Lore'd to Death

The Gith (Githyanki & Githzerai) [Dungeons & Dragons / Baldur's Gate 3]

• Brett

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This week we dive into the history of the Gith, and more specifically the Githyanki and Githzerai tribes. From their time spent enslaved to their newfound freedom and civil war, we have it all covered down to the finest detail. Who are these funky little frog people, and what makes them tick? They're a pretty miserable people, so, everything, actually.

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Hey there, welcome to the Lore’d to Death podcast– a deep dive into the lore of your favourite games, movies, shows, and more! My name is Brett, and today I’m diving back into the world of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dungeons and Dragons by popular demand to talk about the bane of the Mind Flayers– the Gith.

I talked about them previously in my episode about Mind Flayers, but I didn’t go into too much detail other than what was needed to understand their significance to the Illithid Empire. But apparently that wasn’t enough for you thirsty folks, and I’ve had plenty of people ask for a complete history of the Gith, and I am here to serve. As usual, I want to give the forewarning that there may be some slight spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, but nothing major. The Gith are a very important part of the game, but nothing I mention is going to spoil the main game any more than the Illithid Empire episode did. I’ll just be referencing characters within the game and using any new information that we got about the Gith. But again, no major spoilers. So without further ado, let’s meet our favourite frog people.

The Gith are a humanoid race. They are slender, tall figures ranging anywhere from 5 to 7 feet tall, weighing anywhere from 90 to 200 pounds. Being very slender people, their features tended to be very sharp and angular. Their skin colour ranged from a pale yellow to shades of green and even leaning into brown leafy tones. They typically have some sort of darker markings on their skin, much like frogs and toads have some fun little accent colours. Also like frogs, they have sunken, beady black eyes. The most notable features, I think you’ll find, are their tiny, flattened noses, pointed, serrated ears and sharp teeth. Unlike frogs, however, they were able to grow hair which came in black or red, and they typically styled it in a topknot fashion.

The name Gith is kind of confusing, however, so let me explain that thought before I go any further. Gith is, by all intents and purposes, the name of the race of Gith. Gith is also the language that they speak, and the name of the leader who freed the Gith from their Illithid enslavement. That last part is what makes this slightly confusing. So, whether or not she was named after the race of Gith, or the Gith (as a race) were named after her is currently unknown to me. This is such a minute detail that I shouldn’t care about, and I’m sure no one else cares about, but I care and you can’t stop me from fretting over the smallest detail. I just wanted to voice that thought that I don’t know who came first, Gith or the Gith. But we’ll get back to Gith in a moment.

I mentioned that their language is also called Gith (I’m getting the sense that they weren’t very good at naming conventions), and each tribe spoke a different dialect, but it was the same language. It’s like Quebecois and French. One might laugh at the other, but they’re both fundamentally a terrible language. They also had a written language called tir’su, which is going to sound very familiar if you’ve ever watched Doctor Who. The way that they wrote was by arranging characters in a circle. Each tribe did it a little differently, though. The Githyanki started from the top and went clockwise, whereas the Githzerai started from the bottom and the characters went counter-clockwise. But, it was the same premise. Each character represented either a character or an entire word, and each circle that those characters and words formed was either an entire thought or sentence. The way that they are arranged kind of looks like the spoke of a wheel. Each character consists of a straight line with different shapes along it, and when they are put into a full shape, it looks like a circle with several spokes coming out of it. As I’m writing this I feel like I’m not describing it very well, and I’m struggling to find the words to make it make sense to someone who is just listening, not looking at the tir’su word, so I would recommend looking it up. It’s pretty neat, and it really does remind me of Gallifreyan but a slightly more primitive version of it.

Normally I would go right into the physical traits and magical abilities that they have, but once again things are a little complicated with the Gith. I mentioned the two tribes, Githyanki and Githzerai, briefly there and you would think that since they came from the same race they would have the same abilities, but it’s not that cut and dry. There are also the pirates of Gith and the Githvyrik tribes, who are quite different as well, but it’s hard to talk about each of those individually without understanding exactly what makes them different from each other. So I wanted to shuffle it up a little bit and go right into the history of the Gith, because that will more or less explain everything. Then I can go into each tribe (or subrace, if it’s easier to understand it that way) individually towards the end of the episode. So let’s get right into their origins.

I mentioned this in my episode about Mind Flayers as well, but it’s not known exactly where the Gith come from. And by that, I mean that we don’t know what their original race was. And if you haven’t listened to that episode, you might be a bit confused as to what I mean by that so let's just start there. The Gith were a race that was created by the Mind Flayers, or at least the popular theory suggests such. As far as we can tell, they were enslaved and genetically modified by the Mind Flayers to basically be the perfect thralls.

