Cloud Giant
Cloud giants, or himinglæva, are a race of true giants and the chosen people of the Ordning god Duris. Cloud giants are known for their extravagance and capricious nature. They dwell at the highest elevations, either on remote mountain peaks or even amid the clouds themselves in floating castles suspended high in the atmosphere by ancient magic runes.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Cloud giants are the second largest of the true giants. Their ethereal and haughty personalities are reflected in their anatomy, with muscular pale grey-white skin and billowing hair of silver or blue. As a cloud giant ages, their hair becomes more and more intangible until it is nothing more than a kind of mist that floats in and around their heads. Cloud giants have brilliant grey or blue eyes that often seem to glow in dim conditions like stars suspended in the sky on a foggy night.
Genetics and Reproduction
Cloud giants live in small communities, rarely venturing outside of their family group except to mate. Many cloud giant families practice arranged marriages, using their network of connections between clans to find suitable matches for their children. Cloud giants typically bear two to three offspring over the course of their long lives, with female cloud giants carrying their young for up to four years before giving live birth.
Growth Rate & Stages
Cloud giants reach sexual maturity around age eighty and live for up to four hundred years. When born, cloud giants resemble other humanoids, but as they age their bodies become more and more fantastical with mist-like hair, flashing eyes, and unnaturally pale skin. These changes in physical appearances are often accompanied by changes to their clothing and accessories, as cloud giants are famed for their people's material extravagance.
Ecology and Habitats
Cloud giants live in the highest altitudes, regularly making their homes atop snow-cloaked mountain peaks or even floating castles supported by clouds and propelled through magic runes. These castles are massive, containing all the chambers of a royal household as well as enchanted gardens which supply the castle's inhabitants with a steady supply of fantastical foods.
Dietary Needs and Habits
Many cloud giants demand tribute from mortal communities they live above, though this is usually not their only source of food. Cloud giants are avid gardeners and know how to produce large fruits and vegetables worthy of their massive appetites. Such crops include grapes as large as apples, apples the size of pumpkins, and pumpkins the size of wagons. These gardens are rarely affected by droughts, blights, frost, or locusts, making them all the more remarkable. Occasionally, wind or hungry creatures bring the seeds of these strange plants to the ground where mortals dwell, resulting in communities blessed with truly giant produce.
Additional Information
Social Structure
Cloud giants live communally in large groups of clan mates, but the central unit of cloud giant life is the family—a mated pair, their offspring (if any), and some close relatives. Because of their emphasis on material wealth, many cloud giants try to keep the number of their kin living among them to a minimum; too many cloud giants means so much wealth as to attract thieves and adventurers.
Cloud giant families always know their neighboring giant communities, even if they lie hundreds of miles away from one another. This allows them to arrange marriages, trade goods, and also engage in the betting feuds that so often occur between rival families. In a crisis, word is spread from family to family, so that a mighty squad of cloud giants could be assembled, in time, if need arises.
Geographic Origin and Distribution
Cloud giants live across the realm of Holos, largely concentrated in the highest of alpine environments. However, those cloud giant families that have constructed rune-loft castles are actually semi-nomadic, flying across the world in search of locations with suitable views and deferential mortal communities. Known cloud giant citadels exist in the Basceron, the Bluefrost Mountains, Rhapalkan, the Shanindar, and the Mazabar Highlands. Some particularly massive cloud giant kingdoms have even been reported in the fabled Elemental Plane of Air.
Average Intelligence
Cloud giants compete with storm giants for the title of most intelligent of the true giants. While storm giants focus their intellectual energies on divination and religious study, cloud giants have a far broader palette of interests. Many cloud giant keeps include extensive libraries recounting the histories of the giants, as well as other topics such as giant governance, botany, the animal husbandry of powerful winged creatures, and all manner of texts on the arcane. In fact, some cloud giant families boast libraries dating back to the Mithril Era, when magic was far more widespread before the Reckoning of Temekan. With this vast array of magical knowledge, it is no wonder that cloud giants are some of the most potent spellcasters of the true giants.
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Cloud giants are quite perceptive, able to spot threats from a great distance as they make dainty strides atop the clouds. Additionally, cloud giants have the ability to detect magic at will, which helps them discern arcane tricksters or magical forces with ease.
Civilization and Culture
Average Technological Level
Cloud giants are some of the most technologically advanced of the true giants, rivaling fire giants in their endless pursuit of more refined and impressive arcane creations. However, while fire giants focus on utility and the production of high-quality goods for practical purposes, cloud giant technology is often arcane in nature and designed to impress more than to be purely practical. The exception to this is their arcane hover technology, adapted from ancient giant sources to power their massive floating castles as they hover above the surface world.
Common Dress Code
The tradition of depicting Duris with a female or male mask has bled into cloud giant culture, with many cloud giant nobles concealing their faces beneath exquisite masks adorned with gold leaf, glittering gypsum, and precious stones. Each cloud giant has several of these masks, with each mask corresponding to a different emotional state. A cloud giant may change masks multiple times per day, as their mood shifts.
A mask is prized both for its material value and for its accuracy in expressing the mood it represents. Only the richest of cloud giants can afford the dozens of masks necessary to show all the subtle differences in emotion possible among their kind. Artisans who can sculpt and craft masks that meet the cloud giants' exacting standards in such matters are richly rewarded for their skill, and sometimes asked to live in a cloud giant's heavenly abode.
Culture and Cultural Heritage
Cloud giants are known for their race's seeming obsession with material wealth. Cloud giant families compete with one another in the hierarchy of the Ordning through lavish displays of wealth. Thus, cloud giants do not merely hoard wealth—they show it through presentation. Gold is only useful in so far as it can be melted down to make gold leaf decorations within their homes.
