Giants

Tell me about the Giants of your setting, Veeky Forums, I'm looking for inspiration.

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They're big guys.

I've got Laestrygonians.

Laestrygonians are a rough race of ugly, brutal giants who are always angry and looking for things to pummel with their fists. When goblin explorers first arrived at their island, they were quickly caught and eaten, and the same thing happened to the second goblin expedition. Number two is a holy number for goblins, so this meant war. The goblin-laestrygonian conflict lasted a couple of years and resulted in subjugation of the giants, as much as this dim race of cannibals can be subjugated at all.

These days, goblins use laestrygonians as highly valuable giant slaves throughout their empire: they're used to power up the goblin machines with force, in construction of monumental buildings and structures that goblins are so fond of, as living siege weapons and in many other ways. Laestrygonian slaves are almost always bound in lots of chains and bondage in case they get a stupid idea and whipped into compliance by a taskmaster who usually sits in a howdah on the giant's hunched back.

All laestrygonians are all rough, brutal and permanently angry, they spend their entire lives looking for fights and will punch inanimate objects if they can't find one. They are so unstable that even the most ridiculous things make them rage, such as a butterfly sitting on their nose or a cloud blocking the sunshine - a story is recorded of a laestrygonian who got so pissed that he kept hurling giant rocks at a cloud that angered him with shape for hours before the cloud went away naturally.

They look like exceptionally ugly giant humans with very pale skin, usually bearing several deformities such as humps or swollen limbs. This led goblin scientists to believe that they may be the descendants of the last fomorians who managed to escape their massacre by the proto-goblins, or at least their children whose ships wrecked on their home isle; this is very ironic if true, for in this case the masters became slaves to their former servants.

Giants in my settings, tend to come in all shapes and sizes.

First of all, we have the "demigiants" (also known as "False giant" or "Small giants"), which are all the kind of giants that are between 8 and 15 feet tall. These kind of giants, unless they are particularly aggressive, are more likely to live in civilized societies with other races without many issues.
Then we enter the category of giants. These big buggers, may range between 15 and 100 feet of height, and usually are aggressive and do not consider humans and similar "smaller" races at their level, mostly seeing them as "smart vermins" of sort. This makes them sort of isolationists. Very few of them are actually benevolent, and will follow with curiosity what "the small ones" are up to. They are usually seen as weirdos from their communities.
Then, we reach the titans. These beings are giants of divine origin, that are around 100 and 150 feet tall. Their personality, is mostly derived from which kind of divine origin they had. Overall they tend to be good, but rarely they meddle with the affairs of mortals.
Lastly, we reach the biggest of the bunch: the Primordial Giants. Extremely rare , unaging, genderless giants that are so big that they might count as landscape. They usually don't care about any creature, or society and so on, and they are content to pass their lives contemplating existence. Time passes much faster in their eyes. If someone manages to grab the attention of said creature (and he's bored enough), it might be willing to do things that do not involve much involvement on his side, like reworking a bit the landscape with his fingers and such things. They don't really get involved in wars or anything that cause trouble.

I just mostly have the megalithic ruins of the Giants, and isolated groups of giants. Dwarves are either like maggots or lice to Giants, wherever a Giant is or was, so to are Dwarves.

The legends of the wars between Dragons and Giants can be interpreted as truth, or as an allegorical tale of the perseverance of the warm-blooded mammals over the cold-blooded reptilians of the Time Before.

History is full of kaiju battles.

I've always wanted to ask one of the guys who make a ton of variations for every race in their setting: how often do any of them actually come into play?
I'm not making fun of your decision, I'm curious.

Frankly, not too often. But they do come around, either as background info, plot hooks, and NPCs.
I leave the exploration of fluff to the players, and I'm willing to share any non-plot-related fluff info if they ask.
Of course, this means that a lot of my material goes to waste, but it was going to waste anyway, as I have the habit to give backgrounds even to the most basic NPCs that pops in the background, and create sidequests for all the places the PCs walk in.
In the current campaign I'm running, the party encountered at least 5 kinds of "demigiants" so far, and the animated skeleton of a "normal" giant, to make an example. I don't think they'll ever meet the other two categories though.

Giant elementally infused semi-humanoids kinda a mix of panda, silver back gorilla, and hippo.

t. King of Manlets

>Dwarves are like lice to Giants
Now I'm imagining entire dwarf societies living in the beards and hair of a giant like this

I am stealing this idea. I am stealing this so hard.

Unless you run a comic setting, this is going to feel really stupid.

I want to make the Giants in my setting civilized like ones from old fairy tales like jack and the beanstalk. They'll live in feudal societies, and will be neutral and uninterested in small races. They don't have much reason to interact with them at least in trade since they don't need human sized goods and vice versa

1d4chan.org/wiki/On_the_Backs_of_Gods

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Thanks giant to try to help us but you shouldn't use an human computer for that, your fingers are too big.

depending on you

Ancient fey created the first of the Giants to protect the northern reaches of their homeland. Their first experiments were imperfect, leading to the creation of trolls and other sorts of giant monsters. Once they got it right, the Giant used similar magics to create kin for himself and now they dwell mainly in the mountains under his castle.

They're huge, they're usually attractive, they eat people whenever they want and are generally hunted by all of the nations in the world who seek their extermination to be rid of this monstrous predatory menace.

