Liches General

...

...

Because if necromancy isn't bad then there's no reason that your setting shouldn't be entirely filled with animated skeletons doing everything.

You're right, there is no reason. Every setting should be this.

Well, the simple reason that it isn't is that animating skeletons could be hard or expensive.

I mean, there's nothing evil about robots, but it took a while before we could get useful work out of them, and it will still take a while before they run around doing everything.

I guess if necromancy is less than a century old in your setting, sure, but in most its millennia old, at least.

It could be millenia old and still not have progressed enough to make an animated skeleton useful for anything, or it could be cheaper to have a peasant do something rather than gather the ingredients needed to animate a skeleton.

Really depends on how magic works in the setting.

It could largely be frowned upon, even by the gods.
I just dislike that it always needs a human sacrifice or some shit.

The way I always liked handling liches in my settings is that it's the shittiest way to become immortal.

Every wizard's goal is immortality, but not everyone can achieve it in their lifetime, either because they're too dumb or because they don't have the resources. Thus, some wizards would have to settle for the discount version of immortality, lichdom.

As a consequence, liches would be the least dangerous and most numerous of all immortal wizards. The kind of person who would settle for lichdom is also not the kind of person who would have a decent personality, so most of them would be jealous, angry assholes. This also justifies why they would appear as antagonists to the party, but still be beatable.

This doesn't really hold water, considering turning into a rad skeleton is the coolest way to become immortal.

I always thought vampire = discount immortality

>rad skeleton
What if the skeleton you turn into is not rad at all?

Limited numbers. The more liches there are, the more the concept of 'lich' is diluted and so the more the power of existing liches is diminished. A person who wants to become a lich must therefore destroy one that already exists before they can ascend fully into lichhood.

all but the least powerful undead follow this rule in my setting

To become a Lich, you must enter Pact to seal your soul inside of an object, concept, person, place, idea, or power. A drop of water that rides storms and seas, and must never be drank by a living thing lest the Lich become vulnerable to death. Or like old Koschei pulled it off. Or maybe bound to the life of an immortal being who the Lich tricked before death to be host to the Pact.

The strength of the bond of soul in phylactery depends on the skill and knowledge of the Lich candidate, their strength of will, their bond with said phylactery, their ability to persuade it into the Pact, and what they are willing to eternally sacrifice in return that is precious to them in life that they would still have in death (a shaping memory, the ability to laugh, the smell of wine, and so forth). This helps balance out the final cost of tremendous blood and negative power needed to disrupt and shiver the flow of Positive and Negative Mana, life and invert, to allow the Lich the void necessary to be born in and thus trapped inside by virtue of the phylactery.

The Lich's starting power, sanity, ability to hold onto sanity and prior humanity, and many other variables depends all on the individual they were and what went into their Lichdom. Thus, each Lich is unique, and changes further as undeath paces on, so often mistaken or mythologized as a whole other kind of new undead being.

A majority of Liches simply want to further their studies, experiments, math, and formulae arcane. You don't hear about these ones, numerous as they are, because they stay underground or work through dimensions. Many travel to space eventually - there are hundreds of known and unknown Dark Cosmonauts, many rumored to be seeking the ultimate hell within black holes. Some want to become warriors capable of cosmic feats and Abyssal lordship. Others do it for Death Gods, though many Liches are way too willful to ever want to serve divine powers. Many are Ur-Priests of awful success.

Undead in my game generally work on the soul/body/mind thing.
A lich is what happens when you get the mind and body in the same place and contain the soul nearby to prevent further metaphysical decay to your mind due to a lack of the thing.
A zombie/skeleton is usually just a body; the smarter ones with a mind are generally so insane from the lack of soul that they can't really be told apart anyway, aside from ye olde "undead made from awesome fighter still has their fighting skills" trope.
Vampires have a body, but their soul is kinda fucked up and leaking, so they drain blood/life essence to avoid degeneration of their minds. So you get the aristocratic types who, when pushed against their limits, snap and go feral on you.

