Emerald wrote:A quick search through a PDF copy shows that "gish" doesn't show up anywhere in the book, so that's a no.
Fair enough. Although it wouldn't surprise me if 'gish' is actually a typo and the intention was some similar word that
was used in The Dying of the Light. The word 'gish' is on Page 43 of the AD&D Fiend Folio in the lower right corner when it tells you about the various ranks of Githyanki that appear in Githyanki lairs. A Fighter/Magic User of 4th/4th level is a gish. Also Githyanki 'knights' are 8th level Anti-Paladins.
That last bit is especially interesting, because of course at the time of its printing, there were no rules for Anti-Paladins in AD&D. Also, due to the absolutely terrible way AD&D handled multiclassing, it was against the rules for any race to allow a character to be a Paladin
and allow a character to be a Fighter/Magic User. Also Gith the Lich Queen is a 24th level Magic User despite the fact that AD&D did not in fact have rules for level 21+ Magic Users. Basically, much of the Githyanki writeup references Charles Stross' unpublished house rules for AD&D, and it was genuinely unplayable in a Rules As Written kind of way. But it was AD&D and no one cared, it's all mind caulk all the way down anyway.
In related news, a Githzerai Fighter/Magic User is called a 'zerth.'
Emerald wrote:Even better, Stross didn't just write for AD&D, he got in on the ground floor. The Githyanki debuted in issue #12 of White Dwarf Magazine, published in April 1979, and the 1e DMG wasn't published until August of that year.
The best part of this is that in 1979, Charles Stross was
fifteen. Back then TSR
literally let an enthusiastic highschool student write up his rant about his campaign world based on some then-current science fiction he got at the library. And that rant was published as-is in fucking hardback, and became a focal point of iconic D&D lore.
And to make this even more mental, the only reason they got away with this is that George Martin is an actual crazy person who believes in a very aggressive form of adverse possession in intellectual property. That is to say, the AD&D Githyanki are a trademark violation and have been since their first publication upon being written up by said enthusiastic highschool student. But D&D gets to keep using them because George Martin thinks that D&D successfully stole the name from him in the 70s. It's been more than forty years, so D&D can't be sued
now, but there were literal decades when Martin could have done something about it and didn't because he is wrong about how copyrights work.
-Username17