The Gith

“The githyanki and the githzerai were so profoundly scarred by their enslavement to the mind flayers that they forget they were one race, united. Having won their freedom, they wage war against each other with a hatred none can fully comprehend.”

— Aristul the Yellow

The gith (sing & pl) are a race of humanoids who had been enslaved by mind flayers for countless generations. Some sages claimed that they were once descended from humans, while others maintained that their original race was in fact unknown. After breaking free from their enslavement, philosophical differences led to a bitter internal conflict, which divided the gith into two main different races at constant odds with each other: the githyanki and the githzerai.

Description

Gith were tall and emaciated-looking humanoids. They have pale yellow skin, sometimes with greenish or brownish tones. Their skulls were long and angular, with deep-set eyes, flattened noses, and pointed, serrated ears. Typical hair colors included black, red, russet, and sometimes gray.

Society

The gith were an utterly sundered race. Divided by generations of conflict and ideological differences, the two main sects of the gith people regarded each other with nothing but contempt, hate, and wariness. The intense hatred that divided the race was further exploited and amplified by the mind flayers themselves, who kept spies in both githyanki and githzerai communities tasked with stoking their ancient rivalries.

However, a splinter faction of renegade githyanki and githzerai known as the Sha'sal Khou sought to overcome the differences between the two races and bring them together as a single people. They worked secretly within the two races discouraging violence against each other in the hopes of becoming able to call their people simply "gith".

Two other subraces existed among the gith:

• The isolationist pirates of Gith chose to remain in the Prime Material plane and did not follow their cousins into the Astral Plane or Limbo. Instead, they chose a lifestyle of piracy in wildspace, although they retained their extremely militarized society.

Language

The githyanki and the githzerai each spoke their own dialect of the Gith language, which used a unique form of writing called tir'su. It was an alphabetical set of runes in which words were formed in circles instead of linearly, with the letters of a given word linked in a ring. Githyanki arranged the characters clockwise from the top, while githzerai arranged them counter-clockwise from the bottom. Sentences were formed by a series of these rings.