Then there's ghosts, who have their soul and mind lingering behind for some reason, wraiths who are just the incredibly insane mind, and spirits with just the soul.
Ghosts tend to fuck off on their own when they run out of steam, sometimes the more petty ones end up wraiths anyway.
Spirits are usually just divine blessings on items because mortals tend to not want to stuff their souls into shit for an eternity of being someone else's loot.

Those few mortals who DO decide to be an item typically end up as intelligent objects, with mind and soul using an inanimate body.
Cursed items are almost always insane minds left alone in objects, but sometimes it's just a dick of an intelligent item not wanting to accept they kinda don't have a real body any more.

"Living armour" type undead don't exist in this system naturally, they're mostly just a subset of liches who made a magically prepared vessel to move into since they didn't want to stink up the place with their own rotting flesh.
The enchantments needed are also far too expensive for anything but the most decadent necromancers to bother giving their undead minions better bodies than they came with originally.

Then you blew it.

Excellent use of Corpora/Ethereal/Celestial trinity to help define how/why different types of undead are and function. Good system idea flexible for any setting.

Go back to milking your franchise, Nasu.

>Many travel to space eventually - there are hundreds of known and unknown Dark Cosmonauts
youtube.com/watch?v=cNyzqD7QnAE

Well maybe, but to become a vampire you have to be beholden to someone, usually another vampire, at least until you can kill your master or something.

A wizard wouldn't want that.

This is really good, I wish this was official stuff.

Weird, I actually came onto Veeky Forums this morning to ask a lich question on 5eg, but this'll do nicely.

When a lich reforms at its phylactery, what sort of process does that involve? My party have unknowingly been carrying around the phylactery of a lich they killed once and it's about to come back to bite them - but does it reform instantly? Does it have to rebuild its body? How do you envision it?

I like to think it's different for each Lich, and you can turn it into its own weird mythological thing. Maybe rats bring in bits of gristle and bone over the course of a hundred days before the Lich shambles out of the pile. Maybe it comes out of the Phylactery in some dark birth manner, a little blood glob with a skeleton fetus inside that goes through an entire unlife of growth. Maybe it becomes an idea in someone's head and they carve their own flesh off to 'release' the Lich, or else dig up and assemble bones into it per mad dreams and directions. The resurrection of a Lich could be an entire short game on its own, causing a whole town to go mad as a Stephen King Maine hovel as just the prelude to the Lich's return.

Get creepy local myth with it.

...

My head canon regarding liches:
Becoming a lich means figuring out a way to store your soul somewhere else than your body. You also have to create procedures to create a new body if necessary and maybe have the soul snap back to your body in case of critical damage to your phylactery.

Pretty much any necromancer can do it but most won't do it. Why? Because at the beginning the most secure way to protect your soul is to keep it close to your own body and spells.

With more ressources it becomes possible to create a dedicated soul storing place that can be sufficiently protected.

The reason this is evil lies in the nature of souls. They are pretty much divine recording devices that are used to judge you for your afterlife and recreate you to enjoy or suffer thorugh it. Good gods generally don't like it if you meddle with them. And when the gods don't like it's evil.

Sacrificing stuff to become a lich is stricktly speaking not necessary. You can do all the research yourself. But some people shortcut this by bribing a evil deity into handing over the knowledge for sufficiently evil deeds.

In the end, physically destroying a phylactery is stupid. For proper liches the soul is just sent back to its owner. So congratulations, you just pissed of a super powerful magic user. Scry and die is not funny if you're on the receiving end or the lich just hides 'til you die of natural causes.

The smarter thing to do is, to start messing with the soul in the phylactery.