There are theories about what the Gith were before they were Gith, but nothing is concrete. Some say that they were once humans, brought to the astral plane from the world Pharagos and were genetically modified over time to be what they are today. Others say that they are a mix of several different humanoid races, shaped with the power of the Far Realm which is basically a realm of horrors that twisted and shaped beings who entered into grotesque forms, and is one of the places that Mind Flayers are said to have evolved from. The Gith even have a myth of the “forerunners” which they claim were the Gith before they were enslaved, and they were supposedly a pure version of the Gith, but any information about that has been lost to time.

From the book “Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations” we get a passage that tells us that they were quite literally created by the Mind Flayers by genetically mixing different thralls, and that their original form was unknown. I’m taking that as the canon answer because, like everything that is shrouded in mystery, it can be hard to tell fact from fiction and most theories were probably created by a drunk guard in a tavern who heard these things from a friend of a friend.

Regardless of where they came from, they spent an unknown period of time being enslaved by the Illithid Empire. There isn’t a lot of information about that period of time, and what exactly the Gith did as their slaves, but this is where we start to get some information about Gith. But even Gith’s past is a bit unclear. Some say that she was just a footsoldier in the Illithid army, but others say that she was the personal bodyguard to a powerful Mind Flayer. What we know is that Gith possessed a mutation that prevented Elder Brains from maintaining the Illithid hive mind.

I went over the effects of the Elder Brain in the Mind Flayer episode in more detail, but I’ll give the footnotes here. Basically, every Mind Flayer within a certain vicinity to an Elder Brain was under the complete control of said Elder Brain. The brain created a hive mind where it funnelled its thoughts and desires to every Mind Flayer that it could reach and made sure that they were doing its bidding for the grand design. So you can imagine that a slave possessing the ability to disrupt that field of control would pose a very significant threat.

However, I have some questions that I can’t find the answers to. Chief among them is, how did the Mind Flayers allow her to exist when she disrupted the Elder Brain’s field of control? Surely someone must have noticed that everywhere this slave went, no one was connected to the wi-fi. Unless Gith had the ability to toggle her field of effect on and off, but I tried searching for an answer and couldn’t find anything. I have to imagine that is the case, and maybe she can choose who she protects from the Elder Brain’s control and who she doesn’t because that would mean that she could fly under the radar while being surrounded by Mind Flayers. I tried to find evidence of this in Orpheus, another Gith who had the same ability, but again I found nothing.

Either way, slave rebellions against the Illithids were not uncommon, but since they were exceptionally strong usually they were able to crush any rebellion before it had a chance to be a threat. However, Gith was the first one to unite a force strong enough to create such a threat. She managed to band together different rebel groups in a way that no one else had before. This is why I think it makes sense that she was a high ranking slave to a powerful Mind Flayer, because if she were just an unremarkable footsoldier I don’t think that she would have had much of an influence over other groups of Gith.

With a large force of rebels, she was able to lead them to a victory over the Illithids and they were able to break free from enslavement. I’m sure that Gith’s ability to disrupt the Elder Brain’s field of control was a great contributor to this, seeing as it’s her only real defining trait as a Gith, but I can’t seem to find any mention of exactly how it was used to help them break free. I just have to speculate that it did, indeed, help them in some way, shape, or form. I’m sure that being broken off from the Elder Brain’s control without one’s consent would have been a pretty disorienting experience, so I would imagine that Gith was able to use that vulnerable state against the Mind Flayers to help take the colony down. This rebellion was the largest and most catastrophic known to the Mind Flayers up to this point, and since then they have never quite recovered from it. It was this rebellion alone that allowed the Gith to be their own free race, and so Gith was almost deified by the act.

After the rebellion, Gith insisted that they keep up the momentum and begin to hunt down every Mind Flayer in existence across the multiverse so as to end any threat of an Illithid Empire cropping up ever again. Only then would people be able to truly explore what the multiverse has to offer. And while this was a very righteous goal, and every Gith shared a hatred for the Mind Flayers, not all of them agreed that this was in the best interest for their race. There were others who felt that the best course of action was to take advantage of their newfound freedom and look inwards to start repairing the damage that was done to their people in their enslavement. The one who led this group of Gith was named Zerthimon, and it wasn’t a simple disagreement and amicable split. Rather, it started a civil war between Zerthimon and Gith because Zerthimon was actively undermining the Gith war effort. After a period of civil war, Zerthimon was killed, and the group that followed him was united under their new leader, Zaerith Menyar-Ag-Gith (who I am just going to refer to as Meynar-Ag for simplicity's sake). They were forced to retreat into Limbo, a chaotic outer plane, in defeat. And so both factions were separate, and those who followed Menyar-Ag and Zerthimon’s philosophies were called the Githzerai, and the ones who followed Gith were known as the Githyanki. Because of the nature of their split and the civil war, both groups hated each other and were likely to slaughter one another on sight. It wasn’t quite as bad as their hatred for Illithids, but they did not see each other as the same race, but something entirely separate from themselves. So let’s take a moment to talk about both of these splintered groups and what makes them unique from each other.

