sea giants
Sea giants, are aquatic giant humanoids. They were originally created in the First Age as a thurakel race to serve aquatic dragons, but the survivors in the Third Age have gained a modicum of independence and have diverged into different groups.
Sea giants are willing to work with other mortal races amiably, but they are assertive and cunning enough to haggle for a good price and will not tolerate poor treatment.
Sea giants can survive out of the water for short periods of time as long as they stay moisturized.
Basic Information
Anatomy
Sea giants adults tend to range between ten feet and twelve feet tall when fully grown and weigh between 1400 and 1800 pounds. They are bit lankier than other giants with proportionally longer limbs but they care less bulk. Males and females are roughly the same size. Males and females are similar enough that outsiders often have trouble telling them apart.
Biological Traits
Adult sea giants tend to weigh between 1500 and 2000 pounds and typically stand between 11 and 13 feet tall. Compared to other giants they are a bit lankier with proportionally longer limbs but less bulk.
Their hands and feet have retractable webbing that help with swimming. Their hands can fold in their webbing to allow for better manual dexterity and tool yes. Their feet have retractable claws that can help the grip things or dig in sand. They have similar retractable claws on their fingers but they are largely vestigial and not capable of doing much real damage or breaking up hard substances.
Sea giants have a higher top swimming speed than most smaller Scaraquans but they accelerate fairly slowly and they cannot turn with the same agility as merfolk and karakhai.
Growth Rate & Stages
Like most giants, sea giants exit infancy around their fifth yar, they enter adolescence in their early twenties and are considered full adults around age forty. They typically die of natural causes early in their fourth century but a rare few lucky individuals have lived to see their fifth century.
Females tend to remain fertile till about the age of 250 while males tend to remain fertile until around 350 years. Single births are the norm, but twins are not unheard of. Pregnancy lasts about two years.
Dietary Needs and Habits
Sea giants are fully omnivorous capable of subsisting on meat or plant matter. Individuals have different preferences but most sea giants like a mix of food types. Given their dietary needs, sea giants are not especially picky. A sea giant needs about ten times the food intake of a human sized Scaraquan.
They have strong stomachs and strong teeth. They can handle eating most carrion safely and they crunch through a lot of hard shelled sea creatures and deal with moderate toxins. Given their great size, their system can easily process poisons that would be fatal or at least debilitating to a human-sized Scaraquan.
Additional Information
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
Relative to other giants, sea giants have keen senses. Their hearing is a little limited compared to other giants but their eye sight and sense of smell are quite acute, at least underwater. Outside of water, their sense of smell is somewhat muted and they are somewhat disoriented by bright sunlight.
On land or in the water, sea giants have excellent vision in the dark provided there is some light. They cannot see anything in total darkness.
Civilization and Culture
Major Language Groups and Dialects
Most sea giants learn Draconic as their mother tongue but they usually make some effort to learn other languages.
History
Sea giants were created as a thurekal race to aid sea dwelling dragons in the First Age.
Generally speaking, in the First Age wealth and social status correlated to height with the richest dragons mostly living in mountains and towers and the dragons living below sea level were usually but not always poorer than the dragons living figuratively and literally above them. This meant that the dragons had to make due with fewer thurakel.
Land dragons had between two and three giant thurakel per every dragon while sea dragons had roughly a one to one ratio with their giants. This also had the effect that most sea giants were forced to be more versatile, as they were not common enough that they could specialize. A sea giant needed to be able to fight, build, or perform grunt labor as circumstances called for. They are far less passive than the docile brute giants and less aggressive than the violent scale giants.
Roughly eight out of ten sea giants died during the First Unmaking. About half were killed outright by the supernatural disasters and the other half of the deaths were slow death of hunger as their once dependable domesticated food sources were wiped out.
Once the dust settled, a large minority of the surviving sea giants sought to ally themselves with surviving dragons, but the majority opted to live for themselves in small nomadic tribes hunting and foraging much as they did during the First Unmaking only this time in safer environments.
Initially the sea giants were able to thrive and expand quickly but they had to compete with emerging populations of merfolk and ojiongo who were often able to outcompete them with superior numbers and better organization.
The sea giants are not afraid to fight for what is theirs but they can sense which way the currents are going and a great many chose to ally with smaller but numerous Scaraquan often providing combat and labor support in exchange for food. A few even allied with coastal dwelling Scarterrans.
Two subspecies of sea giants diverged from the main race. Nicknamed the shallow giants and the deep giants. The shallow giants were more amphibious and could survive outside of the water for longer periods of time on land. The deep giants lost the ability to survive outside of water altogether but evolved adaptations to handle the darkness, cold, and high pressure of the deepest waters of Scaraqua.
The deep giants thrived and expanded while the shallow giants barely avoided extinction during the Second Unmaking.
After the Second Unmaking, almost all of the independent sea giant tribes were killed off. The few sea giants that survived the cataclysm were mostly those who allied with other races. Except for a few deep giants enclaves, nearly every sea giant in the Third Age is firmly entrenched as a valued minority of one the undersea kingdoms or empires.
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