[Giants] Item - Titansteps

"One small step on man, one fatal step by giantkind.”

— Giant, often misattributed misquote

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You have the following benefits while you wear these boots.

What Big Feet You Have. When you take the Attack action, you can replace one of your attacks with a stomp, magically creating a 2-inch deep shoeprint in a 20-foot long, 10-foot wide area centered on you in an orientation of your choice. Each creature other than you in this area must succeed on a DC 11 Dexterity saving throw or fall Prone. If this shoeprint is created on a soft surface such as loose dirt or mud, it is 2 feet deep instead. You can only make this shoeprint once per turn and you can't make it deeper than the depth indicated.

Big Shoes To Fill. While wearing these boots, you can take a Bonus Action to invoke its rune and magically change your size to Large if you're in a big enough space. This transformation lasts for 10 minutes or until you end it (no action required). Anything you wear or carry changes size with you until you drop it. For the duration, your Speed increases by 10 feet and you have Advantage on saving throws you make to resist being moved against your will or knocked Prone. Once used, this property can't be used again until the next dawn.

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DESIGN COMMENTARY

The Titansteps were one of the first items ideated, stemming from a dynamic scene of stomping the grounds and a chill visual of finding mysterious giant footprints. The first property is essentially a replacement for Shove, allowing you to Shove up to 2 targets instead of 1 for a lowered DC (11 instead of using your Strength to calculate). This probably feels a bit like a ribbon given the trade-offs. The second property is similar to those found in the more recent giants book, which is a 1/day rune property. Note the specific wording that states you "change your size to Large" rather than "grow one size Larger," which prevents stacking similar effects. All in all, fairly simple and shouldn't be problematic even for a non-attunement Uncommon item.

The opening quote attribution "Giant, often misattributed misquote" is a fun one because it's extremely ambiguous, down to whether "Giant" here refers to literal Giants or just describes how grossly misattributed the quote is. Just wanted to point that out.

Visually, I drew from the Viking style because of the giants' runic connection to their culture — fur-lined and hide made from dragons (giants would slay them). Otherwise, as normal as boots can really be. The timelapse will show some struggles returning to art after a hiatus, too. Some of the new runes were designed with other cultures in mind (see if you can guess), so it won't be all nordic.

To set up a specific mechanic, the next couple items will be themed around changing size to Large as well!

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GIANTS WAKE

Welcome back! As promised in my last announcement post, this next theme will be Giants to fulfill the final winning theme poll of the Patreon. The name will be Giants Wake, a dual symbol for giants waking up (I'll be introducing 4/5 new giants) and the destructive path they leave behind (a wake). I plan to compile it all into a compendium at the end of it all (this will take time), but only time may tell.

Ideating for this theme was tough because I'm even more focused on identifying intra-theme mechanics and exploring lesser-used ideas. There's a satisfying one that should carry across all the items. I've also decided to deprecate rarity variants. Even if they logistically offers more flexible play, variants imbalances the text/art ratio, narrows design choices, and are often pretty basic changes anyway. The likely replacement is a GM sidebar about making custom modifications.

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SRD 5.2

In other news, the SRD 5.2 (aka, PHB 2024) has finally released and honestly it's great. Even if not perfect, it's a big improvement over 2014 PHB. There's nothing to lose using the new rules because they're very similar and mostly compatible, so the plan is now to shift over to the new SRD moving forward. I plan to revisit older items to update their art and balance—this is now an opportunity to also update them to modern SRD, starting with Aryka's Guide. Some of the oldest works are embarrassing by today's standards, so it would breathe fresh new life into it.