Giant monsters. There is a certain appeal to them, as movie series like Godzilla, Gamera, and Jurassic Park have shown time and again. Video games have even ventured into this territory with games like God of War which featured boss fights with giant beasts drawn from Greek mythology and Shadow of the Colossus in which the entire focus of the game was roaming the countryside waking and defeating numerous gigantic beasts. Even titles like Star Wars got into the action with the Zillo Beast on The Clone Wars. So it’s only natural to assume that some GMs would be keen to include such threats in their tabletop campaigns.
And if you want to, there are numerous creatures that you can include in your games directly from the books. Dungeons and Dragons and later Pathfinder included the tarrasque – a gigantic creature capable of leveling the countryside when it rises out of its deep slumber in their Bestiaries. You can clearly see the Godzilla influences in the write up for the creature. These games also offer any number of other colossal sized beasts to terrorize your party with.
But I’ve never been happy with just having a creature like this as a collection of statistics. Even if the entire goal of the campaign is to find a way to destroy it and then carry out that destruction, I feel like putting numbers to the beast cheapens it, and you get things like the city that is built around the Tarrasque. Call me crazy, but I’ve never cared for dragons as they’re presented in d20 systems either for this very reason. Because, as the first rule of Munchkinism states – any finite number can be reduced to zero.
In my mind, creatures of this size and power should never be capable of being slain, at least not by a party of five plucky adventurers. Even vast and massive armies should struggle to combat these forces of nature incarnate. Fighting them should be just like fighting an earthquake, hurricane, or other natural disaster. But I realize that that doesn’t necessarily make for a fun play experience. The players want to feel like the badasses they are after sinking in all of that time and experience into their advancement. And for that reason, I can understand the desire to give them something they can hope to overcome or at least contain.
But I do think there are ways you can do this without making the creature a bag of hit points that can be whittled down to zero. The best way that I have seen it handled was in Greg Stolze’s REIGN. The game uses rules where a small band of heroes creates a “Company” that allows them to operate on a larger scale, performing actions that they would be unable to perform individually or even as a small group. These rules scale, and can represent anything from a back alley street gang to a thriving merchant guildhouse, to an Empire that spans thousands of miles of territory.
But this rule is also adaptable and can be used with some individual creatures. There are a few entries in the rulebook, such as a sufficiently powerful demon or other beast of massive size, where Stolze suggests using the Company Qualities instead of statistics, effectively making them something that individual heroes have no hope of fighting themselves. He further elaborated on this concept of Epic Threats with a seven-page supplement he released online detailing more specific rules for handling clashes with creatures of this magnitude in game.
If you need statistics for a threat of this size, this is how I would handle it. Don’t increase the size of the creature’s stats, but find a way to increase the scale. Ability scores and hit points only go so high before they start to lose meaning.
If you don’t need stats, you still need to find a way to make it important to the game, and here is where I think one takes a page from Fate Core with their concept of Issues as Aspects. If you’re able to make your giant beastie something slightly more intangible, but still allow the PCs to interact with it through the the use of those Aspects, you’ve already gone a long way towards removing the concept that this is a problem that can be dealt with by rolling enough damage dice at it.
What are your thoughts on the matter? Have you effectively used a titanic creature in your game sessions? How did you handle it and how did it turn out. Sound off below.
Ben Erickson
