Giant [Birthright]

Most giants of the continent keep to the wilderness and want only to be left alone. Hill giants roam the northern downs and foothills, lonelier and more neutral than their kin elsewhere. Mountain giants are bigger and stronger. Stone giants, deeply bound to elemental rock, hide on the most unreachable peaks, and a scattering of storm giants holds the rocky shores. Fomorians, called fhoimoriens here, haunt bleak marshes and woods and, alone among the giants, love to raid their neighbors. Two kinds are found nowhere else: forest giants and ice giants.

Deep in the oldest woods, far from any village, the forest giant stands watch. It looks like a living, gnarled trunk: bark-rough skin, a heavy mane of dark leaves, a long beard and fingers and toes like roots. It often roots itself into the soil and sleeps for years.

It fights with a single crushing fist blow. It can talk with animals and plants at will (speak with animals, speak with plants). Once a turn it can cast entangle, and once a day each it can use wall of thorns, hold monster, hold plant and call woodland beings. Fire is its weakness, dealing 1 extra point per die.

Patient and hard to provoke, forest giants often help adventurers who serve nature, but anyone who fells, burns or fouls their forest gets no mercy.

Cruel and spiteful, ice giants live among northern glaciers and peaks. They need snow and ice to survive, so summer drives them onto the pack ice, where they brood over plans to spread their frozen realm. In shape they recall frost giants, but their bodies are armored in rime and jagged shards.

Touching one calls for a save vs. spell; failure means 1d4 cold damage and 1 point of Strength numbed away for an hour. Their thrown iceballs hit for 2d10, then burst for 1d10 cold damage to everyone within 5 feet, and anyone caught must save vs. spell or suffer the same numbing effect as touching the giant. Once per turn an ice giant may cast fog cloud, and once per day one of cone of cold, ice storm or wall of ice. Once a day it can also conjure an elemental, always an icy water elemental that serves loyally and never turns on its maker.

When winter comes they leave their frozen strongholds to raid the human lands of the north, and in the bitterest years they push past the mountain ranges farther south.