Cyclops is more interesting.

Giants used to be big(no pun intended) in the fifties and sixties.

Special effects are way easier so producers want something more interesting than a "big human".

>>16908952
>Cyclops is more interesting

How so? It's just a giant with one eye.

>>16908940
>And yet, how often do they show up in fantasy movies, or games, or books, as one of the critical elements of the story/setting?
They show up quite often as elements of various settings, man.

Giants are okay. I think when people run them they forget that almost all giants have human levels of intelligence. They're not dumb, as a rule.

Thing is, giants share their man description (large, strong, stupid) with just about every single other fantasy monsters out there, ranging from trolls to orks (albeit these of course are not quite as large), golems and just about anything else that is evil and not a wizard.

Taking a human and making it bigger just doesn't give it the kick.

Thank you, OP. There is a special place in my imagination, my heart, and my gaming table for traditional fantasy monsters like giants. They are the hero-overcoming-great-odds personified.

I should throw together and entire giants threads game, with players having to hunt down giants and stop the chaos they cause.

I think one of the problems comes from how we think of them. In D&D, for example, giants are just big flesh-and blood brutes. Some of the smarter ones are very good magic users, but for the most part they're just another humanoid race.

But the idea that humanoid supernatural beings are just another species is a Tolkien idea, and even for him, giants were magical. His ents were the giants of Middle-Earth, with their name even being based on "eoten," an old Anglo-Saxon word for giant.

The giants of myth and legend were sometimes physical threats to overcome, but they were also more than that. A trip into giant country was like a trip into fairyland. Giants shaped the land, digging canyon and building mountains. the lived in worlds beyond the outer ring of ours, they built castles in the sky, they warred with the gods.

Imagine a setting where giants were once the dominant force. Mountain ranges are formed from the ruins of their citadels. A giant hunting knife, carelessly dropped, is used as a bridge over a ravine. Ruined giant foundations become natural places to found cities or fortresses. Discarded giant swords become like mines, a source of metal to be melted down and re-used.

You could always look into Trollhunter for some inspiration.

Generally, giants in genre fantasy fall into a few categories.

You have the mythical type, who warred with the gods. You have the mundane, hostile sort, stupid and violent. And, very rarely, you have the friendly giant.

Often he's depicted as just friendly in the way a big dumb retarded guy might be. But what of friendly smart giants?

Imagine a setting where the giants once owned the world, and are slowly being displaced by humans. Most have withdrawn to isolated, hidden realms. A few have grown savage and bestial, dressing in furs and eating humans. And a few of the old giants remain in mortal lands as hermits or wanderers, fascinated by the new, younger race and unwilling to leave the lands they once called home. They keep to themselves, mysterious and stoic, but every now and then they intervene to help humans caught in floods, or droughts, or other disasters that are not of their own doing. And sometimes they just bump into a human and lend a hand, before going off on their own enigmatic way.

There is, of course, also the issue of scale. The brutish sort of giants often aren't that big, and are little more than big ogres. They dress in hides, wield clubs. They don't build things, and are fairly primitive.

But bigger giants can't be. Once you get To fifty, seventy feet with a giant, he'd have to slaughter thousands of animals to make a suit of hide. He'd have to find the biggest tree in the forest to make a club. At that point, you have to start dipping into magical realms and giant animals, because a population of big giants would be beyond our world's capability to support.

They might visit now and then, though.

>>16909030
>
Imagine a setting where giants were once the dominant force. Mountain ranges are formed from the ruins of their citadels. A giant hunting knife, carelessly dropped, is used as a bridge over a ravine. Ruined giant foundations become natural places to found cities or fortresses. Discarded giant swords become like mines, a source of metal to be melted down and re-used.

Thanks for the ideas there! A major feature of the setting I'm working on is a major war between a few exceedingly powerful factions that culminated in a great cataclysm causing them all to be virtually wiped out -- either dying off or being reduced to mere shadows of their former glory. I was planning on having giants be one of these factions (the others being dragons, djinn, and fey), so this gives me some good ideas for how to flesh out this background.

As for the more brutish giants, even they aren't always simple. The giants from all the old "Jack" stories have plenty of magical powers at their call. So do a number of giants in Medieval romances, and even more in old legends that aren't quite myths.

The trick is the nature of giant magic. In PnP games giants with magic tend to just be like humans with magic. Powerful, maybe, but not especially remarkable. There's no sense of mystery. This is partly a result of Tolkien's influence, where he envisioned traditionally strange and alien supernatural beings as other sentient species we just happen to share the world with. Tolkien's elves were mainly based on European fairies, who fit this to a T, but his dwarves were also quite different, considering legendary dwarves made much more amazing things than "+3 battleaxes) and lived not just under the earth, but in entire other worlds under the earth, sometimes with their own sun and moon and forests.

>>16909033

In trollhunter, though, they're just big monsters. They're not especially magical or intelligent. Even their tendency to turn to stone is explained away scientifically.

Well, giants may not get much love, but these are some awfully lovely pictures of them.

>>16909150

Me, I'd also add dwarves to the mix, in the vein described in: >>16909307

The Mountain Folk, the Fair Folk, the Desert Folk, and the Dragons and Giants, who are in a league of their own.

I'd love to see a setting where dragons and giants have a long-running rivalry, both in the metaphorical sense (they're the two most famous fantasy monsters), and in the literal sense (they're the only two races big enough to threaten each other).

Speaking of weird giant magic, I always loved the story of Ruslan and the giant's head. There's something compelling about a massive battlefield full of bones, old weapons, and in the middle of it all a giant severed head, still living and talking, atop a small hill of ruin.

On a related note, Sir. Gawain and the Green Knight.

>>16909416

I'm now imagining a setting where the three great magical races were once dwarfs, fairies, and giants, and now they are fading as humans are stealing the world from them. The plot is about how they team up to strike back and re-take their world, the old forces arrayed against the new.

>>16909537
So Narnia.

>>16909551
>>16909537

Guess it's for the best since that place was a serious shithole.

>>16909551

Sort of, I suppose, but with less talking beavers.

Part of it is probably just because aside from their size, giants aren't that glamorous. Sure, you can give them glowing eyes or rocky skin or a dozen other little quirks, but they are fundamentally just big humans. They don't have the romance or room for creative design that a dragon does, for example.

I mean, look at most fantasy art. Giants? Furs, club, ugly face. Dragons? Artists can't seem to stop thinking of new patterns for their scales, new places to stick horns or spikes, all sorts of little stuff.

21 posts in two hours?

THOR HAS SPOKEN! NO LOVE FOR GIANTS!

You know, Bryan Singer's working on a "Jack the Giant Killer" movie that's due out in a year or two. Maybe that will bring them some overdue attention. Assuming he doesn't give us another "Superman Returns."

My only giant pics are cute/sexy.

Jotuns are pretty cool. They're of average to smart intelligence, magical, and sometimes portrayed as a (somewhat) noble warrior culture.

Also, they're supposed to bring about the apocalypse, which is cool too.
>>16909927
Didn't Thor end up marrying a giant? I know multiple Aesir ended up fucking giants.

>>16910057

I always wondered what the Norse actually thought was the different between the frost/mountain/fire jotuns.

This is a cool thread. Giants really don't get talked about much anymore, even if they're casually included in a lot of fantasy settings.

I shall be monitoring this thread with interest.

>>16910222

Monitoring won't do any good! Post giant ideas!

Giants are one of the most pitiable and awkward species of men, but they certainly aren't evil.

They don't have the Authority, Ingenuity, or the sheer persistance of Dwarves. Beings with such an immense ability and tact to dig their heels. Beings that are so stubborn and so persistant that they've evolved to survive on soil and water alone if it comes down to it.
And they don't have the numbers, charisma, or pride of Humans. Beings who stretched and grew across the world like blades of grass- always changing, adapting, and copying their enemys. Beings so likable and at the same time terrifying that the elvish word for Human was Synonymous for Orc.
But they have always had their size. Standing 36- at times even 40ft tall they would stride across the world; when it used to be their world that is. When they were still regaurded with fear and respect they were considered the titans or forefather's of our people. The giants; standing tall and upright as they battled the unwashed hordes of sloven ogres and trolls, and the vicious flying swarms of dragons as they spit fire and burned the skin of our ancestors fists.

But of course now times are different. Giants aren't seen as the mystical savage peace keepers of man. Now they're seen in a much different light: Starving, desperate, lumbering, monsters. Living in a world thats too small for them, while their fresh faced, small, weak, disrespectfull descendants run past them.

Some Giants are spitefull and lash out, "what good are my children if they wont even take care of me in my time of need? I did not tame this world for you to let me starve for your sick amusement." And Some Giants are patient, "there were giants before this era and there will be giants after this era. There will always be giants."

But there are no evil giants.

>Imagine a setting where giants were once the dominant force. Mountain ranges are formed from the ruins of their citadels. A giant hunting knife, carelessly dropped, is used as a bridge over a ravine. Ruined giant foundations become natural places to found cities or fortresses. Discarded giant swords become like mines, a source of metal to be melted down and re-used.

Building off this idea... It'd have a relatively isolated semi-Medieval European setting, cut off from the rest of the world by a MASSIVE, bigger than the Himalayan mountain range between it and the rest of the continent. The semi-European culture got there from the sea in a time lost to antiquity, but storms regularly ravage the ocean off its coasts, making sea travel difficult.

There's a couple of very dangerous passes through the mountains which lead to the "Trade Kingdoms," (a combination of the Middle East and Central Asia).

It'd be a relatively low fantasy setting, with magic-use being rare, and with supernatural creatures being strange and mysterious and not available for player characters. I'd also combine it with:

>>16909090
>Imagine a setting where the giants once owned the world, and are slowly being displaced by humans. Most have withdrawn to isolated, hidden realms. A few have grown savage and bestial, dressing in furs and eating humans. And a few of the old giants remain in mortal lands as hermits or wanderers, fascinated by the new, younger race and unwilling to leave the lands they once called home. They keep to themselves, mysterious and stoic, but every now and then they intervene to help humans caught in floods, or droughts, or other disasters that are not of their own doing. And sometimes they just bump into a human and lend a hand, before going off on their own enigmatic way.

>>16910231
Fine fine. Well I've always been a fan of Irish/Scottish?Celtic myth. Finn Mac Cool and all that. Supposedly he even built this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant%27s_Causeway

I prefer giants as fae folk. They can cast their glamours (such as Finn's wife disguising him as their baby with nothing but a blanket) and can shape the world around them a bit as creatures of magic.

Leprechauns were at times incredibly tall instead of incredibly short too. IIRC them being short is a very VERY mordern change. But they're more like nine foot tall giants rather than forty foot.

>>16910362
>I prefer giants as fae folk. They can cast their glamours (such as Finn's wife disguising him as their baby with nothing but a blanket) and can shape the world around them a bit as creatures of magic.


I think: >>16909307 has a good point. Time was, elves, dwarves, and giants were all seen as a sort of fair folk. It'd be interesting to see a setting where they were related races, all operating out of a different fairy otherworld of their own.

Giants are a pretty big deal in "GURPS Vikings" Also... muskox are WAY overpowered in GUPRS Vikings 80 STR! preposterous.

>>16909307
>>16910401

Damn you TOOOOOLKIIIIIEEEENNNN!!!!

>>16910454

The problem isn't Tolkien. He looked at the old myths and legends, then came up with his old take. The problem is everybody has just used his approach instead of doing what he did, looking at the myths and legends and coming up with something of their own.

I gotta say, excellent thread idea OP.

I especially like the "discarded giant tools and ruins" ideas. I'm a big fan of big stuff in fantasy landscapes with people living on and around it; like a desert city on the back of a giant tortoise, or whatever. Mining a rusting giant's sword... awesome.

I just got thrills THINKING the words "There were giants in those days..."

>>16910497

No, no, it's

>In those days, there were giants...

>>16910487
Oh of course. That was a purely tongue in cheek curse.

Tolkien did something original with old legends. The problem is, indeed, that everyone after just copied him and his interpretation became the new standard. It's gotten so bad that most people would think you're ripping off Tolkien if you talk about any of the fae myths and so on that he based Middle Earth around.

Anyway, giants. When you go back far enough giants don't seem to be that different from any other legendary figure. So many of them bleed into each other. Finn McCool being a good example. He's only a giant like half the time.

I think there are members of Oberon's court and other versions of the fae that have on again off again giants too. And I KNOW eastern Europe has some good legends of that sort.

Hey what are Russia's giant myths? None are jumping to mind off the top of my head.

>>16910556

The one about Ruslan mentioned above is from a Russian opera, and I remember Serbia has a bunch of stories about a giant whose name escapes me... he had a big bromance with a human warrior.

>>16909030
I love you.

>>16910345
>It'd have a relatively isolated semi-Medieval European setting, cut off from the rest of the world by a MASSIVE, bigger than the Himalayan mountain range between it and the rest of the continent.

And on a clear day (though it's rare that you see such a thing; storm clouds always cling to the mountain tops; the lowland peasants claim the old giants brew thunder up there), you can sometimes see the old, crumbling crenelations on some of the lower peaks.

Because it's not a natural mountain range. It's the ruins of a great, sprawling giant fortress built to cut this end of the continent off from the other. It's long since collapsed into a great pile of rubble, but from certain angles you can sometimes see the glory of the ancient giants. And sometimes, learned men wonder what the fortress was built to ward off...

Also, this world is larger than ours, perhaps twice its size. It's got roughly the same gravity and ecology by a twist of luck.

Giants.

Ah, how they changed the world when the gods were still alive. The oldest ones built the mountains, digging out the soil and rock from one place to another. The old women created the forests, and water to fill the holes the men made in making the mountains. The young ones were piling rocks as high as they could, challenging each other to run the fastest, or jump the highest, to create the most beautiful music. Fighting and fucking their way from the forests of their mothers to the deserts their fathers made for the sake of art. Fearsome battlecries echoing amidst the valleys and screams of exultation whispering in the blizzards.

Ah, how they changed the world.

>>16910713

forgot my pic

>>16909140

I've always loved Giant Fashion sense.

They don't have a lot of options to clothe themselves and their often forced to expose their flesh to the elements.
Thats how you get the different kinds of giants after all; just big humans who've had to roam the world with exposed skin to extreme weather conditions.

Frost giants: Thick skinned giants, roaming around with Wooly mammoth furs, Dragon Hide Tartans, wearing boots and gloves made out of Frost Troll Fur like it was Rabbit fur.

