Check out my Inspirational Tables helping you say cool shit when depicting a Githyanki Invasion.
Silver Swords of the Lich Queen: Inspirational Tables for a Githyanki Invasion
Githyanki Therapy
Fiend Folio, back cover, top left corner
Everyone copes with stress in different ways.
My sincere apologies to Emmanuel, Image by FelixMittermeier from Pixabay, Image by Mike Goad from Pixabay and Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash.
I hope you and yours are well and that your endeavors contain the proper measured ratios of fell horror and wondrous magic that you are looking for in your elf games.
July RPG Blog Carnival: Githyanki Invasion 6d6
The Lich-Queen’s forces are coming to your world. Roll 6d6 and get the session started.
Inspired by the July RPG Blog Carnival
Why are they invading?
- Illithid Infestation
- Githzerai Haven
- Red Dragon Cabal
- Key crossroads World in greater planar campaign
- The Lich-Queen has taken offense to one of your deities
- Someone stole a Silver Sword and won’t return it
Githyanki Random Encounters
- Red Dragon Air Cav Wing
- Warlock Summoning Platoon
- Warlock Skirmish Squad
- Silver Sword Battalion
- Illithid Hunting Posse
- Psionic Urban Unit
The above Githyanki are looking for a:
- Gate to their home
- Illithid or Githzarai
- You
- A place to allow red dragon steeds to graze
- An escaped prisoner
- Stolen red dragon eggs
Something from Githyanki culture that is catching on
- Psionics
- Board game (like chess but with no kings, only a single Lich-Queen who eats pieces from both sides if they travel too far)
- Disdain for religion
- Hatred of Illithid
- Bigotry against Githzarai
- Gith poetry
Something from your world that is catching on with the Githyanki
- A goddess
- A type of music
- A drink
- A drug
- Food
- A battle tactic
They’ve brought some kind of fungal infestation with them from another world that causes:
- Trees to spread their roots through the lower planes and become a gate to hell.
- Vines to choke animals to death, gain the hit points of the beasts it kills, becoming stronger and stronger until burned to the root.
- Vegetables glow different color based on the alignment of those nearby.
- Ponds to become scrying pools that show the nearest Illithid or Githyanki
- A usually edible vegetable to cause a character to make a save or else hallucinate for 1d6 hours, also causing you to re-roll your hit points or one stat (GM’s’ choice) depending on how you reacted to the hallucination.
- Causing all trees to become Treants.
Check out this design and more in the Monster Manual Heraldry collection…
Corvuston, the Raven Queen’s capital
What do I want from D&D?
More Raven Queen.
Welcome to Corvuston. Once it was a fishing village where a young girl saw her family’s barrows erupt due to incarnations of death with no respect for eternal rest. To her credit, when she destroyed her first god of death, she took its black wings as her own and buried it in a nearby tomb befitting a deity deep beneath the sea.
It is built on a cliff above a violently restless ocean. Its buildings and walls are made of gray slate that turns black when it rains. It is always raining. The locals call the rain raven’s tears, also the name of a fine locally brewed whiskey.
Despite the city’s patron, Corvuston is a living place. Its walls are mausoleums where those who have served the queen the most faithfully are interred. Those who hunt undead and slay necromancers are in the highest spires and towers. The paladins who died weakening Orcus’ avatar in hand-to-hand combat have recently acquired their own white marble tombs. Faithful nuns and monks, death’s sons and daughters who prepare corpses for their journey are all resting in walls’ foundations of Corvuston’s tomb walls. Black winged angels take them to Her directly after the ceremonies are finished. Would they awaken if there was a siege? Would the Raven Queen shrug off her hatred of undead to save her capital city?
No one has found out yet but the Orcus cults and cabals of Vecna disciples strive to test the goddess’ will.
With holy dispensation, the dead can be petitioned if the petitioner is brave enough to walk into the depths of the labyrinthine tunnels, make an offering and see to it that the ghost rests well after the question is answered.
For hundreds of miles, rich merchants, well-landed knights and dukes employ embalmers in their homes, so that if anyone should perish they can be preserved for the journey to Corvuston so that the Queen’s Own can prepare them for their afterlife and the priests can help the mourners grieve properly. Mourners walk through the Kübler-Ross Pilgrimage, going through all of the proper rites so that, as the Raven Queen’s verse states, “spirits rest, the dead sleep in tombs forever so that the living might live for a while longer.”
What’s wrong in Corvuston?
Core of the Problem
- Cabal of Vecna Disciples
- Orcus Cult
- Ghoul Plague
- Rogue Death Angel
- God of Death’s Restless Ghost
- Eternal Life Church
Manifesting as
- An army surrounding the walls
- Cults that have infiltrated the highest posts of the city’s government
- Monsters in the walls
- Naval blockade
- Beasts striking during the darkest hours
- Raining Hell from a Sky Fortress
What the hell are they doing here?
- Modrons
- Red Dragon
- Gryphon Queen
- The Beast Princes
- Feuding Demon Princes under a banner of truce
- The Circle of Eight
Art
General Research Division, The New York Public Library. “Corvus carnivorus, Northern Raven.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1860. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-5743-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
These ideas developed, mutated and became Raven Queen vs. the Ghoul King
Githyanki Therapy: Signs of Past Apocalypses
This is the act of posting a mad and beautiful idea on the internet, bonus points for posting it in such a way so that others can participate and/or post their own mad and beautiful ideas.
Githyanki Therapy is usually something I do after I have taken part in some kind of stupid-ass internet argument…
But not this time! I have been saving the drama for my mama.
