Make the monsters great again

Hey there, wealdhungerer is better than Lycan.

Vampire = Sanguir, maybe the Lurking Thirst

I used to have a buddy that DM'd games like this. He'd describe these fantastic scenes where you'd get a vague glance at a creature as it slipped through the shadows, you'd have to guess and test to figure out what magic items did, and there was always an investigation phase where we had to piece together what we were going to have to fight or if we could even kill it...

First game I played with him, we ran into some spooky skeletons that were dispatched with haste. We back tracked through a room where we'd battled a lot of them and he described it as clean and quiet. "Except for the skeletons you mean" ... "What skeletons?"... It was super tense leading up to a huge ambush where everything we'd killed came at us at once. We'd had to find out what was animating them to make it stop.

Nothing was ever as simple as just hitting it with a sword or setting it on fire... I mean, if that was all it took why would a village need to hire you when the blacksmith is an ogre of a man?

The solution is to either get players who don't know the monster weaknesses, use obscure ones or just make your own.

Get new players :p

Running curse of strahd and they hurt Tatyana. They fucking PANICKED when strahd showed up in a rage ready to throw the fuck down.

They brought her back to full up as all the healers blew their wad at once, and he withdrew once she began to scream at the sight of him.

He backhanded the warlock leaving him with one hp, and savagely tore the throat out of their NPC
Swordsmen. (Who is coming back as a revenant to haunt their asses)

We've become jaded to these threats because we keep killing them.

That's all.

Like a drug addict who has to keep upping the dose to get the same effect.

Stop playing D&D.

Start off with the classic tropes. The vampire, the werewolf, the lich, the witch, the necromancer, whatever. Hell, maybe even camp it up a little.

Then, you pull open the stitching and show them a glimpse of the living horrors that live between the stars.

The ageless, formless forms that dwell in the places beyond human perception or understanding.

Beings so alien and unimaginable that rudimentary concepts like good and evil cannot even apply.

For them to turn their gaze upon humanity for even the barest moment would bring terrors undreamed of.

The walking nightmares they've faced so far, the vampire, the lich, they're little more than mindless parasites, fools and madmen who stumbled and floundered onto a grain of truth and were warped by it, turned inside out, their minds and souls flayed raw. They grew fat and mad on the barest sliver of insight, on a scrap of epiphany, and that was all it took to make monsters.

basically, i think the general rule of thumb is: if someone REALLY wants the blood that’s inside of your body, and they’re like… a vampire, or a dracula, or some sort of mansquito, then that’s probably okay. a dracula and a mansquito are made for removing things like blood and swords from inside your body. that’s basically fine.

if something wants to get at your blood, and they’re, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog, that’s where the problems start to arise. a really frog is not made for removing blood, and your blood knows this, which is why it is so vehement about wanting to stay IN your body instead of coming out.

unfortunately this will not deter a really big frog, because a really big frog is full of things like prizes, and value, and quite a lot of hatred, and it would REALLY rather like to replace any and all of those things with your blood, and basically by any means possible.

Dude, WTF are you smoking, and were can I get some?

>...sure, your character would probably draw that conclusion.

You can pull a Conan.

Conan is trying to chase after some evil priests inside a pyramid - and he runs into a vampire. A beautiful young girl from some lost civilization that existed thousands of years before. So Conan does some quick combat math in his head - AND HE RUNS LIKE HELL IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION.

Sometimes, you just need to make it clear to the players that any combat with a foe automatically leads to total and utter death, and no amount of player character plot armour will save them.
The whole statblock that is described with only one sentence "Cthulhu eats 2D6 player characters a turn, no saves allowed" idea.

Make up some new monsters, or restyle existing ones.

In a game I ran last year, I reskinned mummies into undead with nooses around their necks and their faces burned off. They wore veils and robes to hide themselves but no shoes, and their eyes could shine like spotlights. Players loved them.

For your vampire, play up the cool stuff about vampires like their immortality and compsure, and give them one or two surprises, like having a decoy coffin or being unperturbed by holy things.

This. Thouthans times this.

The best monster BBEG I ever played against wasn't that powerful statblock wise, bit he was a great character, and he acted smart. We lost our first party to him because he outsmarted us, and our next party had to deal with the first one turned to his undead agents.

Best part the guy had some good reasons behind his actions and had genuinely loyal subordinates that served him because they believed in his reasons rather than "for the evuls" like usual henchmen.