Sea giants: Humongous Water logged beings spending their free time keeping themselves clean of annoying Barnacles and Whale lice. Drapped over their bodies with the Jaws of Megalithic sharks, The skins of Killer whales, using blades made from coral and the beaks of deep sea cephalopods.

Fire Giants: Thick, Cracked, Tanned over and Fire treated flesh. These towering humanoids walk bare footed across the hot coals of the earth wearing the skins and furs of salamanders as sarongs.

>>16910057
They tend to have a strange attraction for hammer heads. Odd how that tended to work out.

Except Utgard-Loki. More troll than the master troll himself.

Okay lets revitalize this awesome thread.

Topic: sleeping giants as landscapes.

More places in the real world named after giant related things? Other legends of giants dying or falling asleep and becoming part of the world around them? Obviously we have some creation myths right off the bat.

How about the Cerne Abbas Giant? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerne_Abbas_Giant

>>16912365

There's nothing worse than starting a fire in a cave that turns out to be the mouth of a four thousand year old slumbering giant.

>>16910848

Of course, this assumes they always have to scavenge their clothing, and aren't capable of making their own properly. Who's to say great frost rams don't wander the heights of Jotunheim, ice clinging to their shaggy coats? Or that Giants don't raise great cattle in the kingdom above the clouds?

I don't see why giants have to be confined with making do with what things they can find. I remember a picture of a giant using a portcullis as a sandal and thinking "What, you're telling me he can't make his own sandal proper?

Since nobody else is posting, I thought I'd tell a couple of giant stories.

Many centuries ago, a Scottish prince was hunting in the highlands. He was in his own lands, but as he came down the far side of a particularly rocky slope, he found a mountain loch, bordered by a forest. He did not recognize the place, and he had hunted in these hills many times.

Had he been wiser he might have realized the implications of this, but the sun was shining and the grass near the loch's shore looked inviting. The young laird lay down upon the bank, basking in the sun, skipping a few rocks across the water.

Then, a few feet away, he heard a harsh caw.

>>16912875
I like the idea of a giant wearing fine robes, having made them from vast fields of flax, possibly made by servants.

There's an idea. Giants as living siege weapons, mercenaries to the highest bidder, wearing armor costing millions of gold and smiting kingdoms.

>>16913331
How do you pronounce 'loch'?

>>16913331

A crow was standing a few feet away, staring fixedly at a spot on the ground. As the prince looked, he saw a flash of scales; a viper was slithering through the grass, and the crow was entranced by its eyes.

Feeling sorry for the bird, the prince leapt to his feet, drew his dirk, and threw it at the serpent, pinning it to the ground.

When he looked back to the crow, there was a young man in dark but rich clothes standing in its place. The prince was taken aback, but the stranger began showering him with praise. The man claimed the prince had broken his enchantment, and he pressed a small bag into the prince's hands as thanks. The prince stumbled back under the sudden rush of the man's gratitude, and when he righted himself, looked at the bag, and then back at the man, he found the stranger was gone.

>>16913394

A bit like "lock."

>>16913429

The prince was suspicious. He was on unfamiliar grounds, he had seen a transformation. He was certain that, somewhere, he had crossed an unseen border. If he was smart, he should have thrown the bag into the loch and immediately set out for home.

Indeed, he began to do so, but as he walked he thought. He was a young man, full of curiosity and hope. He had done a good deed, hadn't he? The old beings that had once walked the world tended to reward that sort of thing, didn't they?

He stopped some distance from the shore of the loch, and opened the bag.

>>16913438
WRONG MOTHERFUCKER.

I forget the name and author, but I once came across a sci-fi short-story about a human civilization that actually lived on what was, as far as anyone could determine, the perfectly-preserved corpse of an immense giantess thousands of miles long. Loggers cut down and use her hair as we would trees, mining expeditions extract minerals from her teeth and bones to create buildings and roadways, and factories process her flesh into farm-useful compost-soil, the moisture pooled in the corners of her unblinking eyes are large enough to sail upon, and a broadcast tower and helipad were built upon either of her breasts to make it easier for those living on her feet to communicate and interact with those living on her head despite the immense distance between them. And amusingly, there were also religious protestors who disagreed with the fact people living on her legs were not disallowed from having houses that had windows facing her crotch.

I'm in a long running Scion game, and Giants in that game have been common as all hell. I've fought footsoldier Giants to "That's the size of a building" type giants. Always nice to fight against these guys.

>>16913505

Within the bag was a miniature castle, like a child's toy, but more exquisite in detail than any toy ever made. Every block of stone was sharp and clear, every turret was crowed with gold. Two tiny golden chains secured the drawbridge.

The prince took the pretty thing in his hands and set it upon the grass. At once, the little castle began to swell. alarmed, the prince retreated to the edge of the loch.

The towers soared skyward. The walls pressed outward as each stone and mortar joint gained size. The earth groaned as stone and soil was shifted away for the foundations. Trees shot up from the grass around it. Soon, a full size fortress loomed by the side of the loch, its turrets flying banners marked with the princes symbol, its walls girdled with heavy-laden orchards.

Yet as the prince stared, open mouthed and dumbfounded, he noticed a dark shadow looming beside the castle.

>>16913509

Okay.

>>16913634
That's actually pretty goddamn awesome.

>>16913746

A giant was leaning comfortably on the outer wall and regarding the human before him. His brawny arms were tattooed with blue sworls and knots. His beard was long and auburn, and he wore a fine tartan, big enough to cover a house.

"This is giant's country, little man," he said. "you cannot build your fortress here and live."

The huntsman stiffened with fear, but replied as best he could. "I did not call forth this magic, giant, and it is a thing I cannot undo. I would take the building from your lands if I could."

"Oh, I can undo the magic easily enough," said the giant. "But I shall ask a price of you."

"And what is the price?"

"Your first-born son, when he reaches the age of seven."

The prince had neither wife nor son; he therefore readily agreed to the price. With no further ado, the giant raised his hand to the keystone of the castle's gateway and pressed down, and at once the building began to dwindle, shrinking back to the size of a toy. The prince quickly slipped it back into its bag.

"Return to your own country," said the giant. "I will come for your son.

>>16913782
I think I found it - "Her" by Tobias S. Buckell.

http://escapepod.org/2006/08/31/ep069-her/
A podcaster does a reading of it.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?306619
An anthology book where it can be found in print.

>>16913849

The prince fled as quickly as he could. Few people believed his tale when he returned home, but their scoffing ceased when he set the small castle by a a river and it grew to its full splendor again.

Years passed, and in the fullness of time the prince took a wife. He never told her of his bargain with the giant. When she became heavy with child he could took to pacing the halls of his great citadel, desperately thinking of ways to get out of his deal.

On the morning of his son's seventh birthday, his wife found out the truth. The giant's head and shoulders towered above the castle suddenly, as if he had formed from the air itself.

"Prince, I have come to claim my son," he thundered.

rolled 78, 11, 53 = 142

>>16913923
>>16913849
>>16913746
>>16913505
>>16913429
>>16913331

This is great. I love these kinds of stories. Please continue.

>>16913923

Within the stronghold, the wife turned to the prince and cried out "What is this?" And he had to tell her.

She refused to send her boy out into the arms of the giant. Heedless of the prince's protest, she had a cook's son dressed in the child's clothes and thrust forth in his place. From every window, the prince's people watched the small child cross the palace courtyard. All saw the giant pick him up and whisper in his ear; all heard the treble reply, though they could not make out the words.

And all saw how the giant then smashed the child against the castle's outer curtain so that the small head was splattered on the stones.

Dice roller still on, whoops.

>>16913962

"It is a mistake to trick me, prince," said the giant. "Give me your son, or else every living thing within this fortress will die as the cook's son died." For emphasis, he casually smashed the castle gate with one huge fist.

the prince had no choice. His wife wept piteously, but he sent his only son out to the giant, a sacrifice of one for many. The giant looked up to the window from which the prince watched, smiled, and led the child around to the far side of the castle. The prince rushed to another window, but the boy and giant had vanished together.

The prince tried, time and again, to locate the place in the highlands where he had crossed into the giant's country. He spared no expense preparing for a great expedition. But he found no sign of the loch and the forest. As the years passed, he wondered many times whether the enchanted raven and the castle had been a giant's trick to lure a mortal man. He had the fortress torn down, allowed the peasants to cart away the stones to build their homes and stores, and he built a hall of wood in its place.

Decades later, as the prince lay frail and dying, a young brawny man rushed into the building, brandishing mysterious yet potent tokens. He professed he was the prince's lost son, and he spilled out wild tales about his escape from the clutches of the giant. But son and father were strangers to each other, and each died having never known the other.

I've been meaning to have players encounter the giants in my pathfinder game. They are one of the dominant nations, though far from where they are now.

Largely a druidic culture, elemental focused. The druids and their work is pretty much essential to keep them from regressing to hunter gatherers as most normal crops don't grow big enough.

Walking through giant country is like falling through the rabbit hole. Crops as big as trees, roads as wide as fields, it's just uncanny.

Giants are big and long lived, so they take the long and wide view a lot of the time. Don't mistake them for stupid though. The last force to invade their lands was harried for a week by forest giants with longbows carved from a single druid-grown tree each. They run as fast as a horse and don't tire for days.

The giant Siegebreakers? They have not been fielded for more than a century and are still talked about. It's not every day you see a nation put together enough steel to outfit an entire battalion in plate with heavy sledges and picks.

They are ruled by a king, though he takes a loose grip, more overseeing disputes and leading in times of war than running the country as a whole, leaving that to each town's mayor. He is well known for his sentient bow, formed from a thousand year old treant, an old friend of his layed low in battle.

I know it's not a very creative version of them but I wanted something beyond 'There are giants, occasionally a tribe' so I made them one of the world's superpowers.

>>16914066

It's certainly not bad, though I personally would make giant country an inherently magically charged place, operating on slightly different rules than the rest of the world.

Do they have equally large animals?

One homebrew setting I'm playing in currently has giants as ancients who once ruled the island, but they and their empire are now gone. It doesn't have much impact on the story, and you only begin to see the impact if you get into the setting, and they weren't the huge sort that would have gigantic relics left behind, as I can tell they were only about double the size of the average human.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html

Third one down. Vote!

All this talk of the ruins of giant kingdoms, of giants as memories of their former glory, makes me wonder about a setting where they're still in control.

They live in/atop great storm-crowned mountains, but they stride down into the lowlands fearlessly, viewing humans as insignificant mortals not worth noticing. they take what they want, or pursue their own mysterious errands, and consider diplomacy with humans beneath them. Humans, for their part, just try to get by, treating wandering giants as little more than a natural disaster that must be endured.

>>16914101

I was thinking yes. I've not put enough real thought into the nation yet to have too much planned.

High magic makes sense, perhaps a result of thier powerful druids working over centuries. Druidic magic is quite literally part of everything.

I also scrapped the 'Giants have set alignments' part. They are no more good or evil than people. The siegebreakers for instance were a Fire Giant battalion and the work to get them armed and armoured basically involved Druid-assisted strip mining to get the required metal.

I use giant beasts a lot in my D&D campaign settings but I use true giants much less often. I suppose I find them hard to fit in: it was pointed out they are of an intelligence with humans and equivalent races, so they would seem to have to be a dominant factor without some equalizing element.

My current setting has a rare few surviving and truly colossal beasts and is littered with the bones of many more. The previous one has enormous beasts who were sentient (but not sapient) gods. The only humanoid giants in that one were orca-giants who took the place of Inevitables in the setting. Spawn of the god of balance, they came for vengeance on anyone who disturbed the natural order. They were truly huge too - they'd splinter ships rising up, and smash a fleet with a swing of their massive stone swords.

>>16914130
i've always seen them as in complete control of where they are, but not being in very many places, since most places can't produce enough to feed them

>>16914150
giants have long lifespans (and thus breed slow) and require a lot to feed. your equalizer is that each dead soldier takes a very long time and a lot of resources to replace, where shit like humans can take them on by numbers

>>16914174

Which is why we have all this talk of "giant country" as being fundamentally different. I did like the idea mentioned earlier too, of a planet that's simply larger, with a human population still the same size as on a smaller planet. Lots more weird, mysterious lands to inhabit that way, and it's more believable giants could prosper. There could even be parts of the world where other animals and plants are on their scale. Would be a nice way of explaining the omnipresent giant trees elves like to build cities in.

There's also been a lot of talk of "giant magic" and how it should be considered separate from "giants who are also magic users."

So what is "giant magic"? One thing I'd suggest is the ability to distort their size/capabilities. You often see fairy and folktales where the giant is A) small enough to be beheaded by a human yet also B) big enough for his footprints form small lakes. It's not so much size changing as it is being both sizes at the same time, so to speak.

So I guess it's be a sort of limited ability to warp reality in terms of shaping the earth through the means of their physical strength.

"Ooooh, I am the last of the giants,
my people are gone from the earth.
The last of the great mountain giants,
who ruled all the world at my birth.

Oh, the smallfolk have stolen my forests,
they have stolen my rivers and hills.
And they have built a great wall through my valleys,
and fished all the fish from my rills.

In stone halls they burn their great fires,
in stone halls they forge their sharp spears.
Whilst I walk alone in the mountains,
with not true companion but tears.

They hunt me with dogs in the daylight,
they hunt me with torches by night.
For these me who are small can never stand tall,
whilst giants still walk in the light.

Ooooh, I am the LAST of the giants,
so learn well the words of my song.
For when I am gone the singing will fade,
and the silence shall last long and long."

I really enjoyed George R. R. Martin's rendition of giants in Game of Thrones. Even though they were only featured in brief periods, you really got a sense of the majesty behind the coarseness (or at least I did). Mag Mar Tun Do Weg was one of my favourite minor characters despite having no dialogue and being featured twice. Perhaps it's the writing.

"Ooooh, I am the LAST of the giants..."

One thing I've always wondered about is the common element in giant stories where the giantess is shown as more motherly and protective, hiding the hero from the giant or offering him advice. Sometimes, of course, the giantesses are still shown as man-eating monsters, but they often have this contrasting role I find fascinating.

>>16914146
>>16914066

That sounds pretty bloody awesome actually.

>>16914290
This makes me think of an Indian folktale about people who walk backwards/have backwards feet. The tales include mention of them warping perception. Of always being the same size.

A man walks backwards over the hill in the distance. He is easily as tall as the tree beside him although you can cover up both with your thumb they are so far away.

But by the time he gets close to you he is still the same size, having shrunk down to the size of your thumb itself.

