# Giants



## skip.knox (Apr 2, 2019)

Anyone here have giants in their stories? It's a bit odd that we don't see more of these, given how largely (hah!) they figure in traditional folk tales. I'm considering having them play a role in my next novel and thought I'd start a thread where we could kick ideas around.

I have a few thoughts to share, but I'll give the floor to others to start the boulder rolling.


----------



## valiant12 (Apr 2, 2019)

Giant monkeys count as giants, right? I like giant simians.


----------



## Devor (Apr 2, 2019)

I'm using giants.  Well, one giant, I suppose, is all we'll see in the story.

The sprites and other fairies in my setting used to occupy a portal to the fairy realm, and giants are one of the races that came through the portal.  But it's since been destroyed, and the giants were all killed off, save one.

Giants from Tierna Alvone have a few special features.  They can shapechange to match the landscape.  They're incredibly intelligent.  They're masters of fire. And they suffer from an extreme delirium produced by a chemical created in their bone marrow.  In Tierna Alvone they don't have weather as we know it, but a mist that changes to reflect light and night and seasons and change.  That mist sometimes carries a cure for the giant's delirium, revealing them to be their incredibly bright and clever selves.  But the mist passes, and their delirium returns, and the less exposure a giant gets to this mist, the thicker the delirium gets.

In the mortal realm, with the portal broken, the mist is scarce, and at the start of the story the main character has just two vials left.  His giant friend doesn't recognize him.  He's kept locked in chains, underground, where he can barely move and is forced to sleep as much as possible as part of the terrain.  The humans will kill him otherwise.  The rest of their mist was used keeping him together long enough to concoct their plan - you see, the giant in this story plays the role of mentor, in the rare case they can get that delirium lifted.  But two vials.  At the start of the story that's all they have left, and then the giant's brilliant mind might be lost forever.  And the MC is frequently tortured about whether and when to use them.


----------



## pmmg (Apr 2, 2019)

Giants play heavily in Norse mythology, which I look to often as a guide, and in many others as well. I have giant creatures, but so far no actual giants. I think they would make up some of the creation myths in my current WIP, but so far the characters have not really been interested in learning any of it. I am not sure if I will attempt to fit them in or not, but frost giants are pretty cool. I'd love to get them in there.

I suppose if I had a Giant Slaying Sword, it would be effective against giant monkeys, but if one came over the hill, I think I would scream "Giant Monkey!" and not just giant.


----------



## Kalessin (Apr 2, 2019)

Devor I love that setup, especially with the two vials. Would the mist be less effective when the delirium is thicker? I guess that might put too much of a time limit on using them. It's cooler to me that the protag has these two chances to see his friend again. I also wonder what the giant might say about when to use the second vial.

As for the thread itself, I haven't used giants but they happen to be extra meaningful to me in a way - two stories I read as a kid stuck them in my mind for some reason, and I think it'd be cool to work with them at some point. Ender's Game had the "giant's drink" game and The Thief and the Beanstalk by P. W. Catanese had a few main characters who were giants. I wonder if it's completely arbitrary that these impressions of them have stuck with me. It's either that those stories themselves impressed me a lot or that there's something about giants that I gotta reflect on.

Edit: For some reason the most "pure" giant to me, in a probably arbitrary way, is somehow both quaint and clever. They're more rustic than even the possibly rustic humans, yet are cunning. A couple of the ones in The Thief are extremely smart, but then you have one that might be more like the stereotype - a bumbling brute. That's probably what solidified them for me.


----------



## Devor (Apr 2, 2019)

Kalessin said:


> Devor I love that setup, especially with the two vials. Would the mist be less effective when the delirium is thicker? I guess that might put too much of a time limit on using them. It's cooler to me that the protag has these two chances to see his friend again. I also wonder what the giant might say about when to use the second vial.



Oh. Yes, in fact, the longer they wait to use the vials the thicker the delirium will get.  For the logistics of the story, that means the longer they wait to use them the shorter the stretch of time they'll have.  The vial could last most of a day or just a couple hours, depending on how much they let the delirium build back up.

