Cloud and storm giants are the most powerful of the standard races of giant in the D&D rules, the two final rungs on the ladder of increasing humanoid power. There doesn't seem to be any specific inspiration for them, although giants are sometimes associated with the sky in myths and legends. They are also the most intelligent, and the most inclined to be helpful, rather than hostile.1E
Cloud giants are 18 feet (5.5 metres) tall, with bluish skin, and, unlike other giants, have what appear to be blunt, but greatly enlarged, canine teeth in the upper jaw. They aren't shown or described as wearing armour, so their skin must be equivalent to plate steel to explain their stated armour value. Most are of regular human intelligence (which is still smarter than most of the smaller giants), but a few are slightly better, and have limited skills with magic. They are said to have a particularly keen sense of smell, which is likely a nod to the cloud-dwelling giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, although they are otherwise quite different. They are also the first giants tall enough to have a stride that enables them to walk faster than humans, although still less than one might expect, given that they're about six times taller than we are.
They are equally likely to be good or evil, but never in between, suggesting a divided society. The only indication of the difference stated in the description is that the evil sort keep slaves and the good ones don't... although, you know, fair enough. In another distinction from the smaller giants, while females are significantly weaker than males, they are only slightly less common - the split of genders is roughly 60/40, rather than 75/25.
Storm giants are the pinnacle of giantdom, standing 21 feet tall (6.4 metres) and having strength one point off the maximum that the rules will allow. Apart from their size and skin colour, they look indistinguishable from humans, at least so far as one can tell. They are unusually intelligent, skilled with storm magic and typically benevolent, if notably isolationist and inclined to be solitary. For once, there is no mention of how common - or physically powerful - the females might be.
2E
As with other giants, the size of the two races has increased in this edition, although proportionately by rather less. Cloud giants are now 24 feet (7.3 metres) tall, and storm giants 26 feet (8 metres); storm giant females are just as physically large as their menfolk, and while cloud giant women aren't, they are equally strong and capable. The physical appearances haven't changed, except that, in 1E most storm giants were stated to be purple-skinned, and a minority green; it's now the other way around.
The hides of both kinds of giant are even tougher than before, although they are equivalent to each other, eroding some of the stepwise progression from the earlier edition. On the other hand, having skin tougher than steel isn't enough for storm giants, and they tend to wear armour over the top of it.
Cloud giants live in more complex societies than before, with more cooperation between family groups, and regularly trading with humans. They seem to be a sophisticated people, with a notably aesthetic culture. Storm giants, on the other hand, are even more inclined to be solitary; the implication is that a mated couple split up as soon as their children are raised and return to living apart.
3E
Cloud giants appear to have lost their enlarged teeth in this edition, while purple-skinned storm giants seem to be even rarer than before. The descriptions of their cultures are essentially the same as in 2E, although cloud giants now typically wear armour, having previously been said to disdain it (as well they might, given how difficult it is to hurt them even without it).
Thanks to the nature of 3E, however, we do have more insight into the giants' abilities. Both races are more agile than humans, and considerably stronger than, say, an elephant. Storm giants are also supernaturally insightful and strong-willed, and highly charismatic to boot, and retain the high intelligence of earlier editions.
All cloud giants now have intelligence slightly above that of the average human, and they all have the magical abilities previously said to be restricted to exceptional individuals. On the other hand, the magical islands such cloud giants were said to inhabit are now little more than legend. In addition to skills in navigating their environment, they are revealed to be skilled craftspeople, fitting with what we know of their society.
5E
Cloud giants have regained their fang-like teeth, while storm giants are now all at least slightly purple-coloured, with the green variety having vanished altogether. While cloud giants retain skin tougher than that of humans, storm giants do not, and even cloud giants are not remarkably hard to injure. They've also stopped wearing armour again although, of course, they can soak up so much damage that this isn't the risk it might appear to be... although presumably they do get hurt.
Cloud giants are also no longer more agile than humans, but storm giants still are. Allowing for changes in the rules, their other attributes are broadly similar. Cloud giants, however, are considerably more skilled with magic than before. Both 2E and 3E mentioned the existence of cloud giant spell-casters, but now this is something that they can all do, including the ability to literally turn themselves into mist. Their culture seems more based on deception and exploitation of smaller races than before, being clearly avaricious, rather than merely prizing fine things.
The hermit-like lifestyle of storm giants is further played up, with their skills shifting more towards knowledge gained from centuries of watching lesser races from afar. They are portrayed as almost semi-divine entities, far removed from the real world, a plot device more than a foe to be fought.
It's noteworthy that these two very powerful races are the most inclined to have a "good" alignment. Something similar is seen, at least in earlier editions, with dragons - the benevolent ones are more powerful, but rarer, than the evil ones. This fits with the trope of "evil hordes", where evil may be present in comparatively high numbers, but is easier individually for the good guys to defeat. Furthermore, you're not meant to fight the good giants, so making that harder to do successfully is sensible. But you don't want them to be too common, or they could take the limelight away from the heroes.
