Cyclopes, Ettins, Hill Giants, and Ogres: The June 2026 RPG Blog Carnival

01 Jun, 2026

I'm pleased to be host of the June 2026 RPG Blog Carnival. Thanks to Scot Newbury for diligently organizing the carnival for yet another year. This month I'm inviting you to consider the following subject: Cyclopes, Ettins, Hill Giants, and Ogres.

I've chosen this topic for a simple reason: ogres and their ilk are too often boring, and I'm hoping you can help me fix that.

Whenever I read the relevant entries of The Monsters Know What They're Doing (2019), I get the impression that Keith Ammann finds the 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons versions of the lesser giants boring, too. He says on page 256, "Ogres and cyclopes are dumb, simple brutes. They have no tactics." And he says on page 255, "The one thing that makes an ettin interesting as an enemy is that it's difficult to surprise." Ammann's considerations here are strictly tactical, but I'm not much more impressed by the flavour text: everything is pointed toward coarseness and strength, toward uncivilized brutes. Ogres are big, slow-witted, and aggressive. Ettins are big, slow-witted, and aggressive, traits which cause difficulty between their two heads. Cyclopes are big, slow-witted, aggressive, and monocular. It's all rather one-note. For that matter, I think hill giants suffer the same problem: they are big, slow-witted, aggressive, and hungry.

Unfortunately, most systems and settings aren't much better than Dungeons & Dragons is, at least as far as the lesser giants go. There are a few points of light: I like how Daggerheart's giants accumulate eyes as they age. For the most part, though, I find our games' versions of cyclopes, ettins, hill giants, and ogres uninteresting, and I don't think I'm alone. That's a shame, because these all have deep roots in the fantasy genre and European folklore and myth, and there's just something impressive about a giant's size. There's no reason the situation couldn't be better.

The good news is that this hobby has a strong DIY component. I try to develop ogres and ettins somewhat by, in part, giving them oral storytelling traditions and playing with expectations. I'm sure others have their own homebrew fixes as well, and I'm sure more than a few indie games have a unique spin on these giants. I'm just not aware of them. My hope is that, with this carnival, we can make some headway into the problem.

Image credit: Logan Marshall, 1914, via Wikimedia (cropped)

How to Participate

Write a post somewhere with a consistent link on the topic of cyclopes, ettins, hill giants, and/or ogres. You could write about just one of them, or all four, or any two or three. For the purposes of this carnival, they don't need to be called a cyclops, an ettin, a hill giant, or an ogre; they just have to conform to what our hobby generally understands those sorts of creatures to be. A super mutant from Fallout is, as far as I'm concerned, an ogre. However, I'm not looking for a post about trolls; a post that is primarily about trolls is not in the spirit of this carnival (unless you write about Tolkien's trolls, which is fine because those are really ogres by another name). I think plenty has already been said about trolls in our hobby. I'm also not looking for posts about quantum ogres, in which the ogre-ness is irrelevant to the concept; it could just as easily be a quantum bugbear or a quantum hydra.

Once you've written it and posted it with a link back here saying it's part of this carnival, let me know about it. You can leave a comment on this post (by replying on Bluesky) or you can email me at cerhendriks [at] proton [dot] me. I will then publish a round-up post at the end of the month including a link to your post and the posts of everyone else who participated, so please come back to see the results!

I have one restriction and one request. The restriction is this: if I have reason to believe you used an LLM to write your post, I simply won't include it in the round-up. The request is this: please be intellectually honest and follow proper citational ethics, giving credit to the artists whose work you use (which precludes using pictures made with text-to-image generators like Midjourney or Tungsten). I will still include your post in the round-up if you don't give credit but I'll be very cross about it, because you'll be forcing me to pick between upholding my duties as host of this carnival and upholding basic intellectual honesty and the prevailing norms of the hobby. I don't like being put in that position.¹ To make it easier for you, I've created a directory of public domain images of giants, cyclopes, and so forth. I also have a guide to finding public domain and creative commons art you can use. Of course, you're also free not to use images or to just use the header available at the RPG Blog Carnival homepage.

Suggested Topics

It's traditional for the host of a blog carnival to provide some suggested topics, both to give you a starting place and to define the space of the carnival through examples. Any post that does one of the following would be welcome:

• quarrel with the premise, passionately explaining why one or more of these giants is already interesting in 5th edition and its ilk, or explaining why they're interesting in most ttrpg settings (just not in the ones I mentioned), or explaining why big boring brutes are actually a vital part of any game setting;
• reinterpret the stat blocks to find and pull out the interesting stuff just below the surface, perhaps like Panic Pillow has been doing with Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet's series of qualitative monsters from the Little Brown Books (as in "A qualitative Basilisk" and "A qualitative Chimera");
• make new stat blocks for cyclops, ettin, hill giant, and/or ogre variants, or their equivalents by another name (as in these ettins I found on Reddit);
• develop the metaphysics, ecology, psychology, sociology, politics, religion, and/or culture of cyclopes, ettins, hill giants, and/or ogres, or their equivalents by another name (example: my storytelling post mentioned above);
• describe the ogre-, ettin-, or cyclops-like figures in a setting that isn't traditional fantasy (ie. stonepunk, post-apocalyptic, supernatural horror, planetary romance, cozy dating game);
• consider how you'll mechanically construct these lesser giants in an indie game system you're developing;
• create items, spells, effects, or other game stuff that interact well with one or more of these types of giants (as in the ring of the smallfolk and, to a lesser extent, the experimenter's lash from my post "Items That Play With Taxonomies"), or maybe an item that temporarily turns you into a cyclops, hill giant, or ettin;²
• review how these kinds of giants are used in existing game products;
• give a session report in which one or more of these giants feature prominently;
• survey myth, folklore, and literature for examples of these giants and the interest they're able to provide, with an eye for using them effectively and evocatively in your own games (or explaining how what makes them work in one kind of story cannot be recreated in tabletop games, if that's your true opinion); or
• otherwise engage with the problem of boring cyclopes, ettins, hill giants, and/or ogres, either by producing interesting material about them or by discussing the issue directly.

Thanks in advance to all who participate.

#DnD #giants #high fantasy #monsters #rpg blog carnival