So yes. I would say that innate giant magic consists of size overlaps (as you say, rather than switching between sizes they are both at once) as well as some more traditional fae stuff like basic hedge magic (sometimes involving literal hedges growing on them over decades) and weaving glamours.

also important reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigantotomy

Hey if some giants are fae, would those giants be constrained by cold iron? If those rules apply, what if an ancient giant-turned-mountain had a city built on top of it, and what if that city had many forges, and was a great importer of iron? Could that giant ever wake up? Or has it woken up already but can't use any of its glamours or strength to escape?

Prepare for some major contributan, OP...the following passage is from The Runes of Elfland by Brian Froud and Ari Berk.


The oldest gate to Elfland is still found between a giant's staves, and if you want to find that door, you will have to ask one who has been there, for the elder paths into Faery are nearly forgotten. Of course the giants still know about such places, for they made them, though giants are not so great in number as they once were. It's hard to find them now, but they do leave signs of their passing, and such marks on the land are usually hard to miss.

You say you have maps? No doubt. New ones. Very clean. These will never do. For to journey into the giant's country you'll need to follow the old names. Travel by the ancient markers on the land, not by signs along new black roads. The hill is not so far as you might think! Begin at the Ox Crossing, where the little pigs and dragons sleep beneath the town. Go not to Caesar's Camp, but follow the horse track instead. Stop not at the House of Volund, no, not yet, but find the Seven-Beds-For-Seven-Kings, then go to Great Circle and Mound of the Mother. Then turn your face into the cold and you shall see him surely.

>>16914494
The Door Warden, the Long Man, the Lanky Man, if you like, is a very old giant and still guards his door, but little is known of him, for he is a very private fellow. His image still stands upon the hill, but it's hard to know whether he walks in this world or the Other at any given time. Because of his love of travel, some think he is dead, and you may even have heard a tale or two about that giant's demise, a simple story told by silly folk who know no better. Some say the Long Man tripped over the ridge of the hill and died in the fall. Or that a shepherd threw his dinner at the giant and slew him with stew, if you can believe such a thing. Or that another local giant and the Long Man had a fight and hurled boulders at each other until one struck our friend and laid him low. Such things have been known to happen, but do not believe these stories, for like all giants, the Long Man likes to wander and is wandering still, I have no doubt.

Indeed, he has always been a traveler, wandering out of Elfland in the early days. Yes, he walked out of that hill at midwinter, and thinking the land about looked fine enough, he marked that place with a sign to remember it by (for as you know, a giant's memory is far shorter than his stride). So the Long Man laid down his walking staves and his pack of branches upon the grassy slope. From the pile, he selected the supplest twigs (logs to you and me) and wove them into the semblance of himself and set this figure upright near the barrow that now stands at the crest of the hill. Now this wooden figure stood for some time before the winds and the rain wore it down. Long after this, people came to live at the foot of that hill and, dreaming something deeper than the turf, carved a figure into the chalk beneath the grass upon the slopes. And there his portrait remains. A good thing too, for without his picture in the chalk he might have long ago forgotten the way back into Elfland.

>>16914552
If you follow my counsel and find the Long Man still upon his hill, and call in the ancient way, he may open that hill for you and greet you as a friend. He may tell you the secret of his staves, how he moves about them in the manner of the sun. He may tell you or he may not, for that is a very great secret, even among giants. In any event, he will likely give a gift to you, for it's only polite after you've walked so far. Oh, he is quite a gift-giver. You may receive an enormous shoe, or a cow, perhaps a log with pretty bark. Once he gave me a standing stone, which he pulled from a henge circle like a loose tooth, but how I got it home I'll never tell.

When we talk of giants, we invoke the deepest levels of the land---the rocks below the hills, the strata of the storied earth, the massive living poetry of place. Their ancient bones endure beneath us, even now, and are at times revealed by wind, or rain, or story, only requiring our recognition to open the hallowed portals of rock and hill.
Many classical and medieval writers associated giants with the first world, the age of chaos, and spoke of human creation originating in the blood of giants. If this is so, we are bound inexorably to the primordial past, the living magma from which the world was born. So we descend from these strong creatures who proudly walked the bounds of their domain, always living with the feel of native soil beneath their feet.

>>16914584
By their nature, giants belong to the wilderness, avoiding the agricultural fields and cultivated, fertile plains of civilization. The lands on which we find evidence of giants exist where wilderness has not been wholly erased. Because of the close association with giants---both stories of them and their physical remains---with wild country, we watch for such landscapes to indicate the presence of Faery generally. Where we find the wind-blasted tor, and the wildwood, where storms cry out to each other from cairn to cairn, and the stone walls crumble under the weight of years, we are close to the main gate of Elfland.

Just behind the guardian's image, a chalk outline can be seen. Such figures were carved upon some of the hills of Britain as markers and reminders. But by whom and for what purpose is often a mystery, the subject of much speculation and suspicion. Yet, there is great power in such mysteries for regardless of their origins, all chalk figures scrape the surface of the land away, revealing evidence of an inner mystical landscape, always just there, bright beneath the soil.

>>16914630
Behind every story worth telling, there is a hidden portion of the giant's song. This singular, monumental ballad is called in its entirety "The Great Lay of Ur-Land," and is the longest and best-known epic in Elfland. It is extremely old, even by elvish standards, and recounts the creation of every tump and stone once within the giant's domain. At one time, if you spread the song out along the ground, it would have corresponded hill for hill and tor for tor with the topography of the living earth. But the days of old are long behind us, and the land is not as it once was. Many of the wondrous monuments once known to giants have now vanished form the earth, mined into oblivion, torn up, worn down. But the memory of such sites lives on within the stone-vaulted chapters of the lay itself. Beyond the Ur-gate of Elfland, all the lost and ancient landscapes are still preserved in song. If they are found and remembered, you may sing them back into the waking world again.


Well crap, that was longer than I remembered. Still pretty awesome though.

bumping through the night

Well, admittedly, what is there to giants? Other than they're really big people that live a long time?

>>16916241

See: >>16909030

>>16914474

Well, the giant Jack-in-Irons from British folklore walked around wrapped in iron chains, so I'm guessing they might have a resistance. Probably because it IS iron.

Giants don't so much have hedge magic as they have primal magic, earth magic. Their magic has to do with the shape of the mountains, the placement of hills, the paths of riverbeds. They sing the same songs that were sung at the beginning of time, bringing the world into existence. They know the old True Names for every rock and stone. They speak the tongues of birds, beasts, and trees. The thunder is their footsteps, the rain their tears.

Trudvang giants rule!

Imagine looking at a distant line of hills, or mountains. Your gaze slides over them, then snaps back.

Peeking through a gap between the peaks is a face. It is a man's face, grotesque but human. The nose is like a swollen potato, the whites of the eyes bulge around the dark iris and pupil, and a mouth full of crooked yellow teeth like a broken palisade is turned up in hideous smile.

Slowly, you realize that given the distance, the face must be truly titanic. Moreover, as the face leers down from on high, you find yourself certain that it is looking at you, and has been looking for some time.

Grinning stupidly, the face slowly slides away behind the peaks. Sunlight streams through the gap it once filled. A bird sings in a nearby tree, oblivious. You hear nothing, see nothing, but you are more certain ever that great eyes are watching you, their intent uncertain.

The mountain-folk still walk the earth sometimes, and their eyes are upon you. For the rest of your days you will never be comfortable in the presence of the hills and mountains, where the echos and howling winds sound like voices calling to each other. The eyes of the other world are too close in those places.

bump

Giants would be fucking glorious in a game based on the Epic 6 rules.

>>16909952

I remembered seeing this in /tv/ yesterday after reading this thread. Glad it's still up. Anyway, this is the script to said movie, from 2008, though it's supposedly been re-written at least once.

http://www.mediafire.com/?jnxgs40xjnc

I'm delighted/surprised this thread is still here.

Anyway, I remember two old interesting bits of giant lore. One is that there are a number of stories about giants who store their heart/soul outside their body, like a lich's phylactery, and cannot be killed until their heart is destroyed.

The other is an odd tradition throughout Europe of something called "town giants." there are towns and villages throughout the continent (though particularly in Belgium, Britain, and Spain) that each have there own giant. Usually there's a story associated with the town's founding about the giant, where it had to be defeated before the town could be built or it somehow became the town's protector, or something like that. The most famous ones were Gog and Magog, who are associated with London.

So, fighting giants. The OP pic shows that it's easy to imagine relatively small giants being beaten by a human warrior, but when you get to the really big giants hacking at their ankles isn't going to do much.

Has anybody ever had to come up with a creative way to beat a giant enemy in one of their campaigns?

>>16919074

The most logical way I can think of is by not fighting fair. There's no guarantee humans would have the number advantage in settings with giants that size, because they're already going to need the supplies/reality violation necessary to exist at all.

As a result we'd probably have to rely on fighting from the shadows. Traps, poison arrows, tricking them into man-made landslides, etc.

For me, the issue is what constitutes a giant? 10' tall? 20'? 100'?

There's also a matter of reward. You don't hear about giants with dragon level hoards. Not that often anyway.

They suffer way too much from "what's a giant, and why are they interesting"?

>>16919147
>There's also a matter of reward. You don't hear about giants with dragon level hoards. Not that often anyway.

Well, there's at least one wandering around selling a bunch of bitchin' swords...

>>16919168
What was your sword forged from?

>>16919186

The bones of the earth.

It was heavy as a mountain and its swing was slow, but it struck with the force of a landslide.

It was a sword made for a giant.

>>16919213

>>16919147
>There's also a matter of reward. You don't hear about giants with dragon level hoards. Not that often anyway.

Are you kidding? In stories giants always have awesome shit to steal. Golden harps that sing by themselves, mountains of precious coins, kidnapped princesses, giant-sized weapons, artifacts infused with old magic...

>>16919227

You ever notice how trolls/giants/ogres seem to have stuff that's worth stealing, but always rats you out? Like, the golden harp always cries out to its master, there's a bunch of stories where trying to steal a magic bag from a giant has the bag shout a warning when the wrong person tries to open it, and I remember one where the only thing that could kill the giant was a magic sword locked behind three magic doors in the giant's castle, and when each one was opened it cried out the giant's name.

>>16919168

>I received from a giant a sword that was forged out of pure anger.

>It cut only me and my loved ones. The true treasure is being able to cast it aside.

>>16919307

>The giant gave me a sword forged from winter's chill.

>It cut to the bone, but faded away by spring.

>>16919325

>I received from a giant a sword that was forged from the first-fallen leaf of autumn.

>Its rich red and gold beauty is striking, but marked with a faint melancholy.

Jesus fuck how is this thread still going. It started this time last night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJJOTeZcAzQ

this is how i kill giants

>>16919390
I don't give a FUCK how QTE heavy this game is. I want it.

>>16909416
>The Mountain Folk, the Fair Folk, the Desert Folk, and the Dragons and Giants, who are in a league of their own.

Tempting, but doesn't really fit the themes of the setting. A prominent feature is the classical Greek elements (with quintessence split into light and darkness), and each of the factions represent particular elements:
>Giants (called titans in-setting to distinguish from modern giants): Earth and water (mainly the ice aspect of water)
>Djinn: Fire and air
>Fey: Light and darkness (actually two separate factions -- the real war starts when the seelie and unseelie fey start moving into the mortal plane from their own home plane in an attempt to get the upper hand on each other in their own long-running feud).
>Dragons: All of the above

It would be interesting to have the ancient dwarves be vassals of the giants, though, forging legendary armaments for them in exchange for protection from the other superpowers, since they have neither the potent magic nor the physical might to match the dragons, titans, djinn, or fey.

>>16919466

Or the could be an independent faction. They've worked for the giants and Fae, the dragons want all their riches, and they trade with the distant djinn.

>>16919307
>>16919325
>>16919331
Superior.

>>16919521
I dunno, I'm finding the dwarves-as-titan-vassals idea pretty compelling, since it provides a link of continuity between the old dominant races (where titans represent the element of earth) and the new (where dwarves fill that role). Especially since djinn and fey already have continuities of their own to the modern dominant races. Of the djinn who survived the cataclysm at the end of the war, nearly all of them lost their magic and over the centuries became the ashfolk, who are the dominant fire-element race in the modern era; likewise, those fey who were in the mortal plane at the time of the cataclysm eventually gave rise to the modern elven tribes.

I'm thinking I might even have the dwarves be created by the titans themselves specifically as a sort of child/servant race. It would add a nice bit of flavor to their culture and provide a good justification for the stereotypical elf/dwarf rivalry -- if anyone can be blamed for the fall of the old titans, it would be the fey, since it was their incursion into the mortal realm that started the magical arms race that ultimately led to the great cataclysm and subsequent downfall of the ancients.

>>16919642

So, what's the difference between titans and giants in this setting? Because when I hear "titan" I start thinking togas.

>>16919808
As mentioned here >>16919466, "titan" is the term used to refer to the ancient giants in their golden age before the cataclysm. They're more like the kinds of giants we're talking about in this thread -- truly fantastical beings, possessing powerful magic and intelligence at least on par with humans if not greater, and more force of nature than mortal creature.

Like the other ancient superpowers, the cataclysm at the end of the great war ended their period of dominance. This cataclysm nearly wiped out the superpower races, and of those that survived, the vast majority were left broken, shattered husks of their former glory. Modern giants are still pretty imposing, but they lack the potent magic and advanced civilization of their titan forebearers, and are no longer a dominant force in the world. There are a few of the old titans who managed to escape the cataclysm slumbering away in remote corners of the world (and likewise some of the old djinn and dragons -- but not fey, at least not in the mortal plane); however, these are so rare and well-hidden that most consider their existence little more than a myth.

The problem is that magic - in most RPGs - is mathematical and mechanical. As a result, giants become nothing more than big humans.

Narrativist systems like Dogs in the Vineyard - though badly-suited for hack'n'slash - avoid this by making magic and such a fuzzy quantity. In this way, giants can still surprise and do things no mere human could...without losing a mechanical component.

>>16919929

Well, there's always the option of giving the giants their own unique magic mechanics, or at least doing SOMETHING more interesting them "oversized caveman wandering the wilderness." The giant's castle could be full of traps and puzzles and weird magic items. A trip into giant country could be an entire quest of encountering weird phenomena and oversized animals.

How would a civilization of giants work? How many would there be in a town or city? And how would their dwellings work? Would they just be really, really fucking big houses? Maybe they just fall asleep on hills or whatever?

>>16919987

Depends. If they're living in the same world as everyone else there's gotta be a cap on how big they can logically be. They could still construct vast buildings out of stone, herd small armies of cattle.

