On the Inspirational Power of Mercurial Place Names

Because I am a very busy, dedicated and hardworking employee and involved family man, I spend a lot of time dicking around on wikipedia, looking at articles about things like the geological features of the planet Mercury. (The genealogy of the thought process that got me there, since you asked, was that I was idly wondering whether anybody had ever speculated whether Mercury had any moons, on the basis that 'the vanished moon of Mercury' would be a cool idea for a campaign setting. It still would be, but, alas!, there was never a time when the ancient Greeks, Toltecs, Bugulmara astronomers at NASA peered at the heavens and imagined there to be a satellite of that sun-blasted rock.)

Anyway, Mercury has a lot of potential as a diamond-hard SF setting, of course (it has a shit-ton of ice, to use the technical term, concealed in permanently-shadowed craters on its poles - prime locations for human colonists to set up bases and thereby become targets for The Thing, Sam Neill, alien facehuggers, or a mad AI voiced by Kevin Spacey). But looking at the place names conjures entirely different images of planetary romance in the mind - more in keeping with E. R. Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, where Mercury is imagined to be something like a more vivid and dramatic version of Earth, filled with strange monsters, magnificent wilderness scenery, and declamatory speeches. From the wikipedia page in question:

Different types of features are named after different things: Mercurian ridges are called dorsa, and are named after astronomers who made detailed studies of the planet; valleys are called valles, and are named after ancient abandoned cities, towns, and settlements; crater chains are called catenae and are named after radio telescope facilities; plains are called planitiae, and most are named after mythological names associated with Mercury; escarpments are called rupes and are named after the ships of famous explorers; long, narrow depressions are called fossae and are named after works of architecture; bright spots are called faculae and are named after the word snake in various languages.

It is one thing for an alien planet to have mountains, valleys, craters, and plains. It is something else again for it to have dorsa, valles, catenae, planitiae, rupes, fossae and faculae. But the specific names are even better (the rupes, because they are named after ships, being probably my favourites). Gaze in wonder at the landscape that emerges in the mind's eye when imagining what it would be like to see, in the distance, the following:

• Adventure Rupes ('nuff said)
• Blossom Rupes (pseudo-Mercurial pseudo-Japan?)
• La Dauphine Rupes (pseudo-Mercurial pseudo-Sun King)
• Hero Rupes
• Paramour Rupes 
• Pourquoi-Pas Rupes (because, why not?)
• Terror Rupes
• Goldstone Catena (the chain of craters that sparked a gold rush)
• Haystack Catena
• Nzoka Facula (just because it sounds like something Eddison himself might have made up)
• Pantheon Fossae 
• Schiaparelli Dorsum
• Odin Planitia 

The Pourquoi-Pas Rupes is such a brilliant title for a D&D module that I can hardly stand not to begin writing it immediately, but you also have to love Terror Rupes and the sheer poetry of Schiaparelli Dorsum. What wonders would lie between the covers of these never-to-be-written modules, and in what kind of world would they be situated?

The theme of the solar system has appeared at various stages on the blog (in the early days, here, and later on here, here, here, and here, not to mention most recently here) and still think of it as an untapped imaginary resource - just as planetary romance is itself is a sadly neglected subgenre. Hard SF is one thing, but what I really long for is a version of Spelljammer done right, in which the entire solar system - planets, moons and all - is reimagined as a vast sequence of individualised, but interrelated, campaign settings across which a group of PCs could in theory range at will. Here, the emphasis would not be on realism but on capturing the character of the solar system's contents, as conjured by a cursory knowledge of what each planet or moon looks like, its name, and its symbolism in intellectual history or myth. Somebody with the time ought to try it; I'm too busy with aforementioned job and family, not to mention trawling around the internet for tidbits to sate my idle curiosity.

Top 10 Best Commercial OSR Products

[I am putting up a series of 'Top 10' posts in the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals. You can read the first post in the series here, and the second here.]

Since 2008 I have been a heady devourer of blogs, but - I will here confess to heresy and also out myself as a dilettante and ingenue - I tend not to buy a great deal of RPG books, back a lot of kickstarters, or download a lot of PDFs. This is for one simple reason: I am grumpy, stuck-up, and extremely hard to please. I am unimpressed by the things that most other people like. And as a result I only tend to buy things that I am very sure have a high likelihood of winning me over. 

