What's so evil about being a lich?

Lady Vol did nothing wrong.

>In 3e it was implied the ritual comes from Orcus, the Demon Lord of Undeath, and requires various Evil actions to fulfill.
Why not research a way to lichdom free of Orcus's bullshit?
Power your undeath through, like, elemetal fire or something

Cheating death is still cheating.

> Yeah, it runs off of Charm Person. I love all of you.

>Every Lich Ever

>Why not research a way to lichdom free of Orcus's bullshit? Power your undeath through, like, elemetal fire or something

You know how no matter how many times you stick your finger into an open electrical current the exact same thing happens every single time, even though sophisticated medical treatments often rely on electricity somehow at some point, such to make medicine or to run machines, to keep you breathing, etc?

Same problem arises with your idea
Both use a kind of power, but power usually isn't universally applicable in all situations in all fictional D&D settings.
You can't stick your hand into what amount to pure fire and then expect immortality because fire has nothing to do with life OR death; it just has to do with burning shit.

Negative Energy in the other hand has been definitively linked to undeath as sort of the "opposite" form of animating positive energy.

In what setting, fuckwit?
Give us actual details for your query if you want help with your situation already.

Gotta break a few eggs right?

What's so bad about becoming a lich, creating an order of paladins and having them funnel baddies to me for me to reap? I just wanna read books and guide mankind for eons before I have a protégé take over.

You're putting forward a hypothetical situation that isn't even happening in a real game of D&D you're actually playing in real life, aren't you? I bet you've never even been halfway closed a situation like that in any game you have played.

You're posting and talking on here because you're lonely or bored or are genuinely not imaginative enough to actually think of something to do.

Because depending on the system, there's multiple other ways to become immortal? For PF Wizards, at level 20 they can grab a discovery that makes them stop aging, for example.

Immortality and power are hard to get, and Orcus is just there handing out free ways that are just easier but involve fealty to Orcus and doing some evil.

Of course the elves have their own ritual that makes baelnorns, neutral or good elf "liches". Its a non-Orcus, elf specific ritual.

Then there's the archlich, a form of non evil lich which uses a much different ritual and is harder to achieve, requiring spellcasting of a much higher level.

Basically lichdom is the quick easy path but you pay a very high price for it.

HAHA, Ive got an idea, I, a lich of great evil will form an organization of people from churches of Good who are dedicated to eradicating evil and who will have these powers before I make the organization, and then use them to funnel evil souls my way, despite needing the souls of good people, so that I may live for eternity! Its foolproof, I tell you!

It's my next PF character. I'm sure I'm gonna catch flak and might end up becoming the baddie but whatevs. And since you're just looking to pick a fight what does that make you?

..welll... I haven't read a single thing on wizards cause Veeky Forums says they're pretty much just magic man.

It's your next PF concept that you DM will shoot down and say no to, and my guess is you know it already on some level. So ya don't need to worry about the flak at all.
I dunno man, I came in here thought you were asking an actual QUESTION, but really you were just looking for an excuse to do something you were already going try to do anyway. You don't need Veeky Forums for that shit.
Just go DO IT if you GM let's you, don't fuckin' waste time pretending like you need to get permission. You're an adult.

I hate to break it to you guy, but you pretty much just spelled out the raison d'etre of Veeky Forums

Look, I'm just making dialogue, I had no idea this thread was srs bzns.

No, its another episode of ancient liches and zombie apocalypse in fantasy land and I'm going to turn the tables on this bullshit. I know several people in my group are gonna roll with it.

>commit some kind of "atrocity"
>proceed to use the powers you've gained from committing said "atrocity" to do countless more good things

How does this make you evil? Is, say, ripping the heart out of a child and then saving thousands of children later somehow unforgivable?

They lost their boner!

>they still use character alignments

No amount of saving people justifies killing an innocent to do it. There are situations, like when you're the leader of a country, where you have to make hard choices on who lives and dies, but that's part of the Social Contract that everyone in that nation is a participant in. It isn't some lich killing you with delusions of becoming a hero for it.