Bigger giants would have to be the type that exist within their own world, loosely connected to that of others. In that case, it could be a world built to their scale, where everything is as big as them, or it could be a world that sets aside some natural laws, or they could use their powerful giant-magic to make life easier for themselves.

>>16919987

I'd say it depends on the size of the giants. After a certain size it wouldn't really make sense for them to make cities.

>>16920134

Except in a fairyland-style "giant country." I can easily imagine it looking somewhat like the picture in:

>>16909307

A rugged, mountainous land with humongous castles of stone every few peaks, sheep the size of elephants, trees like skyscrapers, etc etc.

Or, if you prefer, a strange cloudscape country.

I recently thought up a plot idea involving a giant. Giants are commonly portrayed as brutish giant barbarians who stomp around and terrorize the smaller races. But there are the few stories of giants being kind and gentle. Thats where my plot idea came from, a gentle giant who put on the mask of a brute to protect something precious

>Off in the far mountains there lives a great giant, though the nearby townspeople fear this giant he is very kind. The giant owns a large castle in the mountains, and inside the castle he houses a multitude of creatures. Endangered animals seeking protection, dying races looking for a new home, magical objects seeking a place to hide from the public, even rare plants in danger of being wiped out. The castle is a home to the lost, the weak and the helpless, and the giant protects them in secret. The secret of the castle could bring lucky adventurers riches beyond belief, or they could keep that secret to themselves, and let the castle go undisturbed.

>>16920276

Certainly sounds like a fun place to quest. I'm imagining a vast castle that seems bigger on the inside then it does on the outside, every square foot of space crammed with bookcases, statues, relics, artifacts of all shapes and sizes, with the giant occasionally wandering through. It'd be the sort of place a party could get lost in.

Two races of giants. One lives in the clouds, the other lives deep in the earth.
Both are ludicrously huge, difficult to reach, and powerful both magically and physically. Dig too deep, and you might come out in an absurdly giant tunnel that turns out to merely be a byway.
Climb too high, and find a castle where the stones are larger than your village.

>>16920335

Would the cloud kingdom just be built on the clouds themselves, with you walking around on the fluffy white things? Or would it be like a whole other landscape above the clouds, with trees and grass and animals?

Likewise fro beneath the earth. Would it just be giant tunnels and caverns, or would there be a whole other world down there?

>>16920366
Probably in the clouds and earth, and if you're going this far, might as well go all the way with funky stuff.
Crystal trees that chime in the wind.
Sheep sheared for cloudstuff.
Rivers of molten fire for the earth giants to bathe in.
Streams of wind that serve the same purpose for the sky giants.

>>16920317
Yes, and all number of mystical and ancient beings. Races long since dead, animals known only in stories, being of legend who vanished from Earth, they live on in this grand castle, living in peace from the outside as the giant protects them. It could be examples of giant magic, the giant using his powers to disguise the castle as a chain of mountains, make the inside larger than the out, anything to keep it hidden.

>>16920659
I think the giant-magic would really come into play in terms of just GETTING there. The mountain would seem to grow as you climbed it endlessly, it'd be buffeted by fierce storm where the thunder sounds like the laughter of giants. Avalanches would be frequent.

Im liking the ideas of giant magic and a bizarre and mystical Giant Country. It made me consider some ideas. As has been stated, giants are always portrayed as just big humans, everything humans have, giants only have bigger. Why not change this with said "giant magic" give them some uniqueness.

Like, instead of giant's forging swords of steal, they take the mountains themselves and forge the stone, the earth, the rock into blades made of stone, yet they cut like steel and have the strength of human blades. Or more bizarre abilities, like, giants can blow thread into giant sizes, which could help to figure out how they make clothes so large.

>>16920716
Yes, getting to the castle would be a journey all its own as the adventurers traverse the many challenges the giant set forth to protect it. The mountain could turn out to be either a magic veil over the castle or a sort of shell the giant built, to the outside it's a gigantic mountain, but on the inside its like a glass window over the castle.

>>16920789

Eh, giants and mountains just sort of go together, you, know? Giant-magic is about the bones of the earth, about primal forces.

I like the idea of fleshing out Giant Magic more, since all races seem to have their own unique forms of magic concerning their race, so obviously most giant magic would concern their size.

>>16920926
So are you saying the mountain over the castle would be an actual mountain, or are you saying the castle would be at the TOP of a mountain?

>>16920982
Giants always seem to be doing things physical to work their magic.

To forge a weapon for an ally they could take a large hunk of stone and crush it within their hands, creating a sword in perfect shape.

to form a lake, they simply stamp one foot in the ground near where they think a lake should be and it springs forth.

when they need a home, they shout down a mountain, causing an avalanche to reveal a fully formed giant home under the snow.

physical, not very magical looking actions.

>>16920982

Size, shape, strength, and nature. In terms of size, they can alter their own size. They can't shrink down to human size, but they can sort of warp reality where their size is concerned, as mentioned here:

>>16914474
>>16917300
>>16914290

They could also alter the size of other things, generally towards making them larger. For example, making their castle seem larger on the inside than on the outside, or making the mountain it's on seem bigger, or like that tiny castle that grows in the one story above. I'd also add that they can make things smaller than them seem smaller still, shrinking humans down to tinier size, making the giant "bigger" indirectly.

In terms of shape they'd probably be limited to what they can alter. Giants in Norse myth could turn into animals, but those animals were still huge, capable of carrying off people. They'd probably be limited to animals native to their environs. They might also be able to change themselves into stone or other earthy things. There also might be some deceptive glamour magic. They could also probably change the shape of others, turning them to animals or to stone or something.

As for nature control, they could only control things found in nature, unaltered. They could, for example, conjure a storm, but not shoot lightning from their hands. And they could cause avalanches and earthquakes, understand (maybe command) the birds and the beast and the trees, etc.

>>16921043

I'd agree with that. There's an earthy physicality to giant magic. If they, for example, want to shrink a human down and put them in their pocket, they're going to reach down, put their palm on the human's head, and PUSH, forcing you down into a smaller size. They can't just point at you and will you to be tiny.

>>16920982
WhirlWind Steed
River Harness
Metamorph Stone (eg, flint to quartz)
Wood to Coal
Great Sunder
Frost Heave

>>16921043
I like that idea, instead of waving their hands and saying a chant they just MAKE things happen. They take a tiny seed and a handful of dirt and a giant tree shoots from the palm of their hand. I also like the idea of huge accomplishments for humans being like hobbies for giants, a castle would take humans many months to complete, while a giant can build one in his free time. Also giant magic should give a feeling of amazement, impossible things that no other races can do, like a vengeful giant could grab the clouds from the sky and twist them up, then throw them at a small down as a swirling twister, or a giant throwing a rope around the moon and pulling it down to the horizon to bring the day sooner. Well those last ideas could be a little more "godlike" than giant magic.

>>16921043
>>16921115

And if they're gonna make a castle bigger on the inside but not outside, they go into the castle and push on the walls and ceilings, forcing them outwards, widening the rooms to colossal height. If you go back outside, though, the building appears to be the same size.

Of course, if the giant wants, he can go outside and pull the building into grander exterior size as well, or just smush boulders onto it and shape them into new mass.

All this also plays into the giant's magic being representational of his physical strength. He's so strong he can push and mold the very fabric of reality with his bare hands.

>>16921169
Imma just take this idea and use it.

Now how about reproduction? Should giant's do it like normal humans or should there be a more mystical side. Like maybe newborn giants break out of mountains like eggs, or giants forge children from stones and breath life into them. Perhaps when a giant dies they fall back and their bodies transform into earth and rock, which could explain why in a land where giants used to live there are no skeletons of the massive beings.

Another concept I like to think of is that giants were there before anyone else, perhaps giants are older than any race alive, the oldest giants seeing the birth of the ancient elves and the rise of the earthy dwarves. They could have been the first race, having cultivated the primal world for the younger races soon to come. It could explain how they have such earthly magics and are more attune to the world.

What about magical items that the giants own? Are they just the spoils of conquest, things them have used their great strength to seize? Or are they things that they have made?

Given "giant magic" as we have described it here, I have a hard time imagining them crafting the delicate features of a singing golden harp, or breeding a golden-egg laying chicken (maybe a GIANT chicken...), etc.

Stuff a giant makes wouldn't have much subtlety of delicacy to it. It'd be heavy, strong, and rugged.

>>16921212
Giants should be born from cataclysms.

>>16921234
Tribute from kings seeking favor.

>>16921212

I'd think the only race to rival them in age would be dragons. In myth, dragons (or dragon like creatures) tend to be associated with the chaos and unformed potential of reality, which the gods must tame or defeat before they can shape the universe.

If gods and giants came about at the same time, the dragons were already waiting. Which, of course, makes giants and dragons natural enemies, which i turn explains why titans and black dragons do double damage to each other.

>>16921212
>>16921237

Giants are born from the womb of the earth itself. When the time is right, they are sprung full grown from the mountains, the land, the air or sea itself.

The birth of a giant IS the cataclysmic event.

>>16921234
Like I said in an earlier post, I feel giant's shouldn't really use much steel in their weapons and armor, maybe a giant can easily forge a sword of pure stone, capable of rivaling any steel blade, hammers that can tremble the earth, boots that grant even humans the stride of a giant, objects that to giants seem natural and simple, but to humans and other races grant them incredible abilities.

The size changing magic makes room for many silly and interesting folk tales that could be told. Like maybe a man invites a giant into his home for dinner and the giant stretches the doorway wide to fit through it, or a king who angers a giant, and the giant stomps the kings castle to the size of a coin.

>>16921169
So giants are the original muscle wizards?

Personally, I think Giants should have reincarnation similar to that of a Galka from FF11, but not with Talekeepers. Maybe some kind of mausoleum?

>>16921279
Someone posted that kinda stuff earlier in this thread, about giants and dragons being natural enemies and such. It would be a good contrast, humans are always portrayed as "order" and nature as "chaos" in some stories, and humans tame the land. In contrast, the dragons would be the natural chaos and the giant the order, as giants combat the dragons in order to tame the world.

>>16921212

Someone mentioned earlier that in fairy tales giantesses seem to have an almost motherly quality, sometimes protecting the hero from the more violent male giants, and sometimes even helping the heroes.

In that regard, I think giants reproduce like humans, but giant women have giant-magic that's more to do with fertility. They'd be very good at creating protections for things weaker than them in a motherly way, and they'd be good at controlling the growth of crops and the reproduction of animals.

Two giants mating, of course, would be like two tectonic plates slamming against each other. the earth would move.

>>16921357
No giantess fetishes, anon.

Giants are best treated as ancient masters of magic and paragons of might and power who fought the gods and lost.

I mean think about it. All the ingenuity, strength, and diversity of men, but with godlike magic and built as the size of a mountain?

It's no wonder they once tamed the world and clashed with the gods.

The gods, realizing their mistake, threw the giants down. Now there are only a few remnants.

They remade the giants into men - smaller, without the magical might, but with an inborn ancestral memory of what they used to be. Now they are eternally hungry for the power they should have been born with, desiring the past they didn't know they had.

The giants are neither good nor evil; they're giant nobles. Nobles in the old dark ages sense - not good people, just very powerful people. They know what they want and they will take it.

>>16921364

I tried to use language to avoid that idea, though once you bring up giant reproduction, skirting it is inevitable. Bottom line: giants reproduce as humans do, and giantess-magic is slightly different from standard giant-magic.

>>16921384
It could just be a preference in the type of magic they use.

Speaking of weapons and items crafted by giants, maybe those items are highly sought after by all sorts of races, human kings sending their knights to gather said items. Giant's would obviously not just hand out those things all willy nilly, since items forged by giants would be really strong in the hands of other races. Ancient giants sitting ontop of mountains could gift worthy adventurers and individuals with weapons or items they forge, as a sign of trust. Hell, weapons made by giants could be seen as a sort of "WMD" in mythical settings, on par to using giant monsters or forbidden spells.

>>16921251

Giants also like to go a' marauding. It's one of their main activities in fairy tales. It's why the hero often has to go fight them. In particular, they're keen on swiping princesses, but I see no reason they wouldn't kill dragons and take their hordes, or break open the halls of dwarfs and take their gold. "Giant country" also probably borders fairyland, so maybe they get their hands on fairy loot as well.

>>16921419
>In particular, they're keen on swiping princesses

I just got the idea for a campaign where an Giant steal a princess, and the players are tasked with pursuing him into Giant Country, climbing a tremendous mountain, braving the elements and the giant's magic, the weird vastness of his castle...

...only to get "Sorry the princes is in another castle" moment.

>>16921212
>Perhaps when a giant dies they fall back and their bodies transform into earth and rock, which could explain why in a land where giants used to live there are no skeletons of the massive beings.


The bodies of dead giants forming natural features is very common in myth. Hell, the Norse gods made the UNIVERSE out of the corpse of the Father of All Giants.

>>16921445
That would be great, if the Giant Country was given a good flesh out. I feel Giant Country should be like stepping into a whole new world (which has been stated before in this thread)

The adventuring party spends a week climbing the vast mountain range, braving the cold and winds to reach the top, a wall that separates the world they knew and the land of the giant. At the top the cloud split open, like curtains in a window, and to the weary travelers it seems like a dream, but before their mortal eyes stretches a land that seems to go on forever, trees stretching higher than mountains, hills rising to the heavens, boulder sized pebbles, bunnies as big as houses, it was as if they had been shrunken on their travel up the mountain, and stumbled on their old home land. But no, what they saw was no dream, or no imagination, it was the Giant's Country, a world nearly untouched by the smaller races.

>>16920997

I meant at the top. You could argue that in the process of climbing the mountain, the heroes are crossing into giant country. Like, as they climb they think they're getting near the peak, but the mountain-face above them is shrouded by a long hanging cloud. As they climb into the cloud a storm starts, hail comes down, thunder crashes, and they can almost swear they hear great voices booming and laughing all about them.

When they get through the cloud the storm abates, only now they find the mountain just keeps going up, and it actually seems like a different mountain than the one they were on. When the cloud below dissipates, they see they are now hundreds of thousands of feet above the distant green lowlands, yet they don't feel light-headed.

As they climb around the mountain, trying to find a way up, they see that on the other side there are more mountains, each as big as this one, some even bigger, stretching off into the distance. Some have huge castle built into their slops, or on their peaks. And in the valleys between lies Giant Country.

>>16921296
>The size changing magic makes room for many silly and interesting folk tales that could be told. Like maybe a man invites a giant into his home for dinner and the giant stretches the doorway wide to fit through it, or a king who angers a giant, and the giant stomps the kings castle to the size of a coin.