With that said, there are certain products that I think of as, if not the 'essentials' (the only really essential thing is the core OD&D rules), then at least the highly recommended. These are the top 10, in no particular order - and here I should also make clear that I am limiting myself to actual commercial, for-sale things, rather than free material like, say, Philotomy's Musings. 

10. Misty Isle of the Eld. This is simply a great marriage of tone, art and content - a module that manages to be very playable while also creating a coherent, integrated mood and feel (in this case, roughly Flash Gordon meets David Bowie meets Michael Moorcock). It remains a high watermark in the peak of the OSR years (2016), when enthusiasm and competence had combined to maximal effect. 

9. Qelong. There are short modules whose brevity derives from laziness. There are others whose brevity derives from the author's incapacity to properly explain and elucidate. This is one which is brief because its author thought carefully about how to condense everything necessary into 48 pages. It is a finely distilled shot of RPG material, and also a beautiful example of how to make a 'high concept' module playable.

8. The original Lamentations of the Flame Princess core rules, in A5 format. I do not myself use LotFP (I exclusively use BECMI and have for years), but I recognise its original iteration to be the best that the OSR really had to offer in purely mechanical terms - and also respect the thematic coherence of its implied setting. I also loved the sheer at-the-table effectiveness of the old A5 basic rule books, which were eminently flippable and browsable - qualities that are severely underrated.

7. Pariah. As I wrote in a review long ago, 'This describes itself as "old school roleplaying when the world was young" - that's right, it is a stone age RPG, though one that is very carefully thought-out and (it seems to me at least) well-informed. Not so much 1 Million Years BC, or Stig of the Dump - more Lavondyss, the middle story of Fifth Head of Cerberus, Helliconia Spring, those novels about neanderthals whose name I forget. The PCs are exiles from their tribe(s); it has spirit realms and rituals; extensive rules for psychobotanicals; a random wilderness generation method; images of waif-like girls covered in face-paint and tattoos. I very much like it and would run it: this is high praise, because as a general rule I don't run anything written by anybody else.'

6. Punth: A Primer. Another book which I reviewed here at the blog, and of which I said, 'Punth approaches Tekumel, not in substance (although there is something of Tekumel's alien coldness in it), but in ambition. This is not a typical fantasy setting. It is an exploration of themes: the control of thought through language, the formation of state power, and the philosophy of law. If that sounds like a bit much, it is a cool ancient Near Eastern sandbox setting ruled by dictatorial multi-limbed aliens written by somebody who has really though things through. And it's a marvel of succinct, concentrated. distilled communication to boot.' It is the closest that I think the OSR-adjacent sphere has come to producing something that is actually philosophically interesting.

5. Veins of the Earth. You have almost certainly read it already. Suffice to say, it would probably be in everybody's top 10 list provided they weren't deliberately leaving it out for effect.

4. The Gardens of Ynn. This would have a strong claim on the number 1 spot if this list was an actual ranking order. Having looked at the reviews on DriveThruRPG it seems that recently a new version was created - I cannot speak to its quality, but certainly the original was a revelation: a brilliantly realised procedural-generation method with a beautiful skin wrapped around it.

3. Into the Odd. Is this an OSR product? It is certainly OSR-adjacent. I have ambivalent feelings about quite how rules-lite it is, but it is certainly the best rules-lite system that I know of, and is also probably the best not-D&D-but-still-recognisably-D&D-ish system that came out of the OSR. 

2. An Echo, Resounding. There have been more successful Crawford vehicles since, and no doubt material of higher quality, but An Echo, Resounding was truly pioneering work - Crawford went out into the Sandbox Hills with a pickaxe, shovel, and a few sticks of dynamite, and came back with jewels. Now the landscape has been picked clean and erosion has transformed it into a barren wasteland, but the valleys and chasms still echo with the sound of his footsteps, and the soil remembers him.

1. Carcosa. At the time Carcosa first came out I thought it was hubristic, and courting of controversy for the sake of it, but the fact remains that if Crawford was a pathfinder for sandbox settings, McKinney was a trailblazer for self-publication in general. Where most of us saw blogs and forums, he saw books; where most of us spewed ephemeral rants in to the ether, he created physical products for people to have and hold. Others saw the crescent, but he saw the whole of the moon - and set the pattern for everything that followed.

