Marsh Giant

The full scoop on marsh giants can be found in Giants Revisited courtesy of Ray Vallese.  Likely a degenerate offshoot of the hill giant race, they have further devolved through inbreeding and traffic with dark aquatic powers, creating the deformed brineborn.

Marsh giants are a nice step up when you want a swamp adventure that doesn’t involve lizardfolk or boggards.  They’re also a bridge between normal humanoid- and giant-killing adventurers to more menacing ones involving demons, qlippoths, or even the Old Ones.

Vodyanoi dockworkers report with alarm that two gangs of marsh giants have burst up from the silted waters of the Blithe River, and they are hooking passersby on the docks and the Promenade with their gaffs in a kind of bleak, burbling harvest.  The responding adventurers reputations with the common folk and the nobility will depend on how fast they stop the giants and which community they had first.

An anthropologist wants to study marsh giants; his purported aim is a monograph that examines how an inbred, cannibalistic society can nevertheless survive.  In truth, he is a blood mage who believe that eating the heart of marsh giant will allow him to commune with their dark master, the Sleeper Below the Waves.

A secretive tribe of marsh giants, many of them brineborn, protects a thoroughly corpulent and fecund queen known as the Brinemother.  Little more than a birthing vessel for her dark patron, the bloated being can barely move or defend herself beyond her spell-like abilities.  If struck in the belly with a slashing or piercing weapon she bursts, letting loose swarms of swampy abominations (likely advanced skum, fiendish gripplis, intelligent oozes, or worse)—her last demon-touched brood.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 129

Something else I forget to tell you about this weekend that’s conveniently both Pathfinder- and music-related: I went for a walk and stumbled upon a) a Christmas parade, and b) three members of my old gaming group, who were partying on the front porch of their friend’s house watching the spectacle.  So it was good to catch up with them; meanwhile, said friend looked familiar and it turned out to be…Nolen of Double Dagger! 

For those not up on the post-punk/hardcore scene (trust me, I’m certainly not!) Double Dagger was beloved act from these parts that broke up last year.  So let’s show Nolen some love.  I heartily recommend checking out “The Lie/The Truth” from More, which sadly doesn’t have a good YouTube video, so here’s their “No Allies” instead.