Bodies don't magically reform for me.
It takes possession of a nearby body without soul. This could mean it claims the corpse of a party member that is being carried to be resurrected. It could also mean he ends up in a pigeon if there is nothing else around.
It takes time of course, the body must be close to the phylactery for at least 6 hours, which ties in perfectly to a long rest. They wake up and a 2 hour old lich is still getting used to their new form.
Usually our dear lich begins newlife feeling the deathpains of the last body, so they need to make a constitution check with the new body's stats to determine if they are flailing around screaming from it. And a wisdom check to see if they're freaking out.
Of course, they get the physical stats of the new body, the wisdom and intellect of their true self, and a charisma that is an average of the two to take into account demeanor and physical looks.

This is not a problem exclusive to necromancy, you rarely see a setting actually justify why people die of disease and injuries if instant healing is a thing or why people still farm in conventional ways if druids are a thing.

Heres mine, I prefer to portray becoming a Lich more as something risky or foolish rather than inherently harmful or evil.

Becoming a lich shouldn't make you overall stronger with no drawbacks. You're getting immortality which is basically the end desire for most people, and in the process explaining to nature and reality that it can, as a matter of fact, go suck a fat one. There should be some major drawbacks and probably some plain chance, otherwise everyone would want to be one and everyone would want their loved ones and important leader figures to be one.

with sufficiently rare magic it is actually fairly logical. It's usually cheaper to just breed more villagers than to have to only capable priest heal everyone. Can't have the royal healer running around the countryside healing peasants when the king might suffer from a paper cut at any moment or heal whatever limbs where cut of by the sunday duel.

Same goes for druids. Sure he could help the local peasants. But removing the corruption that the last vampire/necromancer/demon left behind is far more important.

Unironically the best lich.

Random skeletal mages or "undead who raise themselves" are shit. Complex, inherently evil, and flawed/costly ways to live after death or become alive again should be like Harry Potter. Voldemort spends time as a living memory, feeding off the life force of another as a parasite, and only comes back to life from a magical ritual as a fucked up looking mutant. He's the best lich, far better then any D&D "it's just a wizard but stonger xd" shit.

I know, my point is that necromancy is not inherently less jutifiable than other types of magic.

I imagine that it builds up slowly Hellraiser-style but usually less fleshy.

youtube.com/watch?v=erpHSw3x5cE

For me good and bad are basically concepts that gods have invented due to divine politics. Everything thats good is pretty much a agreement between good gods how things are supposed to be working. Evil gods are those that disagree with these rules.

The name "good" and "Evil" is just propaganda spread by good priests.

Necromancy screws with a number of things that are important to good gods. So it's classified as evil.

If you're a "good" necromancer you'll have to dodge paladins and inquisitors just because you're breaking the rules. Not because you're doing something harmful in itself. And yes the gods consider their rules more important than your little mortal problems.

I like how it was in pre-WotC editions. So the lich doesn't create a new body, but possesses a nearby corpse instead.

Yup.

Pretty typical, you need to find a way to mask your soul from Lady Death. The weak and average ones do this with destructible phylacteries, all of which is just scavenged hand-me-down lore from the first true Lich.

That dude tried all sorts of methods to escape the creation-destruction cycle and eventually settled on a cosmic-enlightenment sojourn, stealing various gifts from the gods and bending almost all universal laws to keep himself within the world, yet out of their reach forever.

>Its like the ultimate act of agency.
>So in my story its only achieved through divine intervention
Bullshit.

Non-evil Liches are kind of my jam.

Doctors only trying to have more time for research and to help people, lichdom being their most accessible way to eternal life. They meddled around with the dead all their lives, learning about necromancy and turning lich is really just the next step.

I suppose all necromancers are misunderstood good guys too.

