Storm Giant
The storm giants, or alvadis (sing: alvadi) are a race of true giants favored by the Ordning god Jötu. The storm giants are the largest of the true giants and in the Ordning culture and religion, they are placed at the top of the giants' interracial social hierarchy. They also are the rarest of the giants, isolating themselves from the mortal races and living in rain-cloaked fortresses floating on and beneath the ocean waves.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Storm giants are the largest of the giant races and perhaps one of the largest intelligent creatures to inhabit Holos. In many ways, they resemble the prototypical tetrapodal or humanoid body plan. Their skin ranges in coloration from pale, purple-grey to deep violet while their hair varies from silvery grey to blue-black. They typically grow to about twenty-six feet tall and are known for their emerald-blue eyes that seem to flash from the low angle of the average mortal.
Genetics and Reproduction
Storm giants are isolationist by nature, and so rarely interact with one another except to compare signs or omens and to engage in a rare courtship. After mating, female storm giants carry their young for up to five years, one of the longest gestation periods among all the mortal and monstrous races. Like most mammalian creatures, storm giants give live birth to a single child. Twins are exceptionally uncommon and seen as a mysterious and often grim omen. Over the course of their long lives, storm giants sire no more than three offspring.
Growth Rate & Stages
Storm giant parents remain together to raise a child to maturity before parting in search of their former isolationist lives. Storm giants can easily reach half a millennia in age, with some individuals living as long as seven centuries. Storm giants reach sexual maturity after a century, which means that most storm giants sire no more than three offspring and often far fewer if they feel their time better spent peering into the future for signs of coming the Era of Twilight.
Ecology and Habitats
Storm giants are isolationists by nature and so live in the far reaches of the world. Their great size and anatomical flexibility allows them to reside in a variety of habitats, though they prefer areas that are unsuitable for mortals. This includes such inhospitable locales as wind-bitten mountain peaks, freezing glacial caves, or even deep oceanic trenches.
Those few storm giants that live in communities often salvage Mithril Era or even Dawn Era giant technology to create floating fortresses that drift on the surface of the sea. These great structures are concealed from the mortal world by the powers of the storm giants, who summon great monsoons of wind, rain, thunder, and lightning to ward off curious smallfolk.
Some storm giants are drawn to the elemental crossings—fabled places where the boundaries between the Material and Elemental Planes are thin. These places are naturally dangerous and often fade in and out of existence with the rotation of the Cosmic Axes, and so these storm giants are often semi-nomadic.
Dietary Needs and Habits
Storm giants live ascetic lives, eating and sleeping very little to better attune themselves to the world and the divine signs they see all around them. Some can go for years without eating. When they do eat, storm giants have similar diets to most other omnivorous humanoids, though the caloric load they consume is obviously far greater. Additionally, like all giants, storm giants have a penchant for mead and ale, and while they can be intoxicated just like any other creature, their drunken rages are so legendary that many adventurers avoid indulging a storm giant's tastes for fear of being caught on the wrong side of their wrath.
Additional Information
Social Structure
Storm giants are isolationists by nature, preferring to spend their days in quiet mediation as they search the world around them for signs or omens pertaining to the coming Era of Twilight. They rarely come together except to breed or exchange oracular information. A few storm giant communities have been recorded living in floating fortresses made from Mithril or Dawn Era giant technology. These societies often have few actual storm giants, and instead act like moving courts led by storm giants and other true giants and inhabited by other monstrous and mortal species such as genasi, merfolk, and aarakocra. These places are governed according to the laws of the Ordning but are primarily concerned with eschatological research and protecting places of power, such as planar crossings or elemental convergences. Male storm giants are said to be found in higher social positions to females, but defer to female storm giants on arcane or divination matters.
Geographic Origin and Distribution
Storm giants do not live in large populations, so it is difficult to say exactly where in the Material Plane they dwell. However, in general, they are found closer to the edges of the map, in places such as the Bluefrost Mountains of the Varangian Peninsula, or the deepest trenches of Brinewater Bight. Beyond the Material Plane, populations of storm giants persist in the Elemental Planes of Water and Air.