I love those ideas.

>>16921527
Hm, i suppose it would be easier for a giant to hide such precious things as dying races, endangered animals and lost items of magic if he hid them in his own home land, or at least on the border, instead of in the land of humans, that way if greedy adventurers or kings try to take the castle for themselves he could just pick it up and run into Giant Country for safety.

Speaking of giant-dragon rivalries, and speaking fo giant country, dragons ALSO like living in mountains. I'd imagine that, like fairyland, giant-country is rife with the things.

Imagine the party stumbling into giant-country, and one of the first things they see is a dragon and a giant fighting, snapping trees the size of redwoods in half, smashing boulders the size of houses.

>>16921563
>if greedy adventurers or kings try to take the castle for themselves he could just pick it up and run into Giant Country for safety

That would be fucking hilarious. The party shows up "lol we're gonna take your stuff" and the giant is all "UH UH MOTHERFUCKERS" and just picks up the castle slings it on his back, and legs it.

>>16921598
"So, I spent thousands in gold to finance your month long journey to find this "castle of riches" you claim to have discovered, yet you return with nothing, did the castle sprout legs and run off!?"

"Well sire...in a way. You see when we got there...there was a giant protecting the castle...when we made our way to take the castle...he just picked it up off the ground and lept off the mountain."

>>16921647

"Throw them in the dungeon."

>>16921581
I imagined, from the way you wrote it, that dragons were a pest problem to Giants. Like a giant has to keep clearing out the caves near his home because its infested with dragons.

>>16921662

I'd imagine that's how the giants see it. The dragons might have another point of view.

Giant-country is huge, and I'm sure it has large tracks of its own wilderness where the giants travel through, but don't live. That's the sort of place dragons would make their lairs.

The giants might see the dragons as pests, but the dragons probably see giant castles ans instant-hoard dispensers.

I'm imagining that at the center of giant-country there is a truly tremendous mountain range, formed from the bodies of one of the first giants and one of the first dragons, who died locked in combat.

Im not a huge mythology buff but how many heroes in mythology were there, that were giants? I imagine it wouldnt be common, since giants were usually on the bad guy side than the good guy. But heroic giants could be great myths in a setting, stories of giants who left Giant Country to see the "small race's" world and in the process protected humans or elves or dwarves from some great threat.

This is a great thread.

>IN THOSE DAYS, THERE WERE GIANTS...

>>16921731
And atop that mountain stands the largest building in the entire world, the grand castle of the giants, where the king (or whatever giants call their ruler) lives. No human has ever stepped foot in the grand castle, as the size of the castle to a human is like a country

>>16921738

It's actually more common than you'd think. One odd thing about legends is that sometime human heroes get so exaggerated in word and deed that they seem like giants, and in later stories it's just taken for granted that they WERE giants.

Finn MacCool, Bran the Blessed, even Charlemange in some stories was claimed to be a giant.

How about the idea of when Giant Magic goes wrong. It's common for humans or other races to dabble in the wrong kinds of magics and pay the price by being corrupted into monsters, what about giants who fall to corruption and turn into beasts of their own? Or are giants so old and world wise that they never even think of dabbling into corruptible magics, or are strong enough to fight off any form of magical corruption?

>>16921777

And in the great cavern formed by what was once the ancient dragon's mouth still lives one of his children, one of the oldest dragons in existence, who covetously eyes the nearby castle of the great giant king. His mighty reptilian heart is filled with greed and the lust for gold. If he thought he could, he would strike in an instant. For now, the giants are too powerful.

Still, he can wait. Dragons are older than giants, older than the gods. Their patience is infinite. But if something were to tip the scales one way or another...

Now I hear tell that Paul Bunyan was born in Bangor, Maine. It took five giant storks to deliver Paul to his parents. His first bed was a lumber wagon pulled by a team of horses. His father had to drive the wagon up to the top of Maine and back whenever he wanted to rock the baby to sleep.

As a newborn, Paul Bunyan could hollar so loud he scared all the fish out of the rivers and streams. All the local frogs started wearing earmuffs so they wouldn't go deaf when Paul screamed for his breakfast. His parents had to milk two dozen cows morning and night to keep his milk bottle full and his mother had to feed him ten barrels of porrige every two hours to keep his stomach from rumbling and knocking the house down.

Within a week of his birth, Paul Bunyan could fit into his father's clothes. After three weeks, Paul rolled around so much during his nap that he destroyed four square miles of prime timberland. His parents were at their wits' end! They decided to build him a raft and floated it off the coast of Maine. When Paul turned over, it caused a 75 foot tidal wave in the Bay of Fundy. They had to send the British Navy over to Maine to wake him up. The sailors fired every canon they had in the fleet for seven hours straight before Paul Bunyan woke from his nap! When he stepped off the raft, Paul accidentally sank four war ships and he had to scramble around sccooping sailors out of the water before they drowned.

After this incident, Paul's parents decided the East was just too plumb small for him, and so the family moved to Minnesota.

>>16921853
That could be just one adventure in the Giant Country, where the dragon discovers the adventurers who have stumbled into the large land, possibly trying to manipulate them into tilting the scale. Really, Giant Country is a treasure trove of possible adventures.

Oh god, I'm getting the idea for a campaign.

A giant steals the king's daughter and absconds with her to his castle on a nearby mountain. The players are tasked with bringing her back, but when they reach the castle the giant, alerted to their presence, picks up the castle, princess and all, and flees into Giant Country.

The players must pursue through this strange land, all the way to its very heart. There the giant flees into the great castle of the Giant King. It is an impenetrable fortress, and the heroes despair, but as they camp for the night in a cave on the mountain opposite, they stumble across the great dragon, who has been waiting eons for just this opportunity...

>>16921842
A giant trapped within a suit of cursed dragon-scale armor, which compels him to ...?

>>16921890
That seems like a good set up to a campaign, though it makes one wonder why the Giant King would allow a kidnapper into his home, or why the giant would run away from adventurers in his own home land. It would be kind of lame to show the giants as uncaring beings who dont mind one of their own stealing humans. But its your campaign so you have control however you like.

>>16921842
I would say that the innate giant magic being discussed in this thread doesn't really go "wrong" or "right" any more than you trying to lift a 400 pound weight goes wrong or right. You simply lift it or you don't. (or it falls on your neck and someone posts it to youtube but lets not count that. Maybe this was a bad example)

Giants who choose to dabble in more standard magic though could be corrupted by it.

I would say that "giant magic" is more like using their sheer strength to bend quintessence. Magic-magic is using will (and codes, spells and so on to strengthen that will, or as a substitute for it) to channel quintessence into something lesser.

A wizard wants a rock to turn into a sword, so he thinks of the concept of a sword, channels the male paradigm invoking its resemblance to a phalus, places a cup on the opposite side of the room from the rock to be its opposite, speaks a few words of power and what he believes to be a sword's true name and voila: Sword!

A giant picks up the rock, squeezes it and the rock remembers its true name is actually sword in the same way that a nerd remembers that his lunch and pocket money actually belong to the school bully.

>>16921899
A suit of dragon scale, cursed by the oldest dragon in the world, thus giving the vengeance seeking beast a giant under his command. That could be one of the dragon's powers, the ability to control the hides of dragons or something. A dragon that old would have to have tons of crazy ass powers.

>>16921909
The fleeing giant could be a complete coward.

>>16921909

From a giant perspective, it'd be like moving after your house got a really severe termite infestation. Does the president care if you leave your termite-house and move to Washington DC?

Of course, if the termites follow you and set up in the White House, then there might be a problem.

>>16921924

Well, maybe the heroes have some way to make him flee. They learned his true name, or figured out where he has hidden his heart.

>>16921911
>A giant picks up the rock, squeezes it and the rock remembers its true name is actually sword in the same way that a nerd remembers that his lunch and pocket money actually belong to the school bully.
I adore that take on it, a giant not physically molding the rock into a sword, but literally making the rock know it is a sword, and the physical body fits to it's name. That could be another aspect of giant magic, along with "out muscling the laws of physics" but also "forcing things to fit their name" or something.

>>16921911

The way I see it is that humans get in trouble with magic because it is an ancient, primal power they barely understand. It can easily get away from them.

Giants, on the other hand, ARE an ancient, primal power. They've been using magic so long it's shaped itself around them, to the point that giant magic is indistinguishable from giants themselves. It's not so much a magic spell as it is a natural ability.

>>16921936
Well no, the president wont care if you move to DC to escape your infestation, but he would care if you escaped your infestation by moving into his house while also carrying the flea pet from his old home

>>16921950

Well, giant culture (and some giants) dates back to when the world was Named, when the songs of creation were sung. Giants probably teach their children True-Naming the way we teach our kids Latin in grade school.

Giants are so long lived that by the time they're adults they know the True Names so well that they don't even have to speak them. They can squeeze that stone so hard that it feels through their hands and their grip that the giant knows the Name.

>>16921965
Hell, that could be another aspect of giants. Magic didn't always exist, in the time of the gods and dragons, it was just there, like air, the raw energy. But when giants showed up, they "forged" this raw energy into usable abilities, though to them is was more like making tools (Giant Magic) than crafting great spells. When they wanted to build mountains, they crafted the raw magical energy into gloves to move the stones of the earth with ease, when they wanted to craft rivers and lakes, they forged the energy into boots to stamp the ground flat. Over generations of this magic forging, the energy just naturally bonded with the giants, giving them their natural Giant Magic. It was the elves and the humans who forged magic into weapons, it was the giants who forged magic itself.

>>16921967

Right, but the Giant King's castle is like a city. The fleeing giant isn't coming to the king, he's jsut coming to the capital, maybe to do some bartering, take care of business, before finding a new place to put his castle. He doesn't even know the termites are on his tail...

>>16922018
Hm I see, it would be easy for giants to build a city ontop of a mountain. The adventurers would travel distances farther than any man has ever walked by just entering the castle.

>>16922018
>The fleeing giant isn't coming to the king, he's just coming to the capital, maybe to do some bartering, take care of business, before finding a new place to put his castle.

Oh god, I just imagined The Giants' Market. The spoils from ravaging fairy kingdoms, dragon hordes, and dwarven treasuries, all for sale. Giant tools and weapons. Storm clouds trapped in eggshells, oxen the size of galleons, Giantstride boots, singing harps, gemstones like beachballs.

Getting to the Giants' Market could be a quest on its own.

>>16922069

And one wandering giant peddler, selling swords considered some of the cheapest items at the market...

>>16922069
>Giantstride boots
Hm, that would be an interesting item, boots that when worn allow you to step the length of a giant's foot stride. But it would be kind of pointless to sell giant stride boots...to other giants eh? Now then, boots of speed, that would be a hell of thing to give to a giant.

>>16922099

Hey, the giant merchant is just selling boots. They're only giantstride boots if a mortal puts them on.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html

Eight down, vote it up. this thread is fantastic,

Giant's could make quite the fortune in selling their natural tools to the small races. To a human, gloves made by giants are a grand item, allowing them to raise objects thousands of times heavier than they with ease, to a giant, its just a nice pair of old working gloves they found in the pocket of their pants.

>>16922125
Frankly I think it's already too high. It's a good thread. It's not one of the best threads ever seen on the board.

>>16922146
I, personally, find some of /tg/s best threads are when they discuss old things and give it new life. /co/ does that good as well, like one thread where they re-imagined Killer Croc into a muscle for hire, King of Thugs kind of deal.

>>16922157

OP here. Would you believe I started the King Croc thread too?

When I was but a lad my mother spoke to me of the Giants, she told me stories of their terrifying acts, how they would eat men by the hand fulls, stomp farms flat just for a laugh, how they would steal treasure from kings and horde them in their pockets. She said the only way to be safe from the giants was to be a good boy and stay in bed during the night. As for my father, he only said one thing about giants, "They're big." I would have asked him more about them, but he was off, fighting in the king's army. I went most of my life knowing that Giants were monsters, terrifying monsters. But one night, it all changed.

>>16922214
It was another dark, quiet night, the forest trembled in the wind, but each creek in the dark made me jump, thinking it was some bandit, or a monster lurking in the dark. The fact that gossip of barbarian hordes roaming the countryside didn't help the matter. But exhaustion would soon take hold, as the scary creeks and creepy taps evolved into a steady rhythm that drifted me off to sleep. I dreamt of being a great knight, like my father was, and slaying monstrous wolves, and beheading giants as they tried to eat my friends. My gentle dreams were soon interrupted by the sound my mother, she had awoken me with panic in her eyes, "Get dressed quickly, we must run!" She screamed to me, though I was half asleep and had no idea what was happening. When my mother dragged me down the stairs and out the door it finally hit me, the heat of the fire, the smell of the smoke, the forest was alight. The barbarians were here to take the town.

>>16922214

>>16922239

Go on...

>>16922239
A shot of panic soon woke me from my dreary state, the screams of my neighbors was all I could hear over the roaring flames that were engulfing the trees, burning branches dropping onto homes and setting them ablaze. My mother carried only her old jewelry box and wore clothes that had been thrown on in seconds. She, along with most of the townspeople, were running in a panic from the flames, the men who remained brandished old swords and spears, pitch forks, knives, anything they could gather as weapons. Through my wide eyes and the glowing flames I could see the outlines of large men, covered in thick furs, the gleam of steel armor and sharp axes caught my eye, rows of brutes brandishing weapons fit for a slaughter. The stories of gossip said bands of barbarians were roaming the countryside, pillaging for food and supplies to feed their war machine as they fought the king, we always thought the king's army could defend all the land, but it seemed the monsters had slipped through the net. It was at this time I wished my father was here, I believed he could have rallied the towns men to fight back the horde, but he was miles away, and any notice of his home being pillaged would not reach him for at least a week. We were trapped like pigs to the slaughter.

So, any other ideas about friendly giants? I get the feeling Giant-Country is a rough place to live. Maybe "friendly" giants are just the more mellow members of their race, who view hanging out in a backwoods of our world, tending to a lone village, as a sort of retirement/vacation/hobby.

I was just thinking. If every giant in Giant-Country has his own castle, who is the peasantry?

And then it occurred to me, the logical answer is ogres and trolls (in the myth/Tolkien sense of trolls). They populate the small villages, the wild wastes. The reason there's more of them in our world is because they come here to get out from under the thumb of the giants' dominion.

