
of player facing content. This firstand foremost lets you become big while you
rage. In effect, that feelseven more impactful if you start with a
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small race. Beyond that gimmick,it focuses surprisingly hard on thrown weapons and
turning the tiny people around you intothrown weapons, which is just amazing.
This book also comes with new backgroundssuch as Giant Foundling and Room Carver,
which are interesting to me not intheming, which is fine, but because
they're bound to two new feats ofsimilar names. The backgrounds of each provide
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much of what I'd expect from abackground, but also specifically grant a bonus
feet at first level. Mind you, we also get a little rules snippet
saying that essentially, if using thesebackgrounds, everybody else should also get a
bonus feet at first level, evenif they don't take the new stuff.
I think what we're seeing here areripples coming off of the new five point
five E or D and D nextcontent, where starting off the game with
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a bonus feet will be the norm. This book also comes with eight new
feats, which is a bit misleadingreally. What we get here are two
new feats, namely Rune Shaper andStrike of the Giants, and six half
feets you can only take if youalready have Strike of the Giants. Each
of these half feats has a different, mostly elemental twist, taking you down
the roots of the six main giantfamilies. I think these will be much
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more relevant in upcoming five point fivereality where everybody starts with feats, but
right now, requiring two feats tomake something happen isn't going to be seen
often. At many game tables.We also get thirty nine assorted tables part
of my inner DM smiles whenever Isee well made encounter in loot tables,
and I was grinning ear to earon these. The book is absolutely brimming
with useful tables for all occasions,many of them even giant related. I
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wasn't expecting a dinosaur encountertable, butI'm happy to have one. I think
this is one of the big waysthat Bigbie presents itself as a DM toolbook
first and a lore book second,as opposed to fitsbands, which went on
for chapters without dealing with anything gamerelated. We also get eighteen giant enclaves.
This is the book's biggest and bestinnovation, and I'm very glad that
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they pushed it and gave it asolid chunk of the book. Each enclave
is a map, either a smalldungeon or a whole region, with accompanying
fluff and giant flavored lore. Eachone is given to you with the special
rules concerning the areas, strange andmagical properties which love the endless rock slide
cave by the way, and fourto five potential hooks to use in your
adventures. More than just idea prompts, these hooks go on to tell you
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how to populate the map with encountersusing those handy encounter tables and monsters,
and even how to string some ofthem together to create a greater story narrative.
Absolutely love this technique. Anyone that'swatched this channel for a long time
probably already knows. I love thingslike this. It holds the DM's hand
loosely, giving them all the toolsthey need to make what they want without
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just driving them down a pre writtenadventure path. Absolute kudos to Watzi for
this. I hope they do moreof this in the future. Dms deserve
more resources like this, especially onesjust starting out. We also get a
surprising wealth of fun magic items here, ranging across all tiers of play.
A good number of these are eitherdirectly related to giants or at least have
some form of ruin magic going on. I know a few of these will
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be making their way into my futuregames, particularly the Tyrannosaurus Rex figuring of
power, because just imagine the troublea party can get up to with a
pocket t Rex. I didn't thinkI'd ever get to say those words.
And then we also get a lotof monsters, seventy one in fact,
for what is expected to be moreof a lore book. For example,
the bc are section of Spelljammer hadonly a total of seventy two monster stat
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blocks, only a single point upfrom Bigbie. I don't know if this
is the result of the remains ofa scrapped adventure path, the New Normal,
or something in between, but I'mabsolutely here for it. I'm particularly
interested to see what they do withthe new Death Giants, which are essentially
just huge draw their purple skinned murdergiants who've sworn fealty to the Raven Queen,
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and I need to learn all aboutthem, or at very least come
up with my own lore for them. Before I wrap this review up,
we do need to talk about Wizardsof the Coast, most recent case of
foot in the Mouth, which hasbeen a frequent occurrence as of late.
For everyone unaware, bigbe presents Gloryof the Giants has shipped with AI generated
artworks. If the debate on aiarthas escaped you completely somehow, the issue
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is complex, but when boiled down, is an argument about an artist's right
to their work and on replacing artistswith machines that use those same artists work
to replace them. Very close tothe release of bigbe we started getting some
spoiler artworks, and some of ourmore observant nerves notice some of the distinct
AI weirdness in those artworks, notall of them, but a few.