We’ll start with the Githzerai– Zerthimon’s tribe. Because of their philosophical differences from Gith’s vision, they were a more peaceful people. They were simple, frugal people who preferred practical and unadorned clothing and chose to follow a more monastic approach. They became philosophers, pursuing self-knowledge through intense training and meditation. But not every Githzerai was the same. There were those who closely followed the teachings of Zerthimon who were known as Zerths, those who simply trained as monks not under the teachings of Zerthimon, and those who chose to splinter off and lose their natural magic resistance choosing to become wizards.

Now, this is the same for all Gith, but the Githzerai all had a subtle affinity for magic and psionics which came from their constant exposure to the Mind Flayers and their mind control. They were all capable of casting minor telekinesis spells like Mage Hand, and could train to use spells like Shield or Detect Thoughts. The Githzerai would hone in on their innate magical ability and infuse magic into their combat skills. However, Zerths had access to more psionic powers than other Gith. They could innately reproduce effects similar to Feather Fall, Phantasmal Killer, Plane Shift, and See Invisibility at their base level. More experienced or enlightened Githzerai might be able to produce effects similar to Expeditious Retreat, Haste, and Teleport. And, yes, I did mention Plane Shift, which is a 7th level conjuration spell, and pretty well all Githzerai (and Githyanki for that matter) were able to cast it at will despite not being primarily spellcasters. This is probably a byproduct of their time spent being enslaved by the Mind Flayers, since they were constantly bouncing between planes in order to expand the Illithid Empire, but I’m not sure exactly. All I know is that Plane Shift is a pretty big spell to have, and this is a huge part of the reason why the Gith were so dangerous to the Mind Flayers.

Anyways, back to the Githzerai. I mentioned that the entire reason that they splintered off from the Githyanki was because of their philosophical differences, sparked from Zerthimon. They valued their own personal freedom, and did not want to behold themselves to being instruments of destruction that would repeat the same cycle of violence that had been imposed on their race for centuries. But this does not mean that they did not gather Illithid hunting parties, it just means that they did not base their entire existence on how many Mind Flayers they were able to kill. If they caught wind of Mind Flayer activity, they would gather a hunting party to make sure that it would not grow to be a threat.

I also mentioned that they were forced to retreat to Limbo, which is a chaotic outer plane. The Githzerai were able to harness the power of the chaos, and use it to channel the power of Spawning Stones to control the very plane itself. Using this power, they were able to physically shape their surroundings, and created great monasteries created of adamantine and stone. Particularly strong Githzerai were known as Anarchs, and they were not only able to shape the landscape of Limbo, but were able to harness the power of Limbo to create fortresses outside of the plane. But the monasteries weren’t all that they had. They also had entire cities in Limbo where the less devout Githzerai would live. These folks were not as strict in following their martial disciplines as those who resided in the monasteries, but still respected and understood their culture.

The largest Githzerai city in Limbo was called Shra’kt’lore which served as a capital of sorts and was where Menyar-Ag resided. Menyar-Ag ended up being deified, and survived for centuries as the Githzerai’s God-King. However, he wasn’t exactly in a proper living state. Menyar-Ag had such a master of the mind that he was able to put himself in a kind of stasis where he was neither living nor dead, but somewhere in… Limbo. During his reign as God-King he was potentially even properly considered a demi-god, which is pretty impressive.

But while he was their God-King, he seemingly wasn’t the only one who was worshipped by the Githzerai. Inside of the largest monastery, Zerth’Ad’Lun (which was large enough to be considered a city), there were temples to several deities including Corellon– the patron god of all elves, Moradin– the lawful-good god of the Dwarves, and the Raven Queen– the Shadowfell goddess of death, fate, and winter. Now, I say that they seemingly worshipped these gods because I don’t know for a fact that they didn’t. I don’t see why there would have been temples to these deities if not to be worshipped and there weren’t exactly a plethora of other races in the Githzerai temples because of their aforementioned disdain of anything non-Githzerai.

And that is basically all there is to know about the Githzerai. There is some more general information that’s shared between the Githzerai and the Githyanki, but I’ll go over that after I go over the Githyanki.

