The Jotunhills are a range of rolling highlands southwest of Konai Mora, home to the Jotun—smaller frost giants with cold attunement and remarkable regenerative abilities. The Jotun are cunning, carnivorous, and view frozen humans as both food and status symbols.
The Giants
Jotun stand roughly twelve to fourteen feet tall—smaller than their cousins elsewhere in Alaria but no less dangerous. Their cold attunement allows them to survive and even thrive in temperatures that would kill most creatures, and they regenerate from wounds with disturbing speed as long as they remain in freezing conditions. Only fire or removal from cold slows their healing.
The Jotun love the taste of flesh, particularly human flesh. They will hoard frozen humans as proof of their wealth, displaying their larders to rivals as a show of status. A Jotun patriarch's prestige is measured partly in the quality and quantity of his frozen collection—older specimens, particularly those with fine clothing or obvious signs of former status, are valued more highly than common travelers.
Despite their brutish appearance, Jotun are highly cunning. They set ambushes, coordinate hunting parties, and understand enough about human behavior to predict trade routes and migration patterns. However, they are terrible communicators with outsiders—their language is guttural and complex, and they have little patience for negotiation. Similar to trolls in this regard, though far more intelligent.
Clan Structure
The Jotunhills are not a unified territory but rather a collection of clan holdings, each dominated by a patriarch or matriarch who maintains their position through strength, cunning, and accumulated wealth (measured in frozen corpses). The clans raid each other as readily as they raid outsiders, and Jotun politics revolves around blood feuds, marriage alliances, and the endless competition for prestige.
Clan boundaries shift constantly as patriarchs rise and fall. A successful raid that captures several valuable humans can elevate a minor clan to prominence overnight; a disastrous defeat can see a once-powerful clan reduced to scavengers on the margins.
Relations with Neighbors
The Winterwood's northern edge provides some barrier between the Jotunhills and the lands to the south—the giants do not enter the deep forest, fearing whatever ancient things dwell beneath the canopy. But Jotun hunting parties still sweep around the forest's edges, and the Zwaeron have learned which routes are safer than others.
Those taken alive are kept frozen in Jotun larders until needed—a fate the Neth consider worse than death. The giants prefer their meat preserved; a human might be kept frozen for years before finally being thawed and consumed. Some captives have been rescued after months of frozen storage, their minds shattered by the experience of conscious preservation.
Shamayok Hills
The eastern reaches of the Jotunhills, overlooking Ennros Lake and the approaches to Sennos, are called the Shamayok Hills. This region is claimed by a particularly aggressive clan whose hunting parties regularly descend toward the lake settlements, making the eastern trade routes treacherous. The Sennosi have fortified their northern approaches specifically because of Shamayok raids, and caravans traveling to or from the lake city hire guards who know the giants' patterns.
Some Shamayok Jotun have developed a taste for the lake dwarves' preserved fish—a dietary quirk that other clans find distasteful but that has made Shamayok raiders marginally more interested in cargo than captives. Marginally.