Its relative to the GM.
When I played Rise of the Runelords for first time it felt very generic in Burnt Offerings but the Skimsaw Murders came and everything took a very unexpected turn.
The reason was one of the villains in that second module, Aldern Foxglove. Stat wise is just a ghast with a few rogue levels but my god did the Gm a good job making him a memorable villain. Before his transformation he was played as a very charming guy and when we found him being the Skinsaw man and that he suffered a MPD we couldn't see him just as "another ghoul".
One of the most creepy things that I remember a part of his constant personality shifts which made us doubt if there could be a way to turn him back was that our GM played well the fact he was undead. He disjointed limbs and even his spine for dodge attacks, climbed and crawled around like a spider and his attacks with the razor were described as those as a serial killer would inflict on a victim for toying with him/her.

Make the Lich cute

You make them great by making them rare and powerful. Even a minor creature can become impressive if you paint it with a new layer of godblood.

>skeleton
>is able to incorporate the bones of the dead into its form
>can jump from corpse to corpse
>has control over gravedirt
>haunts people in their dreams
>induces paranoia in all those who look into his eyes
>can banish light and manipulate shadows
>can make bone-constructs

>Beings so alien and unimaginable that rudimentary concepts like...

Paragraphs. I see you, Cthulu.

I like your wording(maybe you're just quoting Lovecraft wholesale), I'm guessing you make a good DM. Random thought but your description made me think of the heat death of the universe and how it might not be reversible and that though as advanced as we may get we will ultimately just accept our demise because what we have to become and leave behind to tangle with the cosmic forces will mean the destruction of what we are all the same, in the same way that dealing with the old gods is foolish and the best you can hope for is just for them not to care about you in your lifetime or ever

If you can't describe mundane objects in in a way they aren't obvious to the players, you shouldn't be GMing. That's a fact.

This.

Describe what they can see, ear, ect... but don't use names.

"the creature", "the beast", "the monster", "the horror", "the abomination", "the... thing", "whatever it might be"...

Or even do the opposite and really make it clear what it seems to be (with a few subtle hints to the contrary), but then tear it all away when the group tries to fight it in the way they should but find it has no effect.

>try to fight a vampire with silver and stakes
>the vampire's head splits open, tentacles burst out, and it starts spraying acid everywhere

SCP foundation is actually a really good idea for a place to get monster ideas. Thanks man, I'd forgotten about it.

Kek

> Oh, a vampire.
> Oh, a lich.
> Oh, a devil.
Try giving them some class levels, actual intelligence and support services.

Players won't be afraid of something they can take in a fair fight, so you just need to make it a social problem as well as a combat problem.

The vampire gets away because you found him in the middle of the night on a hunt and while you got him into a mist form he escaped. Now you wake up and everyone else in the inn is dead, drained of blood and turned into wights and there's a sign saying "you're next, bucko" stapled to the cute buxom barmaid's forehead. How are you going to stay awake every night? How are you going to deal with the horde of zombies and townsfolk that this vamp has amassed in the next three nights while you were trying to hole up? How are you going to deal with this plague?

>Oh a lich
If you can't make this interesting you're terrible. A lich works or fails through his personality, and the things he can do with a giant bunch of spells.

I've once pulled the old-ass Displaced scenario on my players. But rather than talking about "soldiers in green uniforms pointing their rifles at slightest rustle", it was a story about weird-clothed foreigners, who were carrying some bizzare clubs or maybe spears, speaking a language not even the party's bard heard.

well make them different user. Dracula and Voldemort are the vampire elite and lich elite. Monsters that have achieved human form.

Once upon a time some Veeky Forumsanon came up with the idea of vampires being giant leeches. So go from there.
A bloodless vampire would be small, pale looking, possibly weak. They would have these weird mouths with the razorsharp teeth and anti-coagulating poison.
But once they feed, the bloat up in size. Much more powerful, these big see-through glands on their backs filled with the targets blood etc. Go wild really..
But with the case of ex. Dracula. He might be an anomaly. A mutant. And since he is born as something unnatural (to the vampires) there are two choices: Be killed because you are different or become the biggest and baddest leech and show them all what you can do.
Drac naturally did the last thing. Using his human form he tricked people into his lair, drained them for blood.. He may have some sort of mesmerizing trait in his poison, who knows. The sky is the limit user.