So, the Githzerai were monks and the Githyanki were fighters, to put it in DnD terms. Their entire culture was based around combat, and so the Githyanki were a group of merciless warriors. They didn’t discriminate against male nor female, and everyone was to become a warrior by right of being born a Githyanki. Similar to the Githzerai, they also had a host of innate magical abilities with which they could draw from. This included Mage Hand, Misty Step, and Nondetection spells, with the stronger among them being able to cast spells like Plane Shift and Telekinesis. Using these spells along with their fighting styles made them particularly deadly, same as the Githzerai.

Their society, being very military-driven, was organised and orderly. Just like they didn’t discriminate with genders, blood ties also had no effect on how high a Githyanki could rise. They ran on a meritocratic system, which meant that the only thing that mattered was what you were able to accomplish, meaning that anyone, regardless of their birth, was able to become the best of the best as long as they trained hard enough. But, a result of this system was that the Githyanki tended to be very individualistic and, honestly, selfish. They tended to use others to further their own personal goals, and didn’t have very many parasocial relationships with other Githyanki.

But, of course, you can’t have a society that’s full of just hunters. You need the gatherers as well, and so the Githyanki had a caste system in place (although I think that it’s important to note that you were not necessarily bound to your caste. You could work your way into another caste, if you wanted to, but would have to undergo a tremendous challenge to be able to prove your worth to be able to do so). The three castes were: the g’lathk, who were in charge of food production and general labour. Although this job is hard when you live in the Astral Plane where nothing grows, so they had to get creative. Some were able to channel their psionic abilities to grow a type of fungus that didn’t require sunlight to grow, while others harvested some sort of edible substance from the god-isles (the corpses of deities that floated throughout the Astral Plane) (and, yes, there’s no more to that phrase. I would imagine it’s a kind of slime that grows on the walls or something). However, this group was looked upon as unimportant, seeing as the Githyanki did not require food while they were in the Astral Plane, and their services were only needed for when they travelled outside of it.

The mlar were in charge of specialised tasks and craft making. I like to think that there are groups of Githyanki who are just making hand turkey paintings all day. But realistically, they were in charge of things like creating weapons and astral ships, as well as repairing them. And then there is the military caste, which itself was split into its own subgroups with knights, warriors, and spellcasters. The military hierarchy was divided into companies of ten warriors (and/or spellcasters), and each company was led by a sarth. Each group of ten sarths was led by a kith’rak, and every ten groups of kith’rak were led by a supreme commander. I tried to see if there was a cool name for this supreme commander but… not really. Then those supreme commanders were led by the leader of the Githyanki.

But, Brett, you didn’t mention knights in there! Yes, I know, I was getting to it. A knight stood outside of the military hierarchy, and was more of a political figure than anything and are the only ones who report directly to the queen. The knights wielded silver swords, which were the signature weapon of the Githyanki, and was able to damage the opponent's mind as well as their body (meaning that it does psychic damage as well if wielded by a Gith). If you thought that was metal, in the Astral Plane, a knight’s silver sword was able to sever the silver cord that connected the soul of a traveller by using Astral Projection. Don’t ask me how it works, because I really don’t know, all I know is that if the attack is successful, it kills its target immediately by ripping the soul out of their body. That is metal as hell.

Outside of the three sects that made up the Githyanki, there were also some specialised positions that some took up. Kind of like the Githzerai Anarchs, there were Githyanki who were specialised in manipulating the raw energy of the Astral Plane for various purposes known as hr’a’cknir. These would be healers like the ghustil who were imperative since natural healing spells didn’t work in the Astral Plane, or var’ith’n who were responsive for converting energy into material that the mlar could use to build structures or vehicles with. There were also the seers, or senja’si and the y’rn who could teleport large amounts of material within the Astral Plane.

Then things get really weird for a second and I’m sure that you didn’t expect ghosts to appear in Githyanki culture, but here we are. The undead spirits of knights would just hang around, and they were called tl’a’ikiths. They are… particularly strange. They could not interact with their physical environment except through combat, in which they still had access to their silver swords and martial abilities that they had in life, but they couldn’t otherwise speak to or interact with anyone or anything. The tl’a’ikiths would usually hang around their usual haunts, meaning that if they were a guard in life, they would typically maintain that guard post wherever it was. So if you’re planning on raiding a creche any time soon, you might want to beware. Aside from the Githyanki that you can physically see, you might get randomly attacked by an invisible spirit who has the ability to kill you in one shot by severing your soul from your body. Man I can’t get over that attack… It seems so ridiculously overpowered. It does beg the question, though, do the Githzerai also have spirit warriors? I would imagine that the monks would have been the first to have them, but I didn’t find any evidence to suggest that they existed, and maybe it has something to do with the Astral Plane and that’s why the Githyanki have them. I’m not entirely sure.

