Fire Giant
Fire giants, or hyrrokkin, are a monstrous race of true giant and the chosen people of the Ordning goddess Frothga. They are famed for their industrious and domineering nature, which manifests in their mighty geothermal strongholds and militaristic society.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Fire giants are of middling height for true giants, though this still means they regularly grow to over 17 feet tall. Their skin appears to reflect their industrious nature, ranging from dark iron-grey to a deep soot or ash coloration. While smooth at first, the ever-taxing work and warlike environments fire giants thrive in leaves them with many blisters, calluses, and scars. Their reddish-orange hair too, evokes their fiery heritage. Overtime, fire giant hair actually burns off and their scalp becomes wreathed in flame that gives the impression of billowing flames or smoke. Fire giant eyes even seem to glow, as if they were merely windows into a chamber alight with flame. Interestingly, fire giant bones incorporate many aspects of igneous rock, including porous pumice like sections in their upper body—perhaps to lighten their massive physiques—and obsidian like skulls made of blackened bone. Fire giants have exceptionally high internal body temperature, just six degrees shy of the boiling point of water. In order to maintain that temperature, fire giants must continually exercise and live in artificially hot conditions like geothermal fissures or buildings warmed by coal-fed furnaces.
Genetics and Reproduction
Over the course of their long lives, fire giants typically bear no more than three children. The gestation period of fire giants typically lasts between three and a half to four years. In most fire giant societies, both male and female fire giants work in the foundries and fight on the battlefield, meaning that the task of child-rearing is often left to the lowliest fire giant in the community, or even slaves.
Growth Rate & Stages
Fire giants can live for centuries, and their tradition of armored combat means that even a lifetime of warfare does not necessarily mean a shorter life. Fire giants reach sexual maturity around seventy-five years old, but by age fifty, they are considered full adults within most fire giant societies. Overtime, the skin of a fire giant grows less and less polished, and covered in pockmarks, scars, and calluses. By the beginning of their last century, most fire giants have lost their reddish-orange hair, with it being replaced by a mane of actual fire and smoke.
Ecology and Habitats
Fire giants are most comfortable in places with warm temperatures. This often means areas with access to geothermal activity, such as lava floes, volcanoes, or thermal vents. The desire to live in and around areas of geothermal activity often results in fire giants building settlements within volcanic craters, lava tubes, or even the vein-like magma chambers of the Underdark. However, fire giants are not an inherently chthonic species, and many have adapted to other environments with the help of their technological advancements. These fire giants rely on the mining and burning of coal or the clear-cutting and burning of timber in order to maintain their internal body temperature. When they have to venture beyond the warmth of their fires, they do so dressed in warm furs and armors that retain heat.
Dietary Needs and Habits
Fire giants are omnivorous, consuming vast amounts of grain and meat. Because of their sedentary communities and their abhorrence to agriculture, fire giants usually employ serfs and slaves to farm and breed livestock. Fire giant cuisine is usually roasted, steamed, or cooked over open flame. Fire giants do also need a large amount of iron, ash, and salt in their diet in order to maintain the health of their igneous bone structures, and so much of a fire giant's meal is coated in mineral seasonings and burnt black.
Additional Information
Social Structure
Fire giants live in the largest communities of all the true giants. This is because, in addition to the large number of fire giants in any given kingdom or lordship, fire giants almost always keep a substantial population of mortal slaves or serfs whom are tasked with the business of providing the community with large amounts of food. They aren't overly cruel masters, but neither are they particularly kind- they are uncaring about their slaves, because slaves aren't giants, and there are always more to be had if the supply runs low.
Most creatures that fire giants capture are put to work in the giants' mines or on surface farms the giants claim as part of their domain. Even master crafters of other races are consigned to unskilled labor, because so few of them have talents the fire giants consider "skilled." Only creatures that have skills the fire giants need but
don't practice (because they aren't valued in fire giant society), such as accounting, brewing, and medicine, are allowed to continue plying their trades.
Skilled slaves receive better treatment, at least in the sense that an owner uses less force with a delicate tool, but as a rule fire giants view humans in much the same way that humans view horses: they have utility if properly directed, and some might be prized for rare qualities, but even the smartest, best trained horse isn't a person. That said, it's not unheard of for a fire giant to "consult with" a slave physician when they fall ill, or with a slave engineer right before beginning a difficult stage of tunnel excavation. (Such a consultation would only be to ensure that the right tools and materials are on hand for the excavation, not to solicit a second opinion on the
giant's personal assessment of the structure's integrity.)