I guess so?
Didn't realize how messed-up this board had gotten while I was away I suppose. Hadn't realized Veeky Forums had gotten so fucked up that it was being used as a replacement for having friends and actually developing your hobbies.
Well, great. Go do that then.
Just saying, starting a thread about it doesn't really help and isn't going to give you ideas. All you wanted to know was how to become a Lich and if you has to be evil in PF as far as I can tell, and that's it. There's nothing else to talk about. There's no real subject matter, nothing unusual or special in need of in-depth discussion, nothing that hasn't been retread a thousand times on here.

Look, I'm washing your time AND mind with this converstion so I'll just shove off. I got the wrong impression by the subject matter and thought there was somebody that actually needed some help with something. I apologize.
Good luck to you on your thing and hope your idea works out or whatever.

I didn't even make the thread you fucking mong. I just stopped by to talk about liches in a thread about liches. Goddamn.

If an Afghan police unit is keeping their best guys ,who died ,on payroll to send their kids a few bucks, fuck um, they're corrupt bastards right?

Saving one innocent over ten is and will always be selfish.

>Is, say, ripping the heart out of a child
Evil? Yes. The rest of your statement is irrelevant. The ends do not justify the means. The Future doesn't exist. There is only the present, and if the present is ripping out a childs heart you are a monster.

I'm sure the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, and so on that an immortal highly difficult to kill presumably very powerful magic user could benefit throughout the theoretically infinite amount of lifetimes he or she would have would totally agree.

That's not even remotely the same scenario. Paying out money to someone who died in the line of duty defending people is not the same as killing innocents with the dlusion that you'll somehow be able to make up for it. Like... they're not even remotely the same scenario? Are you baiting, or just honestly that retarded?

Even if being a lich isn't inherently evil, no one who does it isn't inclined to evil.

The "i just want to read books" thing is bullshit and fuck people who do that.

If my only ambition in life is sitting in my tower and reading books where did I scrounge up the ambition to seek out a forbidden ritual known only to a few madmen, build up immense magical power, desecrate my body and soul beyond recovery, and then literally kill myself and put my humanity in a box, so I can live eternally as a rotting corpse.

So I can read some books.

No. Anybody with the ambition and inclination to go through becoming a lich is doing it because he has a special plan for the world.

Also all sorcerers are evil, fight me if you disagree.

The only guy who could handle developing magical powers at puberty and not become an entitled monster with no sense of morality or consequences is Jesus, and not even that since he was so nutbar he killed a fig tree for not fruiting in the wrong season.

Why are sorcerers evil? They're just rape-babies with non-human blood (because somehow you can produce offspring that way in DnD land). The evil of the parent doesn't necessarily translate to the child, unless the parent is one of those races that HAS to be evil like a demon.

Well what I'm trying to show it that what they're doing is against the rules. It is wrong, they're commuting fraud. Are you gonna go Perry the paladin and make them stop?

I'm comparing your whole, "ends are not justifed.." talk. If something little can be justifiable then so can something big. If you can't focus on the bigger picture then I feel like you maybe haven't been in bad spots before to see how sometimes you gotta do bad to do good.

Based. Power corrupts, no matter how "enlightened" someone might claim themselves to be.
And magic is power for the weak.

SMITE AND PURGE THE HEATHENS
DEUS VULT

Developing magical powers at puberty doesn't necessarily mean you'll become an entitled jackass in a world where people can gain magical powers by literally just studying hard enough.

I mean, normal humans develop the capacity to kill other people pretty early on in their life cycle, but since EVERYONE can do it, it's not really special or anything.
And even if it WAS special, how "entitled" someone became would be based pretty heavily on whether they were praised or demonized for their powers. Someone who got chased out of their home by an angry mob may try to repress or hide their powers, for example. Or develop an extremely productive loyalty to whatever groups accepts him for who he is, like a heroic adventuring party.

Why are le ebin deus vult XD cucks so cringey?

>animeposter talking about autism

Like clockwork.

