You could say that they're trying to get back to the Edenic state they were in on their homeworld before the illithids found them and shaped them into a race of war. But the githzerai are taking up the greater existential challenge of redeeming their race. The githyanki are now their own masters, but other than that they haven't changed much. They were the illithid empire's secret weapon and shock troops, sailing out in fleets of voidships to lay waste to entire worlds (or planes, or whatever, depending on your cosmology). I don't know how much this has been explored already in official D&D materials, but I like the idea that the brutal githyanki represent what the gith were like under the control of the mind flayers. it's hard to find that sweet spot between 4E's glowing ninjas and AD&D's terrible newspaper cartoon A githyanki is just a githzerai who gave up the constant struggle for discipline, and vice versa.Īnd of illithids, tbh. The githyanki, on the other hand, survive by embracing that brutality. The githzerai are monastic and severe because they're trying to expiate their horrible past as slaves of the mind flayers. But the githyanki and the githzerai are each a discrete race and culture, each a dark mirror of the other, which I like. Drizzt Do'Urden is kind of lame because he's just one guy who rebels against his evil society and is really obviously somebody's PC. The second thing that's cool about them is the duality of the two races. The gith should be defined by their interactions with the illithids. A whole race of slaves! Possibly brought from a distant world, or possibly created from scratch through unholy alchemy! Like the Jews in Egypt, but with mad psychic powers. I don't know when exactly the idea was conceived of them having been former slaves of the illithids, but it gives both strands of the gith a depth of history that other demihumans generally don't have. However, if you try to forget the history of the gith and just look at them as they are today, they are an awesome concept for a race. And we all know it is perfectly righteous to despise anything that takes evil D&D monsters and gives them a way to be good guys, all because some player said "I want to play as one of those!" The githyanki were originally some crazy alien race from the Fiend Folio who didn't really have much definition beyond a cool illustration and something something goblins from outer space. So I feel like githzerai don't get a lot of love from D&D players, at least old school D&D players, and with some fair reason.
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