>>16922292
My chest was heaving with pain, fear driving our feet onward as the sound of confrontation was heard behind. A glimpse over my should revealed the men putting up what little struggle they could, but the barbarians were experienced, brutal and savage in battle, they lasted barely a minute against the large numbers. The abrupt stop of my mother made me turn back to see the barbarians had made their way to the other side of the town, covering our only escape. They had trapped us, ensuring that no one could escape to warn the neighboring towns. Boys of that age don't normally know true terror, but when facing the closing brutes, their blood soaked blades ready to kill more, terror was all that I felt. The barbarians readied to strike us down, but something made them halt in their tracks. A light tremor ran through the ground beneath us. The barbarians looked out into the tree line, trying to see through the flames, when another tremor hit, stronger than the last. A murmur ran through the barbarian lines, in a tongue unknown to me, their blood thirsty looks soon faded to what looked like fear as the tremors grew. Then it all went quiet, the only sound was the panic struck sobs of women and children, and the crackle of fire. Then a yell went out among the barbarians, a few stuck their fingers into the air, pointed upward. Through my terror I turned to look at what they pointed at. Above the tree line, outlined by the moonlight, like a mountain rising over the trees stood a figure. All at once I knew what I saw, the figure before out eyes, it was a Giant.

>>16922292

Waiting to see where this goes...

>>16922342

A common insult amongst giants goes: "You're dumber than a cat."

>>16908940
I can never tell if a thread is still on point with 200+ replies, but in responce to the OP, the earliest "traditional" giants that I know about were in the Bible.
They were the Nephilim, godless man eating beasts who were the offspring of rouge angels called Gregori and the women of a village/tribe they were charged with protecting.
The sons of the Nephilim themselves, supposedly born by human woman and the giants, were said to have become great heros.
Goliath was supposedly part Nephilim.

>>16922372
The figure was dressed in ragged furs, as if thousands of beasts had been sown together, a variable forest of hair sprouted from below a massive nose, crooked with age, large warts sprouting out, a massive, fuzzy brow loomed over a pair of sunken eyes, the same kind of eyes I have seen on ancient men, eyes deepened by great age, the top of it's head was a mess of hair, tangled and wild, like how my hair looks after I just awoken. My body was like stone, I don't know whether it was blind fear or just amazement at the sight before us. The barbarians seemed to shudder with fear, their boots stepping back at the sight of the Giant. The trees shuttered and groaned as an arm rose above the tree line, as long as a river it stood up like a great, crooked tree, and before I could even blink it swung down, the thick trees that lined our town snapped like twigs against the massive hand as it swept through the barbarians, hurling them into the air, higher than any catapult could ever throw. Amazement struck me as the barbarians screamed like frightening women, fleeing in all directions as the Giant smashed as many as twenty of them with but it's thumb, hurling handfuls of them into the sky, it was like seeing a dream. Whatever barbarians that were lucky enough to get away, ran screaming through the night. What would take the king twenty or fifty well trained knights took this Giant but seconds, the barbarians were like ants to it.

>>16922342
I'd just as soon avoid this since it's so easily interpreted as sized based rankings, which ultimately detracts from the giants.

I see no reason for there to be an absence of other monsters of course. You can have tolkienesque ogres and trolls in giant country just as you can have dragons and so on.

But I do completely reject the notion that giants require peasantry. They are the nobles and the workforce all in one.

They don't need peasants to build for them, or to farm for them, or to do anything at all for them. A giant is a self sufficient creature that requires little it cannot do or take for itself and by itself. I feel this is diminished by even the mention of tinier monsters as their subordinates.

>>16922452

Well, I just found myself thinking of the troll-haunted Mirkwood/Ironwood that was supposed to border Jotunheim in Norse myth.

>>16922342
>>16922452
That said, I do like this
>The reason there's more of them in our world is because they come here to get out from under the thumb of the giants' dominion.

Giants don't go around giving the ogres and trolls orders, or telling them to farm or mine, but they do step on them occasionally and shoo foraging trolls out of the castle with a giant broom.

>>16922473
Yeah that fits. I like having trolls around, especially tolkienesque ones that turn to stone since that ties in so well thematically with the landscape giants talked about earlier.

I just really like the idea of giants being "a hundred men in size AND ability" y'know? They are as self sufficient as a village as well as being as strong as all that village's men put together.

>>16922434
The threat of the barbarians passed like a terrible storm, but the town was not at peace. The terrified folk stared into the eyes of a being that had just wiped out the most brutal enemies they knew, and it wasn't even a task to it. The whole crowd flinched back a whole foot at even the tiniest twitch of the giant's brow. I looked onward with more amazement than fear, watching as the giant's face turned slowly towards us, then his massive head began to move back, the sound of a heavy wind filled the air as the Giant inhaled, it's great beard ruffling as air funneled into it's lips. What remained of the townsfolk stood ready for it to blow them away, but instead it exhaled slowly over the forest, the rushing winds snuffing out the flames that the barbarians had lit. The Giant's face moved slowly over the tree line, then over the homes, gently blowing out the flames that threatened every home. Everyone looked in awe at the raging flames being put out with such ease, their eyes fixated on the giant as he finished his task. A voice came from the heavy bush of hair, like a mountain quaking, a deep, heavy voice, it wasn't loud, but it could easily be heard. The Giant spoke softly, a strange contrast than what I had been told by my mother, and he spoke simply, "Those damned brutes woke me up." That was all he spoke before he stood fully, covering the whole sky, and walked off, his great strides shaking the whole ground for minutes after he had vanished behind the trees. That was the first time I had ever met a Giant.

>>16922496

Makes sense. The ogres and trolls still get the shitty parts of Giant-Country, and the giants look down on them, but they don't really employ them.

>>16922522
It had been many years since that night. But I remember that encounter every day. Many years after that night I would join the king's army, like my father before me. But instead of joining as a knight and fighting the barbarians, I joined as an explorer, someone to travel and discover possible treasures and lands for the king. I have remembered that story of that night so many times, but today I remember it as vivid as I ever had. I stand at the top of the great mountain range to the west of the my home kingdom, possibly the largest range in the world. The clouds before me split to reveal a land beyond my wildest imaginations, a land of myth and legend. The Giant's Country.

[Well, I have never written stories normally, so im sure it wasn't wonderful, but I felt the urge to write something]

>>16922522

That was pretty good. The prose was a bit clunky int he second to last post, and you used the word "brutes" a bit too much, but the ending was solid.

Good work, Anon.

A good limiter for the mortals getting their hands on giant magic would be focus.
You might train for a lifetime learning how to strike foes as a giant does, sending foes over the horizon, or to strike a sword from a stone, but that's it. That's your one trick.

Also makes me wonder about dragon magic.

I once wrote a setting where the giants were the remnants of an intact-but-weakened and seperated-from-the-rest-of-the-world empire of fae, of which the giants were the rulers and the most powerful. They weren't...EVIL, per se, more like clinically detached and wont to perform experiments with reality. Their descendants don't remember too much of their glory days, and just sort of keep things together as best they can. They're quite a bit more friendly than their ancestors, but retained a few things like matrilineal lines of succession and magical talents.

>>16922556

And the way the ogres treat humans gives you some idea of how the giants treat them.

Still, I'm not sure I agree entirely with the idea that the giants don't make use of the trolls or ogres for ANYTHING. They may not need them for manual labor, but they might use them for tedious things they'd simply rather not do, like tending the hounds or answering the door. Footmen and butlers, that sort of thing.

We're like ants to the giants, but the ogres and trolls are sort of related to them. They're lesser descendants, maybe, but the giants don't ignore them entirely.

>>16922342
I don't think its "every giant owns a castle" its more like "every giant's home is pretty much a castle" unless you see giants building normal houses like humans

>>16921364
And now I'm reminded that once I had a D&D character who had to, due to politics, marry a cloud giant princess.

>>16922603
Thanks, like I said I don't write normally, so im not good at variety. Ah well, as long as it was enjoyed a bit im happy.

>>16922612

I've always thought the idea that dragons craft spells to not make much sense. Dragons don't build, they don't create. Dragon-magic is their fire, the power of their eyes and voice, the grace of their flight, the lure of their hoard.

>>16922612
Well we cemented that Giant Magic omces down to out muscling reality and knowing the True Names of things. Dragon magic could probably come from "tricking" nature some how, or, being the chaotic beast they are, threatening natural things to bend to their whim. Like while a Giant simply tells a rock that its a sword, and the rock changes to fit that, a dragon will in a way, threaten the stones to glimmer like gems, maybe with a simple look. As I proposed in an earlier post, Giants created magic, before them, it was just raw energy, so Dragon magic may either be something not actually magic or their own form of magic.

Perhaps mages and warriors alike yearn to travel to the Giant's Country and learn the origins of magic and the magic of the giant's. Could even make way for magic "religions" where people deny that those 'brutish giants" could be the creators of magic.

So how old do, ro should, giants live? Could the oldest giant have seen the beginning of the elves, or do they live a little less?

>>16922727
Possibly indefinitely, on average 500 years with a standard deviation of 50 years.

>>16922749
I like to think Giants live extremely long lives. Having seen the birth and death of many great heroes, mages and kings. The giant a boy's great great great grandfather having met as a child being the same one his decedent meets as an adult

Hey, so I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but Paizo published an excellent adventure (Dungeon issue 133) set around a fire giant fortress which was hanging over a fissure. The PCs enter the scene in the middle of a battle between dragons and giants, and the giants have fuckhuge ballistas which the players, if they're strong enough, can use against the dragons.

The dragons are smart and well organized, and at the center of the dungeon is a macguffin, In this case, a Dracolich's phylactery. However, it can be replaced with whichever macguffin you'd like.

>>16922727

Well, most of the first giants were probably killed off in battles with gods and dragons, or in the tumultuous early days of the world when things were still mutable. a few may have survived, but in time they grew so old they simply fell asleep and hills or mountains formed over them. They may slumber still.

Giants are a magical enough race that it may be hard to measure their lifespan in human terms. Still, I would guess that maybe some of their still living elders remember when the gods made men and dwarves, and when the fae folk were like unto god themselves...

Of course, those giant elders are the type who sit in a corner and mumble to themselves about centuries gone by, while the younger giants mostly ignore them.

So what would drive a Giant to be "bad" Either terrorizing a town, kidnapping people, stealing from kings. What could make something so ancient and wise turn to tormenting the small races? Boredom from age? A feeling of superiority over them?

>>16922727
I'd say it depends on the giant.
Maybe the usual means of measurement aren't applicable.
One might be as old as the hills, another might have seen the first dawn, while a third was born when the Old King set foot on the estuary that would become the Imperial Capital.

>>16922767
I can imagine extremely old giants who simply got lost to the giant populace. Like one who fell asleep and woke up to find a lake around his ankles and a mountain on his back. Like if your grandfather walked off one day and you find him years later sleeping under a tree. Elder Giant's who havn't died but are still lost simply have yet to be found again, probably scattered around outside the Giant's Country.

>>16922768

See:

>>16910337
>>16909090

It could be in part because they feel superior to humans, viewing us as little more than vermin. Or it could be that they resent us. Once, they were masters of the land, but now humans spread out, driving the Fair Folk into secluded forests and across the sea, driving the dwarfs deeper into the Earth, driving the giants beyond the mountains and deeper into Giant-Country.

They are the elder races and we are the younger, and we are taking the Earth from them. It's only natural they might come to hate us.

"Whatever sounds good at the time" is a terrible way to go about this. If giant's being born is cataclysmic, they should be born relatively often, at least once once a generation. Otherwise, what's the point? Likewise, what is the deathrate and desired population size?

>>16922797

You're talking about an extremely magical race that may or may not live mostly in a mysterious otherworld. They may not be readily quantifiable.

>>16922773
Hm, a giant created age system.

"Elder Gromguard is as old as 50 mountains!"

"I'm 32 mountains and 5 hills old!"

Well it's confusing and kind of silly, but just a thought

>>16922797
When thinking of giants I always viewed them as living a barbarian or nomadic life style. High up in mountains. The population being fairly low about 5 for a small group, 20 for a very large. Having low birth/death rates but being extremely long lived and very knowledgeable in the ways of combat and survival.

>>16922768
They're just that over the top and big and poetic.
A giant comes to town, and demands food, because he's goddamn hungry.
He eats ten herds of cattle, drinks a river, and knocks over half the forest with the belch after.
As thanks, he then scoops a valley in the fields outside town, revealing veins of gold and silver.
Or he's still hungry and demands more, as the hunger is just that overwhelming.

Should they be dying out, stable, or growing in pop size?

>>16909140
>But bigger giants can't be. Once you get To fifty, seventy feet with a giant, he'd have to slaughter thousands of animals to make a suit of hide. He'd have to find the biggest tree in the forest to make a club. At that point, you have to start dipping into magical realms and giant animals, because a population of big giants would be beyond our world's capability to support.
I theorize that, just as a human passing into the world of the fey often shrinks to the size of a gnome/fey-dwarf, Giants are their humans who visit iinto our world and find themselves enormous in comparison.

Imagine a setting where man is running around with crude iron, only recently having invented chain mail, building only wooden forts. Every forest is haunted by fairies, every lake has a poisonous orm, every mountain has a dwarf or troll kingdom.

And across the lands stride the Giants...

>>16922815
Going about it the wrong way.
"I was here when that hill over there was a great mountain."
"I was here when that canyon was a trickling stream on the rocks."
"I was here when this cove was merely cliffs."
"I was here when Rome was just seven hills, two dreamers, and some wolves."

>>16922835

Depends on the setting and what sort of stories you want to tell. There's no right answer here.

If Giant's tamed the primal world to a condition where the small races could survive on their own there are surely those Giant's who yearn to keep building more, like a child who builds homes for bugs, or makes sand castles for crabs, the few Giant's who wonder the small race's side of the world and build castles, or cultivate the land so it's easier to set up homes, maybe a Giant helping the elves regrow their forest homes, since a giant could grow a great tree in minutes and make the soil extremely potent for plant life. King's could seek out wondering Giant's and try and enlist their assistance with things. I doubt Giant's would fight in a king's army, that would be like a kid hiring an adult to help him fight another kid

If the magic that the giants use is seen as the sort of reality/perception bending, or shaping the world to its whims, wouldn't resources become unimportant to them? It could make a cow as large as itself, and then eat, or pull a tree from the earth and have a club that fits its hands perfectly, despite a size difference.

>>16922853
An age before the great mountains rose. Before the giants resigned themselves to their own country. In those days, in the blossoming of the world, the giants assisted the small races. Watching over man as they built their homes, protecting the forests for the fairy folk, showing the young dwarves the ways of the earth. Before the mountains rose, the giants strode side by side with us all.

