All of the Pre-master bestiaries work just fine after the Remaster. Hill Giants were not 'axed'. Page space is a consideration, and if you need a hill giant, just use it from Bestiary 1 or AoN.
Not every monster from the three bestiaries will be reprinted. Nor do they need to be. Nor should we want them to be. New monsters are better than old ones that will not be changed at all.
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Giants are in a strange place as far as the OGL is concerned; they really ride the lines between generic concepts and product identity and mythologically inspired. The marsh giant is one that was created by us and not picked up from the OGL, and it occupies the same level band as the hill giant (more or less) so we decided to err on the side of "things we created" for them for Monster Core is all.
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Never was fond of the hill giant. By the time you can fight them youve already probably fought ogres and cyclopes. Basically the same thing.
But the ettin i did like, two dumb heads are better than one.
I guess the hill giant made the smarter more organized giants feel more formidable in contrast.
Can I assume that hill giants and storm giants are 100% D&D creations? That's why they don't appear in Monster Core?
There are six giants in Monster Core: marsh, stone, frost, fire, cloud, shadow, and rune. As far as I know, marsh giants are from the Cthulhu Mythos, and frost giants and fire giants are from Norse mythology. But where are the remaining four types of giants (stone, cloud, shadow, and rune) from? Honestly I've thought Wizards of the Coast created stone and cloud giants as well.
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Can I assume that hill giants and storm giants are 100% D&D creations? That's why they don't appear in Monster Core?
There are six giants in Monster Core: marsh, stone, frost, fire, cloud, shadow, and rune. As far as I know, marsh giants are from the Cthulhu Mythos, and frost giants and fire giants are from Norse mythology. But where are the remaining four types of giants (stone, cloud, shadow, and rune) from? Honestly I've thought Wizards of the Coast created stone and cloud giants as well.
As I said a few posts up from this one:
Giants are in a strange place as far as the OGL is concerned; they really ride the lines between generic concepts and product identity and mythologically inspired. The marsh giant is one that was created by us and not picked up from the OGL, and it occupies the same level band as the hill giant (more or less) so we decided to err on the side of "things we created" for them for Monster Core is all.
This includes hill giants and storm giants.
We can move away from OGL/D&D traditions for things like this by adjusting the art and stats away from the OGL stats, as seen with the stone, frost, fire, and cloud giants, but we also wanted to feature some of the giants we created and that have stronger roles in Golarion, like the marsh, shadow, and rune giants. That takes up six pages in a book where pagecount is at a premium.
We'll continue to update giants and create new ones and revisit OGL ones in new ways as time and resources and opportunities present themselves.
Marsh giants are NOT from the Cthulhu Mythos; they're 100% creations of us at Paizo, but they fit well into those stories for sure.
Giants associated with fire and giants associated with frost are pretty clearly pulls from Norse mythology (the prose edda, to be specific) but I never quite understood what the point of a "hill giant" was except "this is the generic one".
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It's the "we have giants at home" giant for when you don't live in a cool, cinematic location like deep in the snow-capped mountains or next to a volcano.
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Is the cloud giant an adaption in part from Jack and the Beanstalk?
That giant was massive and lived in the clouds.
Then again, how risky is it to make "[insert environment] giants"?
At best, your ogres can be hill giants... or marsh giants :p
So hill giants and storm giants are creations of Wizards of the Coast? I have always thought storm giants are from Greek mythology because in D&D and Pathfinder they look and dress like ancient Greeks.
I asked ChatGPT whether cloud giants and storm giants are from real-world mythology or fairy tales, or if they are purely D&D creations, and it answered that they are indeed D&D creations. If it's true, I have no idea how can cloud giants be used in Pathfinder Remaster though.
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Cloud Giants were often associated with "castles floating on clouds", like Jack & The Beanstalk.
Yup... Fee Fi Fo Fum XD
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So hill giants and storm giants are creations of Wizards of the Coast? I have always thought storm giants are from Greek mythology because in D&D and Pathfinder they look and dress like ancient Greeks.
I asked ChatGPT whether cloud giants and storm giants are from real-world mythology or fairy tales, or if they are purely D&D creations, and it answered that they are indeed D&D creations. If it's true, I have no idea how can cloud giants be used in Pathfinder Remaster though.
Protip, do not use Chat GPT as a search engine, it will literally make stuff up and is about as reliable as going into a random 7/11 and asking people there, sometimes worse.
Hill Giants are definitely not WoTC creations, you can find plenty of stories dealing with the dumb, countryside giant in English folklore, which is also where you get stuff like them throwing rocks at people. All WoTC did was call them "hill" giants instead of just...giants.
The Cloud giants are a different kind of issue. Gygax is on record saying Jack and the Beanstalk was a favorite tale of his, and it shows because Cloud Giants are the giant from that story, just made into a society. This one you could argue is mostly WoTC, since the whole Ordning + them being "benevolent overlords" is their own thing.
Storm giants are again, a weird one, because there are giants with power over storms in several norse tales, but they're not what D&D calls "storm giants", which are very much a D&D'ism.