But I ended up on the tangent of their military hierarchy and almost forgot to go into the other sections of Githyanki society, so here we go. I mentioned that they lived in the Astral Plane and that they didn’t need to eat while they were there. That’s because, in the Astral Plane, time doesn’t pass like we know it to. It still did flow, but time passed so slowly that it might as well not exist. A thousand years could pass in the Astral Plane and feel like only a day passed, so it was considered to be an effectively timeless plane. Because of this, creatures did not tend to age while they lived there. This ended up effecting the Githyanki culture pretty heavily.

Unlike the Githzerai, who dressed very modestly, the Githyanki would dress themselves in ornate clothing and armour, and liked to adorn themselves with trinkets from their slain foes and triumphs. It was fairly common for their weapons and armour to be overly decorated with gems, feathers, precious metals, and god knows what other ornaments. They dressed like that eccentric old lady we all know who frequents thrift stores and bedazzles everything. The Githyanki also tended to have many hobbies. Seeing as they didn’t age while they were in the Astral Plane, they needed to pick something up to keep some semblance of novelty in their lives. However, it was pretty common for a Githyanki to have dozens of hobbies, but never take the time to properly master any of them. A jack of all trades and master of none, if you will. After centuries, this led to a hollow culture of shallow interests and unfinished undertakings. Their only true interest in the world was hunting down Illithids, as was their purpose under Gith. And speaking of Gith, their culture was largely based around hunting down Mind Flayers to the point where it was considered a rite of passage to raid an Illithid Stronghold. 

Their own strongholds were as ornate as their weapons and armour. Githyanki residences tended to be massive and lavishly decorated. Their largest city was called Tu-narath and was built on the corpse of a being known only as The One in the Void. But while this city was massive, the Githyanki were creatures of solitude, and they preferred their own company to others in smaller communities scattered throughout the Astral Plane. This lack of family bonds and friendship meant that they typically lived alone, and the closest that a Githyanki would usually get to having a friend is their relationship with their training partners, which was maintained almost strictly for their own personal gain.

We mentioned how Zerthimon was killed in battle, but whatever happened to Gith? Well, after their battle it’s said that she went to the Nine Hells with her advisor, Vlaakith, to broker a deal with the Dragon Queen, Tiamat. This deal was supposed to give the Githyanki the red dragons with which they could form a bond with and ride into battle as they were known for. However, only Vlaakith returned with a red dragon consort, Ephelomon, who went to Gith’s followers and declared that Gith had made the ultimate sacrifice for her people, seemingly sacrificing herself  as part of the deal that would allow the Githyanki to ride dragons. Seeing how Gith was dead and Vlaakith was her second in command, Vlaakith was named the first Queen of the Githyanki while they waited for Gith’s prophesied return.

However, it turns out that Vlaakith was a lying snake. She knowingly sent Gith to die so that Gith’s son, Oprheus, could not succeed her in the event of her death. She knew that Orpheus would, indeed, succeed her as he had the same defect that Gith had which gave her the ability to disrupt the Elder Brain’s field of control.

After Vlaakith took the throne, Orpheus led Gith’s Honour Guard in a revolt to name himself the rightful king of the Githyanki in what would be known as the War of the Comet. Despite putting up a good fight, Orpheus was defeated in the end. But he was not killed like most Githyanki thought. Rather, he was imprisoned in the Astral Plane in a crystalline cage that could only be broken by the Orphic Hammer, which ended up in the possession of the devil Raphael, son of Mephistopheles. And so, Vlaakith started her reign as Vlaakith I, and would be the first of at least 157 rulers who held the same title of Vlaakith.

Vlaakith saw herself as a divine being, and entered lichdom to become undead and serve over the Githyanki for eternity. She offered a proclamation that those who proved themselves worthy would be able to achieve ascension and be welcomed into her court. This was, of course, the goal for pretty well every Githyanki. In a meritocratic society, the highest honour that you could get was to be personally invited into the queen’s court. However, it was a deep dark secret that ascension would mean becoming a husk that the queen would draw her lich powers from. So, it was as hollow a promise as you would expect from Vlaakith.

And that kind of segues into the next line pretty well, which is religion. We saw that in the Githzerai monasteries that they had temples to various deities, but they also kind of worshipped Zerthimon and Meynar-Ag. The Githyanki, on the other hand, did not have multiple deities. In fact, they had no religion in their society at all. Their society was too militaristic and organised to have a place for religion, as typically religion requires you to do something for other people and the Githyanki were not about that life. They did encounter deities all the time in the Astral Plane… but they were dead and they built their cities on top of their bodies. So that probably made it hard for them to take any sort of divinity seriously. So the closest thing that they had to a God was Vlaakith. But they did not worship her as a deity, but rather respected her as their superior in a typical military fashion.

