Advantage on Arcana

Storytelling Forms of the Giants

If you play in my Ewistar campaign, please do not read the following post while this warning is still at the top. Thanks!

I was preparing a sequence of set-piece fights in a cloud giant castle for my home game; in order to do a bit of narrative groundwork for that sequence, I was going to have a storytelling night among some of the ettins, goliaths, orges, and verbeegs on the giant's staff, who would be involved in the fight on one side or the other.1 The plan was for the player characters to be invited to the event, allowing them to learn a bit more about these characters. Players, however, do not always do as GMs expect, and my players' choices meant I didn't get a chance to run the storytelling night. Them's the breaks. I don't yet know if I'll be able to use the material I prepared … but maybe you can!

For the storytelling night, I came up with one oral storytelling genre common to each of the major giant types among the cloud giant's staff: goliaths, ogres, ettins, and verbeegs. I then sketched out two specific examples that participating NPCs would tell. Although there's no particular reason these stories couldn't be written down, I imagine them primarily as oral traditions. The good news is that oral traditions are appropriate to a wide range of settings.

The Genres

The Risk Tale

A common form of story among goliaths, the risk tale resembles a cautionary tale but is at best ambivalent about living cautiously. Some examples depict the attempt to avoid risk as creating additional risks, while other examples simply show that hardship is unavoidable whatever you do; mostly they lay out the risks of a situation and invite the audience to consider which risks are better to accept. In general, the characters are goliaths and the events described are well within the realm of possibility, though they are not usually drawn from history or the teller's own life. The events may span several years, so the tellers rarely elaborate any given scene or conversation in much detail, focusing instead on a longer view.

Examples

  1. A story about a long winter and a goliath clan's decision whether to stay independent in the mountains or to seek aid among the stone giants, who would require hard service from them; one brother seeks service among the giants and sees many marvelous things; upon returning to his clan in the mountains, he finds the clan pressed into the service of frost giants and he helps to liberate them. The question here is one of safety versus freedom, and the way that choice can be less clear than it looks.
  2. A story about a young man who is courted by two young women, one from his own clan and one from a clan nearby. He dithers between them and they go to various absurd lengths to secure his affections, but he does not know how to choose. Two years after their courtships began, he is killed and eaten by a mountain lion, without an heir to carry his name. Grieving him, the women grow close and are boon companions for the rest of their lives. The question here is about postponing a decision and discovering that unrelated factors may cut the window of decision short–though the ending after the protagonist's death suggests that maybe there is something else going on in the story as well.

The Saga Anecdote

No one in the setting would call this story form a "saga anecdote," nor would they likely have a single name for it at all, but it does the job for us. The ogres have long sagas about various legendary or historical figures, many but not all of them ogres, and when telling stories around the fire an ogre might recount a particular snippet of that saga. In both the saga and the snippet, the characters' actions and (less often) words are described, but never their thoughts or feelings. The audience is expected to speculate on what beliefs, desires, and emotions motivate the characters; the storyteller pauses at various moments to allow such discussion, and the discussion is considered as important a part of the story as what the storyteller relates.2

Examples:

  1. A story about an ogre who was raised in a city away from the rough-and-tumble life of his people; in his later years he decided to return to his homeland. Along the way he stopped at a disreputable inn where he provoked some brigands. The brigands challenged him to a fight, which he accepted, and in the fight he was quite quickly lethally wounded. His last words were, "As I had hoped it would be!" (This story was important to the ogre who told him because discussing it with others was the first time he understood that some people held values beyond their own survival.)
  2. A story about an ogre on a journey and the three strange things she encounters on the way: a city of cats, a man who went everywhere blindfolded, and a woman with golden hands who demanded a toll at a bridge.3 At the end, the ogre arrives at a druid's hut; she asks the druid's name and, on hearing the reply, she goes home again. (This story is interesting to the teller because she hasn't "figured it out" yet. In truth, she may not be remembering it correctly, or may not know enough of the saga it's from to ever make sense of it.)

The Fork Tale

The fork tale is a form that arose among the ettins. Originally these were called "forked tales," but ettins settled on "fork tales" because it is easier to say. (The similarity to "folk tales" is a coincidence.) As ettin siblings tell the story, trading off sections between them, they will begin to disagree about what happens in the tale; for instance, one might insist the protagonists behaved in one way, while one insists the protagonists behaved in another. Over the course of the telling the ettins will disagree on between three and five relevant plot details, usually including the ending. If they do not disagree on the ending, then they almost invariably disagree on an earlier detail that changes what the ending means.

However, in truth the disagreements are carefully decided and rehearsed beforehand, and in general most stories have traditionally-established disagreements. There is no "canon" version of the story; the real story includes both tellers' divergent events. Often ettins borrow tales from the societies they are embedded in (giants in particular) and adapt them into fork tales, but they also tell some fork tales about ettin folk heroes. In my setting, ettin folk heroes are usually siblings who heroically oppose each other on an issue of values or loyalty, because ettin culture is overly influenced by hill giants' and frost giants' libertarian ethos. See here for more on how I run ettins (link). You might run them differently.

