A contribution to the RPG Blog Carnival for June 2026, on the theme of Cyclopes, Ettins, Hill Giants, and Ogres from Advantage on Arcana.
Because I assume that you all, just like me, spotted that and immediately plucked your copies of The Odyssey (Homer) and The First Fossil Hunters (Adrienne Mayor) off the shelf. I will also assume that each of you also has a good friend and table regular who, growing up a poor boy in the hollers of eastern Kentucky, idolized Mary Anning as a kid. So fossil talk and weird biology excursions pop up at the game table all the time. At yours just like mine, right?
In case it ain’t obvious, I like my monsters high-concept. Let’s communicate 90% of the situation to the players in a sentence or two, because anything else is going to slow everything down. That last 10% holds potential for a twist or something else to make the situation interesting. A rose is a rose is a rose, and all, except that there’s a lot of variety even among roses. Even among red roses. Even among red rugosa roses.
I appreciate Homer’s Polyphemos, that classic archetype of the cyclops. A giant (even if how giant remains unspecified) with a single eye. Herdsman of sheep, but no farmer – and consequently without grapes and wine. A loner, living far from human civilization, with the sort of hospitality that manifests as devouring his visitors. When Odysseus tricks and blinds him, his howls of agony draw the other cyclopes near, but they – being as social and empathetic as Polyphemos – laugh off the “Nohbdy” line and leave him with his blind rage. We get that, and in the Odyssey, his part is a memorable one. Were he more complex, we’d probably forget half of it among all the rest of the poem’s adventures and excitement.
Polyphemos is a brute, and while no brilliant tactician – for that’s Odysseus, always clever and one step ahead – he’s not dumb. Unwise, lazily confident in his size and strength, sure, but his failure stems from the faulty assumption that strength means everything. He never bothers to make a fair assessment of the situation because he’s too comfortable being the biggest and scariest. No use being smart if you don’t make use of those smarts.
I’ve already explored an alternative to the big, smashy brute in my campaign’s take on the ogre, and I’m not about to let the cyclops become a fat sack of hit points and not much else. If I need something that’s monstrous, dishing out damage and taking it, too, I have better options. Animated statues. Giant skeletons. Dinosaurs, if I gotta. (I mean, it’s a jungle-centric campaign. Dinosaurs might lurk in any random valley.) If it can talk, open the door a crack for proper parley.
Hell, my giants aren’t even all that giant. Those ogres might end up roughly twelve feet tall, which is still terrifying in the context of a world where one doesn’t regularly find creatures as big a house. Even Andre the Giant was “only” 7′-4″, and that dude was huge by any reasonable standard. (For reference, the hand-comparison shot from The Princess Bride.) If I were to tell my players they were up against Fezzik, they wouldn’t bat an eye if I said each hit of his did d10 damage. Did 2d6 damage. Just crushed skulls outright.
Okay, maybe they’d cry foul at that last one. But if we’re talking about a house-sized monster, anything short of insta-death seems, I dunno, silly. Polyphemos literally eats two entire humans like potato chips with every meal. Like it’s not even effort.
Let’s also take a moment here to flip through Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters, in which she works to reconcile the persistent descriptions and depictions of ancient monsters with the fossils which emerge in known locations of the classical world, against the assertions of 19th-century archaeologists and others who believed that the ancients didn’t notice the fossils around them or understand them in any way. (Spoiler: humans from thousands of years ago are hardly any different than we are today. Curious, insightful, and prone to seeking sensible explanations within the structure of the natural world as they understand it.)
It’s the griffin that piques her curiosity, and she makes a compelling case for the origin of stories of creatures half bird, half lion guarding gold in the windswept deserts of western Asia. Further exploration explains the hero worship of antiquity, of how massive bones eroding from Mediterranean cliffs could be construed as evidence of heroes from a prior era – for in more ancient times, the legendary heroes such as Achilles and Orestes were far larger than today’s humans, the common wisdom went – in part because mammal bones reassembled in humanoid form look a hell of a lot like a giant human skeleton. Especially if you’re primed for it.
Turns out those ancient heroes and giants might have had animal-like features. (Convenient!) Or multiple heads! (Why not?) Particularly human-ish and large fossil bones often ended up in shrines to the founding heroes of a city; in the event of an “entire” skeleton weathering from the earth, the locals might celebrate and provide a new and proper burial.
Did the cyclops come about because of the misinterpretation of an ancient proboscidian skull, from an age before the elephant was known in Greece? Mayor doesn’t deny the possibility, only disprove a longstanding historical myth of how the elephant error came about. She also points out that fossil elephant-and-adjacent skulls don’t survive as fossils nearly as well as teeth and femurs. The relative fragility of skulls, once stone replaces bone, means that in the Mediterranean fossil beds, you’re likely to come across visible fragments of giants, but with few cyclopes among them.
Look, too, at art depicting the cyclops. Hit up the Wikipedia page and check out the Roman versions from the first century CE. I’m particularly fond of this sort, where we see a clearly human face, only with a little unusual about the eyes. Two eyes closed, and quite possibly empty sockets instead, but with very human eyebrows. Then, a third of ordinary size in the middle of the forehead, open and alert. It calls to mind the blind seer trope, and it’s the hook that I think makes for an interesting cyclops to explore.