One could argue that all giants, codified as they are, are D&D creations. Yes, Norse mythology talks about "frost" giants but they aren't like the frost giant you find in D&D/Pathfinder, and the same can be said for the other types. But while I'm pretty sure that wouldn't hold up anywhere, I don't mind Paizo going with the safer choice. Besides you still have pre-remaster Hill Giant stats, so it's basically a non-issue.
Thanks for your kind and detailed answer.
That raises another question. As you can see, stone giants clearly seem like D&D creations to me. They are not from any real-world mythology as far as I know. But somehow, Paizo used them in Pathfinder Remaster. This surprised me a lot because, while Wizards of the Coast certainly cannot own the term "stone giant", it surely owns the various lore regarding them, including their distinctive appearance (I'm not sure how to describe it, but... their moai-like look?). However, Paizo retained this moai-like appearance in Pathfinder Remaster, which I thought was owned by Wizards of the Coast.
In a similar case, while there are barghests in Pathfinder Remaster, Paizo not only rewrote the whole lore about them but also completely redrew the art, changing their appearance entirely—something it did not do for stone giants. I'm not sure if I'm missing something.
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Thanks for your kind and detailed answer.
That raises another question. As you can see, stone giants clearly seem like D&D creations to me. They are not from any real-world mythology as far as I know. But somehow, Paizo used them in Pathfinder Remaster. This surprised me a lot because, while Wizards of the Coast certainly cannot own the term "stone giant", it surely owns the various lore regarding them, including their distinctive appearance (I'm not sure how to describe it, but... their moai-like look?). However, Paizo retained this moai-like appearance in Pathfinder Remaster, which I thought was owned by Wizards of the Coast.
In a similar case, while there are barghests in Pathfinder Remaster, Paizo not only rewrote the whole lore about them but also completely redrew the art, changing their appearance entirely—something it did not do for stone giants. I'm not sure if I'm missing something.
James Jacobs said this, just above:
We can move away from OGL/D&D traditions for things like this by adjusting the art and stats away from the OGL stats, as seen with the stone, frost, fire, and cloud giants, but we also wanted to feature some of the giants we created and that have stronger roles in Golarion, like the marsh, shadow, and rune giants. That takes up six pages in a book where pagecount is at a premium.
They have adjusted the art on Stone Giants and the stats and lore enough that they aren't worried there. As for why Marsh Giant was included instead of Hill, that's also been stated very clearly above, that they would prefer to put their own creation in this book, and when it came down to page space that meant that Marsh won out.
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Here's the D&D stone giant It has a rounded head, and more round features overall.
Here's the Pathfinder stone giant More elongated and angular head, and rockier features overall.
To me, Pathfinder stone giants do have a very distinctive look, one that we have had from book 3 of Rise of the Runelords on.
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So hill giants and storm giants are creations of Wizards of the Coast? I have always thought storm giants are from Greek mythology because in D&D and Pathfinder they look and dress like ancient Greeks.
I asked ChatGPT whether cloud giants and storm giants are from real-world mythology or fairy tales, or if they are purely D&D creations, and it answered that they are indeed D&D creations. If it's true, I have no idea how can cloud giants be used in Pathfinder Remaster though.
1) One of the earlier design philosophies for giants was that they are "oversized humans" who represent "oversized archetypes" when it came to art. And that design philosophy had the cloud and storm giants being modeled on the tropes of Greek warrior and Roman warrior to a certain extent, sort of like how the frost giant was "the giant Viking" or the fire giant was "the giant dwarf" or the wood giant was "the giant elf" or the tomb giant was "the giant necromancer." In 2nd edition, we're largely moving away from that, since it can start to deviate into some unfortunate stereotypes—the hill giant being "the giant hillbilly" being one such example.
2) The original batch of giants from the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual were hill giants, stone giants, frost giants, fire giants, cloud giants, and storm giants. Through pretty much all editions of D&D, and thus through most editions of Pathfinder, these giants and their roles and looks and levels and places in the game's ecosystem and rules remained pretty much unchanged. The concept of these things are pretty generic, and giants are 100% something from pretty much every culture's real-world mythology, but these specific giants (the combinations of their names and which ones are more powerful and their looks and their roles and all of that) are D&D giants. AKA heavilly OGL influenced. They may be generic and simple enough that WotC might not want or be able to defend them as their intellectual property, but personally I'd rather not test those waters. It's easier and more constructive to build new giants and new traditions for Paizo's game than it is to continue riding on D&D's coat tails. It's more respectful to let D&D keep those incarnations of giants for them to continue exploring. It's more creatively satisfying to build new giants. But in some cases, giant tropes (such as the giant who lives in the clouds and is called a cloud giant) are more rooted in folklore (Jack and the Beanstalk, etc.) than they are in the Monster Manual.
3) ChatGPT and any other AI answering service is not something I personally trust to be able to give accurate answers all of the time, as you discovered.
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Thanks for your kind and detailed answer.