Late Summer Blog Competition: Describe and Stat this Location

Holidaying in Port Sunlight - a place which itself would make interesting inspirational material for a D&D module - I came across a mysterious architectural feature. It struck me as something that one might find in a dungeon, wizard's garden, courtyard of a school of magic, etc., and so I post it here so as to elicit suggestions as to what it might be. The best wins a prize: the choice of any one PDF from the noisms games storefront. 

Each entry must consist of a short description as though written for a dungeon key for the edition of your choice, with stats as necessary. The scope of each entry should include the design on the floor and the feature on the wall behind it, but the location could be anywhere: underground, on a boat, on an airship; anywhere you like. The numerals '2008' can be ignored or incorporated as desired.

Top 10 Influences on Play Style from Literature, Art and Cinema

[I am putting up a series of 'Top 10' posts in the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals. You can read the first post in the series here.]

We are, all of us, used to thinking about our influences in the sense of substance and the creation of mood and atmosphere. We are generally easily able to reel off lists of books, films, TV series, pictures and so on that we have tried to emulate in some way or which have exerted some effect on how we approach content creation in the context of DMing. 

But we do not tend to think very deeply about the way in which the things that we read, and watch, affect how we actually play the game. Is what happens 'at the table' influenced by the media we consume? I believe that it is. Here is my Top 10 of literary and cinematic influences on my DMing style:

10. Heat. Over the years, I have noticed that, during the sessions I run, the times when the players are most engaged, focused, and 'present' are - aside from combat - when they are actively engaged in planning out some wheeze or other, be it a heist, ambush, assassination attempt, etc. There is a conspiratorial mood that sets in when a group of PCs are supposed to be plotting something, and these are the moments when the identification of player with PC becomes most complete and the conversation which the players are having between themselves most closely reflects that which the PCs would surely themselves be having at that particular point in time. Lots of films capture the 'a tightly knit group of rogues put their heads together to plot something vaguely nefarious' vibe (everything from The Sting to the vastly underrated David Mamet masterpiece Heist), but Heat is one of my all-time favourite films and therefore gets the final nod.

9. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I watched the absolute shit out of this film when I was a kid and it somehow seeped into my bones as a result - I don't think I am quite able to picture in my mind's eye a medieval fight scene without it somehow ending up looking like it involves Kevin Costner and Alan Rickman trading blows while Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio shrieks in the background. Whether this comes across to the players, I am not sure, but I strongly suspect that it colours how I describe a fight scene whenever called to do so.

8. Gladiator. Gladiator was released in the cinema when I was a student at university and I can still remember the day that I saw it very vividly. All of my friends had gone to see it the previous night and I for some reason hadn't gone with them (I presume because I was working), and they had come back from the cinema raving about it as the greatest film ever made in the history of cinema. So I went to see it in the middle of the afternoon by myself and loved it so much that I immediately went and bought another ticket so I could see it back-to-back. Obviously, Gladiator remains a ridiculously entertaining film full of great cinematography and beautifully choreographed fight scenes, but people don't comment enough on its exceptional script - the dialogue is marvellous, and the actors speak every line as though they are carving an epitaph on a headstone. I love the idea of fantasy characters talking as though they have just stepped off the set of Gladiator, and am always sad that I am never inventive enough to really pull off 'At my signal, unleash hell!'

7. The Fighting Fantasy books as a gestalt. Individual Fighting Fantasy books may have their moments of inspiration, and lots of them have wonderful art, but in terms of actual play, their strongest influence on me has been at the level of ambient mood. To play a Fighting Fantasy book straight (i.e., without the liberal use of fingers and bookmarks stuck between pages) is to confront random, blameless death, time and time again, until one achieves a zen-like state in which matters of life and death simply lose significance when set against the bigger project of working one's way to the end. The main character as such becomes an irrelevance, and his deaths take on the aspect of Bill Murray's suicides in Groundhog Day - they are just incidents that have to be accepted, and dealt with, so that that the show can go on. This is something that I am sure I have carried into my approach to DMing in terms of my attitude to PC death: so your PC has died - so fucking what? Roll a new one and let's get on with things. 

6. MR James' short stories. Almost ten years ago (ten years!) I wrote a post about MR James in which I compared him favourably to HP Lovecraft. I meant that in a conceptual sense, but actually MR James is also technically a much better writer, because he knows how to surprise the reader. He's just good at what you might call 'boo scenes', when the ghost reveals itself and the viewpoint character (inevitably) gets a horrible shock but somehow recovers. I always enjoy those moments in games when the players know something bad is about to happen, or likely to happen if they do X or Y, and are just waiting for the 'boo!' moment.

