Inhuman Proportions — a very light very rough first draft


Illustration by Gustave Dore for Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel

I’ve had the idea of a Gargantua and Pantagruel inspired ttrpg spinning in my head for a long while. There’s a lot of games out there doing the “Standard Dungeon Crawler, but the twist is you are Really Small” thing (Mausritter being an example I’ve played reasonably extensively) and it’s always kinda fun to see what that conceit buys, which led me to ask on multiple occasions: “what if the opposite were true?” What if you were just big as hell.

You are unquestionably capable of feats of brute strength, wanton destruction, foul provocation, and gluttony. What is in question is your capability for trickery, delicacy, and reasoned debate. The small folk will use this against you.

Roll 3d6 three times, assigning each result to one of the following stats:

Trickery — your ability to mislead and befuddle those who take you for a brute alone.
Delicacy — your ability to manipulate the world such that it is left intact after.
Reasoned Debate — your ability to justify in good faith what you do to those that question it.

To test one of these stats, roll 1d20 and get equal to or under your score. Under particularly desperate circumstances it may be appropriate to roll equal to or under half that.

Once you have your stats, roll 1d6 for an additional power:

1. You are a figure of great pride to some people or nation. Their hosts and heroes will aid you, should you uphold their wants and ways.
2. You produce a bodily fluid — sweat, saliva, bile, piss, or similar – in such quantities that once per day you may unleash a flood of it upon an obstacle in your path.
3. Your cavernous interior sustains life — given an opportunity, you may swallow a mortal host alive, where they will dwell unable to harm you without destroying themselves in the process until you belch them forth. Some ungrateful mortals will resent this.
4. The weather is not mysterious to you, given your heads position in literal clouds. You may predict it accurately and, through some effort, change it.
5. Beasts of the wild trust you as one of their own, frolicking in your presence, nesting in your hair, and coming to your aid.
6. Your vast ears are attuned to rumors of the mighty among the small. You never meet a noble, hero, or other important public figure that you don’t know some compromising fact on.

Playing the dang thing:
The GM should find or make a map and populate it with towns and cities, specifically noting how many hosts and heroes the towns and cities can raise, and what their attitudes towards their neighbors are. My own proclivities point me towards an english civil war setting — a countryside in strife is a fruitful playground for the amoral gargantuan.

When the small and the gargantuan come into conflict, the small’s main tools to do harm are hosts of troops which might overwhelm the gargantuan, and heroes, those pesky fucks who pride themselves in felling things greater than they are. If you find yourself in conflict with them:

1. Determine turn order. Heroes always act before you barring advantageous circumstances. Roll a single 1d6: the result is how many hosts can muster to action before you turn your ire upon them.
2. Heroes and swiftly acting hosts may attack or take other actions.
3. Players may attack or take actions.
4. Slow acting hosts may attack or take actions.
5. Roll accumulated damage dice, and return to step 1.

Damage:
My current iteration of this is to use something based on Luke Gearing’s Inhuman Violence rules, particularly the entry on The Dead.
When hosts attack a giant, roll 1d6 per host. For every 3 hosts attacking in unison add an additional 1d6 (for example, 3 hosts in unison roll 4 die, 6 in unison roll 8). For each result of 6, the giant attacked gains one die of accumulated damage, which they keep. When in step 5 of combat you roll your accumulated damage die, consult the following:

Xd6, where X is a players accumulated damage die:
1-10: You shrug off injury.
11-20: You are injured in some way! At the Gms choice, you lose 1d6 from a stat, inflict half the damage die you normally would rounded down on the next turn, or are in some way incapacitated and barred from taking some category of action.
21+: You fall! If hosts or heroes remain unopposed at the end of a battle, they will finish you off in the way they see fit.

When a giants attack a host, they roll 1d6. This is how many damage die they inflict upon them (simultaneously if more than one giant is attacking the same host), and they are rolled immediately — the small folk break quicker. Consult the following:

Xd6, where X is a hosts accumulated damage die:
1-10: the line holds despite your furious blows.
11-20: The host falls into disarray, and will lose access to some action or tactic. The GM has final say but the giant’s input should be considered.
21+: the host is utterly destroyed.

Ideas still in the works:
Diagetic advancement through toppling great works of man.
How heroes function exactly.
Tying the thing to a game about playing as hosts, for a crossover campaign of mercenary companies and great war-monsters working side by side.
Healing by eating livestock and hosts.