So the description on how to become a Lich leaves much to imagination. It only says "the ritual is evil" and that's it.
So I'm trying to figure out ideas for this ritual, ideas that could lead to a PC Wizard in his secret quest to become a Lich or, to stop the evil Wizard to complete it.
Let us hear it /tg/
From the AD&D monster entry:
>In order to become a lich, the wizard must prepare its phylactery by use of the [enchant an item], [magic jar], [permanency] and [reincarnation] spells.
Note this missing oxford comma.
>The phylactery, which can be almost any manner of object, must be of the finest craftsmanship and materials with value not less than 1,500 gold pieces per level of the wizard.
>Once this object is created, the would-be lich must craft a potion of extreme toxicity, which is then enchanted with the following spells:
>[wraithform], [permanency], [cone of cold], [feign death], and [animate dead].
Note the oxford comma.
>When the moon is full, the potion is imbibed.
>Rather than death, the potion causes the wizard to undergo a transformation into its new state.
>A system shock survival throw is required, with failure indicating an error in the creation of the potion which kills the wizard and renders him forever dead.
Also of note, other AD&D sources (I forget which) mention that Lichs need to use soul larva (http://www.lomion.de/cmm/larva.php) to sustain their undeath.
>>46458687
You have to completely, utterly, and irrevocably destroy that which you love the most (that is not yourself). If this is a living or feeling entity, then you must do it in a horrific and torturous manner.
Great power requires great sacrifice.
Make a magical girl with me and become a contract!
>>46459079
M-make one with you?
W-well, if you insist...
>>46458687
Prepare a number of sacrifices, and restrain them with specially prepared chains. Then the Wizard must cut his heart out, on the night of a new moon, and place it in his phylactery.
When his heart isn't in his body, the sacrifices begin to lose 1 HD each round. Each HD gives the Wizard a round of life. He has to complete the ritual and consecrate the phylactery with his heart's blood before he keels over and dies.
Yes, this means plenty of screaming, sawing and wailing.
>>46459007
>At the end of the campaign, the party celebrates
>A day of joy awaits the now tired and beaten characters
>except the Wizard, who has been saving a couple of his most lethal spells for just this occasion
>The wizard kills his friends in a last battle and is accepted into Lichdom
>To this day, the Wizard has kept his old friends' souls stored away in his staff, mourning their loss everyday of his eternal life
>>46458687
Step 1: be a competent cleric/healer
Step 2: embalm yourself
Step 3:
>you break open the tomb where the ancient lich is rumored to rest
>you approach the sarcophagus
>you use your shovel to break it open
>a wave of blinding light sends you flying, knocking you out
>you wake up some hours later, your memory of the last few days rather foggy
>somehow, your skin got smoother and your blisters are gone
Step 4: Lich Doctor, open for business 10AM-8PM weekdays, by appointment only!
Perhaps its just me and my hardon for necromancy that isn't overtly evil, but I've always enjoyed the idea of the lich ritual not necessarily involving evil acts, but being most certainly aided by them. In the setting I made the ritual for lichdom is less about doing something horrific to turn into a lich, but funneling a massive amount of negative energy into the body while keeping you soul from being torn to utter shreds. The ritual itself leads to enough negative energy being spread out into the surrounding landscape to turn an area around half the size of florida from normal nature into hostile, sickly and generally unhealthy landscape. Of course, preforming acts of evil during the ritual helps to siphon that shit off, because undead tend to be formed from a combination of cruel acts and negative energy, but then you're committing cruel torturous acts for your own gain, which is in itself indeed evil. So it boils down to the phylactery making process being all normal and magical, but becomes a 'pick your poison' sort of situation where you're stuck between either turning an area the size of a small kingdom into unlivable badlands or sacrificing a bunch people in the process to act like energy magnets to expedite and ease the process.
I've put way too much thinking into this shit, I just really like complex necromancy, and general mechanics of undeath that aren't just "Its undead therefore its always the most EEEEEEEVIL it can be."
>>46458687
>Kill someone that truly loves you
>Condemn an innocent soul to hell via ritual sacrifice
>Kick a puppy
>Kill 100 people and bind their souls to this world
>Feast on the life energy of 10 good holy men
>Drink a potion made of such lovely things as "tears of tortured pixies," "heart of an infant human child" and "blood of a lover who had found their true love."
>Kick all the puppies
Really I think it should be a specific feat of evil unique to the person and their situation.
>>46459257
>The party breaks into the lair of the mad-lich who has been sacrificing hundreds of people across the country, releasing abominations out into the world, and stealing the most powerful artifacts ever found
>He resigns to his fate, and gives them his phylactery willingly, asking them to destroy it
>He explains that all of this was to try to undo what he did, to try to bring back the loved ones he sacrificed so long ago, to do everything he could to break the immutable laws of the ritual that condemned them to nonexistence
>>46459546
I wasn't expecting feels from this thread
>>46459546
Would that count as redemption for a Paladin?
>>46459873
No amount of action or remorse can undo certain things. What's been done is done - that can't be changed.
Besides, the route to redemption isn't paved with any corpse except your own.
>>46458687
meditate for 3 years in a temple built of the bones of people you've killed or had killed?
>>46459713
>I wasn't expecting feels from this thread
this is /tg/
feels can come from anywhere
>>46459546
>>46463674
Shit like this is why being good can be more fun.
>>46464157
If being good offered the same amount of power as being evil, who would be evil?
>>46458983
What is the significance of the oxford comma, or lack thereof, in this case?
In Libir Mortis there is a Goddess of eternal love through undeath so I was trying to think up an interesting ritual where a wizard couple would become liches together.
>The ritual to Lichdom is similar to an elaborate wedding ceremony
>Only those who worship the goddess and truely love one another can perform and complete it
>First they must perform an act to show their faith to the Goddess and prove their love
>Next they must find a similar couple who meet the goddess' requirements of true love
>They are ritualistically sacrificed as their wrist and necks are slit to allow their blood to flow as they are restrained in the True Hearts Cage*
>The couple performing the ritual must then exchange vows and stab each other with a prepared knife
>If the ritual succeeds then the True Hearts Cage is enveloped in a misty haze of blood and becomes the couple's shared phylactery
I made up the True Hearts Cage which is a special heart shaped restraint so that the couple encased in it are facing each other and forced to hold each others hands as they bleed. a trough at the bottom collects the blood.
>>46464382
That AD&D editing a shit.
It must suck to be a brittle skeleton bitch. Sure, u can do the same magic as when u were alive and come back together after a number of days. But bein weak enuff that a wizard can 1-hit k.o. ur boney-ass, fuck dat noise yo,
>>46466349
That's why you amass mad money and build a business empire so that you can pay people to do things for you while you do what you want.
Though that doesn't work so good if you enjoy physical stuff a lot. Unless you get some good enchanted gear and buffing spells to get your bone body ready.
Since the body and the bones will eventually be ground to dust with time you bind your soul to a machine body essentially becoming an undead cyborg with your fleshy bits kept in tack by preservative fluids.
A lesser form of this is easy to do and semi-mass producible but is undesired as it fragment the original personality leading to many who have faint recollections of their past lives.
The process involves taking another individual and forcibly using their soul as an anchor for your own
>>46467646
>Since the body and the bones will eventually be ground to dust with time
a lich's undead form regenerates magically. that's why they can come back as long as their soul container (the phylactery ) is not destroyed.
>>46459222
Perfect ritual for a death knight but a lich needs a more academic, less blood thirsty ritual.
Maybe a profane word, unknowable to a mortal tongue, that kills his victims