As for the lich just look at what they originally was/is. Some sort of magician that took his or her soul and locked it away so death wouldn't be an option.
So.. make them magical mummies. Bodies that have been wrapped with arcane energies for centuries. As the centuries go, naturally their bodies will decay (but bones remain) but as a lich awakens they will try to find new bodyparts (naturally the best they can find and preferably magical) and will continue to kill until they have a fully formed body once again.
Now imagine a being with a magical skeleton with bodyparts of the finest monsters and magicians. A lich with the eyes of a basilisk or gorgon, skin of the tarrasque to reflect spells etc.
And if you should manage to kill this being, its skeleton will reform in 1d10 days and it will have a new chance to remake its body by starting to kill once again.
Basically treat this sort of lich as a serial killer a la Freddy or Jason

SCP-140 is a great example of an evil that your party can try to stop. For reference: scp-wiki.net/scp-140

Some cult could get their hands on it, and over time you slowly alter known landmarks to make the PCs question what's going on, but have NPCs act as though it's always been that way. Though, because the party may be particularly slow to notice what's going on, or the cult may have a hold of the book for a long time, perhaps the Daevite civilization instead existed several thousands of years ago.

You wanna GREAT monsters again? stop going full on high fantasy, for real, stop making the world litering with MYTHICAL BESTIAL creatures, go low, make it mundande, make it about the conflict btween humans(or whatever other race, just don't do literal monsters), and then, rarelly get a monster on plot, then it will be THE THING, as its rare and no fucker has ever seen one before, nor is expecting one.

>Now you wake up and everyone else in the inn is dead, drained of blood and turned into wights and there's a sign saying "you're next, bucko" stapled to the cute buxom barmaid's forehead.
Or there's no wight and no note, just an angry mob demanding an answer why the fuck they're the only surviving ones.

>But in DnD, both of them would be just another couple of monsters.
No.

This is what happens when a GM in ANY game gets lazy and throws out a monster for PCs to kill without actually THINKING about what the monster is, why it's there, and what it is doing.

Even a random encounter - such as with a rhemoraz - should take into account the monster's reasons and actions. The rhemoraz in question heard hoofbeats through the snow and earth, and came up under a horse, killing it. It came up out of the snow and found there were a bunch of tiny creatures on top of the horses, armed with swords and strangely dressed. Like tiny front giants except dressed strangely.

All it wanted was it's lunch, so it didn't attack them immediately, and it didn't start heating up. It merely tried to move the horse away from them so it could eat in piece. when they attacked, it killed another horse then backed away, waiting for them to get the hint - it was bigger and more dangerous. NOW it started to heat it's back and rise threateningly. when they made their sense motive checks, I told them: it seems to just want the horses for food.

They pressed the attack and instigated a near total party wipe, but more importantly, the rhemoraz didn't just stand there and take it. It burrowed, and tried to sneak up under them and around them. It used the rocks and terrain as cover to try and surprise them. It avoided the spellcaster who used a ray of enfeeblement, scaring the creature.

The important part of this is that the creature was played as intelligent as it is - a rhemoraz is not a dumb beast, it actually is fairly smart. It used the things around it in it's assault. It would have been amenable to letting the party go. It wasn't just a monster - it was an encounter that the players remember well because the mosnter was a personality and a threat and INTERESTING.

A monster without personality or played as a statblock is ALWAYS the fault of the GM, in any game.

>a good example of a lich antagonist is Voldemort
I liked Rasputin from 'Anastasia' better, personally.

...

Why not use mythology's original lich, Koschei the Deathless?

He wears full plate armour like if it was light as a feather;
He can magically create and spread winter;
He can petrify an entire kingdom at once.

Seems slightly OP

Isn't that exactly what OP was asking for?

Please. Lovecraft would never write something like "formless forms".

Make something new. Convince them they are going against a vampire but it actually turns out to be like a Booodsucker from Stalker or something.

Instead of a standard lich, what about an awoken catacombs? Like the ones in france, just bones everywhere. The walls keep trying to kill you, constantly get lost, ect.

He'd say "unknowable forms of terror". Half his shit was just "I can't describe it, but it's really scary, trust me, like your head would exploderise".

Voldy was actually just a lich. A wizard with 7 phylacteries. People don't normally think of him that way because of the way the author put so much good work into him.

In short, you suck as a DM if your monsters are boring statblocks, and its your own fault.

