Without resorting to lichdom or the black arts, what are sensible...

Without resorting to lichdom or the black arts, what are sensible, fool-proof ways for a wizard to achieve very long life or even immortality?

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d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/quintessence.htm
psionics.info/powers/forced-dream/
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Become good friends with a Revenant Cleric that knows True Resurrection and whose Undying Task is to keep you alive for all eternity

de-aging spells

In 3.5 it's actually insanely easy. All you have to do is cast the clone spell when you're young and commit suicide before dying of old age. The clone is a duplicate of you at the time, which means a younger version of you of the same age as when you cast it. You can avoid shortening your life span by 10 minutes for each life time by just having your laboratory on the astral plane where nothing ages.

Infamously, at 17th level in D&D 5e a wizard gains access to the "Wish" spell. It has a number of special uses that run the risk of permanently running out a wizard's ability to use it, but it also has a basic and "risk free" function of duplicating the effects of any spell of 7th level or lower without material costs.

Clone, a spell of 7th level, allows the wizard to create a clone body that his soul is sent to when he dies. It has a rather high material cost, but with Wish you can create a clone of yourself for free once per long rest. Chain this with pocket dimension for a personal demiplane full of backup corpses of a near-infinite number.

Vampirism. Depends on if you consider that part of the black arts or not.

The Imprisonment spell. Make a jade replica of your perfect home, take a lot of books and a crystal ball...

Hit level 20 and take the Immortality Arcane Discovery.

A good diet and a moderate amount of exercise.

Archmage
Archspell
Feyliege
Immanence
Lord of Fate
Magister
Parable
Sage of Ages

Revenants only stay up for a year though.

If there's a sensible, foolproof way to achieve immortality, why bother going through the horrors of lichdom?

Just create a bunch of clones in various demiplanes you made, as well as create a few simulacrums that can revive you, then trap them with Imprisonment, that will end should you die, with the commands to bring you back.

1) Transfer your mind into another person's body.

2) Make an unaging artificial body, do 1.

3) Store your mind in an inanimate object and have a colleague de-age your body with temporal magic, then put your mind back.

4) Go back in time and steal your younger self's body.

5) Extract concentrated life force from plants and animals and ingest it.

Do something meaningful and be immortalized by history :^)

Transform into a dragon. Dragons usually don't die of old age.

Any prestige class that turns you into an Outsider. Outsiders do not die of old age.

>Wizards

>Friends


That's a good one.

You ever watched Moon?

Simple, come up with a way to have serial ressurections, where you are reborn after every death, with your "coil" tied to a secure location. When you die your essence returns to this point, where there is a library as well. You design this library in a way where you have your knowledge from your previous "lives" downloaded into your brain as you mature.

Also as this is an enchanted sanctum, the sanctum speeds up your maturation so what would take someone 18 years you do in a matter of a few days. Stopping the process just as you're about to reach maturity (about 18 Y.O. if you're human...)

They can, but they get bloody ancient before they shuffle their mortal coil.

Has the right idea.

>vampirism
>stealing anothers life essence to add to yours
>not black arts
how? with a willing victim that you bleed occasionally and with their permission?
t. vamp with conscience

I'm pretty sure D&D wizard could make blood with some spell if food and water can be conjured too.

Have a wish spell primed to go off once you die that will take your soul (which is now a petitioner on some random plane) and bring you back to your study. Bam, you're an immortal outsider.

Resurrection spells do not work.
When your time is up, it's up. Read.

alchemy, nice

Turn into a djinn.

pic related

>cast timestop on self
>stop your own time
You'll never age again!

Not super fool-proof, but just have a safe vault with Clone so when you die you're just reborn back into a younger body.

There's an Epic boon that's called Immortality in 5e and does that exact thing.

Take the hourai elixir.

Slay a god and take their place.

Become an Incantifier. You exist forever and no longer need food, sleep, drink or air, all for the low price of regularly needing to get somebody to cast magic at you or find & drain magical items so you can feed your literal hunger for magic. That option's been around since 2e.

