Editing Githyanki (section)

=Mindset=
In fact, githyanki don't like to hear a lot of ugly things about their race, mostly because they're all true. 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. 

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Yeah, they're not the sanest race in the multiverse by a long shot.

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 [[dragon]]s ''and'' the githyanki themselves when they are used up.

And, 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. Oh, yes. 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). 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.

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. 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. 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. And the githyanki are so mindlessly loyal to her that they actually ''do consider this an honor''!

Interestingly, the 4th edition article on [[Tu'narath]] and githyanki society explicitly states that this has had serious negative effects on githyanki society, and that Vlaakith's actions are basically pushing her people to be made up of the mediocre. Which is harming their race's long-term goals.

Fifth edition, in ''Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes'', which devoted an entire chapter to discussing the gith race, instead reframes or reflavors most of the above.  Rather than explicitly eating her people's souls when they get too strong, Vlaakith is sort of deliberately holding them back, preventing any one of her lieutenants from gaining too much experience and power and so overthrowing her.  And because they live in the Astral Plane, where no one ages and time has no meaning, the githyanki are instead basically jaded war-hipsters, spending all the time they aren't fighting or raiding bored out of their fucking minds and desperate for some novelty as they futz about their decadent metropolis of a city toying with various hobbies without ever really getting into any of them.  Thus, as Mordenkainen himself notes, Vlaakith's system does a great job of churning out indoctrinated fanatics without actually creating people fit for doing anything useful.

Also, rather than taking slaves for slavery's sake, they mostly just abandon or kill captives who have no extrinsic value, though there is a small community of random people they've kidnapped living in a slum of the great city.

Aside from their practice of flying around on red dragons, githyanki are most known for two things in terms of combat ability.

Firstly, githyanki are big believers in the concept of [[multiclassing]], with a long tradition of [[fighter]]/[[wizard]] combatants. Indeed, the idea of the warrior-mage is so iconic, and so associable with the githyanki, that their culture's name for it - the [[Gish]] - has been adopted as a general term in greater /tg/ culture. Well, the alternative was the githzerai term "Zerth", but that wasn't as catchy.

Secondly, their most iconic weapon; baroque greatswords forged of a strange, silvery metal native to their extraplanar environment. Known simply as Silver Swords, or, at most, Githyanki Silver Swords, these weapons are uniquely suited to fighting people who are using astral projection, as they can cut the "astral thread" of these people which is, generally, instant death (ironically, less lethal in 1e, when it just booted you back to the material). The other bonuses of the Silver Swords varies from edition to edition; in 1e, they were sentient +3 weapons that weren't very smart, but did have nebulous other magical powers. In 2e, they lost their sentience, but there was also a "Greater" version that was a +5 weapon ''and'' a Vorpal Sword in addition to its astral cord-cutting ''and'' it could cut the threads of people under the Mind Bar power. In 3e, they were initially downgraded to +1 weapons that could potentially nullify a victim's psionic abilities for 1d4 rounds, but in the Psionics Handbook, the classic +3 astral cord-cutters and +5 vorpal versions returned. 4e gave them the ability to convert damage dealt with them into the Psychic type, gaining the feat support that brings, and 5e made them into +3 weapons with psychic damage resistance, advantage on mental saves, and cord-cutting on a crit. Needless to say, githyanki are ''extremely'' protective of these swords and will go to almost any length to retrieve them.

Needless to say, being that they are huge dicks and pretty much all willing slaves to their evil god-queen, githyanki aren't traditionally considered suitable for PCs, unlike their [[Githzerai]] cousins, who were actually in the first wave of [[Planescape]] PCs, alongside the [[Tiefling]] and the [[Bariaur]]. They do, however, have PC writeups in about a dozen Third Edition books, because Third edition will make a playable or pseudo-playable race out of [[ixitxachitl|literally fucking anything]], and in the Monster Manual for 4e. They're also balanced as playable in 5e, with playable versions both in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and Monsters of the Multiverse (which gives them slightly more interesting mechanics at the cost of saying basically nothing about their lore).

In D&D and 5e, the githyanki have a particular interest in the material plane; not just because it's where they go to hunt illithids, but because nothing ages on the Astral Plane, so they need to lay their eggs (yeah, they do that) and rear their children on the prime in hidden creches so they can reach maturity.