Jungle Giant

A jungle giant reaches 18 feet but just 3,000 pounds, remarkably slender for a giant, and females usually outgrow males. Wavy pale green hair and muddy yellow skin, the color of sunlight on the forest floor, help them vanish among upright trunks. They wear as little as possible to move freely, and many tribes add ritual tattoos, bright feather headdresses or filed teeth to look fierce. For especially big or wary game they daub themselves with mud, leaves and sticks. They may live 200 years.

Everything they own goes with them: weapon-making and repair tools, fire-starters and tinder, spare leather and sinew for mending, their valuables, and for every adult a quiver of arrows. They speak their own language plus those of neighboring human and humanoid tribes.

Their bows are 15 feet long and their arrows over 6 feet, dealing 2d6+9; even a creature strong enough to draw one could not use it with normal arrows. A jungle giant fires two arrows a round. A poisoned arrow leaves its target immobile for 2d6 turns unless it saves vs. paralyzation, with a -2 penalty. Occasionally they club foes with dead tree trunks for 2d8+9.

They love ambush, shooting from the canopy and then swinging down on stout vines or ropes to finish the prey. Camouflaging themselves or building a blind takes three turns and succeeds 60% of the time in jungle terrain, and camouflaged giants impose -1 on opponents' surprise rolls.

Strictly carnivorous, jungle giants are the terror of every forest animal and eat any meat at all, mammal, reptile, bird or amphibian, from eggs to adult beasts, carrion eaters to killers. One look at a village proves it: huts of wooden posts roofed with greased hides sewn together with gut, air thick with smoke and butchery, and clouds of insects. Half of all villages host 1d6 giant dragonflies.

They are friendlier than most giants and often team up with human jungle tribes, the giants supplying muscle and the humans supplying the many hands and know-how to herd game into a trap.

Most creatures are simply prey to them, but fellow hunters of any size earn their respect as equals. When a band grows too large for its patch of jungle, it moves onto the savanna and devours whatever elephants, ostriches, warthogs, big cats, antelope and snakes it finds, but their height makes stalking in the open hard, so many drift back to the forest. A single band can hunt a vast stretch of forest empty before it moves elsewhere.