How do you make a lich a good guy?

Unless liching explicitly requires one to be bad guy, there's nothing wrong with being a benevolent undead wizard. I guess stench of decay would upset petitioners for some time, but once all your flesh falls off, you are going to do fine. Particularly in typical fantasy where nothing ever changes.

All I heard at the very end of that paragraph was Mr. Meeseeks talking about Jerry's golf swing.

Have his undead love him, and serve him willingly.

"The end justifies the means"

In one campaign I had a lich guarding an planar gate that led to an eldritch horror dimension. Gate couldn't be destroyed without serious problems, so he just made sure no one ever used it.

Archlich

Have him be evil but not a dick. As in by this point he's lost all desire to conquer and enslave. He does bare minimum to maintain his existence out of pure habit. Which in this case, because of his mastery, means sucking life essence out of cattle like once a year.

Now he's gotten bored and started visiting human towns just to break the tedium. Vivisecting people lost it's allure quite some time ago and the meatsacks walking around and talking is interesting again.

Could be entertaining people as a clown because seeing people happy is one of the major things he hasn't seen in an eternity.

By not making it a bad guy.
You know, like a nice person or something.

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Don't play D&D or any D&D setting.

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Make the lich a girl
She's nice and polite to everyone
She pays her taxes
During times of war she contributes to the kingdom's armies

Make him a wizard who became a lich in order to extend his lifestpan to continue fighting the forces of evil.

Like this.

>lich

Explosion!

Eccentric researcher who accidently became a lich. Views their condition humorously, and makes jokes all the time.

Wizard simply in love with knowledge. Viewed becoming a lich as a step towards learning everything they could. Is now a one-lich library and wealth of information, serving in an advisory role to the nobles.

These are just off the top of my head.

>How do you make a lich a good guy?
They seek to defy death for a good reason? Perhaps they have a vision of X, and became a lich to make sure that X does not happen, for instance?

How good of a person does a lich have to be before letting them (un)live is a responsible, ethical decision?

>Ancient wizard yearning for immortality
>Sacrifices humanity and becomes undead
>Thousand years pass, and he grows cold and lonely
>Goes out and sees the world under a disguise
>Yearlong quest where he sees the highs and low of humanity, falls back in love with everything he gave up a millenia ago
>Wishes to express his love of life by presenting the entire world with gifts
>Marshals his godly knowledge of magic to stop time for a night
>Goes across the lands with magic, hiding gifts in the homes of people he has deemed of being the pinnacle of virtue
>Vows to do so every year on the anniversary of his revelation
>Nicholas, the Christmas Lich

The funny thing is the closest things we have to liches in real life are living buddhas.

Who are essentially Buddhas that come so fucking close to reaching enlightenment and ascending before death, that they're spiritually still alive meditating.

ask yourself how is a lich inherently evil

I love it

"But ends are SHAPED by the means!"

Fucker killed his own granddaughter and the local sociopaths called him out on this.

I had a friendly lich running a kind of private magic forensics lab for a party while they tracked down a different lich. The good lich was growing plants in the undead trying to use them as a way to convert negative energy into life energy. He did however run into snags where the undead negative energy was too strong so only particularly resiliant and often monsterlike plants would survive transplants. Also it had some corrupting properties on lesser autonomous plantlife. Eventually he had to be stopped but not before he marched his small army of shambling plants and zombies against an outbreak of plague zombies and helped save the city.

Lich tries to raise dead as favor to grieving families and to give dead a second chance at life. When that doesn't work (and it never does) the raised congregate around him. Now he's the beloved mayor of Bonetown where the undead are allowed to live a happy quiet unlife away from the fearful judging eyes of the living.

>Bonetown

Are they also constantly harassed by teenaged migrants who try to steal the "Welcome to Bonetown" sign or just stand around giggling all day?

Supposedly he became immortal after an innocent (himself) was sacrificed.

Pretty lichy.

You going to contribute anything other than "I don't like D&D, and you shouldn't either!"?

This occurance is in fact the potential trigger to a long standing political tension and (un)livist predjudice between Bonetown and the neighorboring kingdoms of the living that the party must negotiate.

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You didn't kill the misguided guy did you? Seems almost cruel to.

And he hits on a Canoness...doesn't matter that he's a Dreadnought.

>not knowing about True Resurrection

You can't accidentally become a lich, unless you change it fundamentally, since the ritual to become one requires a willing participant

>clown litch

Dont make them a lich or a lich that wants to revert.

