The Giants of Ur — “the blue Philistines” of the Templar chronicles — are extraplanar giant bankers who keep magical security vaults; after the robbery of the Temple they became guardians of its relics.
| Type | Group (extraplanar bankers) |
| Origin | Ur, the capital, on another plane |
| First clients | Templars of Time |
| Spanish entry | Gigantes de Ur |
Description
Giant-scale beings from another plane, said to descend from those who ran the trade of Tyre — the island city with purple sails — and to have traded across the Mediterranean for three thousand years. They are “Philistines like Goliath but warmer and more precise”, in white tunics, escorted by guards with huge scimitars; their archaism feels put on, answering to the coherence of another world, Ur the capital. When they gesture, their fingers do not add up: they count oddly, sometimes too many. They command a special magic (“a kind of magic that even we prize and respect”).
Their pride: “We are not a pawnshop; we never break a contract.” If a debtor does not pay, he keeps the property but they take its usufruct until the debt is redeemed.
Vaults
They offer vaults in places only those who know how to look can find — King Solomon’s mines, the Queen of Sheba’s Abyssinia, Atlantis, barely inhabited islands — and for the highest demand, the supreme protocol: seven replicating vaults with eight portals each, protection by illusion and magical distance (a compass rose), internal guards (Celadones) and mastodons that are vaults with legs.
History
In the negotiation over relics after the Temple robbery they offered security services with no apparent political agenda — “understand that we would be giving relics of our faith, objects from our very God” — and Hugues de Payens accepted their terms without suspicion. They keep the Temple’s relics: the splinter of the True Cross, a wooden fragment with a pentacle, a blue book, an infernal egg, and others.
Relationships
- The Mercane of Union, sapphire-skinned bankers of the multiverse who keep silent “like Switzerland” (banking neutrality) and guard Vault U-571.
- The Boreal Bank, which arranges death insurance and percentages with them.
- The arithmetic of their fingers rhymes with the Seal of the Six Fingers.