Not sure if it still works this way, but in prior versions of DnD, if multiple clones of you were in existence, your soul wouldn't just jump into one of them; no, a portion of it would jump into all of them, and they would all awaken at once with a pathological urge to destroy the other clones.
Manshoon, the Cobra Commander of Faerun, had like a dozen clones; they all went to war when the original was taken out. Not pretty.

create a fully sealed suit like a diving suit with a portal to the astral plane built into it.

You can never leave the suit but you'd have no physical needs like food and what not.

...

That's why you stuff most of them into chambers filled with quintessence, and leave only one with an empty container. Then you have the next one in line drained.

Quintessence is awesome- anything covered in it essentially doesn't exist, since its time is stopped.

Fun fact- True Creation can make Quintessence, and since there's no price for Quintessence it'd only take 1 XP per casting. Or, if you pay a shaper, 280gp per ounce.

Though if you're dabbling with psionics and Quintessence, you could also guarantee that nothing bad ever happens to you.

Pay this psion to cast Forced Dream on a few of your many Igors or minions, and then give them orders to spend their move action to dive into a jar of quintessence and immediately activate the power after reading a message written on a plaque. Since the moment they enter the jar their time pauses, it's still technically their turn. Forever. Then when you drain the jar centuries later, their turn reactivates, they read a message you wrote in the future, and then they activate Forced Dream, rewinding time until the point just before their turn started.

Do that once every year with a different minion, and you can then have messages sent back in time. If, when you stand there telling Bobby to jump in, he suddenly blinks and gives you a message from your future self.

Then, since he's still Dominated or whatever, have your Psion cast Forced Dream on him again and give him the same order. Waste not, want not.

Hell, might as well have a loyal golem be there in case you die and your clone doesn't awaken. Have that golem investigate what happened, and then write it down on a plaque to send a message to the last year you were around. Then he drains the jar, you get a warning from your future self while you put Mark in his timestop jar, and you don't make the same mistake next time.

....This isn't DnD anymore, right? This is Dungeons the Dragoning, or World of Darkness?
Or the most un-DnD thing I can think of, 3rd-Party Pathfinder?

Nope!

>>d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/quintessence.htm
>>psionics.info/powers/forced-dream/

It's literally just Expanded Psionics Handbook for 3.5 (For the Quintessence), and Magic of Eberron for Forced Dream. Forced dream is really just a buff that you're supposed to consume for a 'do-over' for the buffed character's turn, like if your enemy succeeded in a save you really didn't want them to succeed in.

alchemical accident.

Warning: this method has a 98% chance of instead killing the wizard outright.

Can't you cast a wish saying
>"I wish that I won't age anymore"?

The wish spell has rules, and pretty much explicitly states that if you don't use one of its listed effects, it can go horribly wrong, or simply not work.

Technically, that Wish could come true by using one of several spells. Such as, say, Flesh to Stone.

Statues don't age, after all.

>Not kitting your soul out with all kinds of astral swag, dying a nice natural death after smoking out of your favorite pipe, and exploring the lands beyond death like the adventurer you always were
>Being afraid of death after having had the most fantastical life anyone could ever ask for
>Not having a hearty chuckle at all the knucklehead who pay and increasingly steep and horrifying priced just to buy a couple more years
>Not entrusting the future to a fresh, new generation of magic-users with hearts full of hope and a great thirst for knowledge
>Not having accepted the fact that you have limitations, even as someone with such a deft control of their reality

>implying there's anything beyond death

lol

Be born an elf.
If that's not a possibility, mind-swap with a promising youth every 50 years or so.

In Pathfinder you can just take a feat that gives you immortality once you hit level 20.

As for fluff, I imagine it's just about all of the wizard's lifetime research finally bearing fruit in the form of a philosopher's stone or something similar.

