So, I’ve attempted to start writing this blogpost a few times now and very quickly came to the realisation that I don’t really have much to say that isn’t already in the book. So this one is gonna be pretty short and skip a lot of things, though I do have a few things to talk about.

In Jack Kills Giants I wanted to get away from the typical privileged adventurer class of characters. Even from the generally grittier and lower class characters that come out of OSR style games by focusing on ordinary people, forced into dangerous situations. Giant Slayer will never be a profession in JKG. No-one who does this wants to be doing it forever. Slaying giants is a side gig, a desperate gamble and just a really really terrible workplace environment.

The professions each character can have are intentionally mundane and only tangentially useful to giant-hunting. No print-maker or village farrier in their right mind is going to pick and leave to chase man-eating giants around, but they don't have a choice.

I'm not sure where I latched onto the idea of using keywords, whether it was a specific game or chatter on one of the RPG discords but the moment I started using them I fell in love with them. It started with the giants themselves, a big inspiration, as the name suggests, for Jack Kills Giants was of course the stories of Jack the Giant Killer. In every story Jack defeats the giant through trickery rather than an outright fight (also the original stories, like most folklore, are incredibly gore-filled and brutal).