D&D 5E Inter Giant relations

[practicalm]

So it's clear from the Giants descriptions and SKT that the lowest storm giant is better than the highest ranked cloud giant but would giants from different types ever marry and/or produce offspring?

My players were seeking an interesting solution to dealing with the ambition of a cloud giant countess and trying to get her married up into the storm giant hierarchy.

Seems like it shouldn't happen but I wanted to hear what other people thought.

I ruled at the table that the storm giant in question would consider it marrying too far beneath his caste and didn't want to discuss it further.

It seems as much of a religious thing as a racial thing as well.
And an alignment thing as giants consider the circumventing of the Ordning evil. Except that in SKT the Ordning is broken so is it really evil?

My players were trying to fix the giant issue by freeing the giants. Or trying to get the countess laid.

 

[aco175]

If things are this rigid then I would think that the situation does not come up very often. I would see it like interracial marriage where most people would consider the offspring one or the other race. Giants would mort likely consider the offspring the lesser class, maybe at the high end of the lesser class, but still below the rest of the class. Non-giants may not even be able to tell them apart from one or the other type.

It may make a good story where the half-cloud giant looks more like a storm giant and the PCs are trying to prop him up only to find that the other storm giants identify him right away as the outcast never to climb the ladder.

 

[77IM]

Historically, people married up when their temporal power (e.g. wealth, popularity, military might) exceeded their station, and they were marrying someone who's family was facing hard times. This was a way to revitalize the failing line with a cash infusion, and a way for the lower-status family to buy their way into the nobility. At some points in history, this practice was so prevalent that it was no big deal; at other times and places, it was very much frowned upon by the longstanding nobility.

Considering how one of the main functions of the Ordning is to maintain social stability, I'd imagine this sort of social climbing to be allowed -- every society, no matter how stratified, needs at least little bit of social mobility as a sort of "release valve." (Otherwise, there's a big risk of friction between older nobility and nouveau riche.) But, considering how ingrained the Ordning is into the giantish way of life, I would expect such marriages to be fairly rare. It would probably take a really fantastically successful and well-regarded cloud giant to marry a down-on-their luck storm giant, for example.

Also, just an FYI in case it comes up: In many stratified societies there is also a misogynistic aspect in which it's acceptable for a higher-class man to marry a lower-class woman, because it's seen as his prerogative. I'm not sure that should apply to giants, or to D&D in general, unless you want to deal with gender issues on top of the race/class issues that the Ordning presents. If this came up at my table I'd just declare that many cultures in my fantasy world enjoy near-perfect gender equality.

 

[GreenTengu]

There is no good answer to this.

Functionally, conceptually-- the amount of region any given sort of giant would need to control, the amount of resources any single one would need to live... It just isn't possible for any single tribe to have a particularly significant population. And I have never seen a D&D world that has actually given them the kind of space they would need. Its always like "yeah, there are about 15 or so giants in those mountains and the leader is called a king". And it is usually in terrain that wouldn't produce enough to feed and cloth them no less!

So given how small any given giant tribe is, one would think that unless they are so inbred that a whole lot of negative recessive traits are going to start showing up across their whole populous... well, obviously they need to be interbreeding with other tribes.

But, at the same time, there is significant difference between each type of giant that it is absolutely impossible that the various types are interbreeding. You just couldn't be so specialized for each environment without having absolutely divided genetic pools for thousands of generations.


The reality is just that... D&D has never been designed to be any sort of rational, functional, properly built world that is at all sensibly put together. It is simply about "here is your bag of hit points to pop at your particular level" and the hierarchy of giants or dragons or anything else is just... well... what level the original people who used that monster concept decided to throw them at the PCs to be slaughtered on mass and spew out their XP and GP for players to collect.

If you wanted a world that is actually built in such a way that anything makes any sense at all and it isn't just "hey, random monster appears in room 36 because that's what I rolled out of the entire possible monster manual of creatures of your level to appear in this room and there is no story for why it is here, it literally just poofed into existence because you opened a door to this room and it is absolutely in no way connected to any of the other randomly generated monsters that will appear when you open the doors to the adjacent rooms."

In the case of giants, it was just that some random person at some random time decided that players would be popping bags of hit points for their XP/GP rewards at level X and the giants at that level would be called "_____ giant", generally neatly fitting in the general elements because that was an easy way to differentiate one from the next. One had to call them something after all.

Once you are trying to make a world that well... works... on any kind of rationally-satisfying level, you cannot simultaneously hold to the exact stat blocks given in the monster manual as though they are unquestionable holy gospel.

By all means you could have a cloud giant that is a much better warrior than your typical storm giant. If it is even conceptual that you can ever have a human who could possibly take down a giant in melee combat (something that is plenty possible!) then there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that the creatures in the monster manual, certainly those that are sentient and born and grow and have experiences, would be absolutely eternally stuck with only that particularly proscribed stat block and utterly incapable of changing or improving or advancing in any manner.

The stat blocks are just there to give you an easy thing to toss out for the express purpose of having PCs beat on them like different sized pinatas that can hit back. The moment you have infused any personality, any thought, any motivation, any character into the concept... you have violated the purpose those stat blocks are there to serve and now they are simply loose guidelines that you can use as a starter.

In your particular situation there, rather than what the stat blocks read-- there is a deeper question at stake.

If intermarrying were common or even uncommon but happened often enough that one were as likely to find a mixed blood as not... why are there even "Cloud Giants" and "Storm Giants" as separately label-able things? What exactly is it that is keeping these groups as separate breeding pools? A clear answer to this is not going to be in the book. Nor is anyone going to have the definitive answer for you. You are going to have to come up with that answer yourself.

And once you decide what the answer is, you are going to have to decide yourself what it would take to violate it. Or if it is even worth violating. Because, as I already wrote, if Cloud Giants are a separate and rival tribe to Storm Giants, there is no reason they cannot train and arm and level up and raise a badass enough military to come and beat the Storm Giants down. It is no different than humans rising up to take on hobgoblins or draconians.