Giants that stand low in the hierarchy are assigned to manage slaves and mining operations. Excavating mine shafts and digging out ore is important work, but smelting and metalwork are valued more highly than effort spent keeping a tunnel from collapsing on slaves.
Fire giants typically organize themselves into clans which then live under a single king or lord. A clan's position within the kingdom's hierarchy is usually determined by a combination of skill in the forging of weapons and the making of war. As such, it is just as likely to find a fire giant king that attained their status through the production of expert armors and jewelry as it is to find one that won their title through war. Master artisans, architects, and engineers select the best disciples to pass their knowledge on to, along with their standing. Often pupils are children or siblings of their teachers, but that's not always so.
Geographic Origin and Distribution
Fire giants are found throughout Holos, largely in places with access to seismic activity. They have been recorded in the northern Placidian-side of the Basceron near Gildenvein, parts of the Bluefrost Mountains, the Shattered Strait, and the Mazabar Highlands. Large populations are also said to reside along the magma rivers of the Underdark, as well as in the Elemental Plane of Fire.
Average Intelligence
Fire giants are reasonably intelligent among other giantkin, with strong memories and the ability to quickly learn new skills. Fire giant crafters work through insight and experience rather than writing or arithmetic. Though most fire giants place little worth on such frivolousness they sometimes keep slaves at court who are versed in such skills. Little information is ever physically recorded, though fire giants to place importance in oral histories and songs, as they tell the story of a clan's triumphs and lessons to be learned from their failures.
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Fire giants are highly attuned to their surroundings—an important adaptation for such a bellicose race. They are highly proficient in perception, even staying slightly on guard while smithing.
Civilization and Culture
Beauty Ideals
A unique form of art that some fire giants produce involves manipulating magma as it cools, forming it into fantastical, one-of-a-kind shapes. The most striking of these works are collected and displayed inside the stronghold, not unlike how other cultures create topiary gardens.
Average Technological Level
Fire giants are some of Holos's premier metalworkers, smiths, and metal-focused artisans. Their massive suits of blackened plate armor are famed for their durability and resistance to the elements, making them highly sought after among adventurers and collectors alike. Fire giants don't spend a lot of time crafting works of art, although they would maintain that all of their feats of metalworking and engineering are themselves forms of artistic expression. Beyond such accomplishments, true artwork is scarce among fire giants, and most of what exists is jewelry, made from gems and ore that they mine and then refine.
Common Customs, Traditions and Rituals
From birth, a fire giant is taught to embrace a legacy of war. At the cradle, their parents chant songs of battle. As children, fire giants play at war, hurling igneous rocks at one another across the banks of magma rivers. In later years, formal martial training becomes an integral part of life in the giants' fortresses and underground realms of smoke and ash.
The fire giants' songs are odes of battles lost and won, while their dances are martial formations of pounding feet that resound like smiths' hammers throughout their
smoky halls.
Just as fire giants pass down their knowledge of crafting from generation to generation, their renowned fighting prowess comes not from wild fury but from endless discipline and training. Enemies make the mistake of underestimating fire giants based on their brutish manner, learning too late that these giants live for combat and can be shrewd tacticians. However, fire giants lack a greater understanding to engage in prolonged conflict. This, along with their anatomical need to maintain their high body temperatures with access to immobile heat sources, keeps them from becoming a truly unstoppable, conquering force.
History
Like all true giants, the story of the fire 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 second child was Frothga, a stern goddess of smiths and warriors who then crafted the fire giants in her image. Frothga gave them their discipline, their cruelty, their steady hands and strong arms, and their prowess over the fire and metalwork.
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 fire 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 fire 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.
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.
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
Fire giants raise and train hell hounds as war dogs, and they sometimes persuade human wizards (free or enslaved) to harness fire elementals as guardians for their strongholds. Some allow trolls to roam free in rarely used parts of their fortresses, serving as perimeter guards of a sort. Trolls require little maintenance, able to survive on the fire giants' scraps and on dead slaves; they're tough enough to deter most intruders; and their susceptibility to fire makes them easy to dispatch should their populations grow out of control.
by Chris Rahn
Genetic Ancestor(s)
Origin/Ancestry
Giant
Lifespan
250-300 years
Average Height
5.56-5.76 m (18.3-18.11 ft.)
Average Weight
601.5-873.6 kg (1326-1926 lbs)
Average Physique
Fire giants are considered Huge creatures.
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