Rephaim

Formally the Rephaim — "Giants" is simply what everyone else calls them, and the name that's stuck in every human language. Nephilim-inspired: every Rephaim is born with six fingers and six toes, a trait human scholars fixate on and the Rephaim consider about as remarkable as having a nose. Non-playable — monstrous humanoids rather than a player race. See Giant Kingdoms document for territory, government, the Four Kingdoms, and the war-era engineering legacy — this page covers the people themselves.

Physicality: Rephaim stand anywhere from 10 to 20 feet tall, and height is rank as much as it is size. The tallest are born to it or grow into it through feats significant enough to be sung about; a Rephaim king is rarely under 18 feet, and one who stops growing short stays a commoner no matter how sharp they are. Status and stature run along the same axis, which makes Rephaim hierarchy visible at a glance in a way human hierarchy never is.

Skin and tribe: Rephaim skin runs a wide range of unusual tones — ash-grey, basalt-black, clay-red, bone-white, moss-green — and the color tracks bloodline more than geography, though the two reinforce each other over generations as tribes settle where their coloring already serves them: stone-grey tribes hold the high crags, ember-red tribes hold the volcanic country, moss-toned tribes hold the deep timber. A tribe's color tells another Rephaim, at a glance, which kingdom they're looking at and — depending on history — whether to expect hospitality or a blood feud.

Intelligence: Not brutish. Rephaim courts run on rhetoric, oral epic, and long memory as much as on strength — a king without a sharp tongue and a sharper court philosopher doesn't stay king long. Human nations that write the Rephaim off as big and simple are making a costly mistake, and Rephaim kingdoms are entirely content to let that assumption stand uncorrected.

Culture: Oracle-consulting, hospitality codes with real teeth, contests that test wit as much as muscle, honor cultures built on debts owed and slights remembered for generations. Kingship is earned and defended rather than simply inherited — a throne without the strength or cunning to hold it invites a challenge, and the challenge is expected, not treasonous.

Diet: The Rephaim eat people. Not out of savagery or hunger — it's a delicacy, reserved for honored feasts, and eating a particularly notable enemy or captive is closer to a rite than a meal: a way of taking their measure and closing the account. This makes diplomacy with human nations fraught in ways that go beyond simple horror. A Rephaim king offering a guest the honored cut at a treaty feast believes he's extending the highest courtesy his culture has — and the wrong answer, either way, can end the negotiation. The bones don't go to waste afterward either — see the Bone Sigil, below.

No boats: The Rephaim don't sail, and no Rephaim kingdom has ever fielded a navy. Their weight makes conventional hulls impractical, and the culture has folded that limitation into something closer to superstition — the sea is one of the few places a Rephaim's size stops being an advantage. Whatever the real reason, the practical result is the same: the Rephaim kingdoms are confined to their landmass.

The Bone Sigil: The Rephaim hold the Bone Sigil — necromancy, tied directly to their feasting culture: the skeletons of the honored dead they eat are kept and raised as servants and slaves rather than discarded. It sits outside the thirteen Great House Sigils, in the same category as the Goblin and Hobgoblin Sigils — see The Sigil Houses document.

Origins — unconfirmed: The Rephaim tell their own epic of origin: a mortal woman and something not mortal, generations before the Long War, old enough that even the Elves only have it as inherited story rather than memory. Human scholars mostly file it as myth-borrowing. Whether it has any bearing on the current world — the Sigils, the walking gods, the war — is undetermined and deliberately left open. See Open Questions.

Shemazar: The Rephaim trace their ancestry to a fallen divine being. See World History and Religion documents for the broader theological context; Shemazar's true nature is a campaign-level reveal, not front matter. Shemazar has a sister archdevil, followed by the Hobgoblins of Ssyrathis — see Ssyrathis and Religion documents. What that relationship means for the Rephaim themselves is unresolved and low priority.

Open: what that relationship with Shemazar means for the Rephaim day to day; whether "Rephaim" is used formally among themselves or is itself a scholarly/religious register next to a more common self-name; full Bone Sigil mechanics (first draft lives in The Sigil Houses document).