Crag Giant

Crag giants reach 25 feet, with heavy black hair, craggy human faces, and skin the gray or brown of weathered stone. People call them the Lonely Giants. They share the savage streak of the desert world's giants, though less fiercely than the beasthead kind. Most are chaotic good, and other chaotic outlooks are common. Among themselves they speak their own language, and nearly all also use an old-fashioned form of the common tongue.

Strength 24 gives them +8 damage. Up close they slash with jagged stone daggers (2d6); at range they hurl rocks up to 250 yards for 2d10. Many are clerics devoted to elemental air, which is where their legend as lightning-throwers comes from.

Thousands of years ago their forebears ruled a range of storm-wracked mountains. Old tales say they came out during thunderstorms to dance in the downpour and toss lightning bolts back and forth, living with wild delight.

Then the psionic overlords of a hidden city-state began reshaping the region, walling it away from the wider world to shield a hidden inland sea from runaway magic. The giants were told to move to a reservation on a solitary jungle-topped mesa or be wiped out. Facing that power, they went. They have never adjusted. Their numbers shrink year by year, extinction looms, and the one goal that keeps them going is vengeance against the overlords.

The mesa's jungle feeds them well with plants and game, and they add some seafood. Abundance has not saved them; even after millennia they feel uprooted from their mountains, and the race keeps fading.