Giants

Background Questions

1. What peak claims your lineage?

2. Which storm marked your adulthood?

3. Whose voice echoes in yours?

4. What oath binds your might?

Lore

Giants build to outlast centuries. storm-bridges, cliff terraces, and ice-anchored causeways meant to stand when smaller nations have changed rulers five times. Their law is built on oath, hospitality, and blood-price, and their Jotun pantheon is honored through seasonal rites - winter hearth vows, spring thaw offerings, and storm-swearings at the high ledges.

Homeland: Storm coasts, fjordlands, and high moors where castles can watch both sea and pass.

Government: Jarldoms and Thing-meets. A Jarl rules by reputation and proved protection; disputes are heard in open assembly, with compensation (debt-weight) set in goods, labor, or oath.

Society: Oathbound and public-facing. Giants prize hospitality, honest boasting, and deeds that can be witnessed. They frequently serve as wardens of sea-gates and high passes, and they keep formal alliance-bonds with dwarven holds.

Buildings: Cliff-castles, longhalls, ring-walls, sea-beacon towers, and iron-bolted bridges. Halls are built for feasting and judgment.

Religion: The Jotun Pantheon (syncretic). Scholars argue these are giant-names for Reth's gods. Giants typically keep the list broad and practical:

• Brann-Father - God of Fire and the Forge

• Skadi-White - God of Ice and Winter Roads

• Hroth-Wave - God of Sea, Tides, and Passage

• Eirn-Stone - God of Mountains, Oaths, and Work

• Huldra-Green - God of Forest and Beast-Herds

• Varr-Night - God of Shadow, Watch, and Border Fear

Law. Thing-Law and Debt-Weight. Oaths are sworn on rings or stones; compensation for harm is measured, paid, and remembered.

Cultural Taboo (Exile Crime). Oath-Flight - swearing protection or payment before witnesses, then fleeing the consequence.

Trade:

• Export: heavy guard companies, castle stone, beacon-tower work, sea-gate wardens, bridge crews

• Import: bulk grain, lamp oils, fine cloth, tool-iron and dwarf-made fittings

Lore & Background

Giants build to outlast centuries. Storm-bridges, cliff terraces, and ice-anchored causeways designed to stand when smaller nations have changed rulers five times. Their law is built on oath, hospitality, and blood-price. Their Jotun pantheon is honored through seasonal rites - winter hearth vows, spring thaw offerings, storm-swearings at the high ledges. They are proud, lineage-aware, and obligation-driven.

The rest of Reth has a complicated relationship with Giants. Some revere them as living monuments. Others resent the space they occupy - literally and politically. Giants are aware of both responses. They do not perform humility and they do not perform menace. They exist at their size and let others decide what to make of it.

Role in Aldaedro Society

Giants are the eldest, and the others orient around that fact even when they resist it. Their Thing-Halls have served as neutral ground for inter-Aldaedro disputes for as long as any of the four peoples can reliably trace. Their Law-Speakers are the most recognized Aldaedro voice in the wider world. They do not lead the other peoples. When something threatens all four, it is usually a Jarl who calls the gathering.

Giants still hold a seat on the Prime Council. They attend when a matter concerns the Holds directly. They speak only for the Holds. They make this clear at the start of every session. The Council has stopped asking them to do otherwise.

Social Structure & Upbringing

Giant society is organized around the Hold - a highland community governed by a Thing-Hall assembly under a Jarl. The Jarl rules by reputation and proved protection. Disputes are heard in open assembly with compensation - debt-weight - set in goods, labor, or oath. A Jarl who fails their obligations faces a Thing-challenge: a formal public accounting of the failure. Not a combat. Giants who resolve governance disputes with violence are considered to have run out of words worth hearing.

Skalds and Law-Speakers are the Hold's institutional memory. They carry the exact text of rulings, oaths, blood-debts, and treaties across generations. A skald who misremembers a ruling has committed a serious offense. A Law-Speaker who embellishes a treaty term has committed something close to a spiritual crime.

Giant children grow slowly. Their early years are spent at the Hold's hearth-stones, learning the law-markings carved into the firestone before they learn anything else. Coming of age is a formal presentation before the Thing-Hall - not combat, but recitation. The young Giant speaks their lineage, their obligations, and the debts and honors passed to them from those before them. The assembly witnesses. The skald records.

Appearance

Giants range from ten to fifteen feet, built from the storm-coast clans who run leaner to the Vuori lines who are massively broad. Skin runs from deep earth-brown to pale grey-stone. The oldest bloodlines show a weathering texture that resembles worked rock. Hair is typically dark and coarse, often worn in braids for significant occasions - the braids carry clan markers readable to other Giants.