5. The Way of the Gun. This Christopher McQuarrie film is not an unqualified success, but the action sequences have always stuck with me - and are what I tend to aim for in particular when running a Cyberpunk 2020 game. There is a childish machismo about gun violence on display that, for all its superficiality, is nonetheless exciting. There is intelligence behind what the characters do, and I like that.

4. A Song of Ice and Fire. Yes, it's almost embarrassing to cite George RR Martin's books in any context nowadays, given the ubiquity of the Game of Thrones TV series (I'm happy to confirm I am yet to watch a single minute of it), but it is important to give George - before he became undisciplined - his due: he knows how to craft a compelling plot. And this is largely due to two things: making sure that all characters, even relatively minor ones, have motivations and goals of their own; and making sure that whenever one problem is solved by anybody, at least two new ones are created. Taking these principles too far is undoubtedly the reason why his books have become so sprawling, but there is no doubt that the result is a technique that really sweeps the reader along. 

3. John Howe's illustrations, particularly of the works of JRR Tolkien. There is no more inspiring artist working in fantasy illustration than John Howe, for the simple reason that he knows how to create, with his pen, the quality of vastness: the sense that a fantasy world is indeed a world, and not just a few lines and squiggles on a made-up map. Viz:

This is a feeling which I always try to communicate (however successfully I have no idea) - the idea of size, of scope, or scale, of the opening out of wide vistas and the beckoning to distant horizons, which is surely one of the things that is most compelling about the fantasy genre itself, and has been since its beginning.

2. The Planet of Adventure series. The books set on Tschai are among my favourites of Vance's work, not least because of the effortless way in which he manages to create the sense of a world which teams with different cultures, peoples, societies, languages, nations. Hence:

Coad was a busy town. Along the crooked streets, in and out of the ale-coloured sunlight, moved men and women of many castes and colours: Yellow Islanders and Black Islanders, Horasin bark-merchants muffled in grey robes; Caucasoids such as Traz from the Aman Steppe; Dirdirmen and Dirdir-men hybrids; dwarfish Sieps from the eastern slopes of the Ojzanalai who played music in the streets; a few flat-faced white men from the far south of Kislovan. The natives, the Tans, were an affable fox-faced people, with wide polished cheek bones, pointed chins, russet or dark brown hair cut in a ledge across the ears and foreheads. Their usual garments were knee-length breeches, embroidered vest, a round black pie-plate hat. Palanquins were numerous, carried by short gnarled men with oddly long noses and stringy black hair: apparently a race to themselves; Reith saw them in no other occupation. Later he learned them to be natives of Grenie at the head of the Dwan Zher.... Once Traz grabbed his elbow and pointed to a pair of thin men in loose black trousers, black capes with tall collars all but enveloping their faces, soft cylindrical black hats with wide brims: caricatures of mystery and intrigue. 'Pnumekin!' hissed Traz in something between shock and outrage. 'Look at them! They walk among other men without a look aside, and their minds full of strange thinking!'

I am endlessly fascinated by the sheer variety that exists on our own world, and I always aim where possible to try to conjure up a similarly plausible sensation of multifariousness in the way in which a setting is described, and imagined. Vance achieves this in part simply through the inventiveness of his descriptions, but also through having obviously thought carefully about detail: how one actually sketches out a person's features, attire, mannerisms, gait. This is something to emulate - the ability to make a world seem as though it is inhabited, rather than a piece of canvas on which are pencilled a few crude shapes and figures.

 

1. The Man Who Would Be King. Is there a more D&D film that has ever been made (I include actual D&D films) than this one? A platonic ideal of rogueishness, and in that sense absolutely ripe for mimicry and inspiration. 

As ever, feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments!

Top 10 Early OSR Blogs, Now Defunct

In the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals, I am writing a series of 'Top 10' posts relating broadly to the blog itself and its context. For the first of these, I'd like to do a run down of some of the blogs that were active in the era roughly from 2008-2011, when the scene really took off and was in its initial creative flowering. At that time I followed literally hundreds of blogs through Google Reader, and spent a considerable portion of each day with my finger on the pulse, ear to the ground, eye on the main chance, and nose on the, er, something. My day job at that time involved long, long hours of boring but hard work, so the OSR blogosphere was like water in the desert to me - a raging torrent of creativity and enthusiasm into which one could simply dip a ladle to drink from.