Average Intelligence
Storm giants are remarkably intelligent and in fact often are considered the most intelligent of the giantkin along with their cloud giant cousins. They particularly excel in computing complex scenarios and foreseeing the outcomes of distant events.
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Storm giants are quite perceptive, able to spot threats quickly both under and above the water. Additionally, storm giants have the ability to detect magic at will, which helps them discern arcane users at great distances.
Moreover, while they lack the advanced anatomical sensory abilities of many other monstrous creatures, storm giants are driven by a sense of duty to attune themselves to the natural and elemental worlds around them. They spend much of their long lives in quiet mediation or seeking out signs from their patron, Jötu, regarding the coming Era of Twilight, which they both look for and dread. Though one can argue this is a cultural or religious trait across storm giants, their knowledge of that which has not come to pass is often exceptionally accurate, causing some to speculate that they do have an anatomical condition that makes them such ideal oracles.
Civilization and Culture
History
Like all true giants, the story of the storm giants begins at the end of the Dawn Era, when the young god Jötu helped the deities of the Heavenly Council seal the Dread Dragoness Valdra within the Material Plane's Underdark during the War of the Dawn. Unlike these other deities, legend claims Jötu foresaw Valdra's escape from the Material Plane and a great conflict that would culminate in the end of the Holosian world as we know it. He established the Ordning, a way of life designed to prepare him and his children and his people, the giants, for this Twilight War. Each of his children took those giants that had stood with Jötu at the beginning and infused them with their own personalities, virtues, and flaws. Those crafted by Jötu became the storm giants and they in turn would lead the other giants in the Ordning and in preparation for the Era of Twilight. Jötu made them wise, powerful, and highly attuned to the shifts, ebbs, and flows of the Cosmos as they looked for signs to better prepare their kin.
Some claim the giants ruled a great kingdom in either the Dawn Era or the Mithril Era and that it splintered with the gods of the Ordning ascended to their planes to watch over the souls of those whom had passed on in the Time before Twilight. These theories are supported by reports of floating fortresses of storm giants crafted from ancient technology beyond the scope of modern giants or mortals. However, if such a kingdom existed in the Dawn Era, then it would stand to reason that the storm giants, and indeed all the true giants and their godly patrons, are far older than the other sentient races of Holos. They would have also been intimately connected with their deities in a way that contemporary storm giants do not appear to be. It would also beg the question of where the remains of that mythic kingdom are or if they were entirely destroyed during the Breaking of the Dawn. And while a giant kingdom existing during the Mithril Era is more plausible, questions of their contact with mortal communities, such as the powerful and semi-divine Temekanian Empire, crop up. Little written records of giants or giant communities can be found from that time, further complicating the hypothesis. Only oral histories from some social giant groups like the fire and stone giants affirm this idea, but these histories disagree on many important facts of the fabled kingdom.
Common Myths and Legends
The driving cultural myth and story of the storm giants, and of all true giants, is the Tale of Twilight. This legend is not a telling of what has happened but rather a series of prophecies and laws made in light of those prophecies. They speak of a coming conflict when the Dread Dragoness Valdra will break free of the Underdark which houses her and begin a period of great strife for all beings within the Material Plane. Upon the Era of Twilight, the gods of the giant religion, the Ordning, will return and gather their forces from both the living and the dead to make a final, desperate and ultimately doomed stand against Valdra and all the horrors she shall unleash. The Tale of Twilight is vague in many places and so many storm giants look for signs in the air, earth, flames, and waters of the world hoping to receive a vision of what is to come either from their patron Jötu, or from the essence of the Cosmos itself.
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
Although largely solitary, storm giants do not necessarily live alone in their strongholds. Storm giants often share their abodes with other creatures that can tolerate the harsh conditions they prefer: a sea-dwelling storm giant for example, might have a few merfolk, water weirds, or even a dragon turtle for companions, while a storm giant living on a mountain peak would extend a friendly hand to any pegasi that happened by, and might even welcome yetis into its home for a time if it believed they could be trusted. The giant's guests are expected to be respfj!ctful, to make themselves useful, and to provide interesting conversation or other entertainment when the giant feels like being sociable.
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