A Giant Problem

Other fantasy settings have giants as wild forces of nature. Some can be highly intelligent, living in communities and advising the smaller races like ancient sages.

I wanted something different, so along came the Delve version.

If orcs represented a threat that can't be reasoned with, I wanted giants to represent a mystery that can't be understood.

These massive creatures can be found at random places, and never more than one at a time. Often discovered by a farmer or villager, they appear on the horizon standing still. Observing. Sometimes they walk around. Other times they don't.

They make no attempt to communicate. No threats. No demands. No attacks.

Then they vanish.

Hours later. Days later. Sometimes weeks.

It is possible to talk to a giant, providing you can speak their language. Often they make random cryptic remarks that they seemingly cannot remember immediately after. Things like "The land arose, bringing all the memories back" or "When the fish fly above the sky again, the moon shall tremble" can be uttered, then forgotten. Nobody knows if these statements are premonitions, visions of the past, or hallucinations. They are always unsettling though.

While the giant is not aggressive in the first instance, they all share a curious language made up of both the elven and dwarven tongues, hinting at the idea that they have a magical origin. If agitated – and seemingly random things can cause such a reaction – they become a thing of nightmares: huge creatures with prodigious strength smashing everything they can. And with such bulk they cause immense destruction.

Enough giants have been felled that it became obvious that they were a type of orc. Their biology shared the same *wrongness* as the smaller types.

Why they behave so vastly differently is anybody's guess.