I'm really glad you like it. 



Kalessin said:


> Edit: For some reason the most "pure" giant to me, in a probably arbitrary way, is somehow both quaint and clever. They're more rustic than even the possibly rustic humans, yet are cunning. A couple of the ones in The Thief are extremely smart, but then you have one that might be more like the stereotype - a bumbling brute. That's probably what solidified them for me.



You know, I got part of my idea from seeing something about a piece of Finnish folklore in which there was a giant who lived underground and taught spells.  We've kind of merged giants and ogres and this image of the big lumbering brute, but that's just not what you usually see in folklore. I guess you could say I was trying to reconcile the two images with my take on them.


----------



## Orc Knight (Apr 2, 2019)

Eld has giants. Eld's giants are unfortunately slowly dying off because they can't quite gear up for the new world. They have a few enclaves and can mostly be found working beside humans. They tend to annoy everyone by constantly preaching about how they will one day be the top dogs again and their Elder will get together with their gods and kick everybody else's ass and they shall make great cities and all. Everyone else believes they are quite delusional in that matter.

Now that is a very short overview of them I'll grant. Most any giant who shows up tends to be preaching at people, though as always there is the exception. And they may be called giant, but the tallest any of them get are around thirty feet tall. Many live in the ruins of their once great cities and it helps increase their fervor and that their deities wills will be done one day. And as such the world will pay for it's crimes against them (especially the elves, wood elves in particular. That whole temple of giants skulls thing they did) and then they will put their heavy foot down and crush the smaller folk around them. Just as soon as the alliances with the humans or dwarves works itself out and they actually listen to what the giants are saying.

Those who have gotten out and around in the world either hold fast to their faith or it quickly sours in the wake of the post apocalypse and the fact they see very few of their kind out and about. And those they do see have been almost brought down to the living of feral beasts who swing a club as a mercenary for some food and shelter. There is however, much with the dwarves, some vague prophecy of some new and very much on fire dwarves and giants who will appear to help take back what was lost. So, there is that.

In the meantime they will ask if you've heard the good news of the Great Giant Elders and maybe give you a pamphlet or you might find the odd cleric going about healing the land to the best of their ability and also preaching at some poor soul who got caught in their path.


----------



## Insolent Lad (Apr 2, 2019)

So far, I've only mentioned them in passing so they do exist somewhere in my world(s). They just haven't  come onstage yet. However...the little girl (only one year old) I introduced in the just finished novel (to be released later this year maybe?) has what are  essentially Titans several generations back in her family tree, and is beginning to show her heritage.  So maybe in a sequel I will have a giantess as a character. Or a rather large demi-goddess more accurately, perhaps.


----------



## Futhark (Apr 2, 2019)

skip.knox said:


> It's a bit odd that we don't see more of these, given how largely (hah!) they figure in traditional folk tales.


I wonder if it has anything to do with the ‘realism’ trend (if that’s a thing I’m not imagining).  Speaking from a bio-mechanical point of view, humanoids approaching the 10ft/3 metre-ish mark require some major physiological remodeling.  Most stories I’ve read recently with giants have them top out about here.  Of course, you can always explain it away with ‘hey, it’s a kind of magic’.


----------



## Orc Knight (Apr 2, 2019)

Or not explain it at all and point and go 'Ooh, giants!'. I like that one. It leads to one of the best and most noble space exploration schemes put into existence.


----------



## FatCat (Apr 3, 2019)

I'm not a hundred percent sure but from what I recall there were giant figures in old Christendom, I forget their name but they were supposed to be the offspring between mortals and angels. I think that's a cool take, considering the expectation that giants are large, dumb humanoids .


