# Race: Goliath > [!info] Quick Facts > | | | > |---|---| > | **Rarity** | Uncommon | > | **Perception in Gryth** | Neutral. Respected for their strength and left largely to themselves. | > | **Subraces** | [[#Edarian Goliaths (Stormchasers)\|Edarian Goliaths (Stormchasers)]], [[#Ganath Goliaths (Towering Goliaths)\|Ganath Goliaths (Towering Goliaths)]], [[#Nornian Goliaths\|Nornian Goliaths]] | > | **Guide Section** | Uncommon Races | ## Overview Goliaths are mountain people, and Gryth has a great many mountains. Three populations are recognised, separated by continent and by several feet of height, and all three share a competitive streak, a memory for obligation, and a flat refusal to be impressed by weather. ## Of the Giant Kin Goliaths belong to the giant family, alongside the firbolgs and the giants themselves. Nobody disputes this and nobody can quite account for it. Their origin is generally placed in Skyemount, the great mountain region of western [[Continent - Ganath|Ganath]], though the evidence is circumstantial and the goliaths themselves regard the question as settled by the fact that they live there. What stands in Skyemount is not in dispute. [[City - Irus-Halls|Irus-Halls]], the capital, was built by the giant-kin progenitors of the goliaths at a scale that no modern people would attempt: vast halls in the thinnest air, signposted by the Torches of Guggan, unlit for centuries and still visible from a very long way off. The goliaths found the place abandoned some five hundred years ago and moved into it as nomads, family group by family group, and it now holds many thousands of them. It is the ancestral seat of the race and the heart of its culture, and its precise location is barely known outside goliath society. Irus-Halls lies in the shadow of Golk-ah, the highest mountain on the surface of Gryth, whose peak is seventy degrees below freezing and whose air will put most races on the ground within minutes. Goliaths climb it anyway. The approach to the summit is part of their coming-of-age rites. ## Where You Will Actually Meet One Ancestral home is not the same as population. The goliaths of Ganath have stayed in Ganath, behind country that makes casual visiting impossible, and a traveller could spend a life in the north without laying eyes on one. The goliaths of [[Continent - Edaria|Edaria]] are a different matter entirely. They are far more numerous, they range the Andaganges and the other Edarian highlands in large numbers, and they have spread north and west into [[Continent - Auken|Auken]], where goliath families have settled the black stone mountains of [[Region - Eldvale|Eldvale]] alongside the dwarves and gnomes who came before them. Almost every goliath encountered in a town, on a road or in a war is an Edarian, and most of what the world believes about goliaths it learned from them. ## Strength, and What Counts as Strength Goliaths value strength and nothing else, which outsiders consistently misunderstand. The strength in question is not necessarily the kind that lifts a boulder. An orphaned child who has survived what should have broken them has strength, and a goliath who sees it will say so. Someone who finally looks squarely at what they are, and does not flinch, has strength. Physical power is also strength, and is respected as such, but it is one item on a longer list rather than the whole of it. This is also why goliaths are thought to be mindless brutes and simpletons. The reputation does not survive contact. A goliath family is a complex unit of twenty or more, ranked, obligated and argued over constantly, living a nomadic life across hunting grounds and territories that have belonged to them since before anybody else arrived. ## Trusted, and Not Universally Loved Goliaths are loyal, brave and trustworthy to a fault, and a goliath’s word is taken as settled by most peoples who have dealt with them. Humour is close to absent from their cultures, and subversion, irony and deliberate misdirection are all but unknown; a goliath will usually say the thing itself. None of which makes them safe. Goliaths raid villages and strongholds when a family judges it warranted, they do it openly and without pretext, and the settlements on the edges of their territories hold opinions about goliaths that have nothing to do with loyalty or bravery. ## Goliath Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Determined by your population. **Age.** Goliaths have lifespans comparable to humans. They enter adulthood in their late teens and usually live less than a century. **Creature Type.** You are a Humanoid. **Size.** Determined by your population. Your size is Medium. **Speed.** Your base walking speed is 30 feet. **Powerful Build.** You count as one size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift. **Languages.