Dissecting A Giant: The Guts
Down and Out
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.
If you want a very fun little read look up Jack Black, the rat catcher not the comedian; who’s 1851 interview with Henry Mayhew inspired this profession.
I intentionally set JKG in a time-period that isn’t quite typical euro-fantasy. I drew a lot from the late 1700s, particularly Ancien Regime France & 19th Century Industrialised England. This is a world on the cusp of modernity. Trappings of old feudal order still remain but others are quickly falling into obscurity. The Empire is an all consuming, proto-capitalist, colonial behemoth, gobbling up neighboring peoples, disenfranchising them and rapidly exploiting every resource it can get it’s grubby tentacles on.
Feudal Estates are slowly dissolving, exploitative wage labour is taking over & trappings of the old world, like the hereditary knights who were once symbols of a far more local form of authority have been disbanded and disowned in favour of distant masters and grinding bureaucracy. Slow decay bound to the land by feudal obligation has been replaced by hungry exoduses to the Imperial Cities, those filthy, stinking things that grind up humanity into something they call industry. Most don’t want a return to the old ways but also agree this current hell is not much better.
This is all offset by the slightly whimsical storybook tone I went for with JKG but I still wanted that element of all encompassing industrial-capitalist horror. The setting may be different but the stories are still the same. If I was to make a modern day variation on JKG I’d be filling it’s professions with Delivery Drivers, Retail Employees and Freelancers.
Also you can be REALLY REALLY good at magic tricks to the point of basically becoming invisible so… there’s that too.
Mechanically I structured the professions like GLOG classes. Though I opted for only 3 levels for each to keep things fairly simple and put a soft cap on campaigns to about 3 years in-game. If a character has stuck to the one profession throughout their career as a giant slayer by their 3rd hunt they’ve managed to make their way up the social ladder at least enough that they don’t really need to go giant slaying again. Which is why I made every 3rd level perk pretty over-the-top silly. Also, silly is fun sometimes.
Those unfortunate enough to accompany you.
Since I gave a couple of the professions companion NPCs I had to include a few rules about Hirelings and Protégés. Helper NPCs are just a classic element of old school RPGs & from a GM perspective they’re a fantastic tool for pushing players into action.
Making Meals
Thinking about interesting ways to replenish Luck I was caught on the idea of food. Mechanically speaking, food in Jack Kills Giants has very little to do with “healing” and if you want you can simply carry dry rations for your daily needs & never think about food in any way other than as something that occupies your inventory. But if you want to, cooking is there for you.
I really like modularity in rules systems, making things that can be plugged in and out of a game. To do that well I think, the systems should generally provide more positives for getting involved in them than negatives. With the meal system that is certainly true. There are bad outcomes of course, you can get sick and have negative keywords applied to your party, but for the most part you’re going to get good things out of it.
Also, I couldn’t resist having a rule where you roll Swords against your food.
How much for a Giant Spleen?
Something that naturally came up in writing a game about hunting giants was: what do you do with the body? and it seemed only fitting with the kind of world I had already set up that of course giants would be broken down and processed like any other animal. They’re essentially land-whales… incredibly violent land-whales, but whales nonetheless. The section of Giant-Butchers might actually be my favourite passage in the whole book, it was so much fun to write and really set up a lot of core aspects of the setting.
I had considered even including giant-butcher as a profession and I might later, but I wanted to keep the core book’s selection down to the 10 starting professions in the book.
Also: featuring my personal favourite piece I drew for the book.
As with a lot of thins in Jack Kills Giants these “rules“ (they are technically speaking, rules) are largely fictional placement rather than dice calculations and balancing. Because of how lightweight the core is it’s not too hard to apply it to whatever fiction you’re trying to create with it.
Okay… this was a little rambling and train of thought but hey, that’s kind of the point of these blogposts. Alright! One more Dissection to go, next time, the biggest section of the book though possibly the shortest blogpost, The GM Advice and oh so many random tables.