According to Watsi, those AI abominationsare all from a single artist that used
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AI without their knowledge and without theirpermission. Now, to be entirely honest,
I'm not sure I believe that atall. Hasbro has been aggressively trying
to squeeze more money out of everythingthey own for the last few years,
and I highly doubt their ability toresist the allure of free art for their
products. This could very well bea single artist trying to sneak it in,
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but it could also very easily bemanagement trying to sneak it in to
test the waters, and they threwthe artists to the wolves. I don't
know either way, but at veryleast it means their quality control was slacking
hard, because those wolves definitely hadweird mutant human feet. We all saw
that, right. If you haven'tseen it, you need can I show
it on screen? To their credit, the AI artwork has been quickly pulled
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from the digital version, but thefirst print run has already shipped weird human
dog paws and all that stuff.Take this as just another reason not to
pick up Bigbie as a physical copy, or perhaps even more of a reason,
which we'll get more into in justa second. And to address this
really quick, yes, we didrelease a book back a few months ago
called Andar's Vault that did use aiR, but it also featured human art
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and we would like to think thereis a bit more quality control with that
than Wolf Dog Pause. And alsoskull Splitter Dice does not have Hasbro money.
Hasbro has Hasbro money they can affordto pay for real artists. When
it comes to what's good about thebook, this is essentially Fitzpan's two point
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zero in the best possible way.At the core, bigb is still a
lore book and should scratch that infoitch and provide you with plenty of forgotten
realms reading. But Fitzpands was almostjust a lore book, and that made
it hard to recommend for the averageplayer. You only bought Fitzpans if you
wanted a bunch of dragon law,but you should buy Big Bees if you're
a DM, and if you're interestedin giant lore. That only makes it
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better. There's enough here to craftmultiple giant theme campaigns, and it wouldn't
be hard to assemble them either.Big Bees has set itself up as an
actual set of DM tools, andI think any DM will be better equipped
to run their games with this intheir arsenal. The content we got is
good. It's everything that isn't thereand all the stuff surrounding this book that's
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terrible. Let's put aside the wholeAI art issue first second, because that's
not fair to the book we didget. It still means the book is
now missing a few art pieces,but that's not the biggest issue, not
by a long shot. In thelast few years, I noticed some worrying
trends, and I'm sad to seemy own predictions vindicated. The books are
getting shorter, and they're charging morefor less content. Charging more than ever
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for a standard issue of their shortestbook release is a It's a ballsy move,
Watsey. Seventy dollars is a heftyprice tag for a short collection of
DM tools and lore. I honestlythink that their inclusion of a few player
facing options is less about including contentand more about trying to trick players into
spending seventy dollars for a few pagesof content intended for them. I wouldn't
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be ranting about it if it wasone or the other. But shorter volumes,
fine, lighter content, with moreeffort put into it can be a
good thing. More expensive. Ihate it, but I understand inflation hits
us all. But both together,I feel like unless we draw a line
in the sands somewhere by this time, in a few years, we'll be
spending one hundred dollars for a thirdof the book we used to get for
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fifty dollars. And it's even moreaudacious when you consider just how much free
DM and player related content is outthere, from people that just post it
in a Reddit thread essentially. Sometimes. Heck, you can even find good
aiart on Reddit that you could justput with the thing. Ultimately, I
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do think Bigbie is a step upfrom Fitzpen's, a well rounded set of
lore and DM tools that is elevatedabove a mere lore book. However,
I can't ignore all these surrounding issues. Some great writers and artists obviously worked
hard on this book and accomplish somethingreally good, but getting squads on both
price and content is a terrible positionfor any product. It's just too much
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for me to overlook. Normally,we at skull Splitter don't make that big
of a distinction between a physical anddigital copy and say to each their own.
But in this case, the valueis just not there for a seventy
dollars physical book. Digital copies canstill be had for thirty dollars, though,
and while still smaller than what I'dusually like to see at a thirty
dollars price tag, it is reasonablefor what you're getting. If a big
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set of DM tools and giant loresounds interesting, pick big b up,
but do so from a digital providerrather than bothering with actual paper. And
I thought Stricksaban made me upset whenit comes to a physical copy. Final
score is definitely three out of ten. It's just it's not worth that price.
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Balder's Gate three is that price.It's not the same thing at all.
But I'm just saying digital copy though. Final score easily seven and a
half out of ten, maybe evenpersonally for me, because you know,
I'm actually gonna say me Patrick Fergusoneight and a half out of ten,
because I really do like a lotof the tools here. Uh, just
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don't get the physical copy so disappointing. I have to make this distinction.
Thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. Be sure
to like and subscribe because we're puttingout new content all the time. Go
see what we're up to over onskullsplitter dice dot com. And if you
plan on picking this book up,I would absolutely love to know why down
in the comments. Is that thegiant lore? Is it the is it
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the creatures? Is it the DMtools? I just want to know why
this interests you. Thanks again forwatching. My names Patrick Ferguson from skull
splitter Dice and until next time,farewell