That's the nature of the game, dude. Firstly stop using trashy monsters and secondly stop describing them to your players as obviously trashy monsters. Vampires are supposed to be deceptive, if your guys are spotting them a mile away then stop that.

That's it. I'm sick of all this "Zombies are low-level trash" bullshit that's going on in the d20 system right now. Zombies deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.

I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine zombie in Japan for 2,400,000 Yen (that's about $20,000) and have been practicing on it for almost 2 years now. I can't even wound it permanently with my katana.

Japanese biotechnicians spend years working on a single zombie and infected up to a million people to produce the finest zombies known to mankind.

Zombies are thrice as resilient as cavalry and thrice as dangerous for that matter too. Anything a werewolf can fight, a zombie can kill better. I'm pretty sure a zombie could easily destroy an entire civilisation with a simple infected bite.

Ever wonder why medieval Europe never bothered staking the corpses of zombies? That's right, they were too scared to fight the shambling hordes and their plagues of destruction. Even in World War II, American soldiers targeted the nazi zombies first because their epidemic potential was feared and respected.

So what am I saying? Zombies are simply the best universal enemy that the world has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the d20 system. Here is the stat block I propose for undeads:

(Simple undead - zombie template)
1d10 Damage
Regenerates 2d4 hp per round
+2 to hit and damage (magical), transmits a random disease to the target DC=20 Constitution
Counts as "base creature template + magical (negative plane)"

(Complex undead - plague zombie)
2d10 Damage
Regenerates 3d5 hp per round
+5 to hit and damage, transmits a random disease per round to all within 10' DC=30 Constitution
Counts as "base creature template + magical (negative plane)" and raises all slain foes as plague zombies, raises all nearby corpses as zombies.

Now that seems a lot more representative of the Undead horror of Zombies in real life, don't you think?

I for one can never understand why zombies are treated as cannon fodder for low level creatures, by all accounts a zombie would be terrifying. Even your basic level 0 peasant becomes a whole lot more scary when things like pain, fear and inhibitions are stripped away. The fact that humans only consciously use a portion of their strength and that a zombie would more likely swing at you with as much force as their bodies can muster (more than enough to break their own bones and yours) would put them 2 levels above the simple commoner cattle they are bred from. Imagine a zombie level 1 fighter suddenly gaining +4 str and being immune to everything but total bodily destruction in addition to having a fucking 2-hander to swing at you. I'd be scared. I'd be running.

>Voldy was actually just a lich.

Except he wasn't undead. His physical forms were living, breathing bodies.

You first have to ask yourself this question:
Why aren't these monsters cool anymore?
In my opinion, the answer is quite obvious: you're playing in a universe with too much surnatural. Since there's magic EVERYWHERE, nothing is exceptional about magic anymore.

Therefore:
You want to make liches and vampires cool?
Then try playing in a universe with no magic. Make the antagonists simple humans. And make these humans monsters in ways they could be IRL too.
Yes, that's difficult. Yes, that requires a lot of imagination. But it definitely is a great exercise, and it will definitevely work in two different simultaneous ways:
1) These bad guys will be very charismatic, as they succeed in being horrible without magic, and in a way closer to the players' real lives (that will therefore impact their feelings more easily).
2) Surnatural monsters will become REALLY surnatural again. If you decide to finally put one in the game, it will really be extraordinary and mark your players.

His bodies were constructed. Not real bodies. And he's never shown any need to eat or sleep after being ressirected.
>back of quirrels head
>a pile of junk in the woods that a spell was cast on
>"Live bodies"
No, I don't think so. Fucks sake, he even has a familiar. Any other minor differences can easily be excused as "well Liches work this way in this setting" since there's always small differences. It's just good writting making up for using a tired monster type. The interesting stuff comes from the DM, not from the monster manual entry.

>He backhanded the warlock leaving him with one hp

And level drained him, I hope. Vampires do that, you know.

But they're still live bodies, regardless of who they were made. His last one was made of the flesh of an ally, the bones of an ancestor, and the blood of an enemy and basically gave his already existing small, frail and deformed body his old form again. Which is why he's not cadaverous, like liches are. "Fucks sake", the word lich means corpse.

Not quite. Making a monster horrendously above a parties capabilities makes them not scary, OOC, either because they're too bullshit to actually care about or too incompetent to actually use their massive capabilities.
He doesn't want to make them have a hard encounter, he wants to make them fear the encounter. Koschei is just a lich. A strong lich, but the players know what a lich is and he'll sound the exact same as all the other push come to shove.