Another way cloud giant families display their wealth is through gift-giving. In fact, this practice of giving more and more ostentatious gifts is seen as a way of directly attacking one's rivals. Each gift given comes with the expectation that a similar gift of similar quality be given in time. No cloud giant truly believes that it's better to give than to receive; a family does so only with an eye toward how the giving can elevate its status. Some cloud giant families have bankrupted themselves or resorted to raiding mortal settlements in order to keep up with this violent form of generosity.
Duris's trickery also plays a role in this kind of "game," with the Ordning god of duality encouraging the giving of gifts that appear to be high-quality but are in fact not to be desired. However, if a cloud giant family is caught stooping to this tactic, they are shamed by other communities and placed in a position of having to redouble their gift-giving efforts.
Wealth also changes hands between cloud giants when they indulge their obsession for gambling and wagering. Cloud giants don't engage in betting for enjoyment; it is less a form of entertainment than a type of bloodless feud. No cloud giant is a good loser, and one would be aghast to hear someone else say, "I lost 40 pounds of gold, but I had a good time." Betting wars between families can go on for generations, with fortunes and estates (and the position in the ordning that goes with them) passing back and forth repeatedly. What a parent loses, a child hopes someday to win back, plus more; what the child wins back, a grandchild probably will eventually lose again. The tales that cloud giants tell of their ancestors are seldom about wars or magic or battles against dragons- they're about brilliant wagers won through boldness or deceit, and rival families brought to disgrace and ruin by the same.
History
Like all true giants, the story of the storm giants begins at the end of the Dawn Era, when the young god Jötu helped the deities of the Heavenly Council seal the Dread Dragoness Valdra within the Material Plane's Underdark during the War of the Dawn. Unlike these other deities, legend claims Jötu foresaw Valdra's escape from the Material Plane and a great conflict that would culminate in the end of the Holosian world as we know it. He established the Ordning, a way of life designed to prepare him and his children and his people, the giants, for this Twilight War. Each of his children took those giants that had stood with Jötu at the beginning and infused them with their own personalities, virtues, and flaws. Jötu's first child was Duris, a trickster and magician who then crafted the cloud giants in their image. Duris gave them their pride, their intellect, their cunning, and their prowess over the Script of magic.
Some claim the giants ruled a great kingdom in either the Dawn Era or the Mithril Era and that it splintered with the gods of the Ordning ascended to their planes to watch over the souls of those whom had passed on in the Time before Twilight. These theories are supported by reports of floating castles of cloud giants crafted from ancient technology beyond the scope of modern giants or mortals.
However, if such a kingdom existed in the Dawn Era, then it would stand to reason that the storm giants, and indeed all the true giants and their godly patrons, are far older than the other sentient races of Holos. They would have also been intimately connected with their deities in a way that contemporary cloud giants do not appear to be. It would also beg the question of where the remains of that mythic kingdom are or if they were entirely destroyed during the War of the Dawn. Some claim that those ruins ended up being incorporated into the great hovering castles of the cloud giants.
And while a giant kingdom existing during the Mithril Era is more plausible, questions of their contact with mortal communities, such as the powerful and semi-divine Temekanian Empire, crop up. Little written records of giants or giant communities can be found from that time, further complicating the hypothesis. Only oral histories from some social giant groups like the fire and stone giants affirm this idea, but these histories disagree on many important facts of the fabled kingdom. Many cloud giant scholars have coyly suggested they know the answer to such questions, or at least know parts of the story, but refuse to share it with mortal researchers without the payment of truly absurd fees.
Common Myths and Legends
Ever craving a good story, many legends among the cloud giants concern their patron and creator, Duris; the Heavenly Child. These stories often involve Duris fooling their siblings and also often refer to Duris as both a male and female deity. One tale explains that Duris was originally two deities that were merged into one. What remained was an entity who communicated it's gender at any given moment through a pair of masks, with the female mask being associated with Duris's more positive aspects, and the male mask being associated with Duris's more nefarious traits. Cloud giants revere both sides of Duris, though more benevolent and generous families will honor the female Duris and more ambitious or cutthroat families will favor a male Duris. This tradition of depicting Duris as a masked individual now informs much of cloud giant society, particularly the practice of concealing one's face and only showing emotion through the changing of various expressive and extravagant masks.
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
While storm giants are at the top of interracial giant society, their isolation means that the most respected giants most members of the Ordning encounter are the cloud giants. Cloud giants use their position to contract fire giants to build their castles, frost giants to raid their foes, and hill giants to serve as jesters in their lofty courts. Cloud giants sometimes seek out stone giants for their artistic skills but there is often friction between the two races. The patient, creative lifestyles of the stone giants often comes into conflict with the capricious, wealth-obsessed worldview of their cloud-dwelling cousins.
Just as mortal nobles an aerie for hawking, so do cloud giants keep gryffons, hippogriffs, giant eagles and owls, and wyverns as their own flying beasts of prey. Such creatures also patrol the cloud giants' gardens by night, along with trained predators such as owlbears and lions. Creatures owned by cloud giants are often exceptionally well-trained and well-bred creatures are used as status symbols and gifts among cloud giant families.
by Chris Rahn
Genetic Ancestor(s)
Origin/Ancestry
Giant
Lifespan
350-400 years
Average Height
5.5‒7.3 m (18-24 ft.)
Average Weight
2300 kg (5000 lbs)
Average Physique
Cloud giants are considered Huge creatures.
Body Tint, Colouring and Marking
Pale grey, almost translucent skin. Silver-blue hair. Brilliant white-grey eyes.
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