I prefer Golems with Human souls stuck in them.
To become one you:

You go to the Golden Ones.
If they deem you have potential, they apprentice you to the least of their number.
This lasts for about 20-30 years. During this time they judge your suitability. They also perform various rituals and prepare your body. Most people die in this stage.
If after all this time you've proven you have the patience, intellect, skill and compatible personality, you are given access to the Axiom.
You craft a new body for yourself, usually marble, but sometimes brass. The process is very involved and takes a year or two. You're not permitted to leave during this time. Almost everyone dies at this stage.
If you've done everything correctly, you transfer your Being to the new body, and your old one perishes.
Congratulations! You're now Immutable. Only about one in 1000 do all of this successfully.

This has the following benefits:
- physically very resilient and strong
- never have to worry about disease again or aging ever again!
- Your body over time gets its initial material replaced and eventually you're made of Gold!

And the following drawbacks:
- you must maintain your body using precious minerals
- over time, the minerals must become more and more rare, the Masters all need gold
- failure to do so makes you immobile, but still conscious
- You can never change. You can acquire new data, new knowledge. But you never grow as an individual or have changes of heart.
- You are now bound by necessity to a totalitarian organization that serves the people on top
- This will also never change
- You're just a journeyman now, you'll need a good century or so before you're a Master
- Unless someone destroys your superiors, you'll never advance

Personally my setting necromancers and liches (non-D&D) is pretty much 75% majority-reclusive neutral/amoral, 20% are insane or just murderous assholes making trouble in some way or by uncaring incidental, and 5% genuinely beneficially or helpful kinds. Death/Necromancer is considered part of the Life/Healing colleges of magic, and vice versa, with Resurrection supposed to be the ultimate hybrid of the two, with Lichdom essentially being the one-step-down supreme Death ritual. So there's a lot of conceptual and research overlap- every worthy Necromancer will have a startling command of anatomy, biology, sickness, and also their treatments, mitigations, and worsenings. They have to understand just as much as the doctor and the healer, just in the opposite conceptual direction.

It's enjoyable to leave it intertwined and feeling more varied and historied beyond "makes dead dudes to punch" and "makes your life number go back up"

No, a tool is a tool. Necromancy is neither good nor evil, just as a sword is neither good nor evil. You can kill a man, or stop a man killing another. It is the agency involved with the use of the tool that conveys the cosmic alignment.
Mindflayers are not explicitly evil either, they are naturally parasitic, but that is their nature. When they choose to enslave people, to torture them, to fight wars of aggression just to obtain more slaves... That is when they show themselves to be evil.
A necromancer raising a dead spirit to commune with its living relatives is not evil. A necromancer raising a dead body to serve as his slave is not evil. A necromancer that raises a dead spirit to be his slave is evil.
How a tool is used determines if the person using it is evil.

I always follow a scale of Golems being much harder to program and make work, requiring a ton of backritual and homework prep to get it right or get acting complex, whereas undead are way easier to raise-and-slave, with even basic zombies at least able to seek out things to kill by default, or take basic will-enforced instructions.

There's a neat caveat idea. Wishing to be a Lich includes a hidden gotcha clause that turns you into a specific kind of Genie Lich, bound to your own phylactery-lamp, forced to be as much genie in a way as your own free dark necromancer, having to play a specific role when your undead wished nature finds itself able and wanting to. With the bonus of access to Wishing magics of variable kinds and other unique allowances.

When people die in my setting, a God takes all their souls and strips away all their lies and delusions.
He then allows them to think about their lives forever. Over time, as people resolve their own issues, they fade away.
But so long as they're still in that God's realm, anybody who knows how can summon them for advice, combat and even labor. It's just not very easy and the Guardian of the Dead Realms gets angry if you abuse it.

I also have Golems with programming, or with souls jammed in them, but strictly speaking the Immutable are something very different, with surface similarities.

It's actually a lot safer (and easier) to make shitty stick or straw golems than anything else. Even peasants do it (usually to make scarecrows).

I can easily imagine tons of local-made lesser golems for minor or repetitive tasks. With much better made ones for labor or more complex tasks costing a ton more and needing expert teams of the craft to get done. Kinda like the difference between some home-coded battlebot and some MIT-proof military mega project.