>"Fucks sake", the word lich means corpse.
I never thought about that. Being scandinavian, I never connecte the dots between Lich and our word for a corpse; Lik.

Isn't that basically only in Spanish? In many other languages, Lich just mean the gateway or wall or a graveyard, or the path you carry a coffin on. Any of those seem a fitting metaphor for Voldys position. Face it, your players are bored with you because of your presentation, not because of the monsters.

>Live bodies
I think the point was that that remains to be proven. None of these ingredients together normally make a live body, and could easily be components for a Creat Undead spell.

It's also in Germanic and Nordic languages for corpse, but usually in variations like "leiche" and "lik". That's where the word comes from.

Also, not sure what you're on about with "my players". I'm not a DM, I'm just pointing out that Voldemort isn't a lich.

Lich means lots of things.
And in saying that because you're awfully defensive about someone else being able to turn a stake creature type into something creative and interesting. Keep denying it, keep only using standard unvaried kinds of monsters, and keep having boring games.

The point is that he paid tremendous attention to quality writing, even if it was extremely melodramatic.

>>But if we remember where the vampires came from, Dracula wasn't just a vampire - he was the vampire, the focus of the plot and the most dangerous thing ever.
Yes because that was a self contained story, Dracula was the main villain of a story but he was often a background character. The Vampire was (and usually still is) more of a symbolism for thing. Greed, anger, disease, thrist for violence etc.

Check Extra Credits' episode on "the monster"
youtube.com/watch?v=4mHCG4zbCPM

Being exterior to your conversation, I believe you are a lot more defensive than him. He's just pointing out flaws in your argument, while you, on the other hand, are constantly adding to your posts useless and emotional phrases such as "you're awfully defensive", "keep denying it", "face it", etc.

I guess I'm lucky enough to have players that don't go full HURR DURR the moment I throw a classic creature at them.
I do think this thread is trying to answer a problem that doesn't exist.
Seriously, how many times have you people posting actually run into a were-creature? How many liches have you fought and truly defeated, without cost?
How many times have you saved a princess from a dragon, despite it being "so stereotypical"?

And in the very specific sense of Lich as a creature, it came from the Germanic and Nordic words for corpse. There's no arguing that.

But no, I'm not defensive, I'm not a DM, and I'm not having boring games (I don't even play tabletop shit, I come here for lore and ideas). I just don't consider Voldemort a Lich and we're having a discussion as to why. I'm sorry it triggered your autism.

>Half his shit was just "I can't describe it, but it's really scary, trust me, like your head would exploderise".
That is a lie, he described many of his creatures in detail from the eyes of the characters in his stories.
You are the same shitter from the last Yog-Sothery thread we had, with the exact same sentences.
You don't do that with your zombies? I always had a mob rules effect, where every zombie within X distance made the other zombies stronger in an order of magnitude.

Also, the word lich never appears in the books OR the movies. I mean, you can INTERPRET Voldemort as some king of unconventional lich, but saying he definitely is one is clearly biased.

You're a beautiful soul.

>You don't do that with your zombies?
I regards them as what they are, the product of hideously evil magic, their motive force drawn from the Negative Plane and as such significantly more powerful than typical videogames and media make them out. Zombies aren't cut down by the thousands in my games, not unless a dragon takes offence and gives the shambling masses a firebath.

Yep, that's exactly what's happening.
>B-but he's living!
>Unproven for these reasons
>B-but lich means corpse!
>It also means all these other things that fit
>Also a long list of similarities that we're never responded to such as phylacteries, a familiar, and wizard status
Yes, I'm just replying with defensive words. I'm not actually directly responding to his arguments with counter arguments at all. You're totally not cherrypicking here.

>in the very specific example
So you're getting tunnel vision over one thing to ignore obvious multiple connections and avoid the clear answer of the whole? OK.
You originally brought it up to say that Voldy cant be a lich because he's not decomposing and Liches have to look like that because lich means corpse. I'm pointing out to you that Liches don't have to look like that because lich doesn't have to mean corpse. Again, the I retesting features come from the DM, not from the stat block.

Wow, great job, you discovered the whole point. The point being to present an overused monster type in a new and interesting way that keeps the players from recognizing it as that creature. Great job.

Alright, then what do you do to reflect their relative weakness in smaller numbers, and their strength in larger groups?
Or do you redo them from the ground up?