Of course, no two people are the same and that goes for the Githyanki. That means that there were fringe groups amongst the Githyanki that attempted to worship other Gods. Because of this, that meant that there were clerics in their ranks, however exceedingly rare. This was because any attempt to worship anything other than herself was crushed by Vlaakith, as she was a very vain ruler and wanted all eyes on her. So any clerics that existed had to do so in secret so as to not be killed on the spot.

And to close off this chapter on the Githyanki, I just wanted to talk about their red dragons for a moment. I mentioned them briefly before, that the knights rode them into battle, but there’s a bit more to it that I didn’t want to get too far into and disrupt that portion of the story. So, we know that Gith was sacrificed to Tiamat in some fashion to bring about this accord with Vlaakith and the dragons, but what was the dragons’ part in this? Obviously the Githyanki benefitted from this deal by being able to bring dragons into a fight, which gave them a considerable boost in power. But what did the dragons get out of this pact?

Well, the dragons that they rode were actually younger dragons, not adults. They served dutifully and without complaint, which kept them in the good graces of the Githyanki and kept them out of their politics. Because, remember, dragons aren’t just beasts that they managed to tame. Dragons are intelligent creatures who are able to think for themselves, each of them having their own personality just as any person would. So, as younglings, the red dragons would serve a Githyanki knight. That doesn’t mean that they would always be by the side of the knight, however, it just means that they would come when summoned.

When a red dragon reached adulthood, their accord was over and they would be dismissed from their service and replaced by another younger dragon. According to a chart that I found, dragons are typically in their young age from 6 years old, and would reach adulthood around 100 years old. The exact details of what age they are when they begin serving their knight is unknown, but it seems like they could start as early as 6. So they would be with their knight for probably almost 100 years, depending on what that initial age is. I mentioned that the red dragons served without complaint, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily enjoyed being in servitude. The dragons typically wanted to get out of their contract as soon as they could so that they could be their own person… or dragon. But the Githyanki living in the Astral Plane made this slightly tricky, since ageing didn’t really happen there because of the flow of time being so slow.

This is where we come back around to the point of dragons not necessarily being next to their respective knight at all times. Because if that were the case each dragon could easily spend thousands of years in servitude rather than the hundred or so that they would spend if they were to spend their time entirely in the Prime Material Plane. It’s for this reason that the red dragons preferred to spend most of their time in the Prime Material Plane so that they could actually age and get out of their contract in a reasonable timeframe. They would participate in raids as often as possible to make sure that they were in the Prime as much as they could be, and they would spend plenty of time watching over Githyanki creches as well. I’ve mentioned the creches a couple times, and I’ll get back to that in a minute, I promise.

Okay, so, I asked what the benefit was to the red dragons, and so far it seems like they get nothing out of the experience. But in every raid that they participated in, the red dragon would get their share. And if you know anything about dragons, it’s that they like their shiny piles of gold. So when the dragon finally reached adulthood, they would get to keep all of the plunder that they got from their various raids and experiences, which was pretty valuable. They got to spend over 100 years in servitude, and kept everything that they accumulated, and that was enough for them to be okay with making the deal. They got to grow in power as they gained experience from the constant raids, and got to keep all of their wealth. It’s a win-win for them as far as they’re concerned.

One last thing on the red dragons is that there was also a time when Vlaakith tried to make a Githyanki-dragon hybrid by infusing red dragon blood into newborn Githyanki. This resulted in the creation of a new hybrid race known as the duthka’gith, which were despised amongst Githyanki. They were almost like a dragonborn Githyanki, which meant that they were stronger, faster, and more intelligent than the average Githyanki, meaning that they were able to climb the ranks with relative ease. That’s why Githyanki tended to look down on them. However, they had their place in Githyanki society serving as elite shock guards and palace guards because of their innate battle prowess.

And that brings us to a nice end point about the Githyanki without going into the entire history of Vlaakith and their reign, because there’s quite a lot to that and I’m sure I could do a minisode just on Vlaakith. So if you want to hear about that, make sure to let me know and I can get writing! I also mentioned newborn Githyanki, which is a decent segue into our next topic– reproduction.

Yes, that seems like it’s way out of left field but, trust me, I wouldn’t talk about it if it weren’t noteworthy. I’ve mentioned a couple times when talking about the Githyanki and the Githzerai that they are very isolationist peoples and that they don’t really seem to form parasocial relationships, it seems like it would be pretty hard for the Gith to find a mate that they can tolerate for long enough to procreate. And that is true, but thankfully the Gith seemed to evolve their way out of requiring physical intimacy in order to reproduce, further driving the nail in the introverted coffin.

