#etherguant

a.       God fuck these guys, the most pretentious blokes on the planes.  The Medusas of the mind here are most commonly found on the Ethereal Plane, mostly raiding the Material, and have a nice simple goal…to eliminate the Material Plane.  Yeah, like I said, fuck these guys.  Their most noticeable trait other than the hunchbacks is that their masks have beneath them some sort of horrific insanity that will tear your mind apart on the inside and trust me you don’t want to deal with that.  What’s weird about them is that for Thousands of years people thought that Daanvi was utterly uninhabited by natives, for 12,000 years the Etherguants seemingly vanished for reasons unknown, only to emerge again about 530 years ago, after which they started to spread into the Etheral Plane dramatically while taking back Daanvi.  The vast majority of their activity is made up of scouting parties, small band of Etherguants exploring key points of the Material Plane, gathering information, questioning locals (few survive) and often taking some prisoners before retreating back into their world.  Occasionally they will just straight up raid a village or small towns kidnapping as many people as they can to take back to their home for some unknown purpose. About thirty years ago however, they started to launch full invasions of certain parts of the Material Plane, with the full intent it seems of total eradication of all life.  They focus primarily upon beings capable of any form of belief and those who have been captured have said quite openly they hope to starve the Outer Planes to death.  The Ethergaunts seem to randomly hate the Rule of Three, the Unity of Rings, and Center of All, for reasons that nobody knows, but it appears they have made the destruction of that a personal priority. They are divided into 5 categories, Red, Blue, White, Grey, and Black, though as they don’t seem to attach special significant to colors why this division?  Fuck you that’s why.  Reds are the scientist, scout, and warrior Caste, Blues are engineers and builders, Whites are diplomates, Bureaucrats, and scholars, Greys are spies and Philosophers, and Blacks are the commanders.

b.      In regards to relationships, among the other Alien races, they fight the most with the phaerimm, as both seem to have similar powers of mind control and don’t really work together well.  The Phaerimm were particular horrified to find that they could be mind controlled by the Ethergaunts, though it is difficult and that goes both way, and are willing to ally even with the Sharn to prevent this fate. Their other great foe are the Malaugrym, who aren’t in the mood to tolerate more rivals, and so strive (mostly behind the scenes) to create alliances to oppose their incursions.  What they would have thought of the Slarecian is unknown, but their creations at one point hunted down and killed a Black Ethergaunts, so it must not be good.  Despite these threats though, the Ethergaunts have largely been successful in their invasion without too much difficulty except for three instances.  Firstly, there was a time when their invasion coincided with a Blood War battled and an entire army of Ethergaunts were wiped out, though they inflicted tremendous damage to both sides in the process.  The Second was a when a Trio of Dragons turned their full attention to driving back an invasion.  The Third was then they accidently ran across a hoard of Darkspawn and fought a 18 year war with the creatures before eventually retreating, as the sheer numbers of those Blighted creatures brings fear even to the Black etherguants.  The Etherguant invasion makes them many enemies, though they seem to fear Dragons and the Blight, and have found themselves bogged down due to the Damned making an effort to weaken their war effort.  For reasons unknown they hate mind flayers and make a priority to destroy them first, which is a war that most people can get behind.  Finally for reasons that are really unknown, the Kaorti HATE  them, which is weird because the Kaorti don’t hate anything.  Yet they have been found launching raids against the Ethergaunts and trying their darndest to defeat their armies.  

c.       Ethergaunts are famous for being obsessively rational, however what they call rational…isn’t.  Their behavior from an outside perspective seems erratic, arbitrary, and entirely self-destructive (such as not extending their protection from magic to Divine).  Anyone who talks to them (a tricky task, as they can only talk through a mind slave) will hear them justify all of their actions as simply the most rational course of action but they will hardly bother to explain WTF that actually means, since your inferior brain simply can’t understand their rationality.  It’s like the worse of the Enlightenment meets Cthulhu.  For example, they love randomly building ziggeraunts and pyramids for no reasons all over the lands they control, because that is “rational”. They also have a hatred of Gods, who they believe are not rational.

d.      SECRET DM KNOWLEDGE:  The Etherguants motive is not in fact the elimination of Mortals, that is simply a means to an end.  It isn’t even the destruction of the Gods, though that is certainly part of their plan. No, their goal is much more sinister, the eradication of Conceptual reality itself.  They believe that the world is defined by straight forward conflicts between two forces (Hegel anyone?) and the Universe is torn between the forces of Objective and Subjective reality.  However that battle cannot truly happen as Conceptual reality constantly interferes with said challenge by imposing its existence upon the world. Thus before the final battle between Objective and Subjective can begin, they must destroy the irrational Conceptual reality, where the world might change by people’s belief in it.  Then the final battle may commence to start the process of remaking the universe, which will of course end with the most rational side winning.  The Etherguants believe that this is Subjective reality, which is clearly the most rational because Pyramids lemon face BALOOON muffin.a.        To this end they are trying not to wipe out mortals necessarily, but instead to destroy the worshipers of Gods and thus weaken them, and try to brainwash the other mortals so that they are incapable of any form of belief.  They are planning to set up indoctrination camps for this purpose.  The reason why their invasions haven’t been seen in large parts of the Material Plane is that their home plane keeps being attacked by the forces of the Deities, and should the Gods ever get their act together and unify the Etherguants would be wiped out in an instant.  However their unity, extreme power, home team advantage, and of course their secret masters have allowed them to keep the gods at bay, though it means only a small number of their forces can actually attack the Material Plane, mostly via the Ethereal Plane.  They are secreted allied with the servants of both the Titans, and the Pridmordials (in particular the Yozi/Neverborn), who would gladly see the God’s knocked down a peg. b.      The Etherguants are led by a secret “Council of 5”, a band of 5 super powered creatures who command the whole race. Each one is being of epic power and can create Avatars and Aspects.  These 5 in turn serve a being known as “Reason” who is not a god, but more like an inspiration.  Cults of this entity have occasionally sprung up around the Material Plane known as the “Cult of Reason”.