"He snores and eats all our gobbos, but dat big lug is handy in a fight! "
A massive Giant of Albion bashing through a regiment of High Elf Spearmen.
Giants are a large, lumbering and highly unintelligent humanoid race of brutish nomads that roam the Known World seeking battles and food both large and small. Descendants of the long-forgotten, highly advanced Skytitan civilisation, Giants are extremely few in numbers but they make up for this disadvantage with bone-crushing strength.[1a]
History
"The War in the Sky began, They were strong and tall, But Ogre's were many. We ground their bones in their halls. The giant-feast lasted many moons. But it was not good above the cloud sea. We toppled their castles. We threw them down the skies."
- —The Saga of the Ogres[3a]
The Great Feast held by the Ogres after the fall of the Skytitan race.
Giants, unlike many other intelligent species of the Known World, are not the creations of the Old Ones, but are in fact the remnants of a once proud humanoid race that inhabited the Known World long before that mysterious race of planetary architects came.[12a] The Giants are instead the direct descendants of the ancient Skytitan civilisation, who ruled benevolently within the highest peaks of the Mountains of Mourn. They were far larger than any Giants of today, and were also considerably more intelligent.[2a]
Unlike the Giants, the Skytitans didn't interfere with the lands below; instead, they kept to themselves, secure in their ancient fortresses surrounded by a sea of clouds. For the most part, they only ventured from their fastnesses to tend to their flocks of Mammoths, aloof from the conflict of the mortal world below. As with all things, however, this peace was destined to end, and the Skytitans were eventually destroyed by the destructive migration of the Ogre race.[2a]
The Ogres came to the mountains of the Ancient Giant Lands after their own mountainous homeland was destroyed by the fall to earth of the meteorite that became the Great Maw, a malevolent entity that supposedly obliterated much of the Eastern Steppes and killed a large portion of the Ogre population. Both fearing and worshipping the Great Maw, the Ogre race sought a new homeland to call their own. Eventually, the Ogres reached the Mountains and it was there where the great war known as the "War in the Sky" began between the Ogres and the Skytitans.[2a]
The Skytitans fought this smaller monstrous race with tremendous ferocity and massive strength. However, they could not match the numbers of the Ogres, and like a pack of wolves taking down a bear, the Ogres crushed the Skytitan race, breaking down the great masonry of their soaring mountain fortresses and hurling them to the lands below.[2a]
One by one, the Skytitans fell, and soon their great civilisation was nothing more than ruins. The Skytitans' children were taken and beaten into submission, becoming the Slavegiants of many Ogre tribes. The once-flourishing herds of Mammoths which roamed the lands were mercilessly hunted by their new Ogre overlords. The few surviving Skytitans fled the lands of the Ancient Giant Holds. Forced into small tribes, they eventually became in-bred, their intellect dwindling until they eventually became the boorish race of Giants known today.[2a]
However, the Giants of Albion did interact with the Old Ones. The Truthsayers of that island believe that the Old Ones created them and brought them there to protect their treasures and secrets from all invaders. Whether this is true, none can say.[8a][13a]
Culture
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A Giant prepares to assault the foe.
Giants are solitary creatures that tend to wander the lands, settling for short periods of time when they find a rich food source.[4a] The nomadic race can be found in many locations within the Old World, terrorising the countryside of Human kingdoms and eating many of its peaceful inhabitants.[1a] A Giant can consume an entire herd of livestock in a sitting, and will devastate any village he comes across, pulling out and eating anything he can find amidst the stomped and splintered structures.
Breweries are especially favoured targets, as Giants are notorious drunkards.[4a] Once a Giant has cleaned up all the available food within a region, he will move on to find more fertile and unspoiled lands, often leaving behind the bones and husks of many villagers and their ruined villages in his wake.[1a]
Every season, sometimes more often, the Giants gather in the ancient stone circles, like circles of Ogham stones that dot the Albion countryside, to bash each other’s brains out. Nobody is really sure why the Giants do this, and few people care very much. It’s just a nice change from the Giants bashing everyone else’s brains out. Over the years the locals have come to accept the Big Bash as just another example of how deranged and violent Giants can be. More tolerant souls suggest that it isn’t nice to meddle in other folk’s culture and that it might even be part of the Giants’ religion. These people generally get their brains bashed out.[14a]
Warfare
A Giant destroys a party of Empire Knights.
