Part of this folly was brief mention of a race of jungle-dwelling giants in the far north, a race that the White City has found themselves unable to conquer.
I think these myths (are they myths?) come from dim cultural memories of the giants of the north.
The giants range in size, from between around 9 and 12 feet tall. They are strong, graceful, very quick, and very beautiful. Their skin is bright red as though scalded, and thick white steam sheets from their bodies constantly. It is like they are cooking somehow. They have three eyes, one in the centre of their foreheads (which has a prophetic, precognitive sight), and two in the usual human place, which they keep covered at all times. They go mostly naked, but bind their limbs, genitals, necks, wrists, and ankles in decorative, brightly coloured cords. They also tattoo their bodies with family allegiances, marriages, and great deeds - these show up in bright many-coloured motley against the red of their skin.
They are famous for dancing and singing, and they practice both in combat. They whirl and leap and shout and hack at their enemies. They have a tradition of singing duels, and when more than one giant fights at once they will practice song-duels with one another as they dance through the corpses that pile in their wake. The White City kills them with cannon and poison mostly, or with squads of Courtesans; soldiers and militia get minced in numbers that the City Pragmatists deem unacceptable.
The giants live for thousands and thousands of years. They are also cursed, though no one knows this, and can no longer reproduce. When they give birth, it is to horrible monsters. They are a people facing imminent extinction, and their dances and songs of joy are layered atop endless abysses of hatred, lamentation, and killing rage.
The giants hold a single, ancient city/fortification that they call the Last Bulwark. It stands between the jungles and the boiling endless lakes of the True Final North. No outsider knows what terrible things dwell beyond it, or what the Bulwark guards against.
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Giant of the North
HD8, Flame-Blade Sword (d12) x2, armour: superhuman gracefullness (as chain) and Limited Precognition (see below), speed: 2x human, climbing speed: like a monkey, disposition: laughing, spiteful, proud, cruel, honourable, petty, wrathful.
May alternatively be armed with a Silver Spear (the prince of weapons, d10, +2 to hit), or Iron Cleavers (d10, dual-weidled, can be thrown as a dagger, worn in a brace of 6).
Steam-Veiled: All missile weapons are at -1 to hit a Giant of the North. They are completely immune to fire damage, and enemies in melee combat take 1 fire damage per turn.
Singer, Dancer: If a Giant of the North hits with all of its attacks in combat, their hit rolls and AC will be at +1, and their crit range will expand by one, on their next turn. This stacks to a maximum of +4. If they ever miss with an attack, or if they are hit themselves, the bonus resets to 0. A giant can spend its entire turn doing nothing but singing encouragement and light teasing to another giant, which will give that other +1 to their stacks of Singer, Dancer.
Limited Precognition: In a combat situation, a Giant of the North gets a 1 in 2 chance to ignore any hit against them completely - their third eye widens and they step aside from the blow with a fierce shout of joy. Outside of combat, a friendly giant might speak to you as an oracle speaks, with all that this entails.
Hollowing: If you are fighting two or more giants, and you slay one of them, the others will undergo a transformation know as 'hollowing'. A hollowed giant loses all bonuses from Limited Precognition and Singer, Dancer. Their central eye closes, and their terrible, burning, hate-filled terrestrial eyes snap open. They gain an extra attack, take half damage from all physical sources, and fight to the death.
Giant Noble
As above but HD10 and unarmed.
Giant Nobles wear 'crowns' that cover their two human-placed eyes, but frame and amplify the third in their forehead. These crowns bestow the following abilities:
- All enemies of the noble roll attacks at disadvantage (psychic scrambling field). They also receive strange, fragmented flash-vision of the future, which give a 1 in 6 chance of avoiding any hit against them.
- The noble may fire a psychic eye beams at anything they can see. This attacks rolls to hit as a Longbow +1, and deals 2d6 psychic damage.
Giants of the North will always prioritise their own survival over anything else. They will usually attack in a small group, maybe 2 or 3, and engage in combat one at a time while the others encourage the fighter using Singer, Dancer. When one of them reaches 50 percent HP they will all withdraw, laughing loudly to one another, using their climbing or superior running speed.
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| A bit like this, but also like a dervish and a tumbler/acrobat. |
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Bad Thing
The monsters that issue forth from the wombs of the Giants. Often their parents cannot bring themselves to kill them at birth, and the infants are ejected into the swamps and water meadows that border the northern jungles in the hope that exposure will kill them. These waterways have been poisoned so thoroughly by decades of warfare with the White City that they are completely empty of fauna of any kind. Only the Bad Things survive and hunt there, and they are always hungry.
They resemble a gigantic, fat, water-logged human torso with no head or neck, which crawls silently through the muck on all fours. They can sense the body heat of prey animals, and are surprisingly stealthy for their size. They pummel things to death, and then use their battering limbs to reduce the corpse to a paste, which they push into their anal cavity by hand, facilitating digestion.
Bad Things are spoken of with horror by the veteran soldiers of the White City, and are a sort of boogeyman for citizens there. They often appear in the image game as cyphers for insanity, degradation, or hopelessness.
HD4, battering limbs (d8), armour as leather, blind and deaf, heat and tremorsense (100 ft), speed as human, disposition: ambush predator. +2 to stealth, immune to poison.
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