Giants, seafood, fruit and sunny beaches... this really might be heaven.
Introducing another creature to the setting of Encounters in the Frontier: the giants.
For their redesign I adapted the concept of insular gigantism to a close ancestor of humans.
Giants live in an island close to the southwestern coast of Alwaysummer. They inhabit a giant dormant volcano whose crater now delimits a shallow lagoon.
Giants are adapted to catch mollusks, sea urchins, octopusses and sea cumbers by striding over the lagoon to locate them and then catching them with their dexterous hands. They also complement their diet with fruits they can easily access from the tallest trees.
Giants live slow and long lives and show very little tool usage besides smashing rocks to open shells and coconuts. Still, they have complex social structured, usually consisting of a dominant male and many females and their children. Males engage in screaming singing competitions for dominance and younger males might do this playfully.
Males grow long beards and braid it and poke branches or sea urchin spikes into it as decoration.
They also smell pretty bad.
The discovery of the isle of Titans took place during an expedition sent by the Sun Empire to discover if Alwaysummer had an end to the south and to set and man trading outposts in this region.
This expedition was manned mainly with people from the plateau. In the creation myth of these people, earth used to be a warm and fertile heaven and all people were colossal and child like, but humanity was punnished with a great flood and made small and vulnerable.
When the crew members discovered this islands and the giants, they started to believe that it was the mythical last remnant of paradise and that the giants were the spirits of their legendary heroes and ancestors. (I'm sure this won't eventually turn into a rebellious cult...)
Giants are generally gentle to humans, since to them, they are child like (it's not that they think that adult humans are baby giants, but they find humans cute like we would find a small dog cute). Even though giants are sacred of fire, they did enjoy the taste of cooked food, so it started being common for them to bring food to the humans so that they could cook it (and keep some for themselves).
Male giants started doing favors to the crew members such as reaching fruits and helping them build by moving heavy objects in exchange for getting their long beards groom and braided into intricate styles by the small and precise hands of the humans.
Giants also found the songs and instruments these humans played to be soothing and would stand in the sea at night next to were the humans were playing to hear their music.
Still, most of the times both species stuck to themselves, with the humans building the outpost and having an epiphany and the giants fishing as usual and watching their new neighbours from a distance.
Even though their interactions have been peaceful and even wholesome at the moments, some abandoned shipwrecks and pirate hideouts scattered in the island with no signs of their inhabitants remind the crew members of the island's potential hostility.
Here is a quick evolutionary tree I did of the spec-evo primates of the setting:
