I am trying to come up with an alternative to the name warforged for that race.
In my world “Warforged” where created by a Githyanki who, frustrated by what she saw as weakness and lack of resources in both the war against the Githrezai and the Illithid, took it on herself to try and create a creature that would help fight the war, an autonotom with no soul. But something went wrong and instead each of her creations was imbuded with the energy of soul taken from limbo, identity and memory gone the power however was clear, this was a form of life.
When it was discovered what she had done the Githyanki council agreed that these new creations would not be destroyed, or forced to fight their battles, they would be taught the ways of the Gith and given freedom of choice to choose there own path. The Gith that created them would act forever as their mentor.
Now this is where I am hitting a brick wall, what to call these beings, Warforged seems a very un Gith word. Any ideas?!
(I like the idea of them needing an Adimantium whisker spring battery, with spares being charged at the local water wheel mill.) (though picturing that Articer gem battery is good to..) (I would keep PCs from making them by requiring them to be built through industrial circle magic.. [the clockwork person is built in a magic circle.. But the building requires a team effort Artificer of particular sub-class, and maybe another of a different sub-class, a wizard to do the major part of the circle, again of a possible required sub-class, possibly a creature containing that aspect of an earth genisi, then others with particular tool skills not "contaminated by Heroic levels. you Get the drift.. I originally came up with industrial circle magic to explain magic-items like spell jammers.
(I like the idea of them needing an Adimantium whisker spring battery, with spares being charged at the local water wheel mill.) (though picturing that Articer gem battery is good to..) (I would keep PCs from making them by requiring them to be built through industrial circle magic.. [the clockwork person is built in a magic circle.. But the building requires a team effort Artificer of particular sub-class, and maybe another of a different sub-class, a wizard to do the major part of the circle, again of a possible required sub-class, possibly a creature containing that aspect of an earth genisi, then others with particular tool skills not "contaminated by Heroic levels. you Get the drift.. I originally came up with industrial circle magic to explain magic-items like spell jammers.
I am thinking the Soul Forged, given the background, there where only 1000 made by this rogue Gith, and these are the only 1000 in the world the pc has forgotten his past, he was discovered buried by dwarfs. Hence I am now working on his background. He was part of an illithid hunting party, he fought a rearguard action, there was a cave in and he allowed himself to be trapped, went into a form of stasis and over 500 years lost his memories.
Is it necessary to have a name for a race you're adapting literally in this instance? None of the following is saying you're going about this world building wrong. Rather, it's food for thought via a brainstorm your ideas got me thinking.
You've got this being (mechanically a Warforged) with amnesia, so may well not know what to call itself or how to take itself into account. Is this game going to repatriate the Warforged with its people? How many out of the initial 1000 are left after ~500 years, if they were actively used as combatants for I'm guessing missions too dangerous for regular Githyanki military (though Githyanki arrogance would likely never recognize a circumstance as too dangerous)? Unless a real population of this race is essential to your game world, I'd reduce the number to a few hundred, or maybe even a couple of tens or less for a couple of reasons. If you want to explore the Gith as a way of connecting the character to its people or origins, if you only have a few hundred maybe most Gith don't even know about them, which will then entail further adventuring among the Gith until the party finds the right enclave (boom: you have a campaign arc). If you reduce the number to a couple of dozen or even a handful. the remnant are the character's real kin and will definitely know the character's back story etc. and could lead to great RP on the discovering one's personal past front.
With reduced numbers I wouldn't so much name them as an autonomous race, rather I'd call them something that's attributed to their creator. Say the Githyanki was named Gaath, so the Warforged experiment in time became know as Gaath's Legacy, or Gaath's Mistake, or Gaath's Discovery, etc. Maybe just call them the Curious (named so for their uncanny nature as well as efforts to stake out their identity as living beings).
Other option, while it's entirely possible the Warforged were created as part of the Githyanki military program, I'd also say it's possible your Warforged were created strictly out of Idleness that leads a lot of Githyanki culture to decadently pursue art and science/magic while milling about Limbo with nothing better to do but play around with the stray souls that pass by every now and then. Maybe the Warforged in question was a young Gith's equivalent of a Raspberry Pi, lost on the youth's first war band incursion into the Prime Material plane.