>brain eating monsters who have the natural instinct to dominate all beings telepathically are not evil
Okay.

Funny enough, the card it was on was also a lich.

>Unless someone destroys your superiors, you'll never advance
Sounds like an opportunity, not a drawback!

It's not like predatory animals or parasitic lifeforms are evil either.

Not to mention that a Mindflayer is intelligent enough to willfully not follow their instincts to dominate someone and eat their brains out. Their 'problem' is that they have to do it eventually to survive, even if they don't want to. Lions and wolves also hunt and kill things daily, yet are also very well capable of being peaceful towards other things if they're not hungry. Most animals don't kill for the fun of it but as a way to get food.
Except dolphins. Dolphins are fucking evil assholes that rape animals and use living things as their actual fucking toys, tossing around pufferfish like a fucking waterball.

If mind flayers aren't actually mind flayers in your game, just say so. Because mindflayers can only feel pleasure in consumption of brains from living creatures in canon.

That's generally how it works.
You can use them to keep watch, or to scare away animals, or even to help with manual labor if you know what you're doing.
Proper Alchemists or Witches can usually make humanoid ones that can do all sorts of things.
And those who are well trained can even make them life-like and with a sort of sentience that allows for independent action, though, of course, those are few in number and expensive to make.

Eh, remember that it's a good 20 or so years of testing your personality to figure out if you fit in. I mean, sure, maybe you can fool them, but it's unlikely. They only accept the most intelligent and diligent individuals who prove their loyalty over the course of half a human lifetime.
Most people are made Immutable only when their loyalty is considered absolute, which the change renders permanent.
Those who want power are more likely to ask for greater responsibility and maybe be put in charge of apprentices or something. And if you just wait around enough and contribute to the growth and expansion of your stronghold, you can realistically be expected to lead your own outpost in a century or even less!

Even in canon a Mindflayer may opt not to do that whenever, wherever but control themselves. They're not savage beasts, they can still have reason and not indulge in eating brains all the time. A Mindflayer always falling for their instincts without any holding back and gladly embracing them is obviously evil, but they have enough intellect that it's well within reason for one to still interact with, say, your party of players in a neutral manner and possibly even help them if there's a benefit to it. Mindflayers always mind flaying people because it brings them pleasure and joy would be like animals raping anything that comes their way because it's fun to fuck.

>You can kill a man, or stop a man killing another.
...by killing him.
A sword is an evil thing. You can never use it for good. The most you can hope for is that the evil you inflict on the world with it is lesser than the evil you rid it of.

The only religious viewpoint that even marginally suggests this is Buddhism, and that's only partially.
Even *they* have a story about a monk who kills one man to save several.

This kind of absolutism is incompatible with any version of reality, even one of Zen parables.

>...by killing him.
>a sword can't be used to parry, to intimidate, or to wound, only to kill

as much as i love the Lich from adventure time, idk if it's actually a lich. I dont think it was ever alive and it doesn't seem to have a phylactary, it just kind of doesn't die, like it's a demi-god or something

...

Posting best Lich.

Fuck, Webtoons makes it difficult to post pages.

Either way, I The Heirophant is glorious.

Damn my fat fingers.

Either way, I recommend checking out the sword interval. The Heirophant is an impressive Lich, with a lovely mixture of magic, strength, ancient knowledge, and unknowable motives, all topped off with hospitality and civility.

By breaking the souls of a race that is far lesser than your own and then injesting the parts. You'll begin to take on the form of the lesser race mixed with your original visage decayed. I mean, sure you won't die, but it doesn't exactly do much else for you.

Mediocre at best. Tom Riddle would get his shit pushed in by an intelligent lich.

Makes me wonder what happens next, where can I find this?

They eat brains. Are cats evil for eating mice?
The mindflayer consumes the brain of its victim, it uses its psionic attacks to ensnare the victim. It isn't evil to eat your food.