----------



## CupofJoe (Apr 3, 2019)

I had Giants as a race in one story. They were an off-shoot of evolution more akin to a cross between Neanderthals and mega fauna. They were closely related to humans but too divergent to produce young. They were usually 4-5m tall but stockily built, some were occaisionally much large 10 m+ but I never expanded on Why. They had been a fairly ubiquitous species but Humanity had pushed them into areas that humans found hard[er] to live in, Desert Tundra, and Mountains mostly. They were intelligent and could learn human languages [and humans could speak the local Giant languages if they bothered to learn] so there was some trade and interaction. The Giants had worked out that their size and strength meant they were great at close combat. They became the mercenary force of choice to break a siege or as a spectacular bodyguard. In the story firearms were beginning to made an impact. Now the Giants' size was a distinct disadvantage.


----------



## Futhark (Apr 3, 2019)

FatCat said:


> I'm not a hundred percent sure but from what I recall there were giant figures in old Christendom, I forget their name but they were supposed to be the offspring between mortals and angels. I think that's a cool take, considering the expectation that giants are large, dumb humanoids .


Nephilim


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 3, 2019)

Futhark said:


> Nephilim


And Goliath.


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 3, 2019)

CupofJoe said:


> In the story firearms were beginning to made an impact. Now the Giants' size was a distinct disadvantage.



I like this. I'm always on the lookout for change over time. I've already dealt with the advent and decline of dragons. You've given me an angle on how to deal with the decline (at least) of giants. When Altearth comes into modern times, I've got this notion that there will be preservationists, trying to save the Last of the Giants and so on. Not really a story idea, just more world building background.


----------



## ThinkerX (Apr 3, 2019)

Giants are mostly flukes in my worlds.  The history of Aquas, the secondary world does include a 'short-lived' Giant Empire that conquered a huge stretch of the Strand, but these giants began as ordinary humans and after a few generations the flukes that supersized them played out.


----------



## Kalessin (Apr 3, 2019)

You know what's a fun thought expander for giants? Applying different levels of realism to their interactions with whatever world you're plopping them in. These different levels of realism also have subcategories - the physical, the biological, the cultural, to name a round three. On one end you can easily ignore any implications you want and make something great, because fantasy, and on the other end you can deal with some interesting questions.

I wanna focus on two variants for these thoughts, if anyone wants to reply to this. The typical subversion of the folklore kind (if I'm imagining those properly) is the not-so-absurd ones that have been mentioned here as being in Malazan. You've got bigger ones of those in things like A Song of Ice and Fire, but the main idea is that they aren't straight up mystical to look at. Because then you have the kind that I for some reason associate with folklore even though I don't have any in-depth knowledge of it. These are the colossi, and I think the main reason they stick in my mind personally is that just looking at them in my mind's eye is the surreal kind of fantastical. The main memory of those for me is from that Catanese story, which is actually a kid's book, but a very good one. In fact I recommend it to serious readers of fantasy to be honest. When I think about how they factor into the world there's a satisfying clash that I think gives them their crunch for me. Before I can even get used to the Toy Story effect in this sometimes horror-driven story I'm then dealing with the pretty much existential dread of imagining them actually using the beanstalk themselves, wearing armor and holding weapons and not really caring about people (in this particular story). 

These ones certainly ignore the square cubed law, but what about the more realistic ones? For some reason it seems like the square cubed law factors in _somehow_ when most of those seem to be the lumbering kind. We have an instinct, it seems, to make them not just slow and ponderous in movement but also in thought. With a really big one, do we more easily lift that instinctive speed limit and let them be just fantastically scaled up humans? Could a 12ft tall, comparatively proportioned giant with a scary intellect and a human face be interesting? Would their intellect have to be scary?


----------



## Kalessin (Apr 4, 2019)

Kalessin said:


> Applying different levels of realism



Futhark and the orc actually started this. That's what I get for making my post before reading through the new stuff. Can't edit my comment for some reason. Guess there's a limit? 

So yeah like they were saying.


