Stone Giant

(From D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual - 2014)

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.

(From Volo's Guide to Monsters - 2016)

Stone giants- reclusive, reflective, and inscrutable-take pains to remain apart from the world of sunlight and sky. Only when they're surrounded by stone do they consider themselves to be in reality. A world of all-encompassing stone is a realm of permanence and solidity, one where a lifetime of laborious carving can last through countless eons. The surface world, with its shifting light, endless sky, changing climate, and eroding wind, represents a dream state, an unreality where nothing lasts and therefore nothing has significance. 

Ordning of Artistry. Among stone giants, mastery of an art ranks as the greatest virtue, and among all the arts, stone carving is held in highest regard. Most stone giants spend their lives in unending pursuit of the perfect artistic creation. Young stone giants practice tirelessly, hoping to prove themselves worthy of assisting the tribe's best carvers. A stone giant master carver might devote years to finding the best stone before beginning a great work. The best carvers are honored as the leaders and shamans of the tribe, and their hands are seen as holy-literally becoming the hands of Skoraeus Stonebones as they work.

Of course, not all stone giants have the hands of a god. Those who show little skill in carving are considered pathetic and viewed with a combination of pity and contempt. To determine the ordning beneath the highest levels of artistry, stone giants compete in games of boulder hurling and catching. Their rock-throwing skills suit stone giants well when they have cause to defend their homes or attack enemies. But even where boulder tossing is concerned, artistry is fundamental to the effort. A stone giant hurling a boulder isn't only performing a feat of strength but is also striving to display consummate athleticism and grace. 

Those who can't infuse artistry into every aspect of their lives fall to the lowest rungs of the ordning and are often pushed literally to the perimeter of stone giant society, to serve as guards on the tribe's most distant borders or as hunters that wander beyond those borders. As such, the stone giants that are first encountered by outsiders are almost always the least successful members of stone giant society and the poorest examples of the ideals stone giants aspire to. They are the brutes and boors cast out by a society of artists and philosophers.

For a people that spend their lives mostly in darkness, stone giants have a nuanced appreciation of the effects of shadow and light. They design carvings to p~oduce shadows in specific ways when a light source is placed in the proper location. Without both the light and the shadow, the carving is incomplete and can't be viewed in its true form. For example, a tale carving made with these special techniques tells one story when it's viewed in flat, dim light, but it reveals a second, much deeper tale with the addition of proper illumination.

Speaking Stones. Although they are unsurpassed masters of tale carving, stone giants also employ mundane writing in their stone tableaux. Names, dates, and descriptions appear in their tales, often as part of an image (a character's arms or armor might incorporate runic letterforms, for example). 

Stone giants also make extensive use of the carved word through "speaking stones." A speaking stone is an upright stone cylinder into which writing is carved in a descending spiral. When the cylinder is turned in one's hands (a feat impossible for any creature of human size and strength) or when it's rotated with its base placed in a cradle designed to balance it upright, the writing can be read as the cylinder goes around. The message wraps around the pillar like the threads of a screw, but in two alternating spirals. The first is read from top to bottom as the cylinder rotates; then the cylinder must be flipped over to reveal the second line of script, also read from top to bottom. 

Speaking stones are sized to match the length of the message they carry, so there is no blank space on a stone. A cylinder that turns out to be too long or too thick, so that the message ends before the entire surface of the stone is used, is considered poor artistry. Tradition and honor demand that it be crushed into gravel and a new speaking stone begun. 

Gentle Giants? Newcomers who know only about the stone giants' focus on artistry might think them to be a peaceful and reasonable people. Among their own kind, they tend to be so. But outsiders, particularly non-giants of any sort, are unwelcome in the stone giants' caverns, and trespassers aren't treated politely. 

A creature's first sign that it has intruded into stone giant territory might be a boulder, thrown seemingly from nowhere and exploding into shards against a nearby rock. Those who know anything about stone giants understand that this wasn't a miss; it was a measured warning, and the next stone won't land so harmlessly. 

It's possible for travelers to negotiate with stone giants for safe passage through their territory, if someone in the group speaks Giant and the giants are offered a tribute. Beautiful and large furs, exotic food, or art objects are suitable tributes; money is a weak inducement for all but the lowest of stone giants. If offered such enticements, one or two giants might come forward to negotiate while others remain at rock-throwing range. 