Just a suggestion, if you wanted to add something new and interesting to them;
>Zombies will tend to stick together when they meet another zombie, mindlessly shambling alongside each other. When 3 or more have gathered, the evil energies that sustain them manifest in an aura that makes living creatures physically ill to be near. More zombies multiply this effect.
>They are not the masters of their own forms, and as such are unable to contain this outflow of energy in the same way that intelligent undead can. This is why a caster can only sustain a certain number of zombies at a time, instead of a "fire and forget" method of raising dead, they require a constant refilling of the energy they radiate away.
Make multiple zombies fatigue or maybe even disease living creatures, large groups of zombies give temp negative levels to living.

Silly user, he has horcruxes, not phylacteries! They're completely different! Don't you know only superficial things matter? If it's on the surface, it's all that counts!

I don't play 3.pf, so neg levels aren't a thing.
What I often do is create bonuses for working in groups.
1 zombie grapples, others gain bonus damage+chance for disease.
With CA, zombies knock prone on hit, leads to grapple -> penalties to escape from grapple, Om Nom special attack, etc.

>So you're getting tunnel vision over one thing to ignore obvious multiple connections and avoid the clear answer of the whole? OK.

No, you just seem set on adding other meanings to the inspiration of the Lich. I'm not sure why, though. Lich was inspired by Germanic and Nordic words for corpse. That isn't the first time I've made this clear, and it seems it won't be the last at this rate.

>You originally brought it up to say that Voldy cant be a lich because he's not decomposing and Liches have to look like that because lich means corpse.

Which is true. Lich means corpse.

>I'm pointing out to you that Liches don't have to look like that because lich doesn't have to mean corpse.

But that's where the name lich comes from. It doesn't matter what you try to argue afterwards, because a lich is a name for a corpse, used to describe a cadaverous being.

>Again, the I retesting features come from the DM, not from the stat block.

But enough of your weird tangent, we're talking Voldemort, but here's a few examples as to why Voldemort is still alive and not a Lich:

>no other examples of Wizards brought back as corpses
>Voldemort needed flesh, blood, and bone to rebuild a new living body
>Voldemort always has a piece of his soul inside him, unlike Liches who are always separate
>Voldemort has multiple horcruxes with fragments of his soul, unlike Liches who only have one
>he wasn't cadaverous

>>You know, it's might seem like a minor thing to you, but I'm really annoyed how my players keep looking at monsters as statblocks. Not only statblocks, but known statblocks - when they see a nocturnal nobleman, who seems to frequent young ladies, they know it's time to bring out stakes and holy water. It's just another vampire.
Same with liches.

If the players treat monsters as statlocks then you need to use that against them. The key word is dismepowerment. One would say "just change the statblock" which can work but that is way too easy. A good way is surprise them by throwing enemies against them that they are not prepared for.

A simple example

They will fight a vampire with all the stakes, holy water and garlic ready? Have the vampire own a small crowd of innocent and completely normal women he charmed, enslaved or are legitimately in love with him because Stockholme syndrome or whatever. Once your characters get in for the final fight ready to break open the coffin and slay the vampire have the coffin guarded by these women. They are not vampires or ghouls or anykind of monster, they are just normal people that want to protect the vampire. You could even put in NPC the characters met, know or befriended into the crowd. There you have achieved the disempowerment of the characters because 1) the things they prepared are useless 2) they have met an enemy they can fight but actually want to save so it completely messed up their objectives.

And if your players are absolutely autistic murderhobos on a level that they only see XP and loot in everything no matter if it is a bunch of innocent bystanders manipulated by a mistake, then let them kill all the innocent women and then find that the vampire is already long gone while they were busy so all their actions was for naught. Then have them answer for these crimes of murder later.

Negative levels are a thing as long as you use levels. And your way of making them different is just more stats. You could apply that to any creature. After two sessions I would be equally bored with this as I would be with an unchanged zombie. It's just a stat block still.

Saying it doesn't make it true, user. You can repeat "lich mean corpse" as much as you want, that doesn't erase the other meanings is has. If you're just going to blatantly ignore my counterpoints with "nope, I'm right because I said so" then don't bother responding at all.

