Why are paladins such cocksuckers...

I'm completely for Positive Energy "liches" or whatever type of thing you call someone that has become so charged with Elemental Good that they become forever-living

Buts that's not a lunch a lunch is undead. Positive energy would "kill" a lunch back to true dead.

Can someone learn a lesson about being undead from the death that lead them to be undead?

*Lich. I don't know how I didn't see that auto correct.

I think I've seen more good-guy/banal liches in my games than I have purely evil liches.

I find this to be a crime.

I was a reticent zombie brought back by the raven queen to get some artefact and restore order to the underdark, it was a pretty cool campaign. I felt like the Arbiter from Halo, expected to die on this suicide mission, except that when I died, the Raven Queen just kept bringing my tattered body right back.

Shit, this thread is filled with idiocy.

The vast majority of undead are evil. They engage in activities that are considered monstrous and destructive to society. In many settings they are inherently evil, bearing a malicious cunning even when mindless. In settings where they aren't inherently evil, they are still considered anathema to civilized society.

Liches are evil. The current idea originated in D&D where the process to become one involved an act of pure evil, and which always twisted your morality into evil. The ritual itself came from an evil outsider who wished to spread suffering and destruction to the material world.

Undead in D&D are not created by filling them with evil, but instead the neutral element of entropy and destruction. They are evil because this element twists whatever instincts or mind they possess to create a hatred for life and the living, wanting to destroy it. Vampires become cruel, liches lose any capacity for empathy, zombies kill any life around them, and so on.

Ghosts are one of the few exceptions. They can be any alignment and are only nominally filled with negative energy, being mostly souls trapped upon the Ethereal plane. However, their hollow existence slowly drives them insane, twisting them towards evil.

As to Baelnorns, they are elven "liches" infused with the neutral energy of life and creation in a process derived from divine sources passed to elven communities from the elven gods. Though it shares some similarities with the normal lich process, minus the act of cannibalizing the fresh heart of a humanoid, it only works on good or neutral elves.

>And we *all* know what I'm fucking talking about.

Half-Orcs? Tieflings?

But yeah, they always eventually make a race for playing a Revenant or a Vampire eventually.

The only well handled Lich I've seen in any game was the Ghostlord from Red Hand of Doom.

Entirely evil but also concerned primarily with himself and his hobby of making ghost cats all day, only brought into the story at all because the real villains of the piece manage to snag his phylactery and blackmail him into helping them and will drop them like a bag of rocks the literal instant the PCs get it back for him. He's also much too powerful for the PCs to actually handle and isn't meant as a combat encounter.

The fact that he's a druid lich also lends something to his feeling of uniqueness.

I thing the race in question are Drow

>undead paladin

Don't need to eat or drink or sleep. It doesn't bleed and it will never, ever stop.

Sir Dan was best paladin.

>Just because I'm a blasphemous construct powered by expressly evil energy, created by unnatural magicks cast by an evil necromancer doesn't mean I'm evil!

I do not believe you.

If I were a paladin I'd do nothing else but smite liches all day long.

In the ass.

With my dick.

My 12 inch lawful good alabama black snake.

That's what I'd do.

This bugs me because at their heart liches are a pretty awesome concept (depending on lich fluff).

I am personally a big fan of "making a phylactery is an irrevocably evil thing that involves sacrificing souls and shit" because it really makes you think what kind of person would think of themselves so highly that they feel others deserve to die in order to perpetuate their existence

The problem is that the moral or ideological conflict involved in making a phylactery is such an internal process, you won't see it outside of literature or another medium capable of getting at internal dilemmas.

TTRPGs really don't have the range for this, unless one of the PCs is becoming a lich.

>their hometown sacrificed to become a lich's phylactery
>NPCs the players like sacrificed to become a lich's phylactery
>the quest is to kill a lich who screwed over the Mr. Johnson by making loved ones a phylactery
>killing people for no reason other than to fuel your own life is evil

ez gg no re

There is the Deathless from Eberron, which is basically postive undeads elves.

But that doesn't get at the "what kind of person would think of themselves so highly that they feel others deserve to die in order to perpetuate their existence" question you posed earlier. It doesn't give us a look into the mind of the lich.

Look at any biography. It's always the job of the biographer to try to peace together how the subject's mind worked, and what made them think and make the decisions they did. I'm excluding autobiographies of course. That's the same thing Dosto does in Man from Underground, and so many authors do in basically all good fiction. They're concerned with questions about what makes a person tick. What makes a man a man. Etc.
You need internal perspective to answer that question. Authors of fiction are able to provide that look, because their character is fictional, and they can present an argument through that fiction about how a hypothetical character works.

You're not going to hit that internal level from external examination. You can attempt it, but the examination will be more shallow than a look from the inside would ever be.

> "what kind of person would think of themselves so highly that they feel others deserve to die in order to perpetuate their existence"

Well yeah, that's for the DM to have fun with. If the players want to have fun with it then I guess they could play 20 questions with the lich but in my experience players care way more about their character and the experiences of that character.

Well, in 4th, some undead are unaligned because they're mindless and considered morally equivalent to animals, and it's possible to be a good or neutral "arch"lich if you take special care to find and use a lich-ification ritual that doesn't take awful shortcuts and isn't tainted by Orcus, but yeah, in general, evil.

The problem is that even if you are a good person who just happens tombs undead, the entire fact you exist as an undead being is contrary to the laws of nature. The process involves to make one person immortal in almost all scenarios involves either a one off or constant sacrifice of other beings. Preserving your undeath is almost certainly inherently evil even if you do it for good reasons.

t. zombie