Examples:

  1. A story about ettin sisters on a quest for a magical artifact called the Stammo, but they adventure on behalf of different patrons, who each demand the artifact for themselves; the sisters know that eventually they will have to fight one another before their quest is over. They successfully get the Stammo (tellers usually disagree about what it is), and on the return trip the sisters reach a fork in the road, with each path leading to a different patron. After struggling there for a while, each trying to go a different way, they compromise by going cross-country as long as they can. Eventually, of course, they reach a valley where one sister must go north to reach her patron, and the other sister must go south, and there is no further compromise they can make. After wrestling for some time, they agree to pitch camp and resume their fight in the morning. Several days go by like this, and several weeks, and they build their camp up into a cottage. They spend the rest of their lives in that valley, taking time each day to try to deliver the Stammo to their respective patrons.4
  2. A story about ettin mercenaries who matter-of-factly fight on opposite sides of a battle between trolls and fomorians. When the trolls came to commission the mercenaries, they were only willing to pay one brother's fee, thinking it ridiculous that they should have to pay for both. That brother did promise to show up to the fight, though, so the trolls left satisfied. The other brother, however, was insulted and promptly went to the fomorians and offered his services for gold, which the fomorians accepted. Neither ettin saw anything inappropriate or upsetting about this arrangement, which was strictly business. (One thing tellers typically disagree about is whether the trolls paid up or not afterwards.)

The Not-So Story

According to Wizards of the Coast's Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden (2020), most verbeeg are evil, but some among them are not, including the druidic longstriders. I've said before (link) that I don't love the idea of mostly-evil races kinships, but I'm not opposed to the idea of a people who find their self-appointed druids sanctimonious, which is what's relevant here. I decided that, for my setting, the longstriders are fond of telling just-so stories: how the trout got its spots, how the butterfly got its wings, and so on. Although on the surface these tales appear to explain some feature of the natural world, they are of course not meant literally; they instead usually deliver some kind of prosocial moral about community, being a good custodian of the natural world, or the like. Many of the other verbeeg, none too keen on the longstriders' moralistic ways, now tell not-so stories, which are parodies of the longstriders' tales. They might explain how an animal got a trait it very clearly does not have, or it might explain how an animal lost a trait no one has any reason to suspect it had. Moreover, if the stories deliver a moral at all (and often enough they are simply absurd), that moral seems deeply antisocial.

Examples

  1. A story about how the trout got its fur. The moral of the story seems to be that theft is good, so long as you aren't the one suffering the consequences.
  2. A story about how the bear lost its wings. Apparently, they got wet and frozen in a blizzard and the bear had to convince various other creatures of the taiga to chew them off for him. The moral of the story, if it can be called that, is that it is not worth caring much about anything because you could lose it tomorrow.

Uses for the Stories

I had planned to use some of these stories to suggest certain things about the different NPCs' motivations and what they might be willing to do.

Not all of the stories had an individual use besides verisimilitude, anthropological interest, and camouflage for the plot-relevant stories. I had hoped the risk tales, however, would provide a pretext for the PCs to discuss risk assessment with their goliath NPC friends; in this case, I was not trying to deliver information so much as create an opportunity for a certain kind of social interaction. If you decide to use a storytelling night in your game, you will need to customize the stories to fit your world and NPCs, or else change your game's possibilities to fit the tales.

To that end, as part of my series on using your setting's literature as part of your tabletop games (link), I will soon start putting together broader pointers for creating your own tales and genres to suit your campaign's needs. In the last little while I have learned different ways to use these worldbuilding details and a few techniques for making them feel like a real part of your setting. But first I will need to tell you about the genres I came up with for Planegea (link), and that's a subject for a separate post.

  1. As I understand it, verbeegs are original creations for Dungeons & Dragons settings, without any folkloric precedent.↩

  2. I based this on an observation Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges made comparing modernist literature to Norse sagas; both describe characters' outward actions but rarely give their feelings and motives. This does not mean that modernist authors and Norse storytellers thought human interiority was unimportant; instead, these genres require readers (or listeners) to work out for themselves why characters act the way they do.↩

  3. The image of a woman with golden hands demanding a toll at a bridge comes from Book 5 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The image of a city of cats comes from some of H. P. Lovecraft's short stories and novels, including "The Cats of Ulthar." I did not read them myself and only read about them, which might explain why I misremembered it as a city inhabited only by cats.↩

  4. If I develop this material further, I might say there are other stories about these ettin sisters, concerning the dangers that harass them in that valley, or the children they raise there.↩

#for GMs #high fantasy #made-up literature