That raises another question. As you can see, stone giants clearly seem like D&D creations to me. They are not from any real-world mythology as far as I know. But somehow, Paizo used them in Pathfinder Remaster. This surprised me a lot because, while Wizards of the Coast certainly cannot own the term "stone giant", it surely owns the various lore regarding them, including their distinctive appearance (I'm not sure how to describe it, but... their moai-like look?). However, Paizo retained this moai-like appearance in Pathfinder Remaster, which I thought was owned by Wizards of the Coast.
In a similar case, while there are barghests in Pathfinder Remaster, Paizo not only rewrote the whole lore about them but also completely redrew the art, changing their appearance entirely—something it did not do for stone giants. I'm not sure if I'm missing something.
I'd argue that the concept of "stone giants" who "throw boulders" is something that was first inspired by The Lord of the Rings; there's a scene in the first book of the trilogy where these creatures are encountered and they're pretty much doing the same things that stone giants in D&D do. Considering that other tropes from Tolkien got into the game, this is a pretty safe assumption, I feel.
That said, for Pathfinder, stone giants are one of those things that I feel we've rebuilt as Pathfinder branded ideas from nearly the very start, beginning with Wayne Reynolds designing a look for them back in the fourth book of Rise of the Runelords to give them profiles that evoke the looks of the moais (stone heads) on Easter Island (this was something we pioneered, not WotC—before then, D&D's stone giants just looked like gray-skinned bald humans), and Wolfgang Baur's and my own work to build up new cultures and histories for them in that Adventure Path (such as their worship of new deities like Minderhall, or their role in creating vast architectural monoliths and structures, etc.). Just as we've done our own thing with goblins, ogres, ghouls, and dragon that are different from D&D.
We changed things more with the barghest to make them fit more into the real-world mythology about them, rather than keeping the variations that D&D infused into them.
All of these changes—and all of the decisions we make when switching away from the OGL, are things we research and undertake on a case-by-case, monster-by-monster case. We could do little essays about EVERY ONE of them, but as interesting as it might be for some folks to see our reasonings for each of these... there's not really time for us to present all of that information, and it also comes close to the concern about "airing trade secrets" if we make all of our company's decision making choices and creative methods public.
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Here's the D&D stone giant It has a rounded head, and more round features overall.
Here's the Pathfinder stone giant More elongated and angular head, and rockier features overall.
To me, Pathfinder stone giants do have a very distinctive look, one that we have had from book 3 of Rise of the Runelords on.
Great links! Thanks for sharing these!
Further complicating things is that a lot of the artists all game companies use are freelancers who work for multiple companies, and while it's the art director's job to keep styles creeping into art styles that aren't appropriate, it happens. Early on, when Warcraft was a big hit, we had a lot of artists assuming that our goblins looked like Warcraft goblins and not Wayne Reynolds goblins, and we had to do a lot of sending back sketches with changes and even had to kill some late art that was too close to the Warcraft goblin in style. But sometimes those things slip through, and when they do, they erode the look and feel of a setting's style.
For stone giants, the link you shared above is already drifting a bit from Wayne's control illustrations, simply because it's from a different artist. It's probably best to compare the D&D version to Wayne's version as a result.
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All of this is to say that the task and responsibility of managing the differences between an OGL game element and a Remastered game element are VERY complicated and require a lot of experience with the game's history and the internal art styles and creative decisions of the company. That sort of thing is a significant part of what a creative director's (from the lore side), art director's (from the art side), and lead designer's (from the rules side) job descriptions are all about.
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Here's the D&D stone giant It has a rounded head, and more round features overall.
Here's the Pathfinder stone giant More elongated and angular head, and rockier features overall.
To me, Pathfinder stone giants do have a very distinctive look, one that we have had from book 3 of Rise of the Runelords on.
Agreed. I remember thinking they looked distinct right when Pathfinder #3 was released.
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We can move away from OGL/D&D traditions for things like this by adjusting the art and stats away from the OGL stats, as seen with the stone, frost, fire, and cloud giants...
What will future generations think of the decisions made today? XD
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We can move away from OGL/D&D traditions for things like this by adjusting the art and stats away from the OGL stats, as seen with the stone, frost, fire, and cloud giants...What will future generations think of the decisions made today? XD
Hopefully they'll be as invested and delighted as I am today with content from D&D in the late 70s and early 80s, with enough nostalgia empowering them that they'll go on to help create a new and popular entertainment in the future.
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Thanks for the answer James.
Sigh. Actually, I didn't like storm giants that much, but in Pathfinder Second Edition, they've become my favorite giants due to the art change. While they looked like just giant Greeks (or perhaps giant Romans? I really can't tell the difference) in D&D and Pathfinder First Edition, the new art for storm giants in the Second Edition Bestiary really makes them feel like truly fantastic creatures. It's too bad they're removed from Pathfinder Remaster. :(
Now, I'm really looking forward to Monster Core 2 because I hope to see the return of the good old monsters in Pathfinder Remaster. I'm not sure if Paizo is inclined to bring them back, though. :)
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Again, things aren't "removed" from the remaster in almost all cases. The statblocks from the Bestiary are still compatible, and in many cases compatable without even changing anything other than moving to using modifiers rather than scores for attributes. Sometimes you don't have to reinvent the wheel.