In battle, Giants often charge mindlessly into the enemy's front-lines. They wade in with their tremendous bulk, crush the foe beneath their slab-like feet, or sweep any before them into the air with clubs fashioned out of uprooted trees[4a][1b]
Sometimes a Giant will select a particular target and reach down to pluck the unfortunate up. These victims are sometimes bitten in two, hurled far, far away, squished into paste or simply stuffed into a secure (if smelly) place to be retrieved later for a snack.[4a]
Wearing little to no armour, Giants are highly susceptible to either a concentrated volley of missile troops, or a well-placed shot from a Great Cannon. Should the enemy lack missile capability, it is extremely hard to take down a Giant in close-quarters combat.[1a]
In the Armies of the Smaller Folk
A lumbering Mercenary Giant seeking his next meal.
On occasion, a Giant will be persuaded to join a passing army, often that of Chaos-worshipping Men from the north or marauding Greenskin Tribes, who lure the lummoxes with promises of fighting and food.[4a][1a]
To most Greenskins, a Giant is a bellowing, cursing display of raw might, ruthless aggression and mindless savagery -- traits that are highly respected and sought-after within Greenskin society. As such, many Greenskin tribes would often fight each other over the possession of a Giant.[1a]
For their part, Giants are quite happy to join an army of Greenskins, as it would significantly increase their chances of eating regularly and getting their hands on plunder and strong liquor. To keep a Giant within a tribe, the Greenskins often have to regularly feed him considerable amounts of food, as should the Giant become too hungry, he will usually wander off into the wilderness and never return.[1a]
Savage Orc Shamans will often cover a Giant fighting along their Tribe with warpaint, increasing its survivability.[1b]
Variants
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A Giant ready to enter combat.
- Albion Giant - The Druids of Albion say that the race of mighty Giants that inhabit their island were put there by the Old Ones to guard the island from invaders. Whether this is true, who can say? Yet the Giants prowl the rugged coasts of Albion to this day. They wander along the fog-shrouded cliffs and hurl boulders down onto hapless ships which come too close to the shore, taking a childlike joy in watching them splinter into matchsticks and the doomed crew struggling in the fierce waves. The Albion Druids have a strange power over these Giants and can goad them into lifting up and carrying huge boulders and monoliths. With the help of the great strength of the Giants, these huge stones are arranged in rows or circles in order to measure the sun, moons, and stars.
- Bonegrinder Giant - Bonegrinder Giants are a very old and an incredibly rare variant of the Giant race. These days they're thought to have been almost completely vanished from the Old World, though there are a few, persistent rumours of a handful of Bretonnian mountain villages where Bonegrinders have eaten all the local knights and claimed the villages (and peasants) as their own. Bonegrinder Giants are at least twice the size of their lesser Giant cousins, who themselves stand many times the height of a man.[4a]
- Chaos Giant - Chaos Giants are twisted, monstrous humanoids that have diverged from the rest of the Giant race and become warped by their embrace of the dark powers of Chaos into a creature that possess an even more prodigious appetite for violence than their uncorrupted kin. Chaos Giants often serve alongside armies of Beastmen, Chaos Marauders or the Warriors of Chaos.[5]
- Chaos Siege Giant - Chaos Siege Giants are the creation of the vile Chaos Dwarfs of Zharr-Naggrund. The Children of Hashut, the Father of Darkness, have often found themselves fighting Giants accompanying Greenskin and Ogre hordes. Soon the amoral and curious Daemonsmiths noticed the weaknesses of their enemies and sought to improve on them for their own use. Experimenting on Giants and Slavegiants they acquired through capture or trade, the Chaos Dwarfs fused heavy metal plates to the Giants' skin and implanted weapons such as hooks and pickaxes at its arms, sometimes even branding them in the Daemonic runes of the Father of Darkness. The resulting mutilated, half-mad monstrosities have stronger armour than any other class of Giant and serve the Dawi-Zharr as both beasts of war and siege engines.[7a]
- Norscan Giant - Norscan Giants are a type of Chaos Giant native to the frozen wastes of Norsca, often following the Norscans to war attracted by the promise of slaughter.[6]
- Sea Giant - The Galleon's Graveyard is infested with Undead sea monsters, among which are the so-called "Sea Giants."[11a] It was one of these creatures that put an end to Indigio Roth's sea adventures by taking both of his legs. A Sea Giant skull figurehead with colossal jewels set in its eye sockets adorns the Swordfysh, flagship of the Sartosan pirate Aranessa Saltspite.[10a]
- Skytitans - Long before the Old Ones came, the Skytitans had established their own advanced civilisation in the Far East. They are the ancestors of most present-day Giants, a race of enormous and highly-intelligent Giants that lived in great citadels erected on the mountaintops of the tallest and easternmost mountain range of the Known World, a region known today as the Ancient Giant Lands.