I just had an idea.
>A group of giants are in peace with a human city-state. Every number of years the giants come near the city, close enough to be seen, but too far for an arrow to strike.
>Facing the city, they place their palms together, and bow towards the city, as a sign of respect. In return all the denizens of the city turn to the giants, and on thewlls or ont he roofs or outside the gates, they too put their hand together and bow towards the giants.
>This is not just a sign of mutual respect, but a test of virtue. The giants often remain in this position for nearly the whole day, from dawn to near dusk, and when they raise their heads they do not to turn and leave, but to use their keen eyes to spot those few humans left who remain still, those with their heads down and hands together.
>These few are known to the other humans as Giant-Kin, and no matter their age they are respected for the more personal and meaningful respect the giants grant them in return, as this respect grants them the (believed) blessing of the giants and the actual favor of at least one or two giants.

>>16922865
Still leads to interesting plots.
The Giant comes to town, and offers wisdom. Maybe he shrinks himself down so he doesn't attract so much attention?
Anyway, he offers wisdom. The king comes and asks for victory, the giant shows him how winning over his neighbors would cause his kingdom to fall when the empire to the north rolls both fighting-weary sides over at the same time. The farmer comes for a blessing on his crops, and the giant gives him a scythe that cuts wheat on its own, but warns him not to do X. A warrior comes for a sword, and gets blah blah blah you know how that works.
Just because he's wise, and probably a decent guy doesn't mean he's going to give you exactly what you want, he's going to aim for what you need.
Which might be a painful lesson.

>>16922884
I think it's a kind of more complicated. A giant can't just make a huge cow, they would probably take a calf, and raise it normally, but with the influence of the giant's magic, the calf would grown and grow to be giant sized, the trees would be cultivated in the land of the giants to be the usable size, steel would not be needed, as Giant's could "forge" stone to be exactly as steel. They can change the size of some things, like stretching or shrinking buildings and people, i don't know, it would just be silly if they can just make whatever they need if their whole life they cultivated and constructed the world.

rolled 3 = 3

>>16922908
why wouldnt they use iron for the weapon? i would think it would be more apt to have him hold ore and then make it a sword or a hammer, that would also give you an in with the dwarfs if you desired it or wanted it for a campaign

>>16922894
Certainly. To humans, giants who help them, or gift them things, are regarded in legends, while to Giants, those giants that assist humans are simply sentimental old men who can't sit still and relax in the home country and letting the small races go about their own business

>>16922894

I would argue that while short giants can sometimes seem to do things a larger giant can do, and big giants can sometimes interact with small humans, one limit of giant-magic is that they CAN'T shrink down to human size. Their giantness is too inherent to their nature to allow it.

>>16922927
By why would they need to forge weapons from steel if they could make a weapon from stone that rivals steel? It would give Giant weapons more natural feel, since most pictures and stories depict them using clubs, it would make them interesting if they could turn simple stone into a blade to rival, or surpass steel. They could mold the elements naturally, stuffing fire into stone to imbue it, or tangle the breeze around a sword.

>>16922960
Yeah, I agree, if all Giants could shrink to human size, it would lower the need for their size altering abilities. The smallest they could get is probably the size of a two story home with an attic, so even at their smallest size they would need to stretch a human home to fit inside.

>>16922983

Yeah, once you're down to the 10-12 foot height, you're talking ogres, not giants.

And ogres get tricked by cats, as the giant saying goes.

>>16922983
What if they could get down to, like, 7 feet and well over 400 pounds, but it's uncomfortable to remain that way for more than a day or two?

I'm wondering where other giant monsters can fit into this equation.

We've established that it's likely giants and dragons have at least tensions between them- both are huge, long-lived, ancient creatures, but with different different physical forms, lifestyles and outlooks.

>>16923001
Well Giant's Country is probably full of huge creatures that are normally small. Giant goats, massive cats and dogs, bunnies, lizards, maybe the natural magic of Giant's Country changes the size of anything raised there. Humans who enter the country on horseback find lizards as big as their steeds, ants the size of cats, birds of massive proportions soaring over head, imagine Honey I Shrunk My Knights

>>16922961

I imagine using the stone technique involves sort on compacting and concentrating the weight and strength of the stone. A boulder crushed down to the size of a sword would still weight the same as a boulder. If you could lift it, it could cut a tree in half.

They might use metal if they were making something for a human, who they knew the very Bones of the Earth would be too much for.

I would note that, for all they have in common with the Fae Folk, they are NOT vulnerable to iron. Iron is of the earth, and nothing of the earth rejects them.

>>16922995
I like that actually. The very edge of what they can shrink down to is likewise the very edge of what we as modern humans would believe is possible "holy shit that guy is freakishly tall. That's like head and shoulders above a pro basketball player. He's probably one of like the three tallest people in the world or something. Bet he's gonna die of a heart failure."

But at the same time truly huge people like that may have been the root of giant myths from a scientific perspective. So it ties in there what with nine foot lanky leprechauns and so on talked about earlier.

And the whole time the giant is shrunk down this small they're exceedingly itchy and uncomfortable in their body. Like how you are when you squeeze into a wool shirt five sizes too small but a hundred times more irritating. And for that matter, maybe not all giants can quite shrink down that far.

>>16923034
Giant's wouldn't be immune to all forms of damage, maybe hacking them hard enough with a sword and it'll hurt, but just one swing wouldn't even scar their flesh. Perhaps hand made stone weapons for humans would be a great honor for any human, since the giant would forge a weapon from a stone small enough that the human wouldn't have trouble using it. The question is, would steel made weapons be on par, or better than Dwarven forged weapons?

>>16923030
'Giant's Country', anyone else getting memories of The BFG around here?

As we established, most of the world that humanoids live in simply isn't capable of sustaining a population of Giants, as the Lilliputians learned the hard way. Most giants that live outside of their mysterious country, off the edge of the map, tend to be hermits living on isolated islands or mountain ranges. Some live among settlements of smaller creatures, acting as protectors and helpers for them, but they're still quite expensive to feed and accommodate. And of course, as a result some giants turn to raiding and pillaging to survive, devouring entire communities in a night.

>>16923054
What about the opposite of this? What if a human warrior some how learned the magic of giant's, not all of it, but the size changing power. It would have taken him most of his life to learn it, but now that one warrior has the ability to expand to a giant's size and tower over every enemy. Maybe like how shrunken giant's feel cramped and itchy, they feel stretched to the limit and like they will rip apart.

I Just realized, Giants are too big to effectively use flint and tinder. They likely haven't mastered nonmagical means of producing fire.

>>16923067

Some may also be the outcasts and exiles of Giant-country, who have no intention of helping the younger races, treating them as slaves or food.

>>16923078
Now that sounds awesome.

I like the idea of Giants being a sort of counterpart to Fey, similar in many ways yet the opposite in others.

>>16923067
Which is why Giant's Country is a land constructed by the giant's magic, they built it for themselves and the mountain range that walls it off is the barrier between the world man knows and a completely strange and bizarre world for just the giants

>>16923078

I think it wouldn't be a warrior who learned giant's magic so much as a warrior so strong that his strengths tarted screwing with reality in the same way. Think of Beowulf ripping the arm off Grendel.

In fact, remember how Beowulf kills Grendel's mother? He finds a giant-forged sword in her cavern and cuts her head off with it, but then the sword blade melts.

That A) indicates he can lift an enormously heavy giant-sword because of his own supernatural strength, and B) maybe giant-made weapons don't LIKE hurting giants or their kin (Grendel fits a lot of Nordic cliches for trolls). They'll do it, but they do it unwillingly. They may melt or break afterwards.

>>16923085
Well magic is naturally bonded to them, so pretty much everything they do has a taste of magic. They probably rub their fingers on wood and it ignites.

On the subject og giants, I seem to recall in my toddlerhood a children's book where there's this ominous giant that travels from far away,scares everybody, and eats sheep. Does anyone remember this book

>>16923117
that fits in well with the mentions above of objects calling to the giant when stolen or moved.

>>16923128

Sorry, doesn't ring any bells.

>>16923117
Hmmmm, I like that idea. The Giant's gained control of size through their natural magic and physical strength, so the world is soaked in the natural magic. A human who has achieved incredible strength would leech off that natural magic and gain the power of a giant, but at a limited amount. And since Giant's forge weapons by knowing the names of the the material, Giants can interact with the living side of inanimate objects, so all objects in nature have an inclination to Giants and dislike harming them.

>>16923128
Giants are pretty common in children's books, hard to say.

I was wondering what happened when a dragon mates with a giant. I think the answer is probably >>16923001
...or, it's the other way around- giants and dragons are the magically split reflections of a race of far greater beings that once made the world tremble...

>>16923158

Well, everyday objects are probably too "dormant" to mind. Objects that have been crafted and shaped by a giant's touch are more "awake," though, and therefore are more loyal to their creators.

>>16923159
>mating dragons and giants
From what has been established in this thread, that would be like a man trying to mate with a lion. Dragons and Giants are natural enemies, Dragons being the chaos of the young world, and Giant being the ones who tamed the land. Dragons are treated as pests in the Giant's Country, being chased out of caves near Giant homes like bats, while the oldest Dragon plots to kill the Giant King and take the grand castle.

>>16923173
Yeah, it could be used to explain why if kings or evil men gain control of Giant made weapons why they dont turn them on the Giants and claim dominance. A stone sword made by giant hand could wilt when swung at Giant flesh, or crumble in the wielders hand.

What about glamour magic? would giants be very capable with illusions? They're notoriously ugly, would they be able to mask that? Or make other things seem like they are other than what they are?

>>16923189
The kind of magic we're establishing with Giants actually seems almost the opposite of glamour, the ability to change the nature of physical objects.

Think of Jack and the Beanstalk, and the idea of a giant living in a house on a cloud with gardens and pets and stuff... that'd require some major magic on a cloud to make it into turf.

>>16923189
Well this thread has cemented that Giant Magic isn't "wave your hands and magic" magic, but more like physical magic. Im sure they could have a way of disguising things though. Maybe taking a handfull of sand and scattering it over what they want to disguise and it makes the illusion.

Threads like this are what make /tg/ awesome- no bullshit or arguments, even if opinions and ideas conflict, but basically just one big nerdy brainstorming session.

>>16923200
"Major magic? Bah, I just stamped the cloud flat and started buildin, it aint that complicated little one!"

>>16923200
>>16923206
We really are heading back to Norse/Greek myth territory that Giants are something pretty close to the gods, more or less.

That fits pretty well with the common 'giants vs gods' conflict that a lot of settings like to use.

>>16923188

Actually, that makes me imagine a story where a King somehow tricks a giant into performing a service for him. The giant has given his word but he realizes he has been tricked and resents it.

The king asks for a mighty sword. The giant pick up a boulder the size of a house, squishes it down to a two-handed greatsword. He holds it point down over another stone, lets it drop. The sword splits the stone in twain upon striking it.

The king is delighted, and goes to take the sword and finds he cannot lift it. The giant laughs and tells the king that if he can ever find the strength to lift the sword, it will be the mightiest in the land. The giant leaves while the king, with the help of a team of oxen, drags the sword back to his fort.

He then summons every engineer, alchemist, and wise man in his kingdom, ordering them to build a contraption that will lift and swing the sword. He succeed in instead building a device to hurl it, like a catapult/ballista.

The king tracks down the giant again and, when its back is turned, launches the sword at it. The sword crumbled to dust upon touching the giant's skin. the giant turns, laughs, delivers a little moral lesson, and proceeds to stomp the king and his device into the mud.

So far weve established this.

>The Earth was made, somehow
>Dragons showed up, they were chaotic dicks
>God's came onto the scene, fought dragons for control
>Giant's showed up, dragons and giants fought, Giants made magic, giants tamed the world
>Gods made the other races, probably elves first, dwarves, then humans
>Giants helped out the young races till they started to get a strong foot hold
>Giants make a giant mountain, Giant's Country is made on the other side

>>16923225

Well, the big difference is that gods made something from nothing. The giants just take what was made, and then shape it as they please.

Also, this all takes on a bizarre new level when you consider that in Norse myth, the earth and stones were MADE from a dead giant. No wonder that stuff is so pliable to their will.

>>16923234
>stomps the king into the mud
Eh, the Giant probably wouldn't kill a stupid human for learning his lesson, he would treat it more like a kid who failed to prank his parents, maybe punish him a little.

>>16923234
That's a quintessential fairy tale right there. I applaud you on getting all the elements correct.

Anyone else remember the story of the two giantesses chained to the magic mill that grinds out whatever its owner desires?

>>16923252

More or less, yeah. I'd argue the mountains that wall of giant country aren't a specific range. They can be any mountains, anywhere, any time. Their location is not fixed. If you climb high enough at the in-between times, or when you are good and lost, you may stumble into giant-country.

>>16923272

Yeah, that's from Finnish mythology. Very famous story over there, though I can't remember the names of the mill or the giantesses.

>>16923281
That would certainly be an interesting take, similar to how you get to the lands of fairies. Perhaps the largest mountain range in the world is the wall to the Giant's Country, but if you get lost on a mountain top and climb down you'll stumble onto Giant's Country. So the few humans or other races that stayed to live in the Country were there cause they got lost.

So the only species that seems to naturally fight the Giant's is the dragons, and maybe the gods. So would most Giant weapons, made for Giant's, be extremely efficient in fighting dragons? That could be a way to introduce Giant's into a setting, your party is ordered to slay a mighty dragon, terrorizing the lands, and no blacksmith can forge weapons great enough to fight them, one blacksmith tells the party of a nearby Giant who could easily forge weapons to fight dragons. So now the party must meet the Giant hermit and get him to forge them weapons.

>>16923305
I like the idea of treating fairies and giants as foils in that respect- giants shape the world on a macro scale, fairies shape it on a micro scale. You can enter Giant's Country by getting lost on a mountain top, and Fairyland by falling down a well or squeezing through a hollow tree.

For the most part, fairies and giants find it difficult to even recognise each other.

>>16923252

I'd note that's missing a major element. Why did the giants withdraw? So far we've talked about how the humans drove giants back a bit, but not very specifically. It can't have been a pleasant process.

For all their power, giants are the older race, and lack the vigor of the younger one. Humans reproduced faster, swarming over the lands. some humans didn't care for how giants looked down upon them and didn't notice when they stepped on them. Human heroes challenged and bested giants. Sometimes they banded together and killed giants. Others stole the magical creations of the giants. There might have even been a war between a giant community and a human community once or twice.