Solution: carve all road signs into the living rock to prevent delinquents from making off with them.

Too give him credit he did not know at the time and felt really bad about.

What would you do if a bunch of do gooders went into your crib you use to bind evil hell spawn and as a base against BBEG and started to rek shit up ?

There was a thread a long while back about using schools of magic besides necromancy to turn yourself immortal. The body of an evocation lich would be shaped from invisible force, the body of a transmutation lich would be turned into living iron, etc.

He became a lich to protect his descendents. Its easier than you think.

He used to be an asshole but now he's the party's cool uncle.

Give him a different motivation.

A good guy got cursed to live eternally as a lich.

Some guy got ressurected against his will to be used for evil, but he managed to break free and retain his will.

A band of heroes tried to stop a lich ritual and one of the heroes accidentally stumbled into it and became the focus.

Guy becomes a lich to eternally guard a sacred area or keep some bad guy locked up. Bad guy eventually dies but the guardian is still around, now with nothing in particular to do.

This is the non-evil way of becoming a lich in my setting.

Being more interested in a stable and long-time rule than "kill everyone immediately so I run out of resources!!!"

Undead are an unlimited workforce so the population can spend its time on services/creative professions. Those skellingtons gotta be replaced due to wear and tear though.

Try to talk with them like a reasonable adult?

You clearly aren't warlock material.

I hope you like rotting in hell at the end, stupid eldritch blast fucker.

Technically, it's about a necromancer, but potato, tomato.

CRAAAAAWLING IN MY SKIIIIIIIIN

>All for the sake of his mad dream of ruling the galaxy someday. Scientists and workers will make something to reach for the sky, and... THE STARS WILL BE CONQUERED, AND GODS WILL KNEEL OR DIE. ALL WHO OPPOSES THE WILL OF MASTER OF DEATH AND LIFE SHALL be persuaded to not oppose or PERISH.

[Celestia Regina Intensifies]

>Celestia Regina

That's Latin for "Queen of Heaven" right?

What an idealistic fucking pussy. Thinking that society will ever evolve into something nice without him. He should've made himself a lich and continued to manipulate it from shadows to further his goals. Maybe he did, and it was a decoy.

To be fair... he was still a more relatable and well-adjusted individual than the fucking psychotic Sorceress and serial killer Ranger.

Necromancy is not inherently evil, just magic powered by the neutral underworld. The worst thing he does is disrespect the bodies of the dead

citation needed

some DnD necromancy spells have evil descriptor

Kek, this is basically it. It's is basically rebelling against the natural order, something inherently chaotic and/or evil.

You basically can not have Good Liches outside of you want one, basically everything that a 'Good Lich' provides, there is a simpler, more good-aligned and reasonable way to accomplish.

I meant in that specific setting

#

So for a human in DnD 5e, what is an easier good alligned way to become an ageless being that can regenerate if that body is destroyed and doesn't have a metabolism with all the baggage that comes with it?

Becoming an Elan. Repeated use of Reincarnation.

Didn't one if the AD&D supplements have a chaotic good bard lich?

>Becoming an Elan.

Sorry. I meant to specify "as a human in 5e".
Can you please answer that?

Pic related isn't a terrible example.

Just need something worse than eating souls for them to be preventing. Got to break a few thousand eggs a day if you want a galactic lighthouse.

Great now you made me think the lich is acting like sorin Markov...
"I'm a jerk....for the greater good"

Liches in my campaigns are typically nerds who have a whole lot of time on their hands.
Once my group came accross a lich in his dungeon which itself was a massive library and as long as they didn't fuck with his reading time they would have gone unnoticed.
They did get his attention trying to take one of his books of the shelf and they ended up paying their way out with an ancient almanac.
He was much more interested in the record tomato yeild from 600 years ago than another group of merderhobos trying to gank him again.

The world is being taken over by a great evil. A mighty team is on the verge of destroying it once and for all, but they fail, all dying horribly. All except the wizard that is. Bruised and broken, he manages to escape, utilizing his most powerful spell to warp him back in time. However, it's difficult to control the spell and he goes too far back.

He knows what he must do. He sacrifices his very humanity, and countless innocent lives to become a powerful lich, living long enough to witness the rise of his old group. He becomes the big bad, sending minions to fight the party, but it's all secretly to train them for the far more powerful foe to come.