----------



## Futhark (Apr 4, 2019)

Kalessin.  My WIP is heavy on the realism so I don’t really have any truly gigantic creatures.  I have a giant race based on the _Gigantopithecus _(Gigantopithecus - Wikipedia) but they’re really just window dressing.  I also have creatures like Minotaurs, ogres/oni, etc., due to _blood magic_, which is basically taking an animals DNA and mixing it with a humans, or vice versa, and applying sorcerous energy/rituals.  Most were made ages ago, so the survivors are generally useful, viable species that only inhabit small parts of the globe.

There are wyverns from a distant corner of the world where reptile/avian species became dominant, much like marsupials in Australia.  Ancient explorers introduced them to the old world and wizards often spirit bonded with them.  There have been instances when the wyvern escapes control and kills the wizard, and due to my magic system, the spirit of the wizard lives on, making the wyvern crazy smart, or sometimes just crazy.

I really want to include a giant creature like Chief Toad from _Naruto_ or Shenron from _Dragon_ _Ball_, but I don’t think I can justify it.  As for giant humanoids, well, I can’t do it.  I have too strong an urge to explain how and why.

Larry Niven has Frost Giants in his book _The Magic Goes Away._  The premise is that mana is a non-renewable resource.  When his giants are in a high mana area then they are giants (like, really big), because mana warps reality.  When there is no mana they are just big humans.

But yeah, I think we do have a tendency to view giants as ponderous and slow-witted.  I think this may have to do with real life animals.  Elephants and whales, while not exactly stupid or slow, don’t often rush around.  Their food sources don’t scurry off and they have little concern for predators.  To create a giant that is quick and clever without stretching incredulity may be challenging, but if you could manage it I think it would be one of those characters that everyone would remember.


----------



## Insolent Lad (Apr 4, 2019)

I considered using Gigantopithecus in a story way back when, before it was shown they were apes, not early humans. That took some of their allure away and I eventually scrapped the idea.

I think my favorite fantasy giant of all time would be the _dwarf_ giant in one of Moorcock's books, who ends up standing about the height of a normal human.


----------



## Demesnedenoir (Apr 4, 2019)

One must define "giant", LOL. But yes, there are mannish 15-20 feet tall people in the Sister Continents... but they don't figure into any stories quite yet. As a major culture? No. But The Touched is pushing 10 feet tall, trolls and ogres (more mannish than trolls) closer to 12-15 tall... so it depends on what qualifies as giant.

Giant preservation society, I'm sure Andre would've appreciated this, heh heh.


----------



## Gotis (Apr 4, 2019)

My giants are basically scaled up neanderthals around fifteen to twenty feet tall. Due to their size they get overheated easily, so they tend to stay in colder areas though you'll find the occasional giant in a cave or a forest. They also tend to have tunnel vision. One of my concerns was how a race of giants wouldn't just dominate all us little people. On the northern continent giants do rule, forcing the other races there into paying tribute.  The other major concentration of giants is in a huge mountain range that splits the "Europe" side from the "Asia" side of my largest continent. I've decided to ignore the square-cube law for now, though my world building is still in flux.


----------



## Futhark (Apr 4, 2019)

Demesnedenoir said:


> One must define "giant"


Yeah, I was wondering if we are discussing large humanoids exclusively?


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 4, 2019)

Humanoid was what I had in mind when I posted the original. People are free to take the thread in other directions. Giant elves? Giant sprites? Or *shudder* giant pixies?

As for my giants, I cheerfully ignore real-world physics as simplistic and tedious. Altearth has giants. Punkt.

Where it gets interesting for me is the practical business of where giants live and how they live. Do they build cities? The notion of twenty-thousand giants living in a giant city, with a whole network of giant villages all around, won't fly. Not realistic. <grin> 

Well then, do they build villages? Heck, do they even build houses? Or do they just live in caves (or clouds)? Are they solitary, live in family units, tribes? Every choice has interesting ramifications.

What about agriculture and hunting? They might eat their way through entire valleys ... maybe they're semi-nomadic. 

Are they literate? Among humans, literacy appears only with cities, so maybe not. They would have a language, though it could be pretty primitive, especially if they were solitary, coming together only to mate and raise the youngster. 

