Giants!
They exist in plenty of mythology, it only makes sense they would wind up in D&D.
There are many types of giants but they all hold a common ancestor, according to their
lore.
Annam the All Father created the giants in his image.
Their appearance varies according to the type of giant, but generally they are humanoid
in appearance just larger.
Ancestry is important to giants and most can trace their lineage back to Annam All-Father
himself.
When introducing clans to one another this lineage is recited formally.
Anam All-Father was one of the very first gods to take an interest in Toril.
This claim is hazy as so much time has passed and there were no documents written that recorded
this period of time.
However giants believe that Annam was the first to see Toril as a place for his progeny
to grow.
It is a fact that giants arrived centuries before humans, elves, and dwarves.
Shortly after his interest in Toril Annam married a lesser demigoddess named Othea.
Othea bore him several sons many of whom are still worshiped by giant-kin today.
Her sons were Annam’s first terrestrial children and he loved them greatly.
Annam then took his children and established a great kingdom for them known as Ostoria.
Which translates to “father’s seat” in the language of the giants.
He then divided up Ostoria into new kingdoms for each of his sons to rule.
These regions were items like the seas and lakes, the skies, the rolling hills, the cold
wastes, and the fiery peaks.
Which the descendants of those giants that ruled over those areas became the separate
types of giants we have today.
Hill Giants, Stone Giants, Frost Giants, Fire giants, cloud giants, storm giants, wood giants,
and titans.
It wasn’t long after that the dragons first appeared on Abeir-Toril.
At first the giants paid little attention to these creatures but soon they recognized
them as powerful and cunning interlopers who threatened Ostoria’s very existence.
A great war broke out between the dragons and the giants that went on for a thousand
years.
Known as the thousand year war I covered this a bit in one of my earliest videos which you
can find the link in the top right corner or in the video description.
Legend says the war ended when Annam and the dragon god played a board game to settle the
dispute, the game ended in a stalemate and thus the war was over.
The damage had been done to the giants, Ostoria had shrunk to just the northernmost edge of
Faerun, known as the Savage North and the Cold Lands.
Now it was around this time that Othea the mother of giant kind had an affair with another
demigod.
She had already betrayed Annam with Vaprak resulting in the ogre race, and now she bed
Ulutiu resulting in four sons who later became the firbolg, verbeeg, voadkyn, and fomorian.
To this day there is enmity between the giants and giant-kin stemming from Othea’s betrayal
to their All-Father Annam.
Othea is interesting because she takes the form of a giant mountain in Faerun, which
she is a demigoddess but while on Faerun was a mountain.
Which means a lot of these giants and giant-kin came from the earth which seems fitting for
the giant race.
Ostoria slowly faded away as time went on and the capital was eventually swallowed up
by the great glacier of the north.
The giants moved on, their great kingdom merely a memory.
You don’t see a large number of giants in present day Faerun.
Many believe the giants are going extinct or are a myth altogether.
This is not true, giants have merely settled in areas of Faerun that receive very little
contact with the outside world.
Although they don’t have the same numbers they did while Ostoria was in place there
are at least 500 giants of each major breed currently active in the realms.
Their lifespan is so much more than that of a human or halfling that giants operate at
a slower pace of life comparably.
Most giants can expect to live between 300 to 400 years, but there are older giants that
have lived to be thousands of years old.
With every generation though giants seemed to have lost their longer lifespans.
Giants have a pregnancy between nine and fifteen months and their offspring reach maturity
around fifty years.
Giants have an interesting social structure.
Known as the Ordning it is the social hierarchy that all giants adhere dating all the way
back to Ostoria.
Because of the Ordning each individual giant knows which other giants are inferior and
superior to themselves, and no giants are equal to another.
Titans are the highest in the Ordning.
Standing taller than cloud or storm giants they are mighty.
Alas they mostly fled Faerun altogether for the plane of Arborea.
After Titans, come storm giants, cloud giants, fire giants, frost giants, stone giants, and
then hill giants.
With other giant-kin being at the very bottom such as Fomorians or ogres.
Giants have their own pantheon of gods they worship.
Surprisingly Annam isn’t worshiped because he left his children after Ostoria was forgotten.
He left Toril altogether to live in an Asgardian place only to return when his sons and daughters
have restored Ostoria to it’s former glory.
It is Annam’s first sons that are worshiped by the giants.
Finally giant magic revolves around runes.
They don’t cast arcane spells like normal wizards.
The most outwardly magical are the cloud giants followed by the storm giants.
Both have an innate ability to use some forms of magic related to air, weather, and gravity.
Rune magic is the name of the game with giants, they carve runs into weapons, armor, and even
buildings instilling some magical power into that object.
It’s a slow process but a strong magic.
A storm rune carved into a stone might allow the stone’s possessor to control the weather,