Instead, they asexually produce eggs despite being mammals with working reproductive organs and they actually cannot reproduce by conventional means. As far as I can tell, every Gith is capable of reproduction. Whether or not this was an intentional genetic experiment that came from the Mind Flayers playing God with the Gith while creating them, or whether they had it in the base form of their race that the Mind Flayers enslaved is currently unknown. Lae’zel, in Baldur’s Gate 3, states that laying eggs only happened after they escaped Illithid enslavement and moved to the Astral Plane, but I’m not really sure how that would make sense. I, personally, think it makes sense that this is something that the Mind Flayers intentionally spliced into their genetics. For a race that were bred to be slaves, you would want to be able to create as many as possible and if you could make it so that either gender could lay eggs on demand like a humanoid chicken, why wouldn’t you want that? And, not to get too philosophical here, but it makes sense from a psychological standpoint as well. For most races, sex is a pleasurable act and the want to reproduce is built into our physiology by tying pleasure to reproduction. If you were to take away the necessity for physical reproduction, you’re also denying that being a certain amount of pleasure that is just granted upon most races. I’m having a hard time trying to convey this thought into words because I’m no philosopher, I’m just a guy on the internet who likes writing about fictional peoples, but the point I’m trying to make is that getting rid of that base layer of pleasure is something that would probably result in them being a more hardened, stoic race who is more focussed on duty than finding joy in the simpler things life has to offer. Not to say that they don’t experience pleasure from the act itself, but they have no biological necessity to engage in it, and therefore probably don’t engage in the act much if at all. Why would they? That would require forming a bond on some level, no matter how shallow and self serving it might be, with another individual and if we’ve learned anything about the Gith today, it’s that they just don’t have any interest in doing so. Then you have Gith like Lae’Zel in Baldur’s Gate 3 who is hornier than a rabbit, but I’m not sure if that’s because everyone is written to have the hots for the player character or if maybe I’m wrong and the Gith do have sex just without forming bonds. This is going to a really weird place, and I’m just going to leave you to make your own conclusion with what I’ve presented.

The point is, they lay eggs asexually and we don’t quite know why. And for the Githyanki, there’s an entire subculture built around laying these eggs that wouldn’t be there if they hadn’t settled in the Astral Plane. There isn’t much word about how the Githzerai are faring with child rearing, but they don’t face the same complications that the Githyanki do, so maybe they just lay when they feel like hatching a Githlet and go about their day like the frog chicken that they are. The Githyanki, however, have the unique problem of not ageing while in the Astral Plane, if you remember. So trying to hatch eggs and raise young in a place where time basically doesn’t exist poses some problems. And that’s where we get the concept of a creche.

We get a really great insight as to what a creche looks like and how it operates in act one of Baldur’s Gate 3. In that case, the Githyanki inhabited creche Y’llek which used to be a temple for worshippers of Lathander who the Githyanki seemingly slaughtered and took for their own. I’m sure that this wasn’t always the case, however, and that they would have physically set up their own camps on occasion. But it does seem very Githyanki to just find somewhere that you want to lay eggs at, slaughter the ignorant inhabitants for daring to live in their creche, and then make themselves at home.

Because of that whole questline in Baldur’s Gate, it’s pretty hard to find any concrete history about creches or really anything unrelated to that quest, but I’m going to do my best to explain what they are. So, creche is actually a french word for a nursery, which is pretty on the nose. Why are the Githyanki using french words to name their nurseries after? Because DnD is a mishmash of whatever the writers decided they wanted to use at the time and we don’t need much more of a reason than that. So that’s what it is, a nursery– primarily, at the very least. In the case of creche Y’llek, it was also an outpost for their current mission but I think that was largely by happenstance.

Because the eggs wouldn’t be able to be born in the Astral Plane, and the young Gith would never be able to grow into adulthood there either, a creche was a semi-permanent, if not just permanent, structure in which they would foster and raise their young until they were old enough to join a raid where they would complete their rite of passage by killing an Illithid and presenting its head to Vlaakith and presumably proceed to go live in the Astral Realm. But while they were in the creche, there would be schools set up where they would learn about the teachings of Vlaakith and train in martial arts. And to make sure that it wasn’t just one or two children being raised at a time, the Githyanki were very careful about choosing when to bring eggs from the Astral to the Prime Material plane to make sure that several eggs hatched at once. The ones who would look over the hatchery and rear their young were known as a varsh.

