Goliaths

Powerfully built and of great strength, the goliaths served alongside the orcs as the military class of the Tarijan Empire before the Calamity. However, where the orcs left to find a new life across the seas, for reasons long forgotten, the goliaths remained in the shattering lands of Tarija. Centuries of harsh life allowed the goliaths to adapt to the barren circumstances they found themselves in, creating a culture-wide disposition towards blunt speech and pragmatism. Nothing goes to waste in a goliath society - to be wasteful is to invite death to your doorstep, as a popular adage goes. Proud and resourceful, the goliath consider themselves to be the inheritors of the Tarijan Empire, preserving many aspects of life and culture that the orcs, humans, and even the elves and dwarves had long abandoned. Despite the embracing of Tarijan culture, a distinct undercurrent of resentment and indignancy remains present in goliath society, a bitterness which has divided goliath culture.
The Karakan goliaths favour the preservation of Tarijan customs, going so far as to take up the clothing and architecture of their former masters. Karakan goliaths are overweeningly proud, often refusing to sully their hands with work they perceive to be below them. This is possible largely because of the small size of their population, and the preservation of service automatons created by the Tarijan magisters long ago. Without this need to work, Karakan goliaths have become introspective, viewing the world from high on their lofty mountain perch and finding it lacking.
In contrast, the Lunduk goliaths have adopted only the most useful of Tarijan customs, violently rejecting all others as antithetical to the goliath spirit. Fiercely nativist and fueled still by the longstanding grudge against the magisters, Lunduk goliaths are passionate and brutal, exemplified by their enslavement of their former masters in an act of bitter revenge. A highly militarised society, the Lunduk goliaths rely on force of arms to intimidate their much larger slave population, who carry out the bulk of the labour and toil. Yet memory runs deep, and the Lunduk goliaths fear nothing more than a revolt from their slaves, as they once revolted in the distant past. As such, their society has developed a marked ruthlessness that has started to seep into their very behaviour.
Goliaths speak Lunduki or Karakan depending on whether they inhabit the Lunduk Hills or the Karakan mountain. Though they originally spoke a Runic language, millennia of influence has rendered its traces barely noticeable, with Lunduki and Karakan being almost entirely Elven in lexicon.