So, she solves both problems by making it a simple cultural practice that when a githyanki gets powerful enough, they are granted the "honor" of having her eat their souls. More importantly, she's terrified of being ousted from power by a stronger githyanki even though they've been worshipping her and adoring her for generations. If you need more proof that the githyanki have turned themselves into slaves and never even realized it one of the drawbacks of being a lich (or at least a githyanki lich, depending on edition) is that Vlaakith CLVII needs to eat souls on a regular basis to sustain herself. She never had a daughter, but she turned herself into a lich, so it's all good now she can reign forever as an immortal, undying tyrant. See, Vlaakith was so beloved by the first githyanki that they made her daughter their ruler, and her daughter, and her daughter, and so on, an unbroken line of god-queens that lasted until Vlaakith CLVII (that's Vlaakith the 157th, if you don't know your Latin numerals). Mind you, this "we're not slavers, honest!" thing varies a little depending on edition/cosmology in the World Axis, Tu'narath is home to a sizable population of slave-farmers who exist to try and cultivate food for their githyanki masters - and who are summarily eaten by both the resident dragons and the githyanki themselves when they are used up.Īnd, finally, don't call them out on how they preach total freedom for themselves, but in reality they've become nothing but a race of warrior-slaves for their "divine" god-queen. Yeah, they're not the sanest race in the multiverse by a long shot. But, if you ever point out that this basically makes them slave-owners collecting their serfs' taxes in a very dramatic way, they'll immediately kill the entire band they were robbing from in order to "prove" they're not slave-owners. So, they steal the bulk of the goods from their victims, do as little damage as they can, and let them scrape a living until eventually they have enough of a stockpile to make robbing them profitable again. And, if they steal everything from the astral villages they raid or ships they rob, then they'll ultimately starve to death because those sources of goods will either die out or stop coming where they can get them. See, although the githyanki aren't completely dependent on raiding to survive, the simple truth is that their choice of residence and their war-focused culture means they can't produce enough food, goods and other essentials to support their own population. Secondly, they get really snippy if one notes that their practice of raiding Astral communities, taking a certain amount of the goods and then leaving in a form of "sustainable pillaging" is essentially a master-slave relation dressed up in piracy clothing. The first and foremost is that they're a bunch of hypocrites obsessed with "being free" that they have become convinced their manifest destiny is to conquer & enslave every other race in the multiverse, and they hate religion but worship the Warrior-Queen. In fact, githyanki don't like to hear a lot of ugly things about their race, mostly because they're all true. More than one person has wondered if Vlaakith didn't betray Gith in some way, earning the pact with red dragons by, say, feeding Gith to Tiamat, but the githyanki won't hear of it. Gith herself disappeared after a trip to Baator to secure an alliance with the dragon-goddess Tiamat, but one of her greatest warriors, Vlaakith, took her place as Warrior-Queen of the Githyanki and kept her people on the path that Gith had said. Zerthimon objected to this, an act called the Pronouncement of Two Skies, and thus the illithid's former slaves were divided into "Those Who Spurn Gith" (Githzerai) and "The Children of Gith" (Githyanki), with the former bogging off to Limbo (or the Elemental Chaos) and the latter disappearing into the Astral Plane. well, basically enslaving every other race and making the Gith-kin as bad as the illithids had been.
At the brink of total illithid annihilation, Gith began planning to "truly" free her people by. Bruce Cordell had some lore about this in the 2e Illithiad and associated modules.Įventually two figures rose up and led their people in a massive slave uprising Zerthimon the mystic, and Gith the warrior-woman. Somewhen and somewhere the Mind flayer empire found them, twisted them, and enslaved them for untold generations. Perhaps erectus from the past perhaps estranged humans from some future. The githyanki are the twisted, estranged kin of the githzerai, divided from their cousins by a philosophical breach that occurred centuries ago.īoth races were humans once para-humans, anyway.