The creativity of that period has probably now been surpassed in the sense that a lot of highly imaginative material - and very mechanically innovative systematisation - has emerged subsequent to it (particularly when G+ began to take over as the central hub of OSR activity), but the enthusiasm never has been. It is with that in mind that I have made this list: these are the blogs whose joy, alongside their other merits, I found appealing. In no particular order, then, the Top 10 Early OSR Blogs, Now Defunct are:

10. Sham's Grog and Blog. Sham's blog was one of the very first OSR blogs that I encountered, and alongside producing vast swathes of useful and inspirational material (just take a look at all the links in the sidebars, for heaven's sake) also contains a real-time obituary to Gary Gygax, serving to prove that the OSR was just coalescing 'in the air', as it were, at the very moment the game's original creator died - a regrettable but extraordinary coincidence that undoubtedly had a huge influence on the development of the scene.

9. Valley of Blue Snails. When I first started getting back into RPGs in the mid-late 2000s, I had in my head the typical image of the fantasy genre that somebody of my background and history would inevitably have had - largely a melange of Tolkien, Weis & Hickman, Eddings, Goodkind, Williams, Martin (yes, I was one of the people who read Game of Thrones when first released, as volume one in A Song of Ice and Fire, purchased from my local WH Smith circa 1997 or so) and the like - with a little Moorcock, Vance or Harrison on the side. This was what 'fantasy' really meant to me, at least in the context of D&D - so the early OSR era was almost an education in itself into what fantasy literature could aspire to be. Nowadays the Valley of Blue Snails sounds almost formulaically anodyne given the extent to which boundaries have been pushed, but at that time its creative scope felt truly vast.

8. ChicagoWiz's RPG Blog, now a blasted remnant of what once was, but which still contains a list of 25 of its best posts and some collected links. It is funny how memory of internet drama deteriorates; there are gossamer-like strands of recollections of controversy revolving around ChgoWiz, but whatever that controversy was, it no longer matters - all that is left, fittingly, is useful and interesting material (although I believe the author is still out there blogging somewhere).

7. Huge Ruined Scott's various endeavours. This perhaps constitutes a cheat, or a tease, or both, because Scott Driver has long disappeared (at least to my knowledge; a fragment of a hint of his material can be found here) and had a habit of deleting his projects in fits of either pique or insouciance (or madness). If anyone does know of the existence of an archive of his material, then please do say so in the comments. He was a fabulous writer and the most imaginative creator of the lot.

6. Malevolent & Benign. Max was a fellow footsoldier in the OSR's early days - distinguished above all by his pleasantness and enthusiasm. There was a lot of that about in that era, and his blog feels somehow exemplary of the positive, no-hang-ups vibe that prevailed in those days. I have a feeling that it was the move to G+ that actually killed off a lot of these people - the action moved elsewhere, and became more frenetic and fraught. This had its benefits, but also its casualties. 

5. Land of Nod. I perhaps shouldn't include John in this list as he is still blogging (if much less frequently than at one time) at a different web address, but his old site is a marvel. At one time he was putting out posts on a more-or-less daily basis, always very focused and tight, and his efficient and imaginative hexcrawl work in particular is simply a model for what good keying consists of.

4. A Hamsterish Hoard of Dungeons & Dragons. One of the signal features of the OSR blogosphere during its early years was the sheer number of people who just put out great content, as and when they liked, for free - monsters, spells, magic items, hexmaps, and so on. This blog was among the very best of these sites, and it stood out for its distinctly fairy tale-ish, slightly anime-inflected vibe.

3. Middenmurk. No list of top OSR blogs would be complete without a mention of Middenmurk. Tom Fitzgerald did not write more than 100 posts in his entire blogging career. (Although who knows? He may resurface.) Yet each of them is a pearl. Read his work - he is a man of peculiar and considerable gifts (and did some lovely map illustrations for Yoon-Suin 2nd edition). 

2. Kellri. Kellri's blog was always interesting and enjoyable to read, but it is the huge archives of PDF downloads for which he deserves the most credit - particularly the Classic Dungeon Designer Netbooks, which were (again) produced and disseminated for free, and of immense helpfulness to any DM. It was, to repeat, the sheer joy of creativity that truly characterised those early years, and Kellri's creative output was exemplary of that mood. 

