Frost Giant
Frost giants, or ymira, are a race of true giants and the chosen people of the Ordning god Thenn. They are known for their brutish and violent societies of reavers and their devoted efforts to bring about the Era of Twilight.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Frost giants stand at or around the same heights as their soot-skinned cousins, the fire giants, and are often compared to them as mirrored species. Their hair and beards range in coloration between white, grey, and pale blue and often are matted with frost or even clattering icicles. Their skin, too, appears deep blue like the wall of a glacier. Their eyes are typically bright blue or white and shine like snow crystals in the sun.
This unique morphology likely is the result of their unique biology of thermoregulation. Frost giants have a much lower internal body temperature than most other creatures, likely an adaptation caused not by natural selection but by arcane or divine meddling within their genetic code. Anything warmer than the body of a freshly killed elk feels like a flame to them, and they avoid warmer climates as a result.
Genetics and Reproduction
Over the course of their lives, frost giants typically bear no more than three children. The gestation period of frost giants typically lasts between three and a half to four years. Most child-rearing duties are handled by the elderly of both sexes, not solely by females.
Growth Rate & Stages
Frost giants mature much faster than other true giants—an adaptation that serves them well in their brutish society and reaving culture. Frost giants reach sexual maturity by age forty and are usually considered full adults by this age as well. Male frost giants grow facial hair beginning at age thirty, but their famously long frigid beards do not truly appear until they reach middle age, around a seventy-five years old. Elderly frost giants usually end up at the bottom of a clan's hierarchy, and so many frost giants seek to die in battle rather than fall to such a lowly position.
Ecology and Habitats
Frost giants dwell in high, snow-capped peaks and glacial rifts where the sun hides its golden head by winter. Their low internal body temperature means that warm, dry environments can spell dehydration or death very quickly and so in seasonal climates, they must constantly move along with changes in temperature.
Frost giants are also accomplished swimmers and sailors and so often live near frozen coastlines or one floating icebergs. Coastal frost giant communities often have a culture that supports more advanced crafting so they can continually repair their vessels after naval warfare.
Dietary Needs and Habits
Living in cold, polar climates means that frost giants cannot grow crops. They are nominally omnivorous, gladly eating the stolen grain or mead of a mortal village, but in their natural environment, they are more often carnivorous. Additionally, frost giants do not have a culture of herding wild animals, and so usually hunt or forage for their food rather than raise it themselves. Frost giants do not cook their meat and usually let it freeze before consuming it, as the warmth of a fresh kill disrupts their digestion.
Biological Cycle
Frost giants are often migratory, moving into warmer, seasonal climates when winter arrives and their bodies can survive better in the frigid temperatures. During these winters, they raid mortal settlements but then return with the spring thaw to places where the cold lasts year round. Frost giants also often migrate during blizzards or other winter storms, both to cloak their approach as well as to impede their foes.
Additional Information
Social Structure
Frost giants typically live in clans consisting of several family groups. The clan is led by a jarl, or noble warrior, whom is chosen through a trial of strength. Any member of the clan can challenge the sitting leader for their position by declaring a moot. Challenges of a moot can include such activities as stone throwing, drinking contests, wrestling matches, or actual trials by combat. Tasks are assigned by the jarl according to the strength of a frost giant, with those members with the greatest strength getting the highest honors of reaving and defending the jarl as their thane.
Geographic Origin and Distribution
Frost giants are found at the poles of Holos and in places of extreme cold. They migrate into more temperate climates during the colder months, often moving with blizzards. Permanent populations of frost giants include the Varangian Range and Bluefrost Mountains, the Basceron, the Wolfstone Archipelago, Rhapalkan, the Khaghat Steppe, and the Haunted Drift of Teroa. Some have reported populations of frost giants residing in the Frostfell, a thin place located between the Elemental Plane of Air and Elemental Plane of Water. Followers of the Ordning also claim that all dead frost giants go to Thengaard, the realm of their patron deity to prepare for the Era of Twilight.
Average Intelligence
Frost giants recognize the intelligence of others and have great respect for it. However, their stringent, martial culture's prohibition on many of the hallmarks of intellectualism causes many mortals to consider them dumb or bestial. In reality, frost giants have the same relative intelligence as most mortals, including humans.
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Frost giants are highly perceptive hunters and warriors, remaining on guard whenever they leave their icy strongholds. They are proficient in perception and can spot prey from long distances without much assistance. Additionally, their eyes are adapted to the blinding snow of the polar regions, negating the "sun-blindness" many other animals incur when traveling through these regions.