** You can speak, read, and write Common and Giant. ## Subraces ### Edarian Goliaths (Stormchasers) The most common goliaths in Gryth, the Stormchasers hail from the Andaganges and the other mountainous regions of Edaria. They are rugged survivalists, attuned to the biting cold and punishing winds of the high country, and they take their name from the habit of walking towards a storm rather than away from it. They are by far the most numerous goliaths and the ones the rest of Gryth has met. The Stormchasers have been in Edaria long enough to hold their own territories, keep their own rites and run their own quarrels. They still make the long pilgrimage to Irus-Halls when a family can spare the years, because that is where the halls are. **Rarity:** Uncommon **Perception in Gryth.** Neutral. As goliaths generally. #### Edarian Goliath Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Your Strength score increases by 2, and your Constitution score increases by 1. **Size.** You stand between 7 and 8 feet tall and weigh between 280 and 340 pounds. **Natural Athlete.** You have proficiency in the Athletics skill. **Stone’s Endurance.** When you take damage, you can use your reaction to roll a d12. Add your Constitution modifier to the number rolled and reduce the damage by that total. After you use this trait, you cannot use it again until you finish a short or long rest. **Mountain Born.** You are acclimatised to high altitude, including elevations above 20,000 feet, and you are naturally adapted to cold climates. ### Ganath Goliaths (Towering Goliaths) The Ganath goliaths are the goliaths of Skyemount, and they hold Irus-Halls. They are darker skinned than their Edarian kin, with striking bright eyes, and they stand a good foot taller. Their country is vertical and they are built for it, which is as well, because it rises to Golk-ah, the highest point on the surface of the world. Everything that goliath culture elsewhere remembers imperfectly is still practised here, including the climb towards the summit of Golk-ah that marks a young goliath’s coming of age. Their bodies handle the cold and the thin air well enough to make it survivable. Nothing else in Gryth manages it at all. They have also stayed put. Where the Edarian goliaths spread across two continents, the Ganath goliaths remain in Ganath, in country that nobody crosses by accident, and a Ganath goliath seen anywhere else has travelled a very long way on purpose. **Rarity:** Rare **Perception in Gryth.** Neutral. As goliaths generally, and rarely seen off the Ganath range. #### Ganath Goliath Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Your Strength score increases by 2, and your Wisdom score increases by 1. **Size.** You stand between 8 and 9 feet tall. **Climber.** You have a climbing speed of 30 feet. **Towering Reach.** When you make a melee attack on your turn, your reach for it is 5 feet greater than normal. **Summit Born.** You are acclimatised to the most extreme altitudes, including elevations above 20,000 feet, and you have resistance to cold damage. ### Nornian Goliaths At the furthest inhabited point of northern Gryth, among frost giants and ice giants, live the Nornian goliaths. They stand around ten feet tall, at the very limit of what a Medium frame can carry, with faintly blue skin, white hair, and pale white eyes. Whether they are goliaths who grew or giants who shrank is a question their neighbours have never seen the point of asking, and it is the one place in the world where the giant kinship that scholars argue over is simply the arrangement of the neighbourhood. They have no recorded contact with Irus-Halls and show no interest in acquiring any. **Rarity:** Very rare **Perception in Gryth.** Neutral. Elusive rather than judged. Almost nobody outside [[Continent - Norn|Norn]] has seen one, and those who have tend to be believed about very little else. #### Nornian Goliath Traits **Ability Score Increase.** Your Strength score increases by 2, and your Constitution score increases by 1. **Size.** You stand around 10 feet tall. **Nornian Frost-Blood.** You have resistance to cold damage, and you can move across difficult terrain created by ice or snow without spending extra movement. **Little Giant.** Once on each of your turns, when you hit with a melee weapon attack, you deal an extra 1d4 damage of the weapon’s type. ## Connections - [[City - Irus-Halls]] — Capital and ancestral seat of the goliaths, in Skyemount - [[Continent - Ganath]] — Skyemount and the Ganath goliaths - [[Continent - Edaria]] — Home of the Edarian goliaths (Stormchasers) - [[Continent - Auken]] — Edarian goliath expansion north and west - [[Region - Eldvale]] — Black stone mountains settled by goliath families - [[Continent - Norn]] — Home of the Nornian goliaths --- ## Gallery ![[Race - Goliath.jpg]] --- *See also: [[Races]]*