1. How to Start a Revolution in 21 Days or Less. The author of this blog was neither the most prolific, nor the most prominent, but I include it simply because, having visited it for the first time in many years in the course of writing this post, I felt a feeling of almost unbearably poignant nostalgia wash over me for that lost era of thoughtful, calm, open-minded interaction which seemed to characterise not just OSR blogs but much of the internet experience in those days. There was a time, before social media, when the internet simply seemed to be an unalloyed good - a wondrous blessing allowing in theory everybody in the world to enter into a joint enterprise of communicative bonding. That vision has been displaced by world-weariness, cynicism, and tension, but sometimes it is edifying to revisit that earlier age to be reminded of what once was, and could have been. These are the thoughts that struck me when revisiting this blog in particular (I genuinely cannot explain why) and, since the early OSR seems so redolent of the pre-social media world, it seemed fitting to include it in my list.

That Fresh but Authentic Feeling: The Book of Giants Campaign Setting

One way to come up with campaign setting ideas that are novel and interesting (by which I mean they do not owe anything to pulp fantasy, JRR Tolkien, Robert Jordan, etc.) while also retaining a feeling of depth and authenticity is to plunder untapped resources of legend - one of the most significant being early Judaeo-Christian myth. 

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, were found fragments of a text written some centuries before Christ, which have been painstakingly pieced together by scholars into something approaching a chronological narrative. This is the so-called Book of Giants, which confirms something of the story, found in the Book of Jubilees and elsewhere, of the fallen angels and how they bred with human women to produce a race of evil giants (the Nephilim). 

To read what exists of the the text in English translation provides a visceral thrill - like receiving a garbled message, punctuated by static, from the ancient past (as in a 1980s war or SF movie in which somebody yells 'You're breaking up!' at somebody on the other end of a radio). Hence:

CHAPTER 1

...they knew the secrets of... ....sin was great in the earth.... ...and they killed many... .... [they begot] giants....

CHAPTER 3

....[two hundred] donkeys, two hundred mules, two hundred... ...rams of the flock, two hundred goats, two hundred... ....[beasts of the] field from every animal, from every [bird].... ....for interbreeding....

CHAPTER 4

....they defiled.... ....[they begot] giants and monsters.... ....they begot, and behold, all [the earth was corrupted].... ....with its blood and by the hand of.... .....which did not suffice for them and.... ....and they were seeking to devour many.... ....the monsters attacked it.

The text is partial but the dark hints are obvious enough: the fallen angels (called the Watchers) came to Earth, begot giants on human women, then selected various animals to have sex with to produce monstrous progeny - and, it seems indulged in cannibalism or similar. This is thought to be an earlier, or perhaps contemporaneous, account of the story contained in the Book of Enoch, which in 1 Enoch 7:1-6 says:

And all the others [i.e. the Watchers] took wives to themselves together with them, and each chose one for himself, and they began to go in to them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant, and they bore great giants, whose height was [three thousand ells], who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusations against the lawless ones.

So mixing all of this together, we have a race of evil angels (1 Enoch says there were 200 of them) who come to Earth, and select 200 women to be their wives. They then transform these women into what sounds like witches or druids, able to cast 'charms and enchantments' and knowing the secrets of plants - and these witch-wives then give birth to giants (the Nephilim) who are up to 3,500 metres tall (an ell being just over a metre in length). And these giants then start eating people - and also having sex with animals and (as The Book of Giants' account has it) breeding with them to produce hybrid beastman offspring of many kinds. Eventually, the giants descend into cannibalism.

I don't know about you, but I think a campaign setting ruled by evil angels and their witch-wives, populated by giants (perhaps not 3,500 metres tall) who eat one another and human beings, and who have sex with animals to produce many weird varieties of beastman, is one that somebody could do a lot with. Each Watcher/witch-wife pairing would I think preside over a city, fortress, palace, or tower of some kind, and perhaps those are generally the only places in which human beings can live and remain safe from the giants who roam around the wilderness. And out there in the world are also different kinds of bird-men, beast-men, reptile-men, fish-men, of varying degrees of barbarism and civilisation, but all corrupted by their hideous parentage. 

This all sounds very metal, and very OSR, but owes no debt whatsoever to fantasy literature of the pulp or Tolkienian variety - with the result that it has a fresh but authentic feeling.