Greetings. Great to see the diverse crew here today. I see humans in loincloth (sorry, chainmail is too expensive 'round these parts), ripped muls, half-giants (cough goliaths cough), clean-shaven dwarves, murder-hobo halflings (Frodo got eaten alive), tall elven pickpockets, dray (dragonborn wracking cough) and even the odd gith and belgoi.
Speaking of gith, what do you all think of them? Are the gith the progenitors of the gith race, an offshoot of forerunner gith through planar travel, or a independently evolved race of gith following certain universal patterns of evolution throughout the multiverse? Humans seem to be like the latter, appearing or being created on various worlds of the multiverse without planar migration.
The 2e adventure Black Spine details the origin of the gith on Athas. They are not native to the planet. They are the descendants of githyanki that came to Athas to do their usual pillaging thing, but got mindbombed by the githzerai into amnesia/insanity.
What militates against this is that the Complete Book of Elves is not a Dark Sun branded supplement, and is thus suspect. On the other hand, if gith can be planar immigrants, why not elves?
As someone that played most of his early D&D in Forgotten Realms I tend to assume most nonhuman races arenât native unless the setting states otherwise.
Mind you, if you subscribe by the rhullisti lore, then most races on Athas are of halfling stock. However itâs also possible that Green Age Athas could have seen extraplanar settlers, so maybe high elves and Athasian elves interbred.
While itâs likely Athas has always been difficult to travel to, it is possible other races couldâve gotten stranded there the way the githyanki did. Or perhaps the cleansing wars made Athas even harder to travel to, with the sudden surge in death and magical shenanigans. That may very well have been what stopped the gith from leaving.
I actually dislike the official origin of gith and prefer them to be natives of Athas. However, I cannot argue with the offical narrative, as there is no champion of Rajaat tasked with the annihilation of the Gith. From that, we can surmise that they did not orginate from the Halflings.
Yes - but only assuming that Gith were an extant race during the Cleansing Wars of the Green Age, and not a latter day new race that emerged after the Cleansing Wars.
Like to think the gith were trapped beneath Black Spine in Yathizor for most of the Green Age. It wasnât until some event during the Cleansing Wars occurred and freed them allowing the gith to breech the surface.
Like to further think that it wasnât an accident.
Could be that one of the cleansed races (kobolds come to mind) heard legends of an ancient warrior race beneath the mountains. In desperation, the remaining kobolds followed these rumors in the hopes of gaining an ally against the Curseâs forces. The result was unleashing the near mindless gith upon the Tablelands.
To further run with redkingâs point, gith could be descended from a tribe of elves, men, or halflings that lived too close to the pristine tower and degenerated over time. A fun thought is if groundwater under the pristine tower gained some the mutating properties of the tower and an underground tribe in hiding survived off this tainted bounty, degenerating into gith.
I like all of these ideas and I am going to steal them. I think the idea of gith coming from elves. Maybe they hid in the Black Spine mountains during the cleansing wars and drank from an underground stream contaminated by the Pristine Tower.
I go with the idea that the Githyanki were extraplanar travelers during the age when the planes & gods were accessible to Athas, Because the worldâs creatures were naturally psionic, they probably had a significant stronghold populated by enough Gith to propagate the species that would justify their continued existence.
Then during the cataclysm (could be cleansing wars, or something else in your game) that changed the metaphysical alignment of Athas and closed it off they were one of the early victims of the event and something (an Enemy, could be the Githzerai or something else) managed to neutralize them to the extent that it turned them into less refined forms of themselves and were no longer viewed as a threat.
perhaps, every 10,000 of so births, an exceptional Gith is born with the cunning of his ancestors, who resembles the Githyanki of old. If these special births survive the rigors of Athas to adulthood, they are drawn by a dull, yet constant psychic call to travel to a faraway landâŚnone have ever returned.
I go with the account in Black Spine - degenerate descendants of Githyanki migrants. Black Spine states the githyanki created Yathazor âmillennia agoâ which means you can fit them in as far back as the Rebirth or as recently as the end of the Cleansing Wars or anywhere in the 12,000 years between those 2 events.
I like the idea that Athasâ planar borders, despite being more or less blokaded from the rest of the multiverse now, at some point were more porous. I also like the idea that not everything on the planet is the result of loony halflings, insane pyreen or evolved/devolved bugs.
I subscribe to there was an illithid presence on Athas which is why the githiyanki went to the lengths of creating a city on the prime material.
Also believe it was much easier reaching Athas in its infancy. A planar accident occurred in the Blue Age which has made it increasingly harder to breech Athasâ boarder Ethereal and Astral.
The accident in question could have been a living vortice reaching to deeply into the Negative Energy Plane causing it to spill into both Athasâs boarder Etheral and Astral creating the Gray and possibly the Black.
I looked up the 2E entry for gith. Like the regular githyanki, they are egg layers.
Habitat/Society: The gith live in tribal organizations. The individual with the most powerful psionics generally acts as the leader. All other social positions are distributed at his pleasure.
For every twenty-five gith, there will be a 5 HD leader, for every fifty, a 6 HD leader, and for every tribe of 100 or more a 7 HD leader. In addition to having hit points and THAC0 numbers appropriate to their HD, these leaders will have psionic powers approximately equal to a psionicist of an equivalent level.
Some of these leaders are priests. While little is known of the gith religion, shamans up to the 4th level are known to accompany and sometimes lead gith tribes. There have also been reports of gith wizards (defilers) ranked at the 6th level. Even if true, 6th level would be unusual for gith, but wizards of up to 4th level have been reported by reliable witnesses.
Not much is known about the reproductive cycle of the gith. It is known that they are egg layers; females lay approximately 1d6 eggs in a clutch. It is rumored that the gith operate hatcheries containing hundreds (some say thousands) of nests.
I wonder if the gith are able to leave their eggs unquickened in a preserved state, to be quickened whenever the circumstances allow. That could account for the gith hordes that emerge from the wastes from time to time.
I also go with the notion that Athas had illithids on it along with the idea that planar travel was easier prior to the cleansing wars. Maybe not as easy as on some other worlds, but easy enough that illithids and githyanki migrated to Athas. In my campaign illithids are still around, but all the elder brains are dead. Mind flayer society eventually degenerated and neothelids have replaced illithids almost entirely.
I have illithids in my Sundered Regions part of Athas. For my campaign the illithids were at war with the rhulisti in the early Blue Age over âstealingâ mindflayer graft technology to unlock the basics of life-shaping.
It is a well written segment. However, I think it was more about being as complete as possible for a supplement about elves. AKA it was written for something other than Dark Sun.
The real issue for me is this. It makes no difference as written. How is changing their origin different? In this context, it does not. In essense, itâs academic