So basically I can come into your house, shoot you, and take your stuff if I'm donating it to charity because I feel like the charity is worth more than your life?

Hollllly shit... I have no words...

>Basically lichdom is the quick easy path but you pay a very high price for it.

>Is the Dark side stronger?
>No. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

But did you keep reading?

>having such a lack of vision that you think donating a few bucks to charity is the same as saving potentially millions of lives with your big dumb immortal magic powers

How sad.

That's why I said sorcerers.

Because spontaneously developing magical powers at a young, rebellious age is going to lead to bad behavior adults in your life are unable to correct because you can blow them up with your mind.

A selfish child with diminished sense of consequences is given superpowers and nobody can control him without sending him to a convent. What do you think is gonna happen?

faget

All magic users are evil, for they possess the power mankind never meant to have. Liches in particular just make their horrid affliction more visible.

A magic user is not a part of society. He can create food, water, servants with thought alone, and he can destroy just as easily.

It's only good and sensible for normals, uncorrupted by magic, to band together and exterminate these mutants. If you don't launch the initial attack, the wizard will probably Charm Person and you'll never be yourself again.

But the point remains the same. The value of the good gained is completely in the eyes of the person making the decision, and based on their fallible mortal viewpoints and experiences.

In the same way you deliberately compared ridiculous scenarios that had nothing to do with eachother, I can make the same argument here because the moral logic is the same either way.

You realize you're arguing with at least two different people, bud. Again, of course, lack of vision.

>they possess the power mankind never meant to have

I played a sorc (good, worked for paladins and didn't afraid of nothing) who ended up becoming a good lich as a reward from a good god (technically the good side of death, weird setting...).

He did good things for people, solved a lot of logistical problems for the country he was in and generally was a decent person. He just so happened to be slightly rotten.

Labels man.

The problem with you retards is you have a shit sense of morals and can't understand how to entertain two different opposing beliefs at once in your head so you just say all evil is evil and not sacrifice. I know you chuckle fucks can't handle decision making so you turn to the same way religion has approached morality, that it's black and white.

You're so fucking lazy that you can't be assed to paint your own models, or give complex thought a try. Holy fucking shit.

Reminder that the Nazis thought they were saving the entire human race with their genocide and are pretty universally considered evil now.

What gives me the right to decide what your life or anyone else's is worth, let alone take it for my own purposes?

In many of these hypotheticals I'm seeing there is a clear trend.

>But if I'm becoming a Lich to do good is it still all that evil.

You are by nature killing an innocent to allow you to escape death and shape the world to your will. If you were a player and this was the enemy of an adventure you were in, how would you look at it?

Most settings do define Undeath in any form to be against The Rules of Nature and inherently Evil. If the ritual requires the death of innocents then you are saying you life, your dreams and goals are above the ones you've killed. If you didn't have to do anything like that then we'd get into if the spell and ownership of it was evil. Was it passed down through brutal experimentation? If however it all came down to just burning gold in the Ether had no such evil properties we'd look at how the spell effected the "mind" or the clarity of the soul. Does being in a corpse effect the mind and weather them down as the strain of time takes is coarse. Do they maintain the same ability to learn as they did as a living being? Can the mind handle as the social norms change till regardless of undeath they are an outsider of the times.

Even at the end of the day Alignment systems aside if you are exhorting your will to change society, ethics, save lives of those you perceive as innocent you are in someones eyes evil by virtue of cultural ignorance.

>Power Corrupts
But what about all the LG gods?

If that was a Current 93/Thomas Ligotti reference then you may just be my African American gentleman acquaintance

>butthurt liches detected

Don't get me wrong, magic has it uses. But when demons start to invest my hamlet because jimmy down the street HAD to make more pacts with their foul kind...

Then it is time for a purge.
pic related

Any form of immortality robs you of the essence of humanity, death. You can be a shambling corpse or an amalgamation of fiery gas and be truly immortal, but at that point you could hardly be called human.