>No examples of wizards brought back as corpses
Except Voldemort. And ghosts, in a way. You know what there defenitely isn't? Any example of a wizard being brought back as a living being.
>Voldemort needed flesh, blood, and bone to rebuild a new living body
What exactly do you think Liches are physically made of? If it isn't the same things a living body is made of, you're wrong.
>Voldemort always has a piece of his soul inside him, unlike Liches who are always seperate
>always seperate
>always
Well that's just patently false. On top of that being objectively untrue, this can easily be excused as stylistic differences you'd expect from a different setting.
>Voldemort has multiple horcruxes with fragments of his soul, unlike Liches who only have one
He was the first one to ever do more than one, there had been others before him who only did once. And again, stylistic differences. There's no reason a Lich couldn't have more that one phylactery.
>He wasn't cadaverous
So if a Lich casts Gentle Repose or Restore Corpse, is it not a lich anymore? You're still completely missing the point, only looking at surface details and ignoring all else.

>Negative levels are a thing as long as you use levels
I always found it a stupid mechanic that slows down play, and I play 2e+4e on top of a host of not D&D systems.
As for the rest, what exactly are you looking for, considering what you said yourself is "stat block" as well? What I am doing is playing to a theme, and reinforcing that theme via mechanics. Zombies are the least amount of effort you can put in to creating functioning unliving creatures, but their threat is in their herd mentality and their very mindlessness. They are fearless, relentless, and do not judge "threats"; something that lives is something to consume, and my players mightily dislike my zombies because they will drag a pc down and put them down. You do not need to reinvent the wheel, you need to make the wheel effective for what it is.
It's like how my group rarely kills dragons because they are neither stupid nor suicidal, and are aware that if a battle turns against it, it CAN simply pick up and flee unless it is on it's home turf.

I would simply up the +effective levels gained from being infused by so much energy. Let's go back to my level 1 zombie fighter example. On his own he's a level 1 fighter (zombie) with +4str and like... +30hp, with a racial weakness to Fire. Maybe deduct some dexterity to reflect rigor mortis being in effect (despite being a magical creature it still has a physical body).

Now mr undead fighter is found in a pack of 10, say mr fighter + 9 zombie thugs. He gains +1 level effectively the result of his being surrounded by other beings from the negative plane.

This scales infinitely. A group of 1000 zombies, no matter what their base class will gain +10 effective levels from the raw negative planar energy pulsing from their corpses. If you're fighting a truly monstrous horde of zombies e.g. the consequence of a zombie apocalypse within a major city, where you might be fighting 100,000 zombies or more, the group gestalt gets +20 levels effectively to their base class type.

It would probably be worth it here to make a few other adjustments, say, intelligence set to 2, class becomes "fighter" by default, the only skills they have are ones they possessed in life + grapple + trip. If their intelligence score falls below the score required for any skills they lose those skills permanently. For each level gained they gain 30hp.

So we see that a basic humanoid zombie commoner in a horde of 100k zombies would be a level 1 "+ 19 fighter" with 600hp, he's clumsy but otherwise moves at normal speed and can punch really fucking hard. If he has a steel weapon, chances are he will hit you so hard the weapon would snap or shatter.

A regular pack of zombies raised by a necromancer by comparison, where they are say 10 of them, they are Base creature type and level + 1 fighter level, gain +4 str and gain 60hp.

I mean, did you read my post at all? In-fiction reasoning, behavioral tendencies, metaphysical effects, these are all things that keep a monster interesting. Giving then sneak attack for no real reason other than to make them stronger, and your players only recognizing their threat potential and nothing else, means you could swap out the name zombie for any other name and they'd feel equally about it. It's not making it interesting, it's just making it threatening.

>Saying it doesn't make it true, user. You can repeat "lich mean corpse" as much as you want, that doesn't erase the other meanings is has.

How are you not getting this? The creature lich was named after the word for corpse. That's why Gygax, Fox, Bierce, and even Lovecraft all use the word to refer to cadaverous beings. It doesn't matter what other words are similar to it, because they weren't the source of the name.

>If you're just going to blatantly ignore my counterpoints with "nope, I'm right because I said so" then don't bother responding at all.

Feel free to point them out so I can refute those too. It probably won't take me long.

>Except Voldemort. And ghosts, in a way. You know what there defenitely isn't? Any example of a wizard being brought back as a living being.

Except Voldemort. He was never brought back as a corpse.

>What exactly do you think Liches are physically made of? If it isn't the same things a living body is made of, you're wrong.

Cadavers. The difference between the two? One's living (like Voldemort) and one's dead (like Liches).

