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“The gods feared them, the world forgot them, but the marrow of giants sings still beneath our feet.” 

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The Jotari, or “Graveborn Giants,” are a proud and ancient race native to the deep barrowlands and black-bloomed valleys of Hextor—a land where death is not feared, but woven into life like sinew into bone. Towering and broad of limb, the Jotari are more than brutes or remnants of a bygone age; they are the living relics of an old, splintered world, shaped not by divine mercy, but by the hunger of rot, shadow, and enduring will.

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Physiology and Soul-Flesh

Jotari are massive, powerfully built beings ranging from 10 to 12 feet tall, their skin often marked by marbling patterns that resemble weathered stone, or veined like petrified wood. Many bear bone-spurs, runic scars, or natural necrotic growths that bloom like fungal roses along their shoulders or backs.

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Their blood is thick and black-red, rich with death-aspected mana, and their hearts beat slower than any mortal’s—pumping lifeforce drawn not just from breath, but from their bond to the dead beneath the soil. Some Jotari are even born “tethered”—sharing their soul with the spirit of an ancestor, allowing for eerie flashes of insight, aggression, or wisdom beyond their years.

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Culture and Death-Synthesis

To the Jotari, death is not an end—it is a rite of passage, a transformation to be welcomed, learned from, and eventually surpassed. Their shamans and bone-chanters preach a core belief that life and death are enemies, and only in their synthesis—undeath—may truth be born.

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Their cities, carved from cliffside ossuaries or nestled among petrified forests, are half-cathedral, half-cemetery. They mourn with celebration, bury with purpose, and often harvest the bones of revered elders to create tools, armor, or even constructs that continue serving the clan.

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Outsiders consider such customs barbaric. To the Jotari, they are holy.

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Many giants undergo voluntary death-mirroring rituals to embrace undeath in controlled stages, merging spirit and form into a semi-lich state called a Barrowform. These transformations are not seen as loss of self, but ascension—a rite reserved for elders, war-mothers, and bone-kings.

 

Relationship with Xandera and the Ossuary Dominion

When Xandera rose in Hextor, the Jotari did not resist her power—they recognized in her the long-awaited hand of prophecy. To them, she is not simply a necromancer, but the embodiment of the Synthesis, the rebirth of a true god betrayed by heaven and now stirring beneath the rot of the world.

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Many Jotari serve her directly:

• As bonebound architects raising black pyramids and crypt-temples

• As soul-chained warriors, grafted with iron and bone

• Or as death-priests, preserving ancestral knowledge long thought lost

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In return, Xandera honors their ancient customs, expanding their influence and allowing them full dominion over the barrowlands. She considers them her chosen vanguard—not servants, but kin.

 

 Racial Traits 

• Titan’s Marrow: Resistant to life-draining or necrotic damage; undead recognize Jotari as kin and are less likely to attack unprovoked.

• Barrowborn Memory: May commune with the souls of their ancestors during ritual slumber.

• Death-Synthesis Tolerance: Jotari may undergo partial undeath states without becoming mindless or cursed.

• Gravecraft: Capable of crafting from bone and spirit as naturally as others do from wood and metal.

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Where others see abomination, the Jotari see inevitability. Where others cry heresy, they whisper reclamation.

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And in the shadow of Xandera’s throne, the Jotari prepare—not for the end, but for the bloom of an age where the gods no longer dictate who may live, or die, or rise again.