Once I get some basic parameters, I soon start to think about how they relate to other folk. Do they engage in trade? With whom, and how does that work? Do they have any sort of political structure (can't have politics without a _polis_!), and if so do they have treaties with their neighbors (or among themselves)? 

Do they have a sense of humor? What do they do on a Saturday night? What is their sense of justice or sin? 

And, of course, how does all that fit into and alongside of humans, dwarves, elves, fae folk, orcs, trolls, dragons, and the rest? 

I don't try to answer all that up front. I go for just enough to start working them into a story, then I let the story itself help me clarify fuzzy parts.

So far, I'm finding giants to be difficult. Their size drives me into silly corners. If I have giants, now maybe I need giant horses, and giant houses, and giant carrots to put into giant bowls, which get made by giant blacksmiths working giant forges and ... well, on and on, really. Giant typewriters. You get the idea. 

I sort of wanted to work them into my next story. I have a role for them to play up around Lake Lucerne. But they may be more trouble than they're worth.


----------



## Saigonnus (Apr 5, 2019)

Giants once existed in my world, but no longer. They were simply a larger strain of humans that got to be 9-12 feet tall. They had denser bones than their surviving cousins, so were often used to make weapons. Otherwise, they were not special. 

Modern humans in my story world are descendants of them, but shrank over the centuries from food shortages, disease and natural selection.

Of course, most common folks don’t believe in Giants, or even have the inkling that they are descended from them.


----------



## Futhark (Apr 5, 2019)

skip.knox.  A little brainstorming for you - 

I think giants could have an agricultural society with giant pumpkins and such.  I don’t think they would be as finicky with what they eat as humans are.  They may have an extra stomach or two so they can digest more fibrous parts of plants.  Husk that corn?  No way, thems good eatin’.  And their population density would probably be smaller.

That would encourage some building and literature, storehouses, forges, keeping lists, etc.  As for houses; maybe not, as they are more resilient to the elements and have few, if any, predators.  Their bed is where they lay their head.  You could have the standard ‘elders in charge’, but I seem to recall hearing about a sci-fi novel where the young were the leaders as the adults rapidly became mentally slower as they aged.  Might be a nice twist.


----------



## Demesnedenoir (Apr 5, 2019)

Food sources would be dependent. If there are herds of mammoth or bison... it seems the classic cold weather giant would be less likely as a pure hunter gatherer, but it depends so much on their size. There might be a good reason that giants are famous for eating people... we breed fast and are big enough to make a decent meal of, heh heh.


----------



## Ban (Apr 5, 2019)

Demesnedenoir said:


> Food sources would be dependent. If there are herds of mammoth or bison... it seems the classic cold weather giant would be less likely as a pure hunter gatherer, but it depends so much on their size. There might be a good reason that giants are famous for eating people... we breed fast and are big enough to make a decent meal of, heh heh.



Could even be simple sport. Ferrets and cats kill with abandon just to stay sharp and amuse themselves, a long-lived giant may do the same with a human tribe. Just over a much longer period of time.


----------



## Orc Knight (Apr 5, 2019)

As for food and agriculture, big herd animals like mammoths and elephants might come in handy. Though I admit it's kind of cool in itself which was in part why I used it (Martin and Skryim with the whole mammoth thinking). That and plants and animals in Eld can get big anyways, plus dinosaurs are in the mix as a food source and therefore easier to make cities and build civilizations. Not sure Altearth has those oddities though.

Obviously nothing stopping them from being semi-nomadic or building cities. Building materials may be a bit harder to come by unless they got a green thumber who grows redwoods faster. Or good stone carvers and such. On Eld they carved their original cities from the mountains and the valleys had plentiful food sources, including humans at times.

Just think of what happens if someone comes across their left overs? Chairs that no regular size being can sit in (and to the really short ones, a mystical thing indeed), a house that can hold a village, skeletons of animals and beasts none would touch or thought could be tamed. And who knows, maybe they just can't survive Altearth due to environmental factors. To simply feed a being that big might take a lot and if they came from a civilization where they had things to match them and didn't bring them to earth, like their giant sheep herds, then they may slowly become feral giants who move about and take whatever is available to them.