The Wish Spell

Shadow Lichdom, the most obscure broken kind of Lichdom ever! It's not the black arts when it's a magical accident that binds you to two planes at once!

That said, becoming (Incantrix?) who feeds on magic, an outsider through multiple means, a shade, a Hivemind creature, a class that is somehow evil, I mean it's gross, yes, but I don't see the evil part about it next to the Cancer Mage, and all a Worm that Walks is is you preparing a burial site and sewing in food over the course of a year till you either cast a spell or come back as a WTW which is an aberration.

Ritualism to change your type, genie wishes, dragoncraft items, transmutation to create more ways to live longer, Clones, that shit Micheal Roa Valdamjong pulled off that one time, Deity/lower plane outsider blackmail/support, becoming timeless per it's mention in the Dragon Magazine, being a Psion with an Astral seed and meta level stuff that allows you to into Bloodborne Psionic evolution, becoming a Sharn or Tharzridun nutjob with a lucky streak, or

The only asshole who supplies vampirism thorough rituals is Orcus, the rest have their own little bizzaro ecology relating to their progenitor, Kanchelsis. It's always been evil, and since AD&D they've directly advised against D&D vampire PCs stating how fucking broken they are, given that with the proper knowledge, Vampirs are the only creatures that can become Elder Evil if they actually gave a shit and stop being an alignment anything but CE and aren't vampire lords subverted By Fat fuck Orcus

This, you can take Immortality as an Arcane Discovery once you reach Wizard 20.

Becoming a tree.

Additionally, if you want to make sure that your clone is protected, cast demiplane, which lasts for an hour, then cast wish to cast clone once inside, clone usually has an hour long cast time, but it's instant with wish. Otherwise your clones can be attacked.

Play GURPS. There are about five or six ways of doing this that I can think of off the top of my head.

Your question depends pretty much entirely on the setting youre playing

>witch could be revived as a loli clone upon death

Why does dnd keep catering to my magical realm on accident????

...

High level in Illusion magic in anima has a spell that makey death unable to find you.
Your shell can get destroyed but your soul will never return.

Sounds like the even easier thing to do is just live on the Astral plane as much as possible. When you need shit done on other planes, either keep the trips short or act through some kind of intermediary.

Use Wish to reincarnate as an Elan. They don't age.

Becoming an Elan also destroys all memory of who you were before and makes you psionic instead. You get great psionic power, but at the cost of reformating your brain and erasing its contents to rewire you into a superpsychic powerhouse. An Elan is, essentially, a Newgame+ of a previous dude that has reset himself back down to level 1.

Any wizard powerful enough to pull it off won't want to deal with losing all of their magic and memories.

That's a dangerously vague wording on that wish user.

Yeah. There is exactly one way that wish can get fulfilled that is what that user wants, and a HUGE number of ways that the wish can be fulfilled to the letter while being absolutely horrible or effectively just killing him on the spot.

Like, 'frozen in time forever' is a perfectly valid way to grant that wish, and is less complex than letting him experience time and move around without actually aging.

Become an alienist.
9 levels of alienist is enough:
Timeless Body (Ex): At 9th level, an alienist learns the secret of perpetual youth. She no longer takes ability penalties for aging and cannot be magically aged (see Table 6—5, page 109 of the Player's handbook). Ability score bonuses from aging still accrue, and any penalties the alienist might have already taken remain in place. An alienist is stolen away by horrible entities when her time is up, and she is never seen again.

Just don't get taken by eldritch creatures from spaces betwixt spaces.