Yesterday I tweeted: “I think any good D&D world has weathered a few apocalypses.”
So in the comments or in your own blog posts linked back to this one, let’s show sign-posts of a world’s end, of climactic, often arcane relics and ruins that show the layers and epochs of a fantasy world.
Ruined Witchtowers – Once the proud towers of Tiefling witchlords, when they ruled the world at the head of devil armies led by warlock-generals now they are ruins whose broken parapets touch the clouds while their under-layers reach into the hells. Some say the towers were destroyed during a skirmish of the Blood Wars, other scholars say a sect of Bahamutish Paladins who send their greatest warriors into the hells laid siege to the towers with small elite holy teams.
Arkton – a small town built in the shadow of a cyclopean ship, nowhere near the sea. Scholars who study the ship say the greater part of it is buried in the ground and that its crash landing from the star-sea ended the Reign of Dragons.
The Hand – In the middle of a desert is The Hand, a festering hand cut off at the wrist, the size of the Tiamat Cathedral’s five grand doors. It is often covered in flies or cultures who peck at it. Those who can deal with the unholy smell and watch it have said the fingers and palm flex from time to time, as if only recently chopped off from whatever deity’s limb it came from.
The Ballad of Hal Whitewyrm
A funny thing happened when I played a few games of Burning Wheel in the Forgotten Realms. Friends would contact me online and tell me about the games they always wanted to play on the Realms. Jason was one person and getting to boot up a one-on-one game with him a few weeks ago was really rewarding.
These are the folks with the old Forgotten Realms maps push-pinned to their walls and ceilings when they were a kid.
Daniel was another and he blogged about it and blogged about it again:
Hal Whitewyrm is the character that got away, the one character I really wanted to play and never got the chance to.
Hal Whitewyrm is a half-elf bard living in Highmoon[1], in Deepingdale, in the area known as the Dalelands. He has somewhere in his heritage a trace of weredragon[2] blood which gives him orange eyes. He’s a joyful fellow who honestly loves adventuring.
Hal is the character I created back in the early 90s, when I first started to get into AD&D in high school. He’s the character I would constantly recreate during class, the one I would write short stories about, the one who was my avatar in the world of high adventure that are the Realms. He was a shallow character concept[3] with cool orange eyes and a weredragon girlfriend who existed mostly in my 5-subject spiral notebook in story after story. And I loved it.
I just never got to play Hal. My D&D group played Basic D&D/Rules Cyclopedia and we had a fairly regular schedule, so, little time to try out new ideas. Then we played less and less, then I moved, etc. Aside from the fact that I used the name as an email address for some time, I have not gone back to this character in over a decade. Which is why I surprised myself when I answered Judd’s question about what character I would play in a Burning Wheel Realms game as follows:
* I’d play the character I’ve carried with me for years, Hal Whitewyrm, a half-elven bard with weredragon blood in his ancestry (weredragons are a race of female-only shapeshifting wyrms from the Moonshaes – see the thread there?). He’s the guy I wrote stories about in my teens yet never got to play. Hal is all about the romantic journey (as in literary genre, not mass market Harlequin titles), facing adventure in a large world, ideally of the legendary danger kind, with fast friends at his side, a love life to look forward to, and death around him to put it all in perspective. Think Aragorn’s journey, but with a bard who also deals with issues of identity.”
Wow, I’d never really put those ideas into words before but yeah, that’s what Hal is all about for me: exploring the high fantasy romantic character arc; less about killing monsters and taking their stuff, more about zero-to-hero who saves the princess and loses friends along the way.
I’m kind of fascinated. I’m not sure a successful game of BW is possible from this spot. The expectations of setting and character are pretty intense and that interests me. Playing Hal as a Burning Wheel character is going to mean that what it means to be Hal is going to be challenged. Hal is going to go through the fire and in doing so will be changed. Even the character creation (or as we say in BW jargon – character burning) is going to leave Hal different than the guy Daniel dreamed up.
The back and forth with Daniel during the process of burning up Hal was fun and kinda interesting. BW’s lifepaths have a way of taking what you thought the character might be and adding wrinkles that you hadn’t expected. The tough choices of the Wheel start immediately.
I’m intrigued to give the Obsidian Portal a shot and play around with different online methods of play. We’ll stick to play-by-post but maybe we’ll want to give some skype or G+ stuff a shot. We’ll see how it goes.
For now it is an excuse to write a little every day, hit the heavy-bag, so to speak. My hope is to wake up and make a short post here and then hit on a few stories that are in danger of getting angry with me. Don’t want stories angry with me, when that happens they stop talking to me all together. I can’t have that.
Githyanki Therapy defined
What is Githyanki Therapy?
This is the act of posting a mad and beautiful idea on the internet, bonus points for posting it in such a way so that others can participate and/or post their own mad and beautiful ideas.
For me, this usually has something to do with Githyanki. I have no idea quite why. Maybe it is because they wield silver swords or worship their liche queen or have a pact with red dragons whom they often ride into battle.
Githyanki Therapy is usually something I do after I have taken part in some kind of stupid-ass internet argument and for the record, all internet arguments are stupid. I know there are times when I see sexism, racism and homophobia and I have to speak up but when I do I should drop some thoughts and run-run-run. It just never ends well.
That is Githyanki Therapy. Go forth and find your Githyanki, some odd little thing that you enjoy and when the internet aggravates you or you have made the internet a lamer place, post about that thing in a way that is both mad and beautiful.
Githyanki Diaspora 
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