To unfamiliar eyes, stone giants encountered on the fringes of their territory look and behave like primitives. First, personal adornment has little value in the ordning of stone giants, so their clothing tends to be simple and practical. Second, these giants are the least accomplished members of the clan. They are good at ambushing and throwing rocks, but they aren't leaders or even typical examples of their kind. 

Even if the giants accept the offered tribute as permission to enter their territory, they might demand a higher price to pass through it. Usually this "gift" is a service of some kind-a task the giants would rather not do or that they're unable to perform, such as chasing kobolds out of a narrow cave or retrieving something from deep within a lake. (Stone giants are poor swimmers; they dislike entering water at all unless they can easily walk across the bottom.) 

Stone giants rarely keep pets. They sometimes cultivate colonies of giant bats at the edges of their territory, both for a food source and as a warning system against intruders. They also don't mind sharing their caves or warrens with cave bears, fire beetles, and other beasts that mean them no harm. They keep their other subterranean neighbors at arm's length. Purple worms are their greatest bane, because a hungry worm chews through everything it encounters, including the giants' finest carvings and sculptures. Xorns are among the few creatures that are appreciated by stone giants; their passage through the earth causes no damage, and their alien modes of thought make them interesting to talk with.

Life in the Dark. Stone giants see well in darkness, and the caves and grottoes where they live are kept dark most of the time. They don't prefer. to use illumination for any purpose that's not related to creating or displaying art. 

Most of a giant's waking hours are taken up with meeting its responsibilities, whether that is a low-ranking pursuit or an artistic one. A tribe's chieftain or another leader such as a shaman determines when the tribe's guards and hunters are on or off duty. Other giants align their sleeping and waking schedules with stone giants higher in the ordning from whom they seek to learn. 

Masters of the arts can ask much of lower-ranking students, including waking early to be sure the master has food upon rising, or staying awake while the master sleeps to create something the master will need (or will judge) upon waking. For one reason or another, about three quarters of a tribe's members are awake at any given time. 

When outside their settlements, stone giants travel almost exclusively in darkness or-when they dare to visit the surface world- at night, the better to avoid the glaring dreams and visions that would assail them during daylight. A stone giant that visits the surface for too long or is forced out from underground risks becoming lost in the realm of dreams, living ever after as a twisted version of its former self that the giants call a dreamwalker (see chapter 3 for more information on this creature).

The Linjenstein. When a stone giant reaches the end of its tremendously long life, it joins the Linjenstein ("ancestors of stone"). The term refers both to the giants' forebears and to the chamber inside each stone giant settlement where they "reside." 

A dead (or sometimes merely dying) stone giant is carried into the ancestors' chamber and leaned upright against the end of one of the rows of dead already there. The body gradually calcifies over many decades, until it becomes indistinguishable from an enormous stalagmite. 

Family members visit this tomb-chamber often to pay respects to their ancestors. Some of these visits, especially by elderly giants who know they will soon take their place there, last for weeks or even months.

Skoraeus Stonebones, The Great Creator. Stone giants worship Skoraeus Stonebones as the Great Creator, second in skill to Annam, but master of the other deities in his father's absence. He appears in stone giant art in two ways: as a pair of hands., one holding a chisel and the other a hammer, and as the largest statue or relief carving of a stone giant in a tribe's caves. Typically, Sko· raeus is depicted twice as tall as any other stone giant. 

In the tegends of the giants, Skoraeus often sits on the sidelines during the schemes and battles of his siblings. He acts as an observer, a confidant to the other gods, and a keeper of secrets that he must be forced or tricked into divulging. 

In a classic tate, Memnor came to Skoraeus and whis· pered something in his ear. When Surtur demanded to know what Memnor had said, Skoraeus told his brother ex· actly what he had heard. Surtur brooded on that message, which was misleading when taken out of context, and eventually reacted rashly, but the consequences of his acts were seen as no fault of Skoraeus. If Surtur had instead asked Skoraeus for advice about Memnor's words, the legend would have ended differently. 

Skoraeus is considered the most knowledgeable of the giant gods about magic, wards, banes, hidden treasures, and the secrets of the earth. Skoraeus gave the secret of smelting to Surtur. Skoraeus showed Thrym how to carve runes on his old weapons to imbue them with magic when Surtur refused to forge new ones for him. Skoraeus crafted spears for Hiatea so she could complete her ten tasks of valor. Skoraeus tapped with his hammer on the stone under the sea, so that Stronmaus couid find the chain-tunnels that atlowed him to pull the tarrasque down to the bed of the ocean where at last it would drown.