Or you can get the full deal with another level:
Alien Transcendence (Su): A 10th-level alienist, because of long association with alien entities and intense study of insane secrets, transcends her mortal form and becomes an alien creature. Her type changes to outsider. Additionally, she gains damage reduction 10/magic and resistance to acid 10 and electricity 10. Upon achieving alien transcendence, an alienist undergoes a minor physical change, usually growing a small tentacle or other strange feature, such as an extra appendage, organ, eye, or enigmatic lump. An alienist can hide this abnormality in a robe or hood, but the alien growth is not under the alienist's control and sometimes moves, twitches, opens, or otherwise animates of its own accord. This applies a —4 penalty on Disguise checks an alienist makes to conceal her true nature. Anyone who shares an alienist's predilection for study of the Far Realms immediately recognizes her transcendent nature, and she gains a +2 circumstance bonus on all Charisma- based skill checks and ability checks when interacting with such beings. She gains a +2 circumstance bonus on Intimidate checks involving any other creatures to whom she reveals her abnormal nature.

Having a no-save plot death as a class feature seems suboptimal.

I think he meant to use the druid spell reincarnate, but Elan isn't on the list of reincarnatable creatures...

Reference secured.

I have no idea what an Elan is, but aren't there spells for storing memories?

Just fill an entire bank of Thought Bottles first, containing all of your memories and XP

Polymorph into an Elf, an Ent, a Dragon, or something else that's functionally immortal. That'll cobra you plenty of time to find a renewable source of the handful of de-aging effects that exist in the world.

True Polymorph into a dragon

Read the fucking Draconomicon.

That's the normal creation process but with a willing gm you could possibly use the monster transformation ritual to retain your knowledge with almost no xp penalty.
There are other options like warforged too.

The part
>An alienist is stolen away by horrible entities when her time is up, and she is never seen again.
Obviously just means that you still "die" of old age like other class abilities that take away aging penalties but you're "taken away" instead of passing away and leaving a corpse.
Best you could probably hope for it coming back as an insane far-realms npc.

The extra level does nothing to change that matter and doesn't even mention aging so that was a wasted wall of text.

That create quintessence ability is potentially really broken or a major plot hook.

That's actually one of few ways that exist to actually create it but it has been referenced in other material.
Quintessence is one of the primal elemental forces outside the "traditional" four, along with phlogiston.
Fluff suggests that it's actually quite rare naturally and the mindflayers of thoon, illithids corrupted by the far-realms, have their whole plot and motivation revolve around gathering quintessence a small drop at a time, rarely forming in humanoid creatures, and using it to power all sorts of crazy constructs and bio-tech monsters.

The Epic Spell Seed Transform does it. Or you can invent a high spellcraft Fortify spell to extend your lifespan.

It's not the same thing as, uh, Thoonian quintessence. Thoon quintessence glows green and is vaguely magical, used to produce their monsters, while psionic quintessence is sometimes-iridescent sometimes-transparent congealed time.

If you smear something with psionic quintessence, then that something gets paused in time until the quintessence is scraped off. Or you can feed a drop of it to someone, and then they start dying horribly when parts of their body begins to be slightly-paused while other parts aren't.

I haven't seen anything definitive written but you could argue that psionic quintessence is a more "pure" form compared to the impure small naturally occurring amounts in some humanoids.

I mean they're definitely some sort of quintessence with some relationship to the element.

This might be considered lichdom

That only begs the question of why the Thoonian mindflayers- being psionic creatures- harvest quintessence from other creatures when they could start learning the psionic art to create 'pure' quintessence?

It might be the other way around. The naturally occurring amounts of quintessence in people's brains is a more refined, more 'pure' version than what psions make. Perhaps it's a byproduct of being a sentient being that experiences time.

Could they start learning that? Maybe they're not aware of the power or cannot manifest it for some reason, maybe wotc are just hacks who abandon consistency and balance with every book.
That's why I suggested it as a potential plot hook; If a player starts accumulating massive amounts of quintessence and using it in typical wacky player schemes it might draw attention from mindflayers of thoon, both to take the quintessence and probably the player to figure out how they're making it.
Even assuming psionic quintessence < thoonian quintessence, you can make potentially unlimited amounts of the former so they may still be interested in it.

Also in some ways thoonian mindflayers move a bit away from psionics compared to their normal brethren, incorporating more arcane thoon bs.