Dissecting A Giant: The Eye
Keywords! Keywords! Keywords!
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).
So I decided that the main way players attack giants should be by exploiting weaknesses. In earlier versions of the game giants were absolutely invulnerable unless you were exploiting a weakness but after some revisions I ended up deciding to make it so that weaknesses can cancel out strengths, meaning you could take on a giant knowing nothing about it, but it would have a massive advantage.
Another touchstone for my thinking about the kinds of stories I wanted JKG to facilitate was The Witcher Saga. I listened through the entire, wonderfully narrated by Peter Kenny, audiobook series this year and for a good month or two I was fully immersed in wonderful Witcher-ness. I wanted finding out these weaknesses to feel kinda like Geralt hunting down a monster, he's kind of a detective, looking for clues and making assumptions based on evidence to best prepare himself for the fight.
After giving giants keywords I just kept going and gave characters their own keywords too: Reputations, Professions, Conditions and optionally, Cultural Keywords.
The thing I really like about using keywords for things is how open ended they can be. They're great little prompts for actions & a really neat way to make personality traits mechanically useful and various conditions easy to track. Something I really like in D&D 5e are the character traits: the Ideals, Flaws, Bonds and Traits that really help flesh out a character as more than just their character class. But these things are purely storytelling prompts, they're great, but they have no mechanical heft. Making them into keywords with dice attached just felt like this really elegant way to add that heft. Also, having both positive and negative traits meant I could put interesting tools in the hands of the GM.
I also didn't want these things to be fixed in place. I'm sure everyone who's played 5e has had the experience of setting all these character traits only to find their character is actually quite different in play than you originally set out. Taking from how I already had dice shifting up and down for Luck and Wealth I figured these character traits, which I very purposefully called Reputations could fluctuate. Being Reputations they can be proven wrong by your actions & you can gain new reputations by your actions. I decided to limit reputations to 4 at a time just to keep things easy to manage. The last thing I want is players to be searching their sheet to find the perfect list of keywords to add to their rolls every time.
I'll discuss professions in the next blogpost, since they're a bit more complex than just a keyword & make up a big part of the worldbuilding and stakes setting of the game.
Inventory
A big inspiration for me with my various RPGs has been Luka Rejec's game Ultraviolet Grasslands. There's a lot to love about that book but something I really liked was the inventory system. My only issue with it was that it's poorly visualised in the game.
I originally used this system for another game I have in development but it suited this game better as overland travel and managing your supplies are kind of a big deal when you're a bunch of broke giant-hunters.
Time, Distance & "Season-Crawling"
Giant hunting takes a lot of time, these things are a lot bigger than you so they can cover a lot of ground much quicker than you. I wanted time keeping to have some importance and actually effect the world in a meaningful way which is how I stumbled upon the idea of using Seasons.
Since player characters have a profession I needed there to be a time of year where that profession actually meant something, so naturally, there should be an off season. Which conveniently gives me an in world time to have "leveling up" occur. Summer just felt like the perfect season for it too, since giants are very big... they probably have a hard time keeping cool, so why wouldn't they just walk to the sea for summer?
Building off of that I decided to make each season effect giant behaviour in some predictable way that would allow players to strategize around them. Autumn and Spring felt like the "easy mode", the giant behave pretty normally and aside from a few people and animals snatched off the roads and outlying settlements, the giants keep mostly to themselves. Winter on the other hand... now things get interesting, all the people and animals are huddled up in towns, so all the easy food is no longer easy to get. So the giants get frenzied, very aggressive and actively hostile towards human settlements. The Early Summer migration period also leads to some interesting potential, as players might suddenly have to race the giant they're hunting to the sea, trying to stop them before they get too far from shore.
Blunderis who is one of the players in my ongoing JKG playtest games called this loop a "Seasons Crawl" which I think is fantastic. I like how it reinforces this idea that, this is seasonal work for these people, the moment Autumn begins and the giants return they drop tools and are out looking for fortune.
The Off Season
Something I really wanted to do with this game was suggest a world that at every turn has it out for the players. Nothing gained is ever really kept. Yes there's advancement, but your characters are still having to go hunt giants to pay the bills. In order to enforce that while also leaving fun threads for players to follow in their next hunting season I created a 1d20 table of "Off Season Events" reasons for the players to be bad at square one, at least financially, by the time they renew the hunt.
This is probably one of my favourite tables in the book because every result just paints a picture of what this world is like. Also each one gives you a new reputation keyword to play with, which is a nice sort of "soft advancement" you might rank that reputation up over time, you might drop it, it's open to the player to make that happen.
Two of my favourites:
Bought a Letter of Attainder to
have a rival declared an outlaw
and all property seized by the
Imperial Ministry. Vengeful
For how absolutely brutal it is, also because I had fun mashing together two horrible historical legal instruments: the Lettres de cachet of Ancien Regime France & the Bill/Writ/Act of Attainder which has a long history in England & is one of the things the US Constitution specifically made rules to prohibit.
Went to great expense to gather
a company and venture out into
the woods in search of dragons.
So far it seems dragons are still
not real. Wishful Thinker.
I wanted this setting to be fairly low fantasy, aside from the wizards, witches and giants of course, at least at surface level, all the monsters you might expect of a fantasy game might be around just not where giant hunters typically explore. And I really just loved the idea of people going on expeditions to find dragons when everyone agrees they aren't real.
I could go on, but it wouldn't be a blog post series if I did it all in one go. Next I'll cover Professions, Hirelings and Protégés, Making Meals & just what do you do with a giant's spleen?