My last thought is the Githyanki's treatment of their Warforged sounds sort of out of character given the Githyanki's established lore. I mean, it's your world and if the Githyanki are that altruistic and noble in that space go for it. But we're talking about a society run deceitfully by a Lich queen. Sure they liberated themselves from bondage, but unlike their Githzerai kin, the Githyanki see themselves as next in line to rule the multiverse and in the meantime plunder the multiverse for whatever it wants, including abducting other sentients on a whim. I mean they made a pact with Tiamat for one of their signature military resources, not to mention whatever role Tiamat may play in the present whereabouts of _the_ Gith. So given that somewhat brutal characterization I think Githyanki creation of Warforged might not have resolved as benevolently as you've outlined, but again maybe the Githyanki are more noble in your world.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Is it necessary to have a name for a race you're adapting literally in this instance? None of the following is saying you're going about this world building wrong. Rather, it's food for thought via a brainstorm your ideas got me thinking.
You've got this being (mechanically a Warforged) with amnesia, so may well not know what to call itself or how to take itself into account. Is this game going to repatriate the Warforged with its people? How many out of the initial 1000 are left after ~500 years, if they were actively used as combatants for I'm guessing missions too dangerous for regular Githyanki military (though Githyanki arrogance would likely never recognize a circumstance as too dangerous)? Unless a real population of this race is essential to your game world, I'd reduce the number to a few hundred, or maybe even a couple of tens or less for a couple of reasons. If you want to explore the Gith as a way of connecting the character to its people or origins, if you only have a few hundred maybe most Gith don't even know about them, which will then entail further adventuring among the Gith until the party finds the right enclave (boom: you have a campaign arc). If you reduce the number to a couple of dozen or even a handful. the remnant are the character's real kin and will definitely know the character's back story etc. and could lead to great RP on the discovering one's personal past front.
With reduced numbers I wouldn't so much name them as an autonomous race, rather I'd call them something that's attributed to their creator. Say the Githyanki was named Gaath, so the Warforged experiment in time became know as Gaath's Legacy, or Gaath's Mistake, or Gaath's Discovery, etc. Maybe just call them the Curious (named so for their uncanny nature as well as efforts to stake out their identity as living beings).
Other option, while it's entirely possible the Warforged were created as part of the Githyanki military program, I'd also say it's possible your Warforged were created strictly out of Idleness that leads a lot of Githyanki culture to decadently pursue art and science/magic while milling about Limbo with nothing better to do but play around with the stray souls that pass by every now and then. Maybe the Warforged in question was a young Gith's equivalent of a Raspberry Pi, lost on the youth's first war band incursion into the Prime Material plane.
My last thought is the Githyanki's treatment of their Warforged sounds sort of out of character given the Githyanki's established lore. I mean, it's your world and if the Githyanki are that altruistic and noble in that space go for it. But we're talking about a society run deceitfully by a Lich queen. Sure they liberated themselves from bondage, but unlike their Githzerai kin, the Githyanki see themselves as next in line to rule the multiverse and in the meantime plunder the multiverse for whatever it wants, including abducting other sentients on a whim. I mean they made a pact with Tiamat for one of their signature military resources, not to mention whatever role Tiamat may play in the present whereabouts of _the_ Gith. So given that somewhat brutal characterization I think Githyanki creation of Warforged might not have resolved as benevolently as you've outlined, but again maybe the Githyanki are more noble in your world.
I have realised I have totally got my Gith mixed up lol I meant a Githzerai created it to try and balance against the militaristic might of the Githyanki. Which I think makes more sense now lol. will correct my original question lol.
I do have an idea that the Soul Forged player, when trapped underground, was with a Gith, possibly the creator, in order to save her creation from the madness of isolation as she died she planted her own concisnous in his “mind”. At some point down the line he is going to have to liberate her from himself meaning a chance to travel to the githzerai city, and him discover others of his own kind and why he was created, which is the driving force behind his characters existence.
If they were created by the Githyanki, then they might be seen as a subset of their species. I'd be tempted to call them "Synthyanki" (Synthetic Githyanki). However, any made up word following the githyanki dialectic patterns would suffice.
You could go with something simple, like just calling them The Forged. They were forged by the Githzerai as automatons for war. They were then spiritually forged by Limbo to be living, soul filled creatures. Now they themselves must be forged by their own existence and experiences to unlock their hidden potentials and find purpose in the greater world as a new race.
Maybe something like that?
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"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
Just to riff on Forged, and I like the word play there, I'm thinking maybe a Gith word for Containers. They were devised as a way to contain military encroachments from the Githzerai's enemies. Heck, even the character in question here's backstory involved a rear guard action, containing a threat to allow the Githzerai to live. When it was realized the containers actually contained a ghost in the machine, so to speak, the Githzerai Monks did what they do, and contemplated this. Probably still are contemplating (I play Githzerai as having a different sort of aloofness to them that parallels the Githyanki's idle decadence. They spend a lot of time living in their heads).