Civilization and Culture
Gender Ideals
The hierarchy of a frost giant community is determined by strength and strength alone, and there is no difference in physical prowess between the genders of frost giants. It is considered highly maug, or dishonorable, to attack or challenge a pregnant female, even to improve one's standing, just as it would be to attack a frost giant as it slept.
Average Technological Level
Frost giants cannot stand the head of a forge and so have no concept of metalworking. However, they are adept at adapting mortal inventions to their own needs. They make their clothing from the skins and bones of beasts, and carve bone or ivory into jewelry and the handles of weapons and tools. They reuse the weapons and armor of their smaller foes, stringing shields into scale armor and lashing sword blades to wooden hafts to make giant-sized spears. The greatest battle trophies come from conquered dragons, and the greatest frost giant jarls wear armor of dragon scales or wield picks and mauls made of a dragon's teeth or claws.
Common Dress Code
To show proof of their superiority, frost giants keep and display trophies of their victims. Mammoth tusks, gryphon beaks, and manticore tails adorn the walls of frost giant lairs. Formidable humanoid enemies are memorialized in trophies, too, but only rarely do giants put the heads or bodies on display. A human hero's greatsword or a wizard's staff is a more appropriate trophy in such cases.
A frost giant's armor and weapons are as much a record of its battle honors as its trophy collection is, for those who know how to read the signs. Notches carved into the haft of a weapon show the number and type of foes it has brought down. Horns, feathers, claws, and tusks affixed to helmets and armor serve as decorations commemorating the giant's greatest feats of strength.
Common Customs, Traditions and Rituals
Most mortals know frost giants from their reputation as savage raiders, driven by blizzards and religious zealotry. Inns and taverns suffer the brunt of the damage, their cellars gutted and their casks of ale and mead gone. Smithies are likewise toppled, their iron and steel claimed. Curiously undisturbed are the houses of moneylenders and wealthy citizens, for the reavers have little use for coins or baubles. This has caused some mortal societies to come to the flawed conclusion that those individuals work with the frost giants or have some evil pact with the forces that drive frost giants. In reality, frost giants know that few mortal villages contain jewels large or worthy enough to be worn by a ymir.
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 third child was Thenn, a dark god of hunger and death. From the moment of Thenn's birth, Jötu saw that the child-god would come to be the instrument by which the Era of Twilight would come about. Though Jötu's wife, Vaynera counseled against it, the Allfather cast Thenn out, fearing that he would grow too powerful if the Frozen Son was allowed to come of age in the hallowed realm of Ysgaard. Thenn was exiled to a far realm of inhospitable ice, terrible monsters, and forgotten sorcery. This became the realm of Thengaard, and the young Thenn came to resent his father and his siblings and their people for sending him, the strongest of the children of Jötu, to die alone. Thenn did not die, but grew stronger still, harnessing the Old Magic of this frozen prison to create his children, the frost giants. He gave them his strength, his resolve, his ambition, and his hunger for revenge.
All who believe in the Tale of Twilight hate and fear Thenn, for they know that it is because of his scheming and villainy that the Twilight will come to pass. It is said that each year, the bindings of his frozen prison melt by one drop, and one day he will emerge to reap every soul to feed his demonic army. Frost giants see the release of Thenn to be their moment of greatness, when the rest of the Ordning will see their true potential and bow before them. They believe that through the spread of chaos and bloodshed in Thenn's name, they accelerate the Era of Twilight's coming and so their every waking moment is spent preparing to bring about the end of the Material Plane—as opposed to attempting to slow its approach, like the other giant races of the Ordning.
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
Frost giants dominate wild creatures both as evidence of their strength and to use them as hunting companions. They don't, however, have much grasp of animal husbandry, so their "pets" are bullied and beaten into submission more than they're trained. When a frost giant commands a beast to attack, its less a command than an acknowledgment to the creature that the giant won't beat it for satisfying its hunger. A creature that proves willful or that resists "training" is fated to end up on the giant's dinner table.
The roster of creatures in a frost giant lair can include polar bears, winter wolves, and mammoths, but the giants' most prized living possessions are remorhazes. Adult remorhazes are untrainable by anything short of powerful magical compulsion, but one taken as an egg can be trained as it is raised. In fact, remorhaz hatchlings are surprisingly pliant to the frost giants' manner of teaching by bullying.
by Chris Rahn
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