You can't call something evil just for doing what it must to survive, bacteria are not evil.

Kind of.
No doubt Voldemort's form/way of obtaining lichhood is leagues above skeleton liches, but Tom Riddle himself is a fucking idiot, and like said, would be handily killed by your average D&D lich. Despite being a master wizard, Tom really only uses a few spells; the death curse, the phantom form, the teleport, and that hentai-robe-tentacle thing.

webtoons.com/en/fantasy/sword-interval/ep-1-prologue/viewer?title_no=486&episode_no=1

It's pretty good, although the site that hosts it isn't all that well-loved.

...

>DRUMPH IS SLYTHERIN!
>Implying 90% of the Harry Potter fanbase doesn't identify as Slytherin

I rather liked the Iron Kingdom's take on Iron Liches.

>Not binding your immortal soul into a skeleton of black iron and steam engines

Oh shit I remember this! A long long time ago, I started reading it! The girl ends up becoming a monster hunter and wanders around the world killing stuff, and the first real arc they had was something in a haunted house. Man it's been ages.

Yeah, it's moved forward a good deal. It's just getting into some real interesting stuff now, and The Heirophant's schemes are slowly starting to get revealed.

>his lich isn't the main character of the story he's in
The bar has been raised higher than I ever thought possible, and I'm never going back.

This is a thread for liches, not NEETs ending up in some Isekai bullshit that just so happened to have a Lich as their avatar.

Ainz a shit.

...

You can post smug anime skeletons all you want, it doesn't change the fact that he's shit.

>NEET
you shouldn't have made it so obvious that you've never even watched the anime

Well, it is true that he does have a job, which does prevent him from fitting the standard mould of the Isekai protagonist.

Nonetheless, he is still just a mortal man that got trapped inside a Lich's body, rather than an actual Lich.

"Mortal man that got trapped inside a Lich's body" is pretty much exactly what a lich is, mate

Not quite, Liches make the conscious decision to reject mortality, morality, and the like. Ainz just blundered into it.

Overlord being an isekai story is not ideal for me. But it's ultimately more of a framing device for Ainz's initial motivations and MMO-flavored worldbuilding. It certainly wasn't necessary. It would absolutely be better if Ainz were just a "real" lich all along, without any isekai bullshit. But this is the only story with a skeletal lich protagonist I'll probably ever see, and it doesn't bother me so much, because it all ends up being so trivial. He has undead biology and psychology competing with his former human nature, just like a standard lich wizard would. His old human life and the circumstances of his crossing over are never going to be addressed. It's all just backstory that should have been different.

I know, that's what ruined it for me. I started looking into it when I heard about a Lich Protagonist, and it just got weighed down in JRPG logic, Waifus, and Traps.

Maybe a western fantasy author with good taste will do it right someday. I'm happy with what I've got, as much room for improvement as there is.

I'll wait until then. I'm not going to subject myself to something that comes so close to getting it right, but hamstrings itself like that.

Sounds like it's the emperor in wh40k

Well, no. The God-Emperor is trapped on the Golden Throne because of his wounds, with the throne serving as a life support system and psychic amplifier for the Astronomican's light. Iron Liches swear themselves to the service of Toruk, and have their chassis built to house their souls and enhance their necromantic and physical capabilities.

The God-Emperor was put on the throne as a necessity to save his life.

The Iron Liches traded their life for the power Toruk promised them.

Long story short my character is looking to become a lich, but hardest part is finding an area where I can hide my phylactery.

I was thinking a Demiplane with Sequester on it. To access a Demiplane you didn't make you must know all the contents of it, but if you can't use divination you can never know unless told.

Well, that's boring. An invisible, unassailable pocket dimension?

Go with a comet, or the heart of a golem of apocalyptic size. Make it something that will make your end worthy of legend, rather than something to guarantee it will never come.