Just to riff on Forged, and I like the word play there, I'm thinking maybe a Gith word for Containers. They were devised as a way to contain military encroachments from the Githzerai's enemies. Heck, even the character in question here's backstory involved a rear guard action, containing a threat to allow the Githzerai to live. When it was realized the containers actually contained a ghost in the machine, so to speak, the Githzerai Monks did what they do, and contemplated this. Probably still are contemplating (I play Githzerai as having a different sort of aloofness to them that parallels the Githyanki's idle decadence. They spend a lot of time living in their heads).
I like this idea that while the Githzerai where busy thinking the forged just got in with defining themselves under the tutelage of their “mother”.
Oooh, plot twist that's probably a bit overboard. What if one of the Containers was inhabited by a fragment of Gith's soul? Gith is still bound or imprisoned, but it's been able to shed aspects of its soul in to date vain efforts at revealing truth to the Gith races. Campaign 1, the Container meets its Gith makers. Campaign 2 the return of Gith. Campaign 3 the unified Gith Ascendency, whatever that is.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The Containers (robots) were created by the Monks Karl'Capek and Izzazzimov. Most default to a problematic Lawful Neutral perspective that can be distilled to three simple sounding rules that nevertheless sometimes create friction between he robot's agency and the actual world.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Okay, I've been reading about mankind's sort of cool history of stories about artificial life; and weirdly enough, discounting your myth of Pygmalion and your stories of the Golem of Prague, the idea only really gets cooking in the mid-1700s.
This makes perfect sense - you have a barely-post-feudal society full of peasants wondering what their future looks like in a barely-pre-industrial economy. You start seeing the British passing laws against smashing textiles machinery. The Golem story starts achieving wide circulation. The Pygmalion statue, in a very brief time span, gets retconned with the name 'Galatea.' The Mechanical Turk goes on display. Within 100 years, you get a big wave of these stories with the works of ETA Hoffmann, whose childrens' stories generate two major ballets and an opera built around artificial life. Then, of course - Frankenstein.
They coined the word android back in the 1700s - a thing that was shaped in the form of man. When Čapek coined the term robot, in 1921, he was pulling it from an old word for serf. Metaphorically drawing attention to the moral problems of treating the poor like replaceable machines and of creating a permanent slave class out of beings with souls has been a part of the discussion here since the very beginning.
Since warforged suggests the creation of a permanent slave/soldier class and robot suggests the creation of a permanent manual labor class; let me suggest something that draws from this tradition, but also gets at the relationship you're trying to suggest - Apprentices. Like from The Sorcerer's Apprentice, where the pitfalls of leaving these beings entirely to their own devices is clear and the githzerai accept the responsibility of tutoring them and helping them find their own path.
ETA: I'm honestly tempted to keep digging and see what the relationship was with chattel slavery in the Americas. Writers in oppressive regimes always turn to science fiction and veiled allegories to avoid being physically threatened. I wonder if you could find a suppressed generation of proto-sci-fi authors in the US or Brazil around this time. Or in the Ottoman Empire for that matter.
Sort of germane to Tim's comments, especially if you're looking at chattel slavery, you might want to also look at the 19th century Russian use of "souls" as a conflation with the word "serfs" and the Russian aristocracies use of the word in land management and commerce related to land and population accounting. Gogol most notably in Dead Souls, and to some extend Dostoevsky, sort of subvert but also expand awareness of the concept, which sort of led to a mix of romanticizing Russia while also looking at it as a sort of backwater from the point of view of the rest of Europe, though both had arguably going on since at least the 16th Century. The Russians embrace of Shakespeare and Bynzantine architecture and aesthetics I think was behind some of the later Trek's development of Klingons from The Undiscovered Country on.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
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I am trying to come up with an alternative to the name warforged for that race.
In my world “Warforged” where created by a Githyanki who, frustrated by what she saw as weakness and lack of resources in both the war against the Githrezai and the Illithid, took it on herself to try and create a creature that would help fight the war, an autonotom with no soul. But something went wrong and instead each of her creations was imbuded with the energy of soul taken from limbo, identity and memory gone the power however was clear, this was a form of life.
When it was discovered what she had done the Githyanki council agreed that these new creations would not be destroyed, or forced to fight their battles, they would be taught the ways of the Gith and given freedom of choice to choose there own path. The Gith that created them would act forever as their mentor.
Now this is where I am hitting a brick wall, what to call these beings, Warforged seems a very un Gith word. Any ideas?!
The Clockwork folk?
(I like the idea of them needing an Adimantium whisker spring battery, with spares being charged at the local water wheel mill.)
(though picturing that Articer gem battery is good to..)