Where else do we have the one-eyed man with wisdom and foresight in commonly-known mythology? Odin, of course. Many versions of Odin/Wodin/Wotan exist across northern European cultures and time periods, so I’ll focus on my favorite: the version where his sacrifice is a curdled blessing. See, Odin plucked out his own eye, a sacrifice to the Mimisbrunnr that he might drink from its waters and divine the future. In exchange, he foresaw Ragnarok and his own death, rent apart by Fenrir the wolf. How’s that for a classically bundled win-lose proposition?
Recall also that Polyphemos knew his future, that one named Odysseus would blind and defeat him. His hubris and violent actions pressured Odysseus into his “Nohbdy” ruse, enabling it all to happen as foretold.
(Note here that Polyphemos, in great regret, offers to intercede with his father, Poseidon, on Odysseus’ behalf. That hubris which meant he could not see a mere human – “small, pitiful and twiggy” – as the danger of which Telemos had warned recedes in the face of a divine prophecy fulfilled. Then Odysseus, as expected, is a total dick about it and suffers the wrath of Poseidon for years to come.)
(PS – My favorite version of Odysseus is George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for what I assume are obvious reasons. Such a glorious asshole.)
So: a curse, self-inflicted. Invited in.
The cyclops seeks foreknowledge, a miraculous and Faustian bargain which transforms them into a monstrous form. By my reckoning, any such magical exchange involves demons and Chaos and all of the unexpected outcomes that entails. The wish-granting djinni, whose interpretation of any request is always true to the letter and orthogonal to the spirit, is merely a demon by another name.
No shortcut to enlightenment exists, and those who would seek a higher consciousness and sight beyond sight can expect to spend a lifetime – perhaps many thousands of them – in meditation to achieve it. Impatient for an awareness which transcends the limitations of linear time and past as memory, some would beseech the Chaos for a favor of impossibility. For magic is expressly the impossible manifested in this world.
Touched by this miracle, a cyclops finds themself blinded in the eyes they have known since birth, the orbs turned milky opaque and painfully sensitive to the light of the Sun. A third eye tears its way open in their forehead, returning ordinary vision in addition to an awareness of spacetime as four dimensions, to possibility as an ever-expanding fractal yet to collapse into certainty. All futures are possible, a hazy halo of chromatic aberration about all beings.
And yet, and yet. Futures fade into indistinct auras about the tragedies the cyclops cannot unsee. The world bends about its shadows, and in particular the terrible fates which await the cyclops. Death, dismemberment, agony, loss. With all of existence arrayed against them, they retreat to the remote lands, drawing strength from their mystical misery, seeking true enlightenment in the thin rainbows of color which outline the cruel darkness which beats as the heart of all things. Such a cyclops grows huge, and strong, and fearsome. Thrice the height of an ordinary human, capable of breaking trees and hurling boulders. A giant who need fear no one, and yet, in quiet sadness, fears everyone.
Those who would seek out a cyclops do so, aware of their second sight, in pursuit of an oracle capable seeing the contours of the future. As with their own existence, a cyclops’ sight finds in the presence of others a dominating darkness of future doom. Of a thousand possibilities of their demise and ruin. Of only the slightest potentials of anything beyond endless horror.
Who could possibly want to know such things? What benefit would any sensible person find in the prophecies of their own destruction?
Probably none, but your typical adventurer is rarely a sensible person. Forewarnings of disaster have a tendency to correlate with potential for great wealth. Risk and reward, like peanut butter and sandwiches.
Go, track down the cyclops, hidden far from the shining cities on their remote island. Bring gifts of thanks, and inquire about the myriad ways in which the dungeon will grind you into sausage. Take notes, that you might find the delicate rainbow outlining the shadow of death, silver lining to the stormcloud of the dungeon.
Cyclops HD 6 – 9 + 5 | AC 3 | MV 45 | giant, keen senses, hurl boulder, visions of doom
Let’s not oversell our cyclops here: when it’s time to draw steel, they’re not brilliant adversaries. A lack of clarity in their attempts to critically evaluate their life situation resulted in the current, monstrous predicament, and a whipsaw shift in perception to pessimistic depression isn’t helping matters. They’re massive brutes and that’s their strategy.
Which, when you’ve got up to 9 Hit Dice and a pile of sorta-unearned confidence, sure can result in pulping a number of adversaries before the dust settles. Hell, if the cyclops has foreseen this moment as their undoing – which, given their propensity to seeing everything as the potential for such, assume so – they’ll fight as if they have nothing else to lose.
At a distance, a cyclops will readily hurl heavy stones at threats (see Polyphemos: “The blind thing in his doubled fury broke / a hilltop in his hands and heaved it after us”), be they approaching or fleeing. In melee, fists and tools will do to crush the nearest foes; at giant size, clubs and rocks reduce humans to messy stains. Being a giant, consider using a d10 for damage instead of the typical d6.
Recall that our cyclops lives immersed in visions of dark doom, for themselves and others. In moments of distress, they may take advantage of that curse and act upon their visions of doom. For a cost of 1 HP, grant them combat advantage (+2 AV, +2 damage) on one attack, as they will their visions to reality. Telegraph this to the PCs if at all possible; d10 + 2 damage is a serious threat in Whitehack.
Before it comes to stabbing, though, let them be the NPC they deserve to be. Tortured and difficult, imprisoned by regret for decisions they cannot undo. Perhaps, with enough solitude and meditation, even capable of the true enlightenment they had once imagined so easily acquired.
52 Monsters 