Storm, and especially cloud, giants seem to have relatively sophisticated cultures, and both live in large and complex castles. It's easier to imagine the long-lived and self-reliant storm giants spending their time building such things than the cloud giants. Which is just as well, since their solitary habits mean that they'd pretty much have to, while cloud giants can inherit from their parents. Although somebody still has to build the thing in the first place...
The small communities of the largest giants pose problems for where they get their goods from. It's hard to imagine that they're all skilled in the full range of crafts, and they need raw materials. Cloud giants again have an easier time of it, since the later editions specifically indicate a degree of craftsmanship skills, and separate groups interact with one another, making their circle of potential contacts larger.
Even so, evil cloud giants raid human settlements, presumably for raw materials, since the humans are unlikely to make clothes, utensils, weapons, and so forth in the appropriate size. Good cloud giants have a bigger problem; we're told that they trade... but what with? What do they have that humans want? Perhaps they trade in favours, or there's something valuable on their magical cloud islands that can't be acquired elsewhere.
As the two largest regular humanoid races, cloud and storm giants naturally face the same biomechanical issues that smaller giants do, but on a larger scale. Assuming they scale naturally, a 5E storm giant would weigh something like 6.5 tons, which is about the same as a particularly large African bull elephant. Since that only stands about 10 feet tall at the shoulder, even allowing for the fact that the giant is bipedal, we'd expect it to weigh somewhat more than the elephant, largely due to the heavy bones required to support the rest of the body.
The exceptionally large size does also raise some other questions. For instance, there's the size of the brain. Given that storm giants are the same shape as humans, and that we can assume their brain structures are similar, they should have a brain that weighs approximately 100 kg, which is massive.
But while we might think that larger brains mean more intelligence, it's not quite as simple as that. That's because a larger body requires a larger brain simply to run it; to some extent, it has to scale with the body. An elephant's brain, for instance, is larger than that of a human. So should we just consider how proportionately large the brain is? Well, no, that doesn't work either, because a human's brain is about the same size, in comparison to the body, as that of a mouse. This is likely because the mouse, being smaller to start with, needs more of that brain to do essential housekeeping, and so the apparently large proportion is misleading.
Plotting brain size against body size, what we actually get is a curve that scales to about the power of 1.5, and it's this that we can use to figure out how larger we'd "expect" a brain to be. The end result is something called the encephalisation quotient (EQ) that indicates how much larger or smaller a brain is compared with what we'd expect for a mammal of its size.
By definition, this is 1 for a typical mammal - and rather less for things like reptiles. A domestic sheep has an EQ of 0.8, and a dog around 1.2. Chimps are around 2, dolphins close to 5, and humans about 7.5. You may have spotted where this is going: because giants are larger than humans, but their brains are proportionately the same size as ours (except, perhaps, for hill giants) their EQ is higher than ours. Yes, elephants have larger brains than we do, but, compared to the rest of the elephant, it's quite a lot smaller - and that's not true of giants with human-proportioned heads.In fact, for storm giants, the EQ comes out at around 18. Now, in reality, EQ doesn't directly predict intelligence since a lot depends on the brain's internal architecture, the density of the neuronal connections inside it and so on. But it's still consistent with the storm giant's very high intelligence... although clearly not the lower intelligence of, say, frost giants.
Another question arises with regard to lifespan. We're told that cloud giants can live for up to 300 years, and storm giants for 600. For ease of calculation, let's say that these are four and eight times the lifespan of a human, respectively. This is obviously a lot for a mammal, but it is fair to say that larger animals tend to live longer than smaller ones, if not quite by this much.
But what we don't know is the rate of maturation - how quickly they grow to full size. Even though they start out larger, this is likely to take longer than it does for humans, and we'd expect giants to be slow-growing. Sufficient nutrients would be hard to acquire, for one thing. But, once again, it doesn't really make sense to assume that this will be linear - that if you live four times as long, it must take you four times as long to mature.
A male rhino takes about 10 years to reach adulthood, which is rather less than humans. A bull elephant reaches sexual maturity in around 24 years, which is longer than for us, despite their overall lifespan being about the same as ours. These figures indicate that there isn't anything stopping an elephant-sized animal growing to full size and maturity in about the same time as a human does, even if it ages very slowly from that point on.
In fairness, it's likely that a giant would have a longer childhood and adolescence than an elephant, for the same reason that we humans take an inordinately long time to develop - the need to grow and mature our large brains. But eight times as long seems excessive.
One can consider pregnancy from the same perspective. An elephant's pregnancy lasts a whopping 22 months, and it's 16 months for a white rhino... but, then, it's only around 11 months for a blue whale, so no simple rule applies. Perhaps a figure of two years or so makes sense for the larger giants, but not the six years that the lifespan might imply. (For which, no doubt, a storm giantess would be very grateful).
It's more likely that it just takes a long time for such giants to get old.
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