Deep beneath the earth, far away from the schemes and plots of kings and dragons, live the Stone Giants.

They’re not here to fight or to conquer lands. These are the philosophers of the Giants, contemplating the tectonic motions of mountains and earth, writing poems to geologic strata and carving the artistic truths of the Deep Earth into the walls of their deep homes.

Chances are, your Players will never meet a Stone Giant. And the Giant won’t really mind.

Compared to these huge, long-lived creatures, the lives of your adventurers are sparks in the shadows. Your Players will be concerned about hours and days – the Stone Giants think in terms of millennia. The concerns of a plucky band of surface-dwellers are but grains of salt in comparison to the great boulders of meaning the Giants are concerned with. Your players are ephemeral, impermanent, and largely inconsequential.

This means that if your Players do meet a Stone Giant, there had better be a very good reason for it to get involved.

One way to approach putting a Stone Giant in your game is to think of them as artists. They reshape the Earth itself in ways that can only be understood by them, only seen from a great height. These great creations may tell of great truths, known only to them – but desired by many other, shorter-lived creatures who think they rule the world.

So perhaps your Players have been hired by a wealthy patron to acquire the work of a particularly well-known Stone Giant artist. That patron is paying your Party handsomely to get that piece one way or another, so this will be a good test of whether your Players can demonstrate respect and patience over force, or if they will go in, spells blazing, and soon find themselves facing the underside of a thousand tons of stone.

It would be interesting, too, to make this Stone Giant into not only an artist but a seer. Your Party is contacted by an agent of a particularly anxious deity who needs to know what future this giant sees, and how the deity might work to ensure that it emerges stronger from it. That way, your Party would not only need the art, but need the artist alive to explain what it was they saw in its creation.

Of course, your Party won’t know what the art actually is at first. Sure, it could be an elaborate sculpture, carved out of layers of geologic strata, laced with crystals that have been encouraged to grow just so. But it could just as easily be an entire mountainside, sliced by glaciers, pounded by boulders, cracked by the roots of stunted trees that were planted generations ago in accordance with a vision that was already centuries old at that time.

So what would be really funny is if, as your Party treks to the caverns where this artist/prophet is said to live, they have to shift a boulder to keep moving, or they knock over a small cairn in a mountain stream. And not long after, they hear a voice like the sound of an avalanche coming up behind them, hollering, “YOU RUINED IT!”

This is where the Party learns that the Stone Giants are not just thinkers and poets – they are graceful, athletic, and powerful.

Which will become immediately evident the first time a two-ton boulder lands very precisely in your Players’ camp from a hundred feet away.

Now with luck, they might be able to negotiate with the Stone Giant – explain themselves to this creature who finds it almost painful to think in timespans as short as these adventurers experience. If the Giant is feeling agreeable, it may allow them to pass – for a price. It might ask their help in reconstructing their work, rebuilding it in a way that pays tribute to its disturbance.

See how patient your Party can be when the Giant tells your Barbarian, “Hit this. Many times. As hard as you can. I will tell you when to stop.” Or has your Wizard hurl as many fireballs as they can at one particular crack in the cliff face and then sigh at their ineffectuality. And when your Party asks if they’re done, the Giant will look surprised – this project will take many… what’s the word you people use…. years to complete.

At this point, most Parties, used to the frantic pace of ‘saving the world’, will reach their breaking point. To the Giant, time is a river; to the adventurer, it’s a ticking clock. And when the Wizard realizes the Giant expects them to stand there for three years, the initiative rolls are inevitable.

Fighting a Stone Giant in any circumstances is a bad idea, but fighting it on its own turf is extremely dangerous. They’re likely to fight from above – coming out on ledges and cliffsides to hurl stones at their enemies. If your Players get up close, they’re faced with a creature wielding a club and a 15-foot reach who will almost certainly try to knock them to the ground far below.

It is possible to attack from afar, of course – your Rogue or Ranger will probably prefer to shoot arrows at it – but the Stone Giant is very good with flying objects. I imagine they practice as kids by tossing stones the size of camper vans at each other the way we play catch. If the Giant is ready for it, they can catch and redirect flying objects like swatting a fly.

If your Players manage to subdue the Giant, convince it that all of this was just a terrible misunderstanding, then that’s probably going to be okay. They’ll have to make some pretty tough Charisma checks, but it is possible for this encounter to be resolved peacefully.

But if they don’t? If they slay the giant like the heroes of storybook and bardic tale?

Do you remember the last celebrity death that really hit you hard? A young singer, lost to despair and drugs? An artist, taken in an act of irrational violence? A writer whose worlds ended at the hand of illness or age? Do you remember the gut punch when you heard the news, knowing that there would never be anyone like them in this world again?

Now imagine they had been making their art for centuries, and were expected to live for centuries more. Art that told the story of your people and how they saw the world, a unique vision that could have given voice to their people generation after generation.

And now some short-lived, thoughtless mayfly adventurers cut them down.

The Stone Giants are not here to fight. But if they decide to do so, these keepers of stone and hill, Gods help anyone they’re coming after.