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 5, 2019)

Aurochs! If I'm going to have giants, I'm definitely going to have aurochs.

But I also like the idea of letting giants build--they could also use stone--and then have them go extinct, so later generations could find remains. Encountering them as a distant reality could add to a story without the fuss of actually bringing them on stage. The thing about the bones being valuable offers a different take on the usual dragon skin and dragon teeth.

Another notion I had was to have the giants migrate. They have withdrawn to a distant island(s) where they can live in peace. Then they could have this tragic phase where modern hunters go after them as trophies.


----------



## Orc Knight (Apr 5, 2019)

Leave 'em on an island long enough and you'll have pygmy giants. 

Also, yes, aurochs. I've always wanted to try the beef from one.

Edit made because of beef.


----------



## JBryden88 (Apr 14, 2019)

I have giants. Hell, my WIP is about giants. Giants are my heroes AND my villains. Giants in my world are creatures of magic in the sense that they bargained with the spirits of their ancestors for the strength to overthrow their enemies. They became the giants. I still haven't settled on their size, but they need to be able to have half giants with humans on rare occasion. I have them living in the kinds of mountain halls you'd NORMALLY see Dwarves in.


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 14, 2019)

What do they eat? Do they have farms in those mountain halls? How do they fashion the tools they use to carve out those halls? 

Questions like that occupy me from time to time.


----------



## Ban (Apr 15, 2019)

skip.knox said:


> What do they eat? Do they have farms in those mountain halls? How do they fashion the tools they use to carve out those halls?
> 
> Questions like that occupy me from time to time.



Can always make them mineral-eating giants that grab handfuls of rock throughout the day for sustenance, sort of like a whale sifts through enormous amounts of water to get its plankton buffet. Then you can even have heated conflicts between giants and non-giants on the basis of mining rights.


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 15, 2019)

That made me think of sandworms. The giants would live in warrens of tunnels more than in grand mountain halls. Also, they would not be tool-makers. There's certainly plenty of room for variation here.


----------



## KnightOfLain (Apr 27, 2019)

In one of the books I'm working on the only account of giants comes from a merchant who traveled to the far east of the main continent to the city of Dis. Located in the center of a major desert the majority of the city is underground and four giants stand around the entrance. Each one is buried up to their knees in sand yet the crests of their heads still easily reach a thousand feet above the ground. For miles around the city balls of fire will randomly fall from the skies through out the day and together the four giants hold up a giant metal shield to protect the city. Supposedly they never so much as grimace in pain when they themselves are struck and that they have gone for centuries without sustenance.

Commentators have noted that for whatever reason when he the account starts describing the city it swishes from prose to poetry and thus argue that the writer may have been taking poetic liberties to describe some kind of architectural structure designed to provide some shade, but considering that this is a world where every 700 years or so the dead refuse to stay dead for a few decades no one really knows.


----------



## D. Gray Warrior (May 8, 2019)

One of my worlds was a continent with various nations. Many of them were your standard European fantasy cultures, with slight variations (different gods, language, form of government, etc), but there were also Middle-Eastern inspired nations, a couple of feudal Japan inspired, and so on, all on the same continent (I was a teenager and likely did not think all of that through.)

Every race also had it least one nation of its own, including giants.


----------



## Rob Ball (Jun 14, 2019)

The Romans claimed that the original inhabitants of Britain were Giants but were chased into Cornwall. Most of the British myths see them either as builders or as the cause of earth works such as mountains or valleys, generally by falling over and or dying.  Some were cunning (Finn McCool) and some stupid but I always get the sense from the northern European myths that they represent the past.  Creators of but not part of the landscape.  In one world I have them exist but having separated themselves off from the 'real' world into a dimension more suitable.  I have them as kind and clever but just too big to be around small squashy things.  The old English for giant is Ent and I do see giants like Ents, part of an old world, a connection to the past, immensely powerful but wanting nothing to do with the squabbles of the little people.