(I would keep PCs from making them by requiring them to be built through industrial circle magic.. [the clockwork person is built in a magic circle.. But the building requires a team effort Artificer of particular sub-class, and maybe another of a different sub-class, a wizard to do the major part of the circle, again of a possible required sub-class, possibly a creature containing that aspect of an earth genisi, then others with particular tool skills not "contaminated by Heroic levels. you Get the drift.. I originally came up with industrial circle magic to explain magic-items like spell jammers.
Itinerant Deputy Shire-reave Tomas Burrfoot - world walker, Raft-captain, speaker to his dead
Toddy Shelfungus- Rider of the Order of Ill Luck, Speaker to Friends of Friends, and Horribly big nosed
Jarl Archi of Jenisis Glade Fee- Noble Knight of the Dragonborn Goldcrest Clan, Sorcerer of the Noble Investigator;y; Knightly order of the Wolfhound
Arcanid?
Weirdfolk?
Clockfolk?
I am thinking the Soul Forged, given the background, there where only 1000 made by this rogue Gith, and these are the only 1000 in the world the pc has forgotten his past, he was discovered buried by dwarfs. Hence I am now working on his background. He was part of an illithid hunting party, he fought a rearguard action, there was a cave in and he allowed himself to be trapped, went into a form of stasis and over 500 years lost his memories.
Is it necessary to have a name for a race you're adapting literally in this instance? None of the following is saying you're going about this world building wrong. Rather, it's food for thought via a brainstorm your ideas got me thinking.
You've got this being (mechanically a Warforged) with amnesia, so may well not know what to call itself or how to take itself into account. Is this game going to repatriate the Warforged with its people? How many out of the initial 1000 are left after ~500 years, if they were actively used as combatants for I'm guessing missions too dangerous for regular Githyanki military (though Githyanki arrogance would likely never recognize a circumstance as too dangerous)? Unless a real population of this race is essential to your game world, I'd reduce the number to a few hundred, or maybe even a couple of tens or less for a couple of reasons. If you want to explore the Gith as a way of connecting the character to its people or origins, if you only have a few hundred maybe most Gith don't even know about them, which will then entail further adventuring among the Gith until the party finds the right enclave (boom: you have a campaign arc). If you reduce the number to a couple of dozen or even a handful. the remnant are the character's real kin and will definitely know the character's back story etc. and could lead to great RP on the discovering one's personal past front.
With reduced numbers I wouldn't so much name them as an autonomous race, rather I'd call them something that's attributed to their creator. Say the Githyanki was named Gaath, so the Warforged experiment in time became know as Gaath's Legacy, or Gaath's Mistake, or Gaath's Discovery, etc. Maybe just call them the Curious (named so for their uncanny nature as well as efforts to stake out their identity as living beings).
Other option, while it's entirely possible the Warforged were created as part of the Githyanki military program, I'd also say it's possible your Warforged were created strictly out of Idleness that leads a lot of Githyanki culture to decadently pursue art and science/magic while milling about Limbo with nothing better to do but play around with the stray souls that pass by every now and then. Maybe the Warforged in question was a young Gith's equivalent of a Raspberry Pi, lost on the youth's first war band incursion into the Prime Material plane.
My last thought is the Githyanki's treatment of their Warforged sounds sort of out of character given the Githyanki's established lore. I mean, it's your world and if the Githyanki are that altruistic and noble in that space go for it. But we're talking about a society run deceitfully by a Lich queen. Sure they liberated themselves from bondage, but unlike their Githzerai kin, the Githyanki see themselves as next in line to rule the multiverse and in the meantime plunder the multiverse for whatever it wants, including abducting other sentients on a whim. I mean they made a pact with Tiamat for one of their signature military resources, not to mention whatever role Tiamat may play in the present whereabouts of _the_ Gith. So given that somewhat brutal characterization I think Githyanki creation of Warforged might not have resolved as benevolently as you've outlined, but again maybe the Githyanki are more noble in your world.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I have realised I have totally got my Gith mixed up lol I meant a Githzerai created it to try and balance against the militaristic might of the Githyanki. Which I think makes more sense now lol. will correct my original question lol.
I do have an idea that the Soul Forged player, when trapped underground, was with a Gith, possibly the creator, in order to save her creation from the madness of isolation as she died she planted her own concisnous in his “mind”. At some point down the line he is going to have to liberate her from himself meaning a chance to travel to the githzerai city, and him discover others of his own kind and why he was created, which is the driving force behind his characters existence.
If they were created by the Githyanki, then they might be seen as a subset of their species. I'd be tempted to call them "Synthyanki" (Synthetic Githyanki). However, any made up word following the githyanki dialectic patterns would suffice.