I'm very much trying to entertain your opposing viewpoint right now, but you're not giving much of an explanation of why your viewpoint is rich. Calling it a "sacrifice" doesn't change the fact that you're literally deciding someone's life is worth less than some good you think you can achieve, and you're then saying it's right that you can take that life to achieve an end that you decided is best. Society doesn't work this way. If someone AGREED to sacrifice themselves so you could become a lich hero, if someone AGREED to be the sacrifice, then I might be able to see your point... but in the case of liches that's usually not the scenario, and if it is it's usually done out of fear or some other coercion.

What if you're the innocent person that you ate the heart of in your lich ritual?
You used some magic to keep yourself alive long enough to kill yourself.

>comparing gassing the undesirables and eugenics because it might somehow have some positive effect to sacrificing a few people for VAST MAGICAL POWER

Are you even trying?

i'm a different user, throwing my hat in because i can

One of the biggest things about being good is that you choose not to take the esiest path, or the path that will bloody your hands with innocents. Evil thinks the ends justify the means, it's good when your means justify your ends.

In my opinion. (i actually do understand the dichotomy of thought that is needed to be great leader, but that's a misnomer, great leaders can use evil and good tactics to get what they want. which hopefully dismantles the inevitable strawman that gets put up.)

You're not innocent if you're using magic now, are you?

In D&D cosmology good and evil are metaphysical concepts that objectively exist and have meaning, and gods are aligned to that cosmic axis.

Outside of D&D cosmology gods define morality.

God told the Jews to exterminate the Midianites and take their women as slaves, and it was Good.

I'm saying that perspectives of right and wrong are based on context, and giving an example of such happening in the real world. Generally people who think their way is the only right way end up becoming tyrants and dictators who oppress the very people they're trying to "protect" and end up being seen as "evil", not "good".
Meanwhile you're doing pic related instead of debating with any kind of legitimate defense of your viewpoint.

You're not good if you can't give them a chance, are you?

That picture already lost me 3 friends.

Because the undead are spooky.

I'm not sure why fantasy should follow the conventions of old christfag literature.

...

Giving people chances for absolutely no reason has probably lead to more evil than most things.
Good intentions being main source number one.
Goodness =/= naivety.

Threads like these are the reason I've come to hate Veeky Forums. It depends on the fucking setting you absolute fucking moron.

If we're talking dnd the reason is because there is EVIL and GOOD in the planes. They have physical embodiments - there is no other way to get around this. You PURPOSEFULLY turn yourself into a lich. You spend thousands upon thousands of gold and sacrificed the blood of innocents to become immortal. You're a fucking abomination to any goodly being.

If it's any other setting then fuck you who cares. Make them not evil and suck your clock for free. Do the stupid meme of HAHA My undead were for the good of all!! Or whatever bullshit you can think of.

The point of being a lich is BECAUSE you forcibly made others die for your own greed of immortality. If you want to contrive meme reasons for not doing that go play with your dick and jerk off to your bullshit fantasy.

I'm gonna give out an autistic amount of (You)s here to remind everyone that this is why the current generation of males and most females of any generation should not be allowed to make any important decision.

>showing people demotivationals after 2006
I would stop being your friend too, nerd.

I'm sorry your friends are so sensitive they'll stop being your friends over 15 year old internet memes.

I think there was alot more to it than just the picture if this little "debate" you've been having is any indicator though >__>

Goodness =/= oppression.

goodness is innocent until proven guiltily. Goodness is not punishing people for something they haven't done yet.

it's not Nativity, it's confidence. It's trust, trust in yourself, and trust in the good.

That being said, good should also have a big stick when that gets thrown into their face, because rude.

In 5e, if I remember correctly, with DM permission, after level 20, you my gain something like a feat, but its called something else, that is open to all classes, and that feat prevents you from dying of old age

Hypothetical future situations aside, you are still evil for murdering the innocent. The fact you have to use a future which does not yet exist to justify an atrocity of the present merely reveals your true nature.

>feefees based argument
>emoticons
>unable to comprehend that more than one person is giving him (You)s

What are you even trying to do?

