Wild Hunt Studios » History of the Giants

History of the Giants

The giants were the great-and-noble race of the Rebirth, learned and wise, valuing wisdom and order. They become diplomats and councilors and kings, ruling over and advising other races of the Rebirth. Many of them spawned legends and religious orders dedicated to the principles or ideas they espoused and, in time, would become known as the “lost gods” of Athas, after the Cleansing Wars had swept through the land and history become fractured myth and embellished legend based on nearly forgotten lore.

The noble giants were betrayed from within by Rajaat’s forces: humans in the noble courts were seduced by the War-bringer to believe the giants were dictators and despots, and that men should rightfully rule, not giants. Thus giantish diplomats and councilors were carefully manipulated into disfavor and criminal controversy, or quietly assassinated.

But the giants were not fools, and it was they who named Rajaat “the War-bringer”, for they saw the pattern of his plans clearly, though the warnings of their prophets and ambassadors went unheeded by the other races until far too late thanks to the manipulations of Rajaat and the selfish greed of humanity.

Multi-racial rebellions against the rule of giants led by men drove the noble families into hidden places where they cut impregnable citadels from the rock and guarded their borders carefully. Thus, when given the task of their eradication, Dregoth did not so much make war against the giants, but turned insidious sorceries against them in an attempt to destroy their kind from within.

Before descending into the madness of the metamorphosis he pursued, and becoming consumed with his own change and power, Dregoth created a spell that was meant to transform all the giants of the land, mutating them and merging them with the wild pets they kept, turning their kind into savages and destroying their race through conflict that they could not use walls to defend against, by destroying their ability to breed true.

Dregoth’s spell both succeeded and failed.

Many giants changed into or were born as savage beast-headed creatures (or worse), their intellect and wisdom replaced in favor of instinct and nature. These creatures fought both the true giants and their own kind, and eventually began to breed, while those few giant families left unaffected by the plague fled into far mountains and valleys and to distant lost isles, where they struggled merely to survive, their advanced culture devolving into simplistic hunting-and-gathering.

The Great Library of the Giants

A place rumored to hold all the lost wisdom of the ancient world, this ruin stands nearly buried in a vast, waterless stretch of flat desert cursed by vicious and often deadly sandstorms and wind funnels. It is said to be guarded by a strange, beast-headed giant with snapping claws instead of hands and a dark maroon skin as hard as stone.

Some tales say the beast can speak and tells confusing tales of what must have been wondrous or terrible things past. These tales also tell that the strange, forlorn sounds carried by the wind across hundreds of miles of empty desert, and the distant sighs sometimes heard to drift subtly across the vast open land, are ghostly echoes of the giant race’s maddened wailing and weeping at their fate and the folly of man.

Other tales speak of this giant’s mindless and unpredictable fury, stirring up the sands and winds into deadly storms. Curious listeners seeking the source of the Giant’s Song are led to their doom by it, swallowed by sandstorms, sinkholes, and hungry cracks that open in the earth, often with the giant’s hungry maw waiting behind it all to devour them.