They're also the PCs

Mostly dead sadly. Only the dwarves know how to find the last of them, and the dwarves aren't telling. I, however, can tell you that they're currently enslaved by certain dwarven clans. The enslaved giants are the cause of massive infighting between the dwarven city-states which will probably lead to open war if the players fuck about too much.

In my setting, giants are the offspring of the titans, and want to conquer the world for the glory of their gods. As one the race is unified and at least partially organized. Ogres are a slave race inbred from the offspring of hill giants and a captured royal family, so every ogre in the world qualifies as having royal blood.

One nation trains them to obey a handler on their shoulder and use staff slings, The tactical effect is having a fast siege tower with a mangonel on top.

They also use two giant-handler teams together to load and fire trebuchets very quickly for human standards.

Said nation is greco-roman-saxon, so "it seems like it was built by giants" is literal for their temples, polis and walls.

Guys, remember the dwarfs were maggots feasting on Ymir flesh.

Here between us, as said flesh became the earth, I always took it to mean it as symbolism of their mining and skill with metals.

Hmm... a dwarven society which follows the idea that digging and fashioning metals is akin to decomposing the mineral flesh of their god into new life... Father-Earth provides us with tools and civilization...

They were some of the first creations formed by the Maker, each one handcrafted and shaped into an embodiment of primordial perfection. After the Maker vanished from the world, the Giants and Dragons warred over who would be the new craftsman of creation, and ultimately both suffered terrible losses. After centuries of wars between their human slave-built kingdoms and subsequently being hunted down after the rebellions, they are few and far between, each one knowing that their death means their final end: there is no afterlife for them, no reincarnation like the mortal races, simply oblivion. In the hidden places of the world they still work, working on secret projects or mostly keeping to themselves. Most people now think of giants as the degenerate cousins known as Hill Giants who are leftovers of crossbreeding gone horribly wrong.

In the system we're currently playing, virtually all of the magical races fucked off from Middengard after the Gods made humans again, because the last time the did that things went right to hell.
However, some gates between the other realms and the realm of man do still stand, and some of the other races still use them. Most of them are young by the standards of their races, which means that most of them are essentially rebellious teenagers going through a Middengard phase. The giants are a particular problem, they mostly live in the far north and wander out of the wastes now and then to try and kick over our goddamn City Wall, probably in an attempt to do some youthful vandalism.

Giants are not a specific race but rather individuals whose inner demons consumed their personality. This extends to races beyond humans and as such there is aesthetic and sociological differences among giants of similar heritage based on their ethnic start point. Furthermore, the inner demon which consumed the humanity of the individual affects their classification. As such they follow this pattern

>Ogres/Giant-Kin
Self-interested Neutrality/Opportunists
Cowardice

>Lesser Giants
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Wrath

>Middling Giants
Heresy
Violence - Against Neighbours
Violence - Against Self
Violence - Against Gods, Art, Nature
Fraud - Panderers/Seducers
Fraud - Flatterers
Fraud - Simoniacs
Fraud - False Prophets/Diviners
Fraud - Barrators
Fraud - Hypocrites
Fraud - Thieves
Fraud - Counsellors of Fraud
Fraud - Sowers of Discord
Fraud - Falsifiers

>Greater Giants
Treachery - Against Kindred
Treachery - Against Country
Treachery - Against Guests
Treachery - Against Lords/Gods/Benefactors

>Ascended Giants
Giant Demigods/Demon Princes/Gods etc., usually epic CR encounters

Gladiator Aztec mercenaries, if they lived in Russia.

The Yotan Solar warriors are a frequently employed auxiliary force in Culminate armies. They are few in number on the battlefield, thought whether this is because of the nature of their tithes or the disposition of their race as a whole is not known to outsiders. Of all the races of man they grow the tallest, to heights of 8 to 10 feet, and their physical fortitude and stoic attitude sees them deployed by their masters wherever the fighting is harshest.

The Yotan are a pre-industrial people that see mass wars as an emulation of their mythic stories, where elemental and abstract opposites battle for control of the world - Spring against Winter, Day against Night, Truth against Deceit. To that effect they go to war in ferocious masks that allow them to channel the persona of their chosen abstract. Typically this will be a variance of the virtue of forceful patience, for the spirits of Yotan folklore, in spite of their might, will be engaged in their conflicts for eternity.
The Yotan warrior fights trance-like under his mask, as if in a dream - to shatter it awakens them into an inhuman fury.

While officially armed with typical field gear, including specialist weaponry, the Yotan without difference carry massive round shields, decorated with feathers and emblazoned with an intricate motif of seven rivers, representing the seven cosmic tribulations their first ancestors braved to first come to their native lands. This was mistaken for a sun motif by Culminate officials documenting the peoples of their Empire, and the Yotan have been dubbed Warriors of the sun ever since.

Depends on which setting you're asking about

In one that I was fond of, of giants are unique because they weren't created by the gods. They were more akin to elementals given life by the creation throes of the world. As such, giants became the enemies of all of the races the gods created (humans and elves). They did have some religion and venerate/worshiped notable ancestors (the first husband and wife, the first necromancer, etc.) They also had throny relationships with the fey because Titania the giant queen was a pure waifu who died of sorry because Oberron the fey king was an asshole.