----------



## Eclipse Sovereign (Sep 6, 2020)

My giants are more... exotic. 

These giants are generally 50-100 feet tall, and are immensely strong and durable. They are virtually immune to damage, with missiles or rail guns barely slowing them down, and can regenerate from any wound as long as their Nucleus is intact. The Nucleus is an orb about 5-6 feet in diameter, with numerous needle-like spines serving to integrate it with the rest of the body. It produces enormous amounts of blood when damaged, and is relatively weak. Giants are mostly empty except for the muscles, bones and skin. They are driven to devour animals and humans, but need no external nutrients.

Some giants, dubbed Traitors, can take the form of humans they’ve eaten. While in this form, they have no knowledge of their true nature. They have caused massive casualties by infiltrating human settlements and activating. This is part of the reason why humanity has no centralized government or single head of state.

The Shifters are the only means to really stop the giants. Their origins are unknown, but there are currently seven in existence. They are also used as terror weapons to maintain control of humanity by the military junta, as nothing short of a nuclear bomb down the throat can reliably do anything. Despite this, the Shifters are human, and sometimes disobey.


----------



## TWErvin2 (Sep 7, 2020)

Giants have played a part in some of my First Civilization Legacy Series novels, but as antagonists. In that world, they are not very common to begin with.

In my LitRPG series, Monsters, Maces and Magic, a giant has been mentioned several times, but he has not appeared, yet.


----------



## Son of the Roman (Sep 7, 2020)

Giants play as the main antagonists in one of my stories. They’re about 7-9 feet tall and extremely strong. They are slow however, and depend on tough armor of bone and leather to make up for their lack of maneuverability. Their strength is matched only by the dark aura about them.


----------



## Son of the Roman (Sep 7, 2020)

FatCat said:


> I'm not a hundred percent sure but from what I recall there were giant figures in old Christendom, I forget their name but they were supposed to be the offspring between mortals and angels. I think that's a cool take, considering the expectation that giants are large, dumb humanoids .



That’s actually one theory of what it meant. Some commentators believe the “sons of god” are angels, but others believe that they were the offspring of Seth, with the “daughters of men” being of the line of Cain. If the second theory was correct, they became giants through natural means as opposed to supernatural.


----------



## Insolent Lad (Sep 7, 2020)

Though I hadn't thought of them as 'giants,' the variety of demons who play a prominent role in my two Wizardry books are giant-ish. Cory, our young wizard's sidekick (though it wouldn't admit to serving in that role), stands about eight foot tall and is fairly humanoid. But not really human at all--more like a giant vegetable. Their home world is pretty much a hothouse, under a red giant sun. They certainly do giant-like things, such as intimidating us puny mortals, when necessary, but would just as soon ignore us unless we get in the way of their sunlight. They are reasonably bright and generally honorable (while sticklers for the letters of their laws) but Cory itself has a criminal background, mostly as a muscle-demon for higher ups.


----------



## Snowpoint (Sep 7, 2020)

I have one setting that uses the word "giant" somewhat loosely. They are shape-shifting cloud people that live in the sky. 
In some fairy tails, Giants live in a castle in the clouds. I asked, "How does that work?" and came to the conclusion the are also lighter than air.


----------



## StrawhatOverlord (Sep 20, 2020)

My giants descend from primordial beings who "devolved" into what they currently are because their link with the primal magic was heavily dampened long ago. They went from nebulous metaphysical sizes, like "as high as a 1000 days trek" (ie. as tall as whoever is beholding it at the time can travel in ~3 years) to averaging around 65 feet. And I recently decided that the magic they have doesn't come from the same magic dimension as everyone else.


----------



## Gurkhal (Sep 25, 2020)

Seldom if ever, I'm afraid. I have my hands full writing humans and additions of new species is more likely to cause me to drop it on the floor than anything else.


----------

