When D&D was in its earliest days, giants were the well-known core of the so-called “true giants” — hill giants, fire giants, frost giants, stone giants, cloud giants, and storm giants — alongside lesser “giant-like” creatures such as ettins and ogres. As the game expanded, it made “giant” into a formal creature type and added other folk to that type. But in so doing, it created a kind of schism in the giants, whereby folk such as cyclopses and fomorians couldn’t be a part of the core identity because they were effectively an afterthought to it.
For both the fomorians (still awaiting final development) and the cyclops, I wanted to work with the idea that they were effectively peers of the core six giant peoples (renamed in CORE20 as the hallaek, the wiirdhar, the fiirmar, the rohkhad, the clohmad, and the istruhmad, because having sapient creatures with advanced and ancient cultures named in the languages of other cultures is part of that colonialism thing that D&D has long struggled with). But even as peers, cyclopses and fomorians (as athachs, ettins, and ogres) needed to be set up as outcasts from the core giant culture in some way.
The specific angle for the cyclops and fomorians that appealed to me is that they have a connection to druidas magic, which traditionally isn’t part of the whole giant magical oeuvre. As such, the idea is that the giants have an overall ancient arcane tradition, but those two subgroups started messing around with nature magic and ended up splitting off from the giants’ central culture as a result.
(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)
