Whatever the Ixians looked like originally (from hints in the text, they were "Middle Easterners" of some sort), their appearance was affected from years of living in Sharath and on IX. I think a skin tone that is not exactly like anything on Earth would be an interesting idea.

Yes, I believe the Ixians are indeed Designer Imposter Stygians (with some additional flavor from CAS stories).

I think this is best left to our imagination and not nailed down to some fixed thing.

It's your game and idea of Ixians

In our game I think we view them as Stygians essentially. Great bad guys due to their cultural ways, certainly. All steeped in black magics, esoteric ecclesiastics, lotus, and slavery. Totally great villains, love it.

My original question was are they grey skinned. That threw me off and was just seeking clarification.  Nothings a game changer really, just my own curiosity and minds eye view on how they look.

Carnby wrote:

It is worth noting that both Scythium and IX are right at the edge of the world. Who knows what weird energies and radiations they get there and the effects they have on the human body, especially over thousands of years.

Not only that, but before moving to Scythium they spent (per the Referee's Manual) "several generations" living in Sharath, which is constantly being directly blasted by God knows what from the Black Gulf.
 

I was thinking about this topic again the other day. Here is one of the Google image search results for "dusky skin"

I think you could argue that this attractive Indian woman has a bit of a "grayish" undertone to her skin (the way people with olive skin, such as myself, have a bit of a "greenish" undertone). Obviously she's more brown than gray (just like I'm more pink than green) but I can see it. It probably wouldn't be hard to find even more "grayish" examples of dusky skin if you wanted to spend more than the three seconds I thought this was worth.

So I think Ixians could range from "dusky gray" in the sense that this could describe some actual people on Earth to "dusky gray" in a completely exotic way. I probably would fall a little more on the "exotic" side myself, but I think the interpretation here is up to the DM!

Last edited by Blackadder23 (4/16/2024 12:33 pm)

Blackadder23 wrote:

Carnby wrote:

It is worth noting that both Scythium and IX are right at the edge of the world. Who knows what weird energies and radiations they get there and the effects they have on the human body, especially over thousands of years.

Not only that, but before moving to Scythium they spent (per the Referee's Manual) "several generations" living in Sharath, which is constantly being directly blasted by God knows what from the Black Gulf.
 

Yes, the idea here is that the people and places of Hyperborea are not a static thing. Migrations, war, disease -- all of these have an impact on the various races of the realm. But then there is the weird and otherworldly impactful events and environments, such as you've cited. 
 

Thinking more, I've come to like the idea that while most Ixians look like someone you can meet in real life, there are Ixian sorcerers who are actually grey, but in a monochrome kind of way. Thinking about the "grey dust of corroded planets" found in Sharath, I think people who spend enough time messing with the weird energies and radiations at the edge of the world might find their colour draining away until they look like they're out of a black and white movie. I imagine this is a weird effect that will even affect their clothes and other wearables, or at least as long as they're worn. Laboratories in Sharath end up looking like a scene from the '31 Frankenstein.