Giant Country had always existed beyond human understanding, and as the tide of time turned agaisnt them, the giants slowly withdrew to their ancestral lands, where the bones of their ancestors formed the hills and the peaks, where they had carved the valleys by hand. They mostly left the earth to the new races, though a few giants stayed, and others visit occasionally. And giant criminals and exiles are cast out of giant country to find what mercy they can in the hands of the mortals.

>>16923340
Now that I think of it I find that I adore this idea. It puts the Giant's Country on it's own level, a completely separate world built by Giants for Giants. Just like the fairyfolk have their mysterious world. Thus the humans, elves, dwarves and other "major" races have the regular Earth as their home, while the Giants find home in their own country.

>>16923340

I like to imagine that Fairyland and giant-country border each other a bit in the same way they do with the world of humans. So giants may cross over into fairyland and fairies into giant country, and both may come from those lands into human lands by a roundabout way.

They may also have wars and diplomatic relations with each other. I could imagine the treasuries at a giant castle of two having a decent amount of spoils taken from raids into fairyland.

>>16923362
Well, heres the problem with that. The Giant's tamed the land FOR the races to come. They knew there would be younger races coming, and lent their hand by cultivating the world to make it easier for them to live. They stuck around in the early ages to help the small races get a foot hold.

When the races finally got a firm hold on the land themselves, the Giants began to back away. But the humans who grew up under the eye of the Giants saw differently. Most humans feared the giants, treating them as monsters, waiting to stomp out the humans, and thus tried to fight back against them. The Giants were like parents to the humans, and thus only defended, never engaged. The ones that actively attacked were the minority, angry Giants spurned by the small race, while the majority had infinite patience. As humans grew greater in their lands, the Giant's felt squeezed out of this new world, and thus went off to build their own land, their own country, and leave the small races to their own devises. They didn't leave because the humans threatened their existence, they left because the world was too small for the small races and the Giants, liek a parent giving their child space.

>>16923444

You could really go either way. You could have a setting where the parting was violent and negative, or gradual and expected, or even a combination of the two.

A combination of the two might make sense, because when a child rebels against a parent it can get pretty ugly.

>>16923395
The way that fairies and giants interact could even be affected by the world- when going from Fairyland to Giant's Country, fairies find themselves upsized so the giants can notice them, and vice versa, Giants are shrunk so they can communicate with the fairies.

But the er, regular world doesn't level out their traits as much, so we're stuck with little fairies and big giants that need megaphones and microscopes to communicate.

A problem with this thread, we don't have enough Evil Giants. While some giants are all hippie dippie, some should definitely be malevolent. Some spend days just collecting clouds and spinning them into a stormfront. Some are sleeping, and if awakened do volcanic things to the surroundings.

While I definitely like the wise giant thing we've got going here, I think that giants should primarily be adversaries.

They steal princesses to turn them into giantesses. Giant's aren't fertile, so when they crave companionship they abduct women with royal blood (Obviously inherently magical.)

I just had an odd idea for a setting where you didn't have a "planet" proper, but a stack of multiple worlds ala Norse mythos. Humans know of each one, and there is communication, travel, and sometimes war amongst them.

You'd have the mundane world of humans, which is like a crossroads of them all. You'd have Giant-Country. You'd have Elf/Fairyland (with "elf" in this case just being a term for the tall, human-looking fairy nobility), you'd have the Deep Underground kingdoms of the trolls and dwarfs, maybe a few others.

The routes between them would be vague. Dig deeply enough and you might come out in the Dwarf Kingdoms, climb the mountains and hills and you might reach Giant-Country, get lost in the woods and you might find Elfland. There would, however, be a few regular "gateways" that are guarded and monitored from both sides, used as conduits for trade, diplomacy, and in some cases war.

Each of the non-human otherworlds would be very magically charged, like Giant-Country, with dwarves, elves and trolls being less flesh and blood races like humans and more mysterious and magical like the giants in this thread, with their own strengths and magics.

>>16923482
Eeeehhhh I don't really like that. Giant's could easily notice fairyfolk, perhaps their natural Giant magic helps them notice the small things. Of course only a few number of Giant's could enter the Fairy realm, since a lot of Giants there would stomp up the fairy world. While tons of fairies could pass over to Giant Country easily. Imagine a Giant, stroking his beard as he sits in the clearing of a forest, tasting a sweet honey treat the fairy chief prepared while discussing things. After all Giant's can shrink a bit, so the world doesn't need to shrink them. Plus the fairies could use magic to speak to them.

>>16923497
But the whole point of this thread is to rethink Giants. Normal fantasy shows Giant's as monstrous enemies, barbarians and idiots who kill for fun, or eat people alive. Were trying to craft Giant's into an actual race, they built the world for the small races and treated them kind. The bad Giants are simply Giant's who felt spurned by the small races, or felt superior to them. They shouldn't be primarily enemies, fairies aren't primarily evil to other races, so why should Giant's be evil?

>>16923517
That could work, in the early ages the other worlds were more of a mystery to humans, but as time went on they came to be familiar with them. Hell, the Giant's could have even built these worlds, unless we want to keep the "Giants cultivated the primal world, but the races created their own worlds to escape the human dominated land"

>>16923497

Yeah, I've tried to paint the giants as mostly neutral in my posts. They were shaping the earth for themselves, or because it amused them, not for humans. They can be as good or bad as humans, and some will DEFINITELY resent being driven from the lands they shaped, while others will look at us like ants.

One of THE most common things giants do in fairy tales is go marauding across the country side, stealing cattle and princess, eating people, flattening villages, swiping treasures.

>>16923550
>>16923578
i think that in order to have them be a truly fleshed out race you have to have both of these not every elf is good and helpful not every human prince is noble not every giant will be wise or helpful some will be spiteful and some twisted and evil some will be aloof and noble. i imagine very few would be actively friendly.

>>16923550

Fairies are a good comparison. There are good fairies and there are bad fairies, and it's not always a wise idea to even trust the good ones. Giants are sort of similar. They're not all kind and nurturing. The old ones might have been, before there was much hostility between man and giant, but the younger ones probably might not always be so understanding

Moreover, I'm sure not every kingdom in Giant-country is a pleasant one. There are dark corners of that land you don't want to wander into, and I don't just mean the wild parts full of dragons and trolls.

>>16923602

The most helpful ones will probably be the hermit like ones who remained behind to hang out in human lands after their brethren withdrew, like here: >>16909090

In fact, if a giant comes storming down out of giant-country and into mortal lands, it's more often to cause trouble than go sightseeing.

>>16923597
The basis for the Giant's in this thread is they are old, incredibly old. Any giant's that survived the war against the dragons are STILL alive, any Elder Giant's not known are simply asleep, covered in stone or forest in the land of the human's. The Giant's dont really hold a constant hostility towards humans. Sure there are the few that are agressive, the man eating giants, the kidnappers, the pillagers, but the majority of Giant's simply relax in their own Country, not bothered by the human world. Similar to how there are bad giant's who actively attack humans, there are also giant's that wonder the human world, assisting the small race as much as they can. More "evil" Giant kingdoms exist, but they are far and few in the Giant's Country, and the King probably tries to ensure no lost travelers wonder into the wrong neighborhood.

I imagine Giant Country is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. An invitation usually must be extended to safely enter Giant Country, and the Giants are careful not to allow too many of their own go off into the human side mainly so as to avoid suffering on all sides.

Or perhaps it's just an innate magical area that shrinks those who enter and enlarges those who leave, but then we get back into "giants are just big humans" which is nonsense.
I'm just trying to think of how a nation of giants wouldn't consume all the resources of a world.

>>16923641

I think it's best to assume giant-country doesn't physically exist in mortal worlds. Mortals can stumble into it, but it can't be plotted on a map. On its own, it's big enough to support the giants.

>>16923638

Right, but remember the stuff about trolls and ogres? The giants in Giant-Country aren't exactly NICE. They're not evil, but they have a tendency to not really view humans and other "lesser" races on the same level they do each other, and they can be callous and cruel without really intending to.

>>16923602
Heres how I see it, like most races there are three kinds of Giants, and there are Giants who fit inbetween these catagories

>The Actively Helpful Giants
These are the ones who have left Giant's Country, or never gone there, and have instead stuck around to assist the other races, like a clingy parent, they are sentimental to the small races

>The Average Uncaring Giant
The majority I suppose, they live in Giant's Country, a land they built with their hands with everything they really want and need is there, sealed off from human contact. They have no worries, so why should they care about the humans, they aren't actively helpful to humans, but they don't hold any resentment

>The Aggressive Giants
They either feel spurned by the small races, feel greater than them, or just general aggressive nature, they actively go out and attack humans, eating them, kidnapping them, stealing from them, destroying homes and castles, just like there are bandits and barbarians and evil nobles, there are evil giants who despise, dislike or are disgusted by humans. Just like the first category they are few and not common

Then theres the mysterious and rare fourth category
>The Elder Giants
They so old they don't give a shit either way.

>>16923654
I wish my group would accept that as an explanation. I know they wouldn't.
>it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit!
>yeah, okay, but, in the book it says that *spends rest of session bitching*

>>16923672
>they can be callous and cruel without really intending to
Yes, that makes sense, but only if it's treated like how your grandfather would make a crude or mean comment simply because hes doesn't understand it's mean, hes old so he doesn't really keep up with the newer things, so when a Giant calls a human an "insignificant child" or something along those lines, he didn't intend to be rude, he was just being literal, to a Giant even the oldest human is a child.

>>16923654
>>16923713
>>16923641
Yeah, Giant's Country is like the world of the Fairyfolk. It's like having another level on a building, it's an different place, but build atop, or below the old place. Giant's cultivated and tamed the world, they could easily build another realm for themselves.

Maybe Giant Country is really in the far distant past? The further into giant country you go, the further back in time you go.

This could lead to some sort of Giant undead who exists into modern day, yearning to exist past all his extinct (or sleeping) giant comrades. The players have to go into the depths of giant country to try and stop him.

>>16923748
So what do Giants do for fun?
Oh, they like building worlds, sometimes they dick around a little bit in the ones they've already built.

>typing that out I realized I just made them into the fantasy equivalent of a Sims world builder.

>>16923713
>bunch of nerds can't make allowances for extraplanar pocket realms
Good God, what kind of willfully ignorant mouth-breathers do you associate with?

>>16923793
Well Giant Country would probably seem like "old country" sort of feel. Simple huts and vast fields, Giant shepherds with flocks of giant sheep and goats, they have thousands of years to live, they aint gonna move too fast. But I can see how maybe an undead Giant, or a lich Giant could be scary. Maybe one who died in the war against the dragons and thus has an intense loathing of dragons, or one who was slain by human armies, and when he awoke from the dead seeked to clear the "filth" The problem with an undead Giant is the fact that when a Giant dies, he turns into the land itself, so there isnt really a body to zombify, so the only hope is some kind of magic fuckerdoo, or a Giant's natural magic twisting and changing and raising him back as some kind of undead.

>>16923829
The giant must have learned Draconic magic, warping the world to his will instead of forcing it into a new shape.

>>16923804
The kind that think if it's not printed in a hard bound book on glossy paper with professional illustrations, it's not applicable, and should be attempted to be broken at every opportunity.

>>16923849
You kinda got that backwards. The dragons force the world to their will, the Giants manipulate it. A dragon will force a stone to glitter like a gem, but in a Giant's hand the stone will believe it's a gem, and become a gem to fit. True Naming, as one anon said earlier. Giant's know the names of the world, and thus can use said knowledge.

>>16923829
You could have an Elder Giant in second childhood,
lost within his memories and recalling ancient times.

>>16923798
Well, having eons of working they mostly relax in a quiet life. They most likely enjoy many celebrations, enjoying the music of the Earth itself, the purest of flavors and arts. Swimming in the vast lakes they built, fishing and raising pets, playing Giant games, and building things, like castles, or towns, similar to how people build ships and cities as a hobby.

Imagine a Giant relaxing with the soothing sounds of music on the wind, gently laying brick after brick of a castle wall, grooming the trees and grasses around the castle, building every little detail on their free time. Giant's Country, just a world for retirees

>>16923883
That's an adventure in itself, a giant wandering around, lost because none of the old landmarks are around. Of course, that's if it's a living giant.


An undead giant on the other hand would probably be either chained under his castle when an order of paladins took over his fortress for their own purposes, or chopped up into little pieces. His hands can each still cast spells, though often they don't know what they're casting at, and his mouth could still speak words of power if only a knight hadn't cut out his tongue.

>>16923829
An 'undead' giant could maybe be something like a Stone Giant, slowly turning into the earth like a human zombie is stuck mid-decomposition.

>>16923883
Well a land where a Giant has died could be teeming with the Giant's presence, since Giant's and the Earth are incredibly intertwined a Giant's essence wouldn't just fade, it would linger for ages. Maybe some sort of magic mishaps causes the essence to bond to the land and maybe raise stone to flesh?

>>16923931
Oh god, that's awesome.

A vile necromancer casts stone to flesh on a mountain, and animates the dead giant.


Also, Giant mummies

>>16923867
I'm so sorry.

>>16923924
Perhaps a band of paladin's on a "monster hunt" sealed a Giant into the ground with magic, turning it to a mountain and building ontop of him. If he were unsealed, he would rise from the stone, most likely angry as fuck

Maybe many of the evil giants are giants were enchanted by something. Someone mentioned cursed wyrmhide armor earlier. Maybe cutting out the heart, while making the giant immortal, also drives him mad. Maybe that's why they're stealing princesses, they're trying to put something good in their chests to compensate for something which they've lost.

Yeah, not only do they HIDE their hearts, they have to lose them.

>>16923936
Reminds me of Tomb Kings, except they made Bone Giants inspired by the legends of giants, or so I heard. Though apparently Tomb Kings had a total makeover with the last codex so I dunno.

>>16923951
Now that sounds awesome. Anyone remember, of all things, Tubba Blubba from Paper Mario?

Also I think we're in autosage, someone wanna start a new thread?

>>16923936
"The very soul of the Giant still lingers in this land. It has taken months, but I have gathered what I need to raise what no longer has flesh. To bond the essence of the land back into the stone, to bring life back to the soil, to turn stone back to flesh. I shall raise the unraisable, I shall raise a Giant!"

>>16923869
Aren't you the one who has it backwards?

Dragons were the manipulators, giants the ones who force.

And if you're talking about the true naming from this post

>>16921911
>A giant picks up the rock, squeezes it and the rock remembers its true name is actually sword in the same way that a nerd remembers that his lunch and pocket money actually belong to the school bully.

Than that's a very clear example of the force side of things in contrast to a dragon that tricks an object into thinking its name is something else.

>>new thread

>>16923978