Automatons, Clockworks, or Mannekin would all be good alternate names.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
You could go with something simple, like just calling them The Forged. They were forged by the Githzerai as automatons for war. They were then spiritually forged by Limbo to be living, soul filled creatures. Now they themselves must be forged by their own existence and experiences to unlock their hidden potentials and find purpose in the greater world as a new race.
Maybe something like that?
"Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
Characters for Tenebris Sine Fine
RoughCoronet's Greater Wills
Just to riff on Forged, and I like the word play there, I'm thinking maybe a Gith word for Containers. They were devised as a way to contain military encroachments from the Githzerai's enemies. Heck, even the character in question here's backstory involved a rear guard action, containing a threat to allow the Githzerai to live. When it was realized the containers actually contained a ghost in the machine, so to speak, the Githzerai Monks did what they do, and contemplated this. Probably still are contemplating (I play Githzerai as having a different sort of aloofness to them that parallels the Githyanki's idle decadence. They spend a lot of time living in their heads).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I like this idea that while the Githzerai where busy thinking the forged just got in with defining themselves under the tutelage of their “mother”.
Oooh, plot twist that's probably a bit overboard. What if one of the Containers was inhabited by a fragment of Gith's soul? Gith is still bound or imprisoned, but it's been able to shed aspects of its soul in to date vain efforts at revealing truth to the Gith races. Campaign 1, the Container meets its Gith makers. Campaign 2 the return of Gith. Campaign 3 the unified Gith Ascendency, whatever that is.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
About a hundred years and nine weeks ago there was an old word coined by a Czech playwright named Karel Čapek that I always liked - robot.
The Containers (robots) were created by the Monks Karl'Capek and Izzazzimov. Most default to a problematic Lawful Neutral perspective that can be distilled to three simple sounding rules that nevertheless sometimes create friction between he robot's agency and the actual world.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
How ‘bout “Bob?”
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
They are mechanisms, right? Forgetting what the contemporary term means, why not call them Mechanics? Mech-nicks Mech-folk?
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I'll pitch 'the Constructed'
More Interesting Lock Picking Rules
I like “Mechon” though I’ll admit that’s cribbed from xenoblade chronicles
Okay, I've been reading about mankind's sort of cool history of stories about artificial life; and weirdly enough, discounting your myth of Pygmalion and your stories of the Golem of Prague, the idea only really gets cooking in the mid-1700s.
This makes perfect sense - you have a barely-post-feudal society full of peasants wondering what their future looks like in a barely-pre-industrial economy. You start seeing the British passing laws against smashing textiles machinery. The Golem story starts achieving wide circulation. The Pygmalion statue, in a very brief time span, gets retconned with the name 'Galatea.' The Mechanical Turk goes on display. Within 100 years, you get a big wave of these stories with the works of ETA Hoffmann, whose childrens' stories generate two major ballets and an opera built around artificial life. Then, of course - Frankenstein.
They coined the word android back in the 1700s - a thing that was shaped in the form of man. When Čapek coined the term robot, in 1921, he was pulling it from an old word for serf. Metaphorically drawing attention to the moral problems of treating the poor like replaceable machines and of creating a permanent slave class out of beings with souls has been a part of the discussion here since the very beginning.
Since warforged suggests the creation of a permanent slave/soldier class and robot suggests the creation of a permanent manual labor class; let me suggest something that draws from this tradition, but also gets at the relationship you're trying to suggest - Apprentices. Like from The Sorcerer's Apprentice, where the pitfalls of leaving these beings entirely to their own devices is clear and the githzerai accept the responsibility of tutoring them and helping them find their own path.
ETA: I'm honestly tempted to keep digging and see what the relationship was with chattel slavery in the Americas. Writers in oppressive regimes always turn to science fiction and veiled allegories to avoid being physically threatened. I wonder if you could find a suppressed generation of proto-sci-fi authors in the US or Brazil around this time. Or in the Ottoman Empire for that matter.
Sort of germane to Tim's comments, especially if you're looking at chattel slavery, you might want to also look at the 19th century Russian use of "souls" as a conflation with the word "serfs" and the Russian aristocracies use of the word in land management and commerce related to land and population accounting. Gogol most notably in Dead Souls, and to some extend Dostoevsky, sort of subvert but also expand awareness of the concept, which sort of led to a mix of romanticizing Russia while also looking at it as a sort of backwater from the point of view of the rest of Europe, though both had arguably going on since at least the 16th Century. The Russians embrace of Shakespeare and Bynzantine architecture and aesthetics I think was behind some of the later Trek's development of Klingons from The Undiscovered Country on.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.