Giant

Giants, or sometimes known as the giantkin, are humanoid creatures of great strength and size usually living about 300 years. Their kind is divided into a hierarchy of highborn and lowborn giants, but few highborns acknowledge this system..

History
There are various versions of giants' origins: They might be distant ancestors of the human race, after the gods' attempts in transforming giants into humans. Or, alternatively, giants are the humans who tried to ascend to godhood, making bargains with fiends and imbuing themselves with essences of the elemental spirits.

By 812 PD, the giants have been hunted down for centuries and driven away to live far from other civilizations.

Highborn
Although there are no different types of highborn giants, humanoid races of Tal'Dorei divide them into: cloud, fire, frost, stone, and storm giants. Each of the types of giants have their own culture with their own magic, codes of ethics, law, and fighting styles. Hill giants once were highborn as well, but they were "stripped of their nobility" and exiled by the Council of Seven Scepters.

Saturated in their idyllic cities, highborn giants often live full lives and mostly die of old age. Though in highborn politics many giants met their end assassined or with their throat cut.

Cloud giants
The cloud giants have a flying city-state of Jovatthon, floating invisibly above Tal'Dorei, ruled by two wedded kings who are particularly concerned with appeasing the s, who lost their own flying city long ago and whose remnants could easily conquer Jovatthon.

Fire giants
On the Material Plane fire giants have a civilization beneath the Ashkeeper Peaks and beneath the Cliffkeep Mountains (that occasionally allies with the duergar of the Emberhold). In the City of Brass in the Elemental Plane of Fire, most fire giants were enslaved or cast out of the city following the betrayal by some of their own. Some of these exiled fire giants served the ancient red dragon Thordak, when he controlled Emon.

Frost giants
The mostly nomadic clans of frost giants roam the northern wastes of Tal'Dorei and Wildemount. They are are master animal-tamers, seen with such dangerous creatures as purple worms, remorhazes, mammoths, and even white dragons, at their side (that said, one ancient white dragon, Rimefang, destroyed a society of frost giants in Issylra and kept some as slaves). An artifact recovered from the ruins of Aeor instantly turned a fortress of frost giants in Eiselcross into zombies and the Mighty Nein fought three of them near an entrance to Aeor.

Stone giants
Stone giants prize physical perfection, and to that end they hold a quadrennial sporting tournament at the greatest of their strongholds, Skyanchor Citadel, carved out of a mountain in the Alabaster Sierras. One nearby group of stone giants was killed and raised by Briarwoods as zombies to enforce their rule over Whitestone. Over in Xhorhas the Mighty Nein helped a group of stone giants retake their home from a demon incursion.

Storm giants
These mysterious giants had a flying city-state long ago that was cast into the Lucidian Ocean. In 812 PD and still in 836 PD, they are relatively isolated, protecting themselves and their families. In 835 PD, storm giants were blocking the sea trade routes from Icehaven to Balenpost.

Lowborn
Hill giants, ogres, and cyclops are the lowest in the giant hierarchy. They were cast out from the highborn society and were forced to fight and struggle for survival. Though the giants live up to 300 years, the hardship lowborn giants endured shortened their life span, and they rarely live past 200 years.

The lowborn giants tend to be ruled by cyclopes, and some hill giant warriors are known to ritualistically tear out an eye in order to imitate their rulers. When lowborn giants turn to corrupting magic that help them in their quest for survival, their minds and bodies are mutate beyond recognition, transforming them into trolls or oni who typically live selfishly, sometimes take over lowborn tribes.

Hill giants
Among the giantkin who was cast out of highborn society, hill giants were forced to fight and forage when Hillqueen Ovam'mura was banished from the Council of Seven Scepters. Hill giants were (apparently unwittingly) responsible for the destruction of the gnomish city of Wittebak. Hill giants made one of the villages of Igrathad their fortress.

Ogres
Ogres look like large, muscular humanoids with large heads and rely entirely on numbers and brute force to overwhelm their foe. They are integrated enough with humanoid society, that several of their species have joined crews at the margins of society: Buddy was accepted into then-struggling Darrington Brigade, Kutha works for the Gentleman, and Bouldergut served as a bodyguard for the pirate Avantika.

Cyclopes
Cyclopes tend to rule the lowborn giantkin settlements, and some hill giants remove one eye to imitate their rulers. When born during a powerful storm, a cyclops might become a stormcaller, with innate magical ability offsetting a smaller stature and reduced physical strength; there has been a locus of stormcaller activity in the Daggerbay Mountains of Tal'Dorei. There is also a roving band of cyclopes in the Iothia Moorland of Xhorhas.

Ettins
Ettins are two-headed giants, each having a mind of its own and often can hardly agree with each other. A pair of these two-headed giants ambushed and chased the Mighty Nein's wagon through the Wuyun Gorge.

Fomorians
Vox Machina encountered one of these fey-cursed giants outside Yug'Voril, who they named Tiny. The party dropped him in K'Varn's temple from the lethal hights to destroy the apparatus he used to control the mind flayer colony there.

Oni
Oni, sometimes inaccurately called "ogre mages", are giant possessing innate spellcasting abilities. The disguised oni Lorenzo, who headed the Iron Shepherds, killed Mollymauk Tealeaf but fell fighting the Mighty Nein in the Sour Nest.

Trolls
There are various kinds of trolls: Vox Machina fought common trolls in the pre-stream adventures nad a group of zombie trolls in the Crypts of Thomara. The Mighty Nein battled an ice troll in the Victory Pit of Zadash, and a venom troll caused trouble for the party in the Labenda Swamp.