Giants may just look like bigger humans but they are not just idiotic brutes that just go "Fe fi fo fum!" These great creatures were dragon slayers, dreamers, crafters, and kings, but their kind fell from glory long ago due to some great catastrophe.
Each of the main giant races—the cloud, fire, frost, hill, stone, and storm giants—are related by common elements of history, religion, and culture. They view one another as kindred, keeping any inherent animosity over territory and ambition to a minimum.
Giants belong to a caste structure called the ordning. Based on social class and highly organized, the ordning assigns a social rank to each individual giant. By understanding its place in the ordning, each giant knows which other giants are inferior or superior to it, since no two giants are equal.
Types of Giants[]
Cloud Giants - Although cloud giants are lower in the ordning than storm giants, the reclusive storm
giants rarely engage with the rest of giantkind. As a result, many cloud giants see themselves as having the highest status and power among the giant races.
A cloud giant earns its place in the ordning by the treasure it accumulates, the wealth it wears, and the gifts it bestows on other cloud giants. However, value is only one part of the assessment. The extravagances a cloud giant wears or places about its home must also be beautiful or wondrous. Sacks of gold or gems are worth less to a cloud giant than the jewelry that might be crafted from those materials, creating treasures that bring esteem to a cloud giant’s household.
Storm Giants - Storm giants see the events of the world in a wide perspective. They can foretell the rise and fall of kings and empires, see the beginnings and ends of fortune and disaster, and find the patterns within seemingly unrelated events. By reading omens and prophesying, storm giants learn of vast secrets previously unknown and troves of lore utterly forgotten.
Storm giants communicate infrequently with others of their kind. They do so usually to compare signs and omens or engage in a rare courtship. Storm giant parents stay together to raise a child to maturity, then return to the solitary isolation they cherish.
Frost Giants - Frost giants dwell in high peaks and glacial rifts where the sun hides its golden head by winter. Crops don’t grow in their frozen homelands, and they keep little livestock beyond what they capture in their raids against civilized lands. They hunt the wild game of the tundra and mountains but don’t cook it, since meat from a fresh kill tastes sufficiently hot to their palate. 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, child rearing, and crafting are given to giants based on their physical strength and hardiness.
Fire Giants - Fire giant fortresses are built around and inside volcanoes or near magma-filled caverns. From birth, a fire giant is taught to embrace a legacy of war. At the cradle, its parents chant songs of battle. Just as fire giants pass down their knowledge of crafting from generation to generation, their renowned fighting prowess comes not from wild fury but from endless discipline and training. Enemies make the mistake of underestimating fire giants based on their brutish manner, learning too late that these giants live for combat and can be shrewd tacticians. They excel at smelting and smith work, as they do at the engineering of metal and stone, and the quality of their artistry shows even in their implements of destruction and their weapons of war.
Stone Giants - Secluded caves are the homes of the stone giants. Cavern networks are their towns, rocky tunnels their roads, and underground streams their waterways. Among stone giants, artistry ranks as the greatest virtue. They create intricate murals, paint sprawling murals across cavern walls, and indulge in a wide variety of other artistic disciplines. They esteem stone carving as the greatest of skills. Skilled rock throwers are granted positions of high rank in the giants’ ordning, testing and demonstrating their ability to hurl and catch enormous boulders. Such giants take the front ranks when a tribe has cause to defend its home or attack its enemies.
Stone giants view the world outside their underground homes as a realm of dreams where nothing is entirely true or real. They behave in the surface world the way humanoids might behave in their own dreams, making little account for their actions and never fully trusting what they see or hear.
Hill Giants - Hill giants dwell in hills and mountain valleys across the world, congregating in steadings built of rough timber or in clusters of well-defended mud-and-wattle huts. Their skins are tan from lives spent lumbering up and down the hilly slopes and dozing beneath the sun. In a hill giant’s world, humanoids and animals are easy prey that can be hunted with impunity. Creatures such as dragons and other giants are tough adversaries. Hill giants equate size with power. The hill giants’ ability to digest nearly anything has allowed them to survive for eons as savages, eating and breeding in the hills like animals. They have never needed to adapt and change, so their minds and emotions remain simple and undeveloped.
Sources[]
Aa.Vv. (s.d.), "Giant (mythology)", Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Accessed: January 29, 2014.(source)