At least half those people are making legitmate arguments and discussion points instead of screeching that their opponents are some kind of tumblr-tier nu-males buzzwords and pretending that's a defensive or productive discussion of their own viewpoint.

Waiting for evil to happen before acting is an evil act in itself. Not taking preventative measures is sloth and sloth is evil.
Look those eaten children in eyes in the afterlife when you have to explain to them you weren't sure if the dragon was a vegetarian or not and you didn't want to oppress it.

I wouldn't have been your friend in the first place user, you're ruse and insult people.
Well, the picture was extremely related. I'm a big detractor of dogmatic thinking, and organized religion in general (you're all wrong, so am i, lets just be good and kind to each other and work together, hopefully your gods aren't such petty asshole that that will be enough)

So yeah, lost friends, having a blast.

>I'm a big detractor of dogmatic thinking, and organized religion in general (you're all wrong, so am i, lets just be good and kind to each other and work together, hopefully your gods aren't such petty asshole that that will be enough)
Christ, I remember being 17

t. numale

>Literally gathering a compilation of half a dozen people telling you you're wrong.
>"YEAH, THESE GUYS ARE RETARDED, AMIRITEGUISE?!"

So, are you women, or raised by single mothers?

>Why not research a way to lichdom free of Orcus's bullshit?
Why not just research a way to become a god, if we're playing a freeform game anyway?

Trying to attribute a numerical value to amount of goodness and evilness is retarded try to relate and convert them like a fucking currency is ridiculous.

That said, that's basically the way it works in DnD and there's probably planes that trade good boy and bad boy coins.

But committing a violent action on an innocent is evil in of itself, is it not? If the person hasn't committed the act (you merely, based on appearance condemned them) are they guilty?

Saying yes here, well, makes you evil.

I can prepare to take the punch, and warn you of the consequences of what'll happen when you punch me. But i'm not going to stop you until you've committed to the act.

It's not evil to believe they will do good, expect them to do good. It's naive either, it's the right thing to do.

when i was 17 i was a by the book christian in the KKK, so you know ~assumptions~.

This is after seeing the terrible shit being dogmatic does, and i don't budge onn my belif that we can be better. I don't compromise myself for the feels of others, and i don't compromise my belief in doing good even for my on safety. I am a bit broken.

D&D's worst legacy is the opinion magic and opinion-based interdimensional fauna, and making personality exclusive for the murderhobo protagonists who couldn't care less about it.

U mad bro?
:^)

>when demons start to invest my hamlet
That's a problem with banks, not wizards.

Hell, as long as the lich saves my ass, he can kill as many innocent kids as he wants.

But the kind of person who'd murder children for power probably wouldn't make a very good hero.

Do fetuses count? Maybe you could abort your way to lichdom and skirt the line.

>getting mad over mocking numales and women

Literally why? I've been smiling through this entire thread, and you're not mad either. Almost nobody actually gets mad over internet arguments. You'll forget about it the moment you close this tab, just like I will.

>But committing a violent action on an innocent is evil in of itself, is it not? If the person hasn't committed the act (you merely, based on appearance condemned them) are they guilty?
Acting wrathfully is what makes you evil. Taking preventive efforts does not.
You don't have to murder every dragon in existence, but you should also keep children away from dragon caves and occasionally spray the village down with dragon repellent.
Sure, there might be 1 dragon in the hundreds who is a vegetarian, but why take that chance and endanger the children of the village?
You're not going out of your way to murder dragons, but you're also not taking chances with them. This is the moral path.

That's how a cabal of dark wizard neets performed the lich ritual in my modern fantasy setting.

Mother and father, 3 brothers and host of old world grandparents.

Don't make assumptions to justify being a dick.

>But when demons start to invest my hamlet

See, now you're just spouting bigotry and lichophobia. Respectable, upstanding demons want to invest in your hamlet, likely bringing jobs and competitive wages; and all you can do is spout hateful words. I bet all your friends are paladins.

#lichlivesmatter

>Didn't realize how messed-up this board had gotten
>implying it's a change
>implying you were gone