- Slavegiant - Slavegiants are Giants indentured into servitude for Ogre tribes. Unlike the Giants that accompany the other mortal races of the world into battle, those who look down on their smaller comrades and pick fights as and when they choose, the Slavegiants of the Ogre Kingdoms live a life of forced servitude to their smaller but equally ravenous masters.[3b]
- Mercenary Giants - Sometimes the best way to stop a Giant eating all your livestock is to pay it to join your army. Not all Giants are evil creatures, and some of them still possess the peaceable natures of their Skytitan forebears. They are just very dimwitted, and often very hungry, two things which, when put together in the body of a Giant, do not make for the maintenance of peace.[9a]
Notable Giants
- Blorgar, the Mad Titan - All who stand before the Mad Titan are likely trampled underfoot, if not first debilitated by his putrid flatulence.[6]
- Little Gork - So named because he was once hit in the face by a stone from a Grudge Thrower and has since believed himself to be the Greenskin god Gork.[9a]
- Halagrundsor the Horrible - Halagrundsor is a mercenary Giant in the employ of a Reikland warband.
- Magrig One Eye - Mightiest of the giants of old, a slayer of dragons and behemoths in his day, before his brain became clouded and he acquired the lust for manflesh. He is large as a hillock and can smash castle walls with a blow of his club. He was bound to the service of Chaos by Kelmain and Lhoigor, two of the foulest and most powerful of all the Changer’s servants.[8a]
- Thunderball - Amongst the defenders of Middenheim during the Storm of Chaos was a Giant nicknamed "Thunderball," who served as the loader for the colossal cannon known as Ulric's Thunder.[9a]
Miniatures
.jpg "Giants - New Model 1 (Mercernary).jpg (62 KB)")
.jpg "Giants - New Model 2 (Orcs & Goblins).jpg (59 KB)")
.jpg "Giants - New Model 3 (Chaos Mutant).jpg (65 KB)")
.png "Giants - Giants of Albion (Cachtorr).png (289 KB)")
.png "Giants - Giants of Albion (Bologs).png (246 KB)")
.png "Leech Wyrm, Sea Giant and a Bone Hydra miniatures (Dreadfleet Specialist Game).png (1.82 MB)")
Canon Conflict
"The Giants were made long ago, by the Old Ones, to guard their treasures and their secrets. They are near-immortal, but over the years, it is said, they have become altered, a degenerate parody of the noble creatures they once were. They fell to the worship of Chaos, and other vile practices. They became wicked, predatory creatures, that preyed on all things weaker than they, but still they kept to their duties in an odd way, bound by the geas the Old Ones placed on them. They haunted the old places and made them their lairs, filled them with their ill-gotten treasures."
In the novel Gotrek and Felix: Giantslayer by William King, Teclis tells the Loremasters of Hoeth that the Giants were a race created by the Old Ones specifically to guard their treasures and other secrets on the island of Albion. The druids of Albion also believe that the race of Giants who inhabit their island were put there by the Old Ones to guard the island from intruders.[13a]
However, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition: Lustria clarified that the Giants as a whole are one of the few mortal races that were not created by the Old Ones, being the descendants of the Skytitans, a race native to the mortal world who had existed long before the Old Ones first came.[13a]
Sources
- 1: Warhammer Armies: Orcs and Goblins (8th Edition)
- 2: Warhammer Armies: Ogre Kingdoms (8th Edition)
- 2a: pp. 10-11
- 3: Warhammer Armies: Ogre Kingdoms (6th Edition)
- 4: Storm of Magic (8th Edition)
- 4a: pg. 104
- 5:Warhammer Armies: Warriors of Chaos (8th Edition)
- 5a: pg. 44
- 6: Total War: Warhammer (PC Game)
- 7 Tamurkhan: The Throne of Chaos (8th Edition)
- 7a: pg. 200
- 8 Gotrek and Felix: Giantslayer (Novel) by William King
- 8a: Ch. 20
- 9 White Dwarf 316
- 9a: pg. 25
- 10: White Dwarf 382
- 10a: pg. 20
- 11: Dreadfleet Rulebook (Specialty Game)
- 11a: pg. 43
- 12: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition: Lustria (RPG)
- 12a: pg. 18
- 13: White Dwarf 233 (UK)
- 13a: pp. 10-11
- 14: White Dwarf 259 (US)
- 14a: pg. 90