Giants have between one and three eyes. In Aldaedro culture, extra eyes are treated as a visible mark of sight-for-the-work - a sign of the depth of attention a Giant carries. They move with deliberateness that is not slowness. An experienced Giant in a lowland settlement has learned to angle through doorways, avoid load-bearing structures, and never gesture expansively indoors. Young Giants occasionally forget. The damage is usually repairable.

Religion: & Philosophy

The Jotun pantheon is syncretic with Reth's broader gods, but Giants insist the names matter. Brann-Father is not merely another face of Azirosh. Brann-Father is the forge-fire that existed before the world had language for it. The philosophical difference between the Jotun names and the common names is, to a Giant, the difference between the thing and the word for the thing. The thing came first.

Giant religious practice is embedded in daily life. The hearth-fire is tended with specific observances. Oaths are sworn in specific forms that invoke specific deities as witnesses. The dead are remembered in skald-song before they are buried, and the song must be truthful. Embellishment is considered a disservice to the dead and an offense to Eirn-Stone, who keeps the record. Giants who die with unresolved debts are buried with those debts carved into their grave-markers, so the obligation remains visible and can be claimed by descendants.

Relationships with Other Ancestries

The Druazer are the most genuine long-term alliance Giants maintain. Shared highland territory, shared respect for craft and oath, shared experience defending the same passes. The relationship is warm in the way that two peoples who have eaten at the same fire for three hundred years are warm. They know each other's insults and their weight.

The Orc relationship is the most friction-laden within the Aldaedro. Giants deliberate. Orcs move. Both approaches have merit and both peoples know it, which does not stop the arguments. With Firbolg, Giants share a reverence for deep time that neither people quite shares with anyone else - quieter and warmer than the Orc relationship. With Cragborn, Giants receive a reverence that they find genuinely touching and occasionally wish was slightly less formal.

Select Druthal courts have cultivated Giant alliances for their ceremonial and strategic value, which Giants find mildly amusing and agree to because the trade terms are favorable. Ranta coastal traders deal with Storm-coast Giants regularly and have developed the practical ease of people who have been doing business with something much larger than themselves for a long time without incident.

Military Presence

Giants do not maintain standing armies. What they have is every capable adult of a Hold who answers a muster - which, given Giant scale, is a military force by any other name. Before a Hold goes to war, the grievance must be stated publicly, the other party must be given opportunity to answer, and the Thing-Hall must ratify the action. This takes time. Other peoples sometimes mistake it for hesitation.

When Giants commit to a fight, they do not do it quietly. Their strength is overwhelming in direct confrontation, their endurance is exceptional, and their reach means that most weapons wielded by smaller peoples cannot threaten them before they can respond. They are correspondingly poor at skirmishing and ambush warfare. They know this and plan accordingly. Giants at war are seldom surprised, because they do not move until they are certain, and they do not move alone.

Cultural Traits

Honor kept, debts remembered, and the long view. Giants measure time in generations and judge actions by how they will read in the skald-song a hundred years from now. A Giant's word, once given, does not bend - and they remember every word given to them with the same precision.

Species Name. Droaedor

Homeland: Storm coasts, fjordlands, high moors - cliff-castles watching both sea and pass

Government: Jarldoms and Thing-meets. A Jarl rules by reputation and proved protection. Disputes heard in open assembly with debt-weight compensation.

Law. Thing-Law and Debt-Weight. Oaths sworn on rings or stones. Compensation for harm is measured, paid, and remembered.

Exile Crime. Oath-Flight - swearing protection or payment before witnesses, then fleeing the consequence.

Export: Heavy guard companies, castle stone, beacon-tower work, sea-gate wardens, bridge crews

Import: Bulk grain, lamp oils, fine cloth, tool-iron and dwarf-made fittings

Racial Allies: Druazer (Dwarves), select Druthal courts, some Ranta traders

Racial Enemies: High-pass raiders, oath-breakers, any warband that violates Thing-law

Council: Practice: Giants still attend the Prime Council when a matter concerns the Holds. They speak only for the Holds, never for the other Aldaedro peoples.

Jotun Pantheon

Brann-Father - God of Fire and the Forge

Skadi-White - God of Ice and Winter Roads

Hroth-Wave - God of Sea, Tides, and Passage

Eirn-Stone - God of Mountains, Oaths, and Work

Huldra-Green - God of Forest and Beast-Herds

Varr-Night - God of Shadow, Watch, and Border Fear

Caraezer - Insectoids