For questions about the gith, a race of extraplanar humanoids from Dungeons & Dragons. As D&D depicts them, the gith were enslaved by mind flayers for generations; when they broke free, philosophical differences over their path forward led them to split into two warring factions: the githyanki and the githzerai. The gith first appeared as NPCs in AD&D 1e and as a player race in AD&D 2e, and have appeared in every edition of D&D since then.
For questions about the gith, a race of extraplanar humanoids from Dungeons & Dragons. As D&D depicts them, the gith were enslaved by mind flayers (illithid) for generations; when they broke free, philosophical differences over their path forward led them to split into two warring factions: the githyanki and the githzerai.
The gith first appeared as an NPC/monster race in the AD&D 1e book Fiend Folio, and as a player race in the AD&D 2e book The Planewalker's Handbook; they have appeared in some form in every edition of D&D since then.
The githyanki race for D&D was originally created by Charles Stross and published in White Dwarf magazine #12 (April/May 1979), in the "Fiend Factory" column. According to Stross, he borrowed the name "githyanki" from an alien race of the same name in George R. R. Martin's 1977 science fiction novel Dying of the Light.
According to most D&D lore, the initial rebellion of these thralls of the illithid was led by Gith, who united a collective of different rebel groups under one banner to bring down the entire illithid empire. Afterwards, Gith ordered that the war continue until every last mind flayer was hunted down, and that the gith establish an empire of their own based on conquest. However, another freedom fighter named Zerthimon challenged her ideas, claiming that the gith needed peace and that Gith would lead their race into imposing a similar tyranny as that of the mind flayers.
Civil war broke out, and Zerthimon was ostensibly killed. His followers, calling themselves "githzerai" (meaning "those who spurn Gith" in the race's language) retreated to Limbo after a protracted fight; Gith led her surviving followers, calling themselves "githyanki" (meaning "children of Gith"), to the former mind flayer settlements on the Astral Plane to regroup. The two factions continued to fight both mind flayers and each other in the many years that followed, though some githzerai and githyanki secretly worked together to reunite the two groups and achieve peace.
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