Perhaps this has been discussed here before, but I must've missed it. :-)
Where did the Forest Giant come from?
The TFL instruction book mentions that 'their enmity with the Trow goes back for centuries.' Centuries being a rather vague term, and the timeline for the world being rather vague itself, I've often speculated that the Forest Giants could've been created at the same time as the Trow, and perhaps even faced their own trials and tests from combative younger races even as the Trow were tested.
Based solely upon 'modern' human maps of Myth and the information I've seen I see no reason to think that the Trow ever held lands in the 'west' (Re: West of the Cloudspine), not to mention the ever unseen south and east (Out towards 'Gower'). This leads me to speculate that perhaps the Trow are not the ancient chosen of the gods that they might first appear (And would *certainly* present themselves as, all cultures do this), but simply a regional variation of over sized races that were being tested all over the world of Myth.
And let us never forget that there are regions to the South and East that we never see, and potentially even lands across the oceans with wholely different races, not to mention the far world that Fetch are drawn from.
What got me started thinking about this? The classic four/five elements and their relations to the known and unknown Myth world. Consider:
Trow clearly represent 'earth' (Though it could be argued, because the Forest Giant's claim to worship the earth in their TFL caption and their claim that Trow 'poisoned the soul of iron (By perverting it into steel with *fire*?) that the Trow is fire and the FG is earth)
Forest Giants probably represent 'fire' (Their god is referenced as the 'lava god' in the TFL tags and their special attack appeared to involve jerking something explosive from the ground. Their only appearance in TFL SP was on a level with a large stone object with a fire burning within, which they appeared to be trying to reclaim from the Trow.)
The 'Drowned Kingdom of Yer K's' remains uninhabited by humans, perhaps because it is defended by a giant water race? Perhaps that recently released new giant unit from Bungie is this water race, or an interbreeding of Forest Giants and the water race (The new unit lives in a swamp, highly suggestive of the combination of fire-as-energy and water (Or, alternately, poisoned earth and water))
The Southern realms, where SoulBlighter goes to learn new and terribly arts in TFL, would logically be the strongest area for an 'air' (Tropical currents, heat making air perceptable, etc.) elemental.
Finally we have the far east where The Great Devoid (Void) is present, and hints at a true 'void' beyond it and Gower, whence Connacht came (Could Connacht have been an avatar of void, sent to create balance with the Trow and the young races (Heck, could the younger races represent the new, combination of all others, element 'flesh?'). What sort of giant unit would the gods have created from Void to amuse them?
Whew, to be brief, does anyone else think the Forest Giants could be just as old and powerful as the Trow, but less interested in the keeping of records, or the development of complex societies? Is the origin of the Bre Unor and Fir Bolg races in ancient combat tests of the Forest Giant?
If only we knew *when* the Trow 'poisoned the soul of iron' (Could this even be a metaphor for the Trow race's development of a complex, city building society?) we could reasonably assume the age of the Forest Giant...
Ramses II (I could go on and on)