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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9427394" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 100/159: July 2003part 9/10Culture and Gear: While there is a fair bit of crunch in this part as well, there’s also quite a bit of philosophical thought over the course of these 9 pages. While they might be evil overall, the githyanki are not ravening monsters who treat even their closest family cruelly, but people who have a very strong in and out group distinction and a society that is still heavily shaped as a conscious reaction against generations of slavery and selective breeding. While in theory the lich-queen is an absolute dictator, they have near total freedom in terms of day-to-day things like freedom of speech, association, movement, fashion choices, sexuality, etc. As long as you don’t worship anything or go above 16th level you can get away with a lot, and since it’s easy to leave with their powers you can probably get away with those as long as you slip away quietly and don’t come back to the astral plane, letting them assume you died on an expedition. Since you don’t need to eat on the astral, their society has few day to day needs and would be weirdly utopian if they weren’t also so xenophobic and warlike. They contrast very sharply with the average prime material humanoid, for whom life is short and a constant scrabble for the basic necessities of life, giving little opportunity for developing more sophisticated culture. There’s plenty to think about here even before we get to the new mechanics, an NPC class for the Mlar, who turn astral energy into clothes, tools and other handy solid objects, making them useful in an everyday sense but just as underpowered as their healers. Bladed armor, making you considerably less pleasant to grapple. Several new weapons, mostly variants of existing things with more offensive parts like double-bladed swords and triple-shooting crossbows so you can do lots of attacks per round if you’ve taken the feats to mitigate the penalties. Finally, stats for several of their flying ships and the magical items they can use to make them even more dangerous. So the fluff bits of this are more interesting than the crunchy ones, but both are useful and remain consistent with their existing depiction while building further on it. Monstrous Allies: We’re well into a flow now and this is pretty much pure crunch. First up, monster stats for Dutha’gith. As is often the case, their CR as a monster is lower than their ECL, with a basic 1st level fighter being CR 3, which means a 1st level PC will probably be considerably weaker in actual play than their supposed 6th level peers. Then two more new monsters. B’kallash Dreadnoughts are a hybrid of astral dreadnoughts and red dragons, in an attempt to create something more powerful and tractable to unleash upon their enemies. They’re still not going to win any awards for tactical acumen, but can at least follow single word commands and function beyond the astral plane. Unleashed on a prime world not used to fending off Godzilla level threats just one could win a battle for them.Spectral Hounds (no relation to Stephen Innises version of Gith dogs from Dragon 117) are incorporeal canines that can track you nearly anywhere. They won’t kill you, but their bite carries a disease that gradually turns you incorporeal and sends you to the astral plane, which may well be a fate worse than death when the githyanki who dispatched it in the first place catch up with you. You could run a very interesting horror scenario using that idea, showing how horror often works better if you slow things down and use fewer monsters with unusual powers rather than relentless waves of attackers.</blockquote>

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