The Hollow Men

“The Knight in the Dragon Helm heard an echo coming through the ages. The whispers silenced as they moved beneath the somber plates of his armor. There were no eyes at all, just ragged blind holes that glowed with blackness, yet they easily evaluated the barren world in which he found himself.

The Prime is a womb, a means to existence without matter. In a certain sense, however this plane was fertile. Here souls were for the taking, harvested by ways far more advanced than those understood by the lesser fiends. True, it is a dangerous playground, after all, one’s essence is tethered to the Ethereal until sufficient energy is gathered to reform and materialize in the Prime again. All due to the tentacled mortals who called themselves illithids, with their inferior mind tricks they crafted another mortal race that could adapt their processes to the Dream Cycle, one who was crafted in such way as to be able to wield the silver swords. They had become too reliable on their own powers and were eventually wiped out of the Astral into Carceri. The illithids also fell under their own yoke, the gith.

All these thoughts roamed simultaneously among the Knight in the Dragon Helm’s straw mind, in those silent whispers to be substituted by a single resonance: hunger.”- Carvings found among Maanzecorian’s remains by illithid alchemists. The githyanki recognize forty different words for void and emptiness. Wrall is just one of these words and means literally “crooked hollow”, as if it could somehow grow in the wrong directions and shapes.

Living in the Silver Void it becomes easier to understand such naming. The energy that pervades the place is given to sudden tides and storms that surpass by far any terror experienced in the dramas of Ossa. No combat is simple and decided when sheer wills collide. The Wrall are not part of the githyanki’s history after all this time, not even the illithids’, even though ancient beings like Ilsensine might remember.

The hollow, barely self-containing, orbs of Carceri serve as home to dry, lofty, mucous, frozen and worse archetypes, as suits their respective layers. Yet, despite the building betrayals inside self-betrayals and eternal repression, the Wrall point out as the pervading emptiness that in the end is the final result, the whimper behind illusions. It all sums up to vibrations in the void, which have for destination nothing.

This race is composed of cages without prisoners; ego phantoms that have no true self, superego and no love for Creation. The psychology of these beings spins around external components, as if reaching away from the violent hollow energies. Swordplay is a defining factor, partially as a unwavering heritage of the Astral, and all Wrall are effectively warriors and advance in levels starting from their minimum Hit Dice to a practically limitless ability.

Their swords are as prized and sophisticated as the ones they used to wield eons ago. The superior quasi-magical, quasi-psionic technique with which they forge them is something not repeated even by modrons, illithids or Dragon Kings of Athas. The result is the melded sword that paralyses the soul and weakens the mind at the same time, sometimes directly absorbing the soul as life stealing; others can persistently use ego whip attacks until the target is rendered effectively “mind-flayed.’

Music is the second master characteristic that defines culture. Wrall play organs the size of cities through tunnels in Colothys like the winds of Pandemonium. Their capacity for understanding sound is comparable only to air elementals and they usually use this advantage to spread subliminal music that repels gehreleths, fiends and other dangerous denizens.

The third external factor, perhaps the greatest of all is hunger. An enemy, a soul, anything to fill, only if temporarily their emptying selves. Once they used mental energies to do this and when they managed to create a great reserve of mental energy they made a loop into the fabric of conduits that would with time become a true void and a Wrall. Now they use a different, adapted version of this idea.

Their sword thrusts and terrible gaze saps away the very ego resistance (DMs might wish to apply damage both to hit points and PSPs) until the victim cannot impose its will to survive over the Wrall’s power of reducing them to their very soul, in the way of larvae. A knot of larvae in a particular twist creates another of their number, but only by the artificial means of the Orb of Sand. This has brought them into many conflicts with the gehreleths, who use the many corpse-petitioners as a way of survival. Enemies are but a reflection of this lack. There is nothing one of them want more than to find a worthy adversary, with true strength, to be their eternal enemy.

Among their greatest opponents are the so-called antediluvian horrors. The Great Old Ones, the abominations that ruled the Astral even before they did and were costly imprisoned in Carceri, were most of them sleep. The ones still awake plot and destroy Wrall whenever possible, which in turn stop their plans to destroy the Prime, their main resource, and organize expeditions to put them back to sleep or even try to annihilate them in wars far impossible to comprehend to mortals.

Their tendency to underestimate any mortal makes them commit errors in calculation that brings in death. But theirs is not this comfort; they can always remake their bodies after a time. It is just that away from the reach of the Orb, it can take from minutes to millennia for this happen and only a soul-shattering power can permanently slay them. But then, it is all part of the great game.