We get a good amount of information about the topic from Baldur’s Gate 3 from Lae’zel, and I think that’s probably where most of the information about creches in general are bound to come from since there really aren’t many sources that talk about the process except A Guide to the Astral Plane which was released in 1996 (and, while a great resource in learning about all things Githyanki, it is quite outdated by this point). So, from Lae’zel we learn that creche K’liir held about 3 dozen eggs, but she says that she knew of some that held a hundred. I wonder if this is kind of an urban legend told by Vlaakith that there are hundreds of eggs all over the place as some sort of propaganda, but I also don’t really see why they would have to lie about it. The only issue I can see with creches having hundreds of eggs is overpopulation. Because time doesn’t really pass on the Astral Plane, and Githyanki tend to live extremely long lives because of that fact, they don’t lay eggs too often because they wouldn’t know what to do with basically an unlimited number of Githyanki. Eventually, they would face overpopulation and so their population was controlled by Vlaakith herself. We also glean from this conversation that the ones chosen by Vlaakith to lay eggs are called Shu’kyani. Vlaakith assigns them a creche and tells them when, where, and how many eggs they are to bear. It seems like this process is pretty strict and rare, which led to a fairly low birth rate, keeping a stagnant population in check. 

And that’s pretty much it for the Gith. There are a couple of fringe topics that I didn't really know where to put, so I figure I’ll just chuck them here at the end. I mentioned the Githvyrik and Gith pirate tribes very briefly, and I think it’s worth talking about them for a second, even if we basically know nothing about them. The pirates are basically a group of Gith who decided not to follow Zerthimon or Gith’s followers into either Limbo or the Astral Plane, but instead chose to stay in the prime. Basically, they just became an extremely militarised group of pirates that occasionally exist in Wildspace. The Githvyrik are a small group of Gith who also didn’t follow Zerthimon or Gith, but chose to basically renounce the Gith entirely. They did not identify as Githyanki nor Githzerai, but chose to follow their own path outside of the typical militarised society of the Gith. I wish that we knew more about them, because the entire idea sounds pretty neat. They see themselves as something greater, keeping that typical Gith arrogance, and I’d be interested to see them come up again. Maybe with the rising interest in the Gith from Baldur’s Gate 3, we’ll see them return some day.

Then there was a third group that I haven’t mentioned yet. We know that the Githyanki’s hatred for the Githzerai was only second to their rivalry with the illithids and vice versa, but there was a group that existed called the Sha’sal Khou whose philosophy was to unite both sects under one roof, shed the rivalry that existed between them. They wanted to get rid of the title Githyanki and Githzerai and instead unite under one banner and call themselves, simply, Gith. This sounds good and all, but their leader, Zetch’r’r, only wanted this so that he could guide the undivided military force of the Gith to continue the conquest that Gith had originally set out before the civil war. So, it was a great cause but it existed for all of the wrong reasons. But this was a pretty blasphemous idea to most Gith, and I’m sure that included Vlaakith who unseated Gith herself, and so they had to operate in secret somewhere on the Sword Coast.

And with that, I think we’re finally done here. I thought that this would be a quick in and out, but it turns out that there’s almost as much information about the Gith as there is about the Mind Flayers, which makes sense considering that they go hand-in-hand. I think it’s worth mentioning here at the end of the episode that, because both the Githyanki and the Githzerai are both constantly warring with the Illithids, the Gith are the pretty much the only force across the multiverse that are keeping the Mind Flayers at bay and stopping the Illithid Empire from coming to fruition. I said that in the Mind Flayer episode as well, but I think it’s worth reiterating that they are the single force that are keeping Mind Flayers from enslaving everyone and everything across all planes. I think that’s impressive. And I think it’s even more impressive that they managed to do so after being enslaved as a race for god knows how long. They truly are my favourite species of frog.

And that brings us to my favourite question, which is– what do you think? Did you know that there was a difference between the Githyanki and the Githzerai? Because let me tell you, I didn’t know that until researching for this episode. I’m not going to lie, I thought that those were terms for the different genders. I’m glad that I was educated in that regard. Or, what do you think about the fact that they lay eggs? I think it's pretty fascinating, but also extremely confusing for a lot of reasons.

You can find us online @loredtodeath on your favourite social media apps, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, please send me a message wherever you can find me or at loredtodeath@gmail.com. If you’re using the Spotify app, there’s a Q&A function attached to the episode where you can submit any questions or topics. I would love to hear from you!

I usually don’t say this, but please remember to rate us 5 stars wherever you are listening. If you’re on Youtube, then leave a like and subscribe if you’re not already. It really does help me out, and we’re on the cusp of being able to monetize this podcast over there so please share with anyone who you think might be interested. Alright, that’s enough shilling.

And remember, if you come across a frog that has gained sentience and starts talking about how it needs to start systematically eliminating all squids from the oceans… hear him out. Maybe he’s on to something. And I’ll lore you to death in the next one. C’ya.

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