Lichdom tends to require you to do horrible things in pursuit of sustaining your life, tearing your soul out, and forcibly binding it to this world in defiance of the natural order in most DnD depictions.

A perfect description of one of my old characters.

You misunderstand what I meant, my point was that the reason often comes after the idea.

I have this great idea, it is X. Now, how can I fit X in to a story? My point was that if you take the end product say, I want an this resting place guarded, an order is created in secret with their charge handed down from generation to generation.

Lets say, I need somebody here to await a message, let us create a Golem who can be tasked with recording it.

My point was that in fiction, especially young-adult fiction, the really cool idea tends to be the center point with the plot dropped in around it. Do not get me wrong, I do love some of the adults and have very fond memories reading them.

>some

Exactly. There are probably spells with the evil descriptor in every school.

Sure, in Book of Vile Darkness.

I don't understand what you are saying.

D&D and all D&D settings are geared toward liches being evil. It's deep underpinning that's very central to the particular flavor of the D&D genre.
By throwing in non-evil liches you're suddenly opening the door to non-evil intelligent undead like vampire hunters. This makes organizations that hunt undead seem less like societies of monster-hunters and more like a fantastical KKK. So now you have to justify how these crazy assholes can go around killing non-evil undead without provocation without being evil themselves. At this point you have to struggle with whether alignment is truly objective, which defuses all ambiguity by creating a bland moral divide, or subjective, which makes alignment a meaningless doodad in an amoral world.

Or you can avoid all this by playing something else.

A quick look I found,evil non necromancy spells in these books.
planar handbook, spell compendium, sandstorm, dragon magic, defenders of the faith,tome of battle,stormwrack, players handbooks,ghostwalk,heroes of horror,draconomicon,dragons of faerun,oriental adventures,
Monster Compendium: Monsters of Faerûn, frostburn,miniatures handbook, heroes of battle,complete adventurer,unapproachable east,complete arcana,complete mage.

There may even be a metamagic that can turn evil spells good.

>Or you can avoid all this by playing something else

This is what I did.

What are ways you would recommend to attain lichdom (or a functional equivalent that does doesnn't require periodic infusions of expensive materials to keep going) in a Non-DnD fantasy game where morality is not objective?

>Non-DnD fantasy game
Via fucking magic?

Authors and creators think of a really cool idea that does not make much sense or is an inversion of something that already exists.

This example is a Good-Aligned Lich, this is a contradiction in both folklore and the majority of standard fantasy settings as Lichs are evil, the act to become one requires the mage to commit a brutally evil act, or several, to become a Lich.

Once the idea is create, the Lich is that Good, they then have to come up with a reason to place him in a setting or a story. Almost every single time a Good Aligned lich is placed in fiction there is a better alternative.

Pic related, this is what you want.

fucking what? links.

>Via fucking magic?

Yes. What I am asking is what forms of rituals would you recommend that take.

oh that's dirt fucking simple.

Most liches are power-mad fucks trying to escape death.

Make a lich that doesn't care if he dies, he just wants to accomplish a goal and isn't going to live long enough normally. Madness can take him as long as he strives to complete the task.

Say..... saving the world from climate change.

Sealing the door to a cthulian horror.

Shutting down the warp.

Making peep marshmellows at an affordable price for every walk of life.

It really doesn't matter.

I think he's referring to that female Inquisitor from Fenris he met during the SW's little war with the big I.

Fist you make a magic circle.
Fill it with magic dust.
Get the magic faries to dance the magic ritual.
Carve the magic cheese in the ancient tradition that makes it airborn.
Sing the magic song of the eldars.
Wiggle the fingers.
Jiggle the butt.
And wave it around like you just don't care.

BAM! Non-D&D magical lichdom ritual.

>Making peep marshmellows at an affordable price for every walk of life.

>The Ancient Lich has an army of animated marshmallow chickens

oh, I should clarify.

The faeries alternate between breakdancing and waltzing mid-air.

Got the rest of these comics? They never fail to make me giggle.

I also love this interpretation of a "good" lich.

He Mad.

Call upon the god of life and god of time, making the appropriate sacrifices. The ritual happens at the same time that a rare species of snake, contained in its own separate magical circle, sheds its skin, Then you drink the potion, which is mostly a well proportioned poison, and fall into a deep slumber. When you awake,the snake is dead and you are immortal.