Titans

I was recently thunderstruck by the majesty of The Motherland Calls, the largest statue in Russia (http://www.giganticstatues.com/the-motherland-calls/). What particularly struck me was the way the statue towered over the terrain, appearing like a god on earth.

Out of curiosity, I decided to use the rules in Lairs & Encounters to work out the Hit Dice of a titan the size of The Motherland Calls. The statue is 170' tall. A typical human is 5'9" tall. Therefore the Motherland Calls is 29.6 times larger than an average human being; let's call it 30 times larger for ease of calculation. Weight increases at the cube root of height. An average human being is 150lbs, so the Motherland Calls (if it were flesh and blood) would weigh (150 x 30^3) 4,050,000lbs, or about 2,000 tons.

According to L&E, humanoid body forms have a Body Mass Exponent of 1.88 to 2.5. Body Mass Exponent, weight, and HD correlate according to the formula (HD x 10) ^ BME = Weight. If we use a mid-point BME of 2.0, then the Motherland Calls titan would have around 200 HD, as (200 x 10)^2.0 = 4,000,000lbs. At 200 HD, the titan would have about 1,000 HP. 

A quick search on Google suggests that it would take 1,500 bee stings to kill an average human. An average bee is 1." long. A giant bee in ACKS is 1' long, or about 12x the size of a normal bee. Its stinger does 1d3 damage, for an average of 2 points. It would take about 500 giant bee stings to kill our titan.

Since our titan is proportionally larger (30x versus 12x) than our bee, it should be more survivable than that. 

From this I conclude that (a) Giant bees deal too much damage, or that (b) Titans need to have a lower BME, or (C) Titans should be built with shp that takes less damage from normal attacks, or (D) part of the damage from bees is due to their poison.

    

I'm thrilled there's a website dedicated to gigantic statues. That's good down-home Internet.

There's also (E) - giant bees are not giant enough, or (F) regular honey/killer bees may be closer to 1/2 inch, rather than the giant honey bee at an inch, which would get you to 24x.

This is a heck of a bee lair, regardless:

http://timewheel.net/Video-Giant-Himalayan-Bees-Produce-Hallucinogenic-Honey

 

It'd be interesting to see where to draw the line on SHP. What about something like an Iron or Bronze Golem? Magic weapons should do SHP, perhaps - 1 shp per 5 hp, like pg 112. When do we completely turn into Rifts, though?  :)

 

"When do we completely turn into Rifts..."

Don't give me ideas!

 

maybe just giving him some form of damage resistence? 5 or 10 hp would do