Your Players are trekking through the wintery wastes of the north, avoiding Polar Bears and Ice Mephits and perhaps looking for the hidden citadel of the Winter Imperium, as one does.

They come to an outpost that has been thoroughly ruined. The great stone walls have been smashed, buildings wrecked, and there are bodies everywhere of soldiers who tried to fight back. In the midst of all this, they come upon one survivor: freezing, exhausted, barely alive, who is chained to a boulder the size of a horse. “They said if I could move it, then I could eat,” the survivor says. “And if I couldn’t, then I wasn’t worthy of food. They laughed and said that any one of them could do it.”

Your party asks who “They” were.

“The Frost Giants,” the survivor says.

It’s very easy to run Frost Giants as “The Viking Ones,” and just have a lot of yelling and cleaving and pillaging, but that would do them a disservice. Much like any fantasy culture, there needs to be an underlying ethos that drives them, and it is actually in the 2014 Monster Manual that we see what it is:

“Rulers by Might. Frost Giants respect brute strength above all else, and a frost giant’s place in the ordning depends on evidence of physical might, such as superior musculature, scars from battles of renown, or trophies fashioned from the bodies of slain enemies. Tasks such as hunting, childrearing, and crafting are given to giants based on their physical strength and hardiness.”

That gives you a lot to work with, and it’s a pity that it’s been left out of the 2024 edition.

The Frost Giants operate under a very simple principle: Power = Legitimacy. If you can do it, you deserve to have done it. If you can wrestle a Mammoth, then you deserve to eat. If you can’t, then nature has spoken and you shall starve. Grudges between Frost Giants are solved not by talking things out or “sharing your feelings” like some soft Warmlander. They’re solved by battling, sometimes even with whole Giant clans getting involved. Conflicts between clans or challenges to status result in great wrestling matches if everyone is feeling civilized or, more likely, a massive free-for-all that utterly wrecks the landscape around them.

That outpost your Players found? It wasn’t able to repel the Frost Giants, so the Giants came in and took what they wanted. And the challenge they gave to the survivor was, believe it or not, a kindness. They wanted to give them the opportunity to show that they were strong. Only they did it in Giant terms, not human.

With this in mind, let’s see how you might give your Players a chance to really flex their muscles.

Your Players are visiting a northern village, perhaps to seek a cure for a malady that has befallen one of their number, or to trade for supplies they need to go further north. They arrive during a period of mourning – the village’s greatest warrior has died, peacefully of old age. They are singing songs of great battles and telling tales of the enemies they had slain in their glory days.

And then, the thunder of footsteps. A troop of Frost Giants emerges from the snowy waste. They stop and call out the name of the dead warrior and rattle spears against shields as they chant the warrior’s name again and again.

The villagers are terrified, of course. Why wouldn’t they be? They beg your Party for help, to rid them of these fearsome creatures who are known to destroy whole settlements. And, of course, your Party agrees.

What they discover, however, is that the Frost Giants did not come here to ruin the village. They came to honor its greatest warrior. To hold funeral games for one who had lived a life of strength and glory. And, their leader says, to see if the village he came from can live up to a hero’s reputation.

Now your Players get to navigate a cultural exchange and perhaps avert a disaster. The Giants are ready to raze this village to the ground to “honor” the fallen. After all, if the people the hero protected cannot protect themselves anymore, then what good are they? And the villagers themselves just wanted to have a nice, warm way to remember the one they loved. Your Players, as outsiders to this situation, can be the ones to navigate the misunderstandings here, and perhaps provide what both sides need: might and compassion.

In that sense you could lean into the idea of Frost Giants as the auditors of civilization. They don’t destroy because they are cruel or mean-spirited. It is because winter is the ultimate judge. Where they come from, if you are not strong, you die. End of story. And that is how they approach the world in front of them.

A small Northern kingdom begs for help because the Frost Giants are coming. Again.

Every hundred years, the Jarl of the Frost Giants brings his best warriors to the kingdoms of the North to get an answer to one very specific question: have you earned the right to be here?

It’s a simple question that the Giants test rigorously by their own standards of might and strength. If the Kingdom passes, they get to stay for another century. If not, the Giants take everything. They take everything because weakness – bad enough on its own – invites worse things, and they would sooner see a kingdom destroyed than have weakness bordering their territories.

Unfortunately, the current King is a little too fond of the arts and literature and philosophy, hobbies for which the Frost Giants would gladly stomp him into a pulp, so he’s hiring Adventurers to make up for the shortfall in muscle and violence. Your Players may find themselves to be one of several Adventuring Parties that has been promised vast rewards if they can convince the Giants to let the Kingdom survive.

Whether those rewards are actually available or not, of course, is up to you.

In this way, the Frost Giants stop being just “huge Vikings” out to destroy everything they see. They have a world view that makes sense to them, but which the world (and the folks at Wizards of the Coast) might classify as “Neutral Evil” – willing to hurt people in the service of pragmatic motives. They’re not unreasonable or impossible to negotiate with. They just have a moral code that your Players might not be prepared for.

In a world where weakness truly does kill, the Giants are doing the only thing that is right. Making sure that the strong survive, by any means necessary. And if you can’t get on board with that, they’ll happily demonstrate the power of their convictions. The question for your Players is whether they’re willing to let the Giants judge everyone else by the same standard.