Thursday, March 16, 2023

How tall is my brood giant?

In a comment to last Sunday's post, Zak asked about how the beasties from Broodmother Skyfortress matched up to the math I was doing there. He did not like my answer, saying "The Broodmother giants are WAYYY bigger than 21 feet iirc". I'm not so sure. This cover art from Ian Maclean looks at least in the right ballpark to me:

 
Did I specify in the book an actual size? I don't remember doing so. I'll have to go back and check. However, I do know that the original logic of the broodmother and her kin was the following: AD&D Cloud Giants, but they are Elephant-Centaurs and also Sharks. (Also the broodmother is the Slurm Queen from Futurama, but that's not important here; I'm wanting data on a typical brood giant.)
 
This morning I had a lengthy exchange with ChatGPT to try to find out what an 18' giant body on a bull elephant would come out to height wise and how much that body would weigh is it was made of dense shark flesh. The answer we came to was 28 to 29 feet tall and a weight between 11,200 and 12,300 pounds. This puts the brood over the top of the scale of Raggi's animal chart.

If you'd like to see the ridiculous conversation that led to these conclusions, here's a transcript.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous4:16 PM

    The creature in the picture is only a little more than twice as tall as a human. Granted, it's centaur-like in form, rather than human-like. Probably 9' at the shoulder, so probably about 3 tons (by comparison with the weight of large horses and the square-cube law).
    If you're going by an 18' human torso on an elephant-sized body, that should be about 18'/2 = 9' taller than an elephant's shoulder height which seems to be about 13' at the max. So, about 22' tall at most. The weight estimate looks basically reasonable, though. Maybe a touch low.

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