>Well that's just patently false. On top of that being objectively untrue, this can easily be excused as stylistic differences you'd expect from a different setting.

But it's entirely true. All the pieces of his soul are accounted for in his horcruxes and in his own body. How else do you think he existed?

Stylistic differences make him a Vampire, then.

>He was the first one to ever do more than one, there had been others before him who only did once. And again, stylistic differences. There's no reason a Lich couldn't have more that one phylactery.

Even those who did only one still split their soul in two: one for their body, one for their horcrux. Liches never do this.

And yes, Liches can't have more than one, because they can't split their soul.

>So if a Lich casts...

It still has no soul in it, though. Unlike Voldemort, who does.

Except like you, I am putting mechanical effects to their thematics.
The difference is you are using mechanics that do not meh well in the games that I play compared to yours.
Or do you think -1 to defenses, saves, attack rolls, -5 hitpoints, or -2 to attack rolls, can't run or charge is "interesting"?
In 2e, the fact that they will not break due to morale makes them terrifying opponents outright. In 4e, doing what you are talking about boils down to Aura 1/2, -2 to attack/damage rolls/defenses so long as you are in the aura. It is almost exactly the same as what you said you do, except from the GM side of the screen.
I honestly do not know what you are arguing about, because you aren't doing anything really new with your zombie idea, jut reinforcing one of their themes (unnatural creature), and I am reinforcing a different them (unstoppable horde).
In your own words, you could apply your design plan to any undead creature in the game, because all are animated by negative energy, save a sparse few.

Every single one of these points is cyclical logic.
>Voldemort is living because there's example of living reanimations which is Voldemort who is living because there's examples of living reanimations because...
You realize that isn't a real point, right? Every single point you make in this post is cyclical like that. At least I backed up my points with evidence. I'm done with you if you're only going to give me back this crap.

Come up with an interesting monster of your own or adapt one from folklore?
Neither Vampire nor Liches are original, both have their analogues in mythology.

>Except like you, I am putting mechanical effects to their thematics.
Already stopped reading. You really didn't read my post at all. I listed specific circumstances that being about specific status conditions to specific creatures. This is a mechanical effect. The real difference is I have a reason and storytelling elements behind my effects, and yours are just stats.

>Voldemort
>or Cartoon Rasputin
>a lich exemplar
You both disgust me.

>Every single one of these points is cyclical logic.

That is the weakest refutation I've seen for a while. Either try, or just admit you're wrong. Playing the stubborn child is just pitiful.

>You realize that isn't a real point, right?

What, you mean like "Voldemort is dead because there's examples etc."? The only time undead are mentioned are the inferi. There is never a time anyone mentions a corpse being able to retain a soul. They even made the damn Resurrection Stone just bring back visions of the dead instead of bringing them back to life.

>Every single point you make in this post is cyclical like that.

Claiming it doesn't make it so. Try harder.

>At least I backed up my points with evidence.

Same as above, really.

>I'm done with you if you're only going to give me back this crap.

Really? Are you this deluded? I'm trying to have a discussion and you're acting like a petulant child, but you think it's me with the issue. Grow the fuck up.

The difference is quite slim.

The main difference is that he anchored his soul to the material plane while being still alive

> Slavic fairy tales
> Relevant
Pick one

Holy shit I've never seen such a lack of self awareness.

I suppose it's like the difference between a skeleton and a zombie, in that one just happens to have no flesh.

fuck off and take your junkosuba with you

>The real difference is I have a reason and storytelling elements behind my effects
>Using thematics and characterization to inform on what they do and the nature of their threat
>just stats
user, you sound like you have a very high opinion of yourself where it really isn't warranted.
You are the GM, you don't need to act like you need to hide everything behind symbolism that only you will really know.
If the creatures are a threat, why are they a threat? What makes them dangerous? This is what your players are going to be directly dealing with, and you can write pages of fluff about whatever, but what matters is what the players will be confronting.
Further, what do you do when the lore does not match your specific 3.PF version of the planescape? I can't use your reasoning in 4e, or GURPS, or WoD, so then what?

You can reply to me instead, you're giving me a good laugh.

Is Voldemort not actually a wizard since he doesn't use material components for spells?

Tell me again how your points prove themselves, I really liked it when you completely ignored being called out for that and just called him a petulent child when he brought it up!

>a really frog is not made for removing blood

you sure bout dat?