How Ogres and the like show up in-world (RPG Blog Carnival)

Advantage on Arcana gives us this months prompt Cyclopes, Ettins, Hill Giants, and Ogres for the RPG Blog Carnival and asks that we come up with something that makes those named monsters more than varying sized bags of dumb, mean aggression. In much the same was orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears need a bit of work to distinguish between each other and that mostly being in how they show up in the game, you can take the same approach with these giant-kin. For the goblinkin, you get the more chaotic ones (orcs), ordered ones (hobgoblins), small sneaky ones (goblins) and big sneaky ones (bugbears) which is not bad but we can do better. Some factors I have talked about before are lifespans - giants are around a long time - and the constant requirements for these big guys to fuel big frames with big feasts. Thoughts on our candidates Cyclopes I think are the easiest one because they are classically children of the gods and enmeshed in the whole divine court. Maybe they live a little…