Stone Giants

## Stone Giant

Stone Giants are reclusive, quiet, and peaceful as long as they are left alone. Their granite-gray skin, gaunt features, and black, sunken eyes endow Stone Giants with a stern countenance. They are private creatures, Hiding their lives and art away from the world.

***Inhabitants of a Stone World.*** Secluded caves are the homes of the Stone Giants. Cavern networks are their towns, rocky tunnels their roads, and Underground streams their waterways. Isolated Mountain ranges are their continents, with the vast spans of land between seen as oceans that the Stone Giants only rarely cross.

In their dark, quiet caves, Stone Giants wordlessly chip away at elaborate carvings, measuring time in the echoing drip of water into cavern pools. In the deepest chambers of a stone giant settlement, far from the chittering of bats or the patrols paced out by the giants’ Cave Bear companions, are holy places where Silence and Darkness are complete. Stone takes on its most sacred quality in these cavern cathedrals, their buttresses and columns carved with a beauty that shames the legendary stonecraft of the Dwarves.

***Carvers and Seers.*** Among Stone Giants, artistry ranks as the greatest virtue. They create intricate murals, paint sprawling murals across cavern walls, and indulge in a wide variety of other artistic disciplines. They esteem stone carving as the greatest of Skills.

Stone Giants strive to draw shapes out of raw stone, which they believe reveal meaning inspired by their god, Skoraeus Stonebones. The Giants appoint the tribe’s best carvers as their leaders, shamans, and prophets. The holy hands of such Giants become the hands of the god as they work.

***Graceful Athletes.*** Despite their great size and musculature, Stone Giants are Lithe and Graceful. Skilled rock throwers are granted positions of high rank in the giants’ ordning, testing and demonstrating their ability to hurl and catch enormous boulders. Such Giants take the front ranks when a tribe has cause to defend its home or Attack its enemies. However, even in Combat, artistry is key. A stone giant hurling a rock performs not just a feat of brute Strength but also one of stunning athleticism and poise.

***Dreamers under Sky.*** Stone Giants view the world outside their Underground homes as a realm of dreams where nothing is entirely true or real. They behave in the surface world the way humanoids might behave in their own dreams, making little account for their Actions and never fully trusting what they see or hear. A promise made above ground need not be kept. Insults can be made without apology. Killing prey or sentient beings is no cause for guilt in the dreaming world beneath the sky.

Stone Giants lacking in athletic grace or artistic skill dwell at the fringes of their society, serving as the tribe’s outlying guardians and far-wandering hunters. When trespassers stray too far into the Mountain territory of a stone giant clan, those guardians greet them with hurled rocks and showers of splintered stone. Survivors of such encounters spread tales of stone giant violence, never realizing how little those brutes dwelling in the unreal dreaming world resemble their quiet and artistic kin.

## Stone Giant Dreamwalker

The giant presented here is more powerful than others of its kind, either because the gods have shown it favor or because fate has dealt it a bad hand and forced it to seek out other paths to power.

The surface of the world is an alien realm to stone giants: fluctuating, temporary, exposed to gusting wind and sudden rain. It is as wildly changeable as a dream, and that’s how they regard it—as a dream. Nothing there is permanent, so nothing there is real. What happens on the surface doesn’t matter. Promises and bargains made there needn’t be honored. Life and even art hold less value there.

***Dream Dwellers.*** Stone Giants sometimes go on dream quests in the surface world, seeking Inspiration for their art, to break a decades-long ennui, or out of simple curiosity. Some who go on these quests let themselves become lost in the dream. Other Stone Giants are banished to the surface as punishment. Regardless of the reason, if they don’t take shelter under stone, such individuals can become dreamwalkers.

Dreamwalkers occupy an odd place of respect outside of Stone Giant ordning. They are considered outcasts, but their familiarity with the surface world makes them valuable guides, and their insights can help other Stone Giants grasp the dangers of living in a dream.

***Mad Wanderers.*** Dreamwalkers are driven mad by isolation, shame, and their unendingly alien surroundings, and this Madness leeches out into the world around them, affecting other creatures that get too close. Believing that they’re living in a dream and that their Actions have no real consequences, dreamwalkers act as they please, becoming forces of chaos. As they travel the world, they collect Objects and creatures that seem especially significant in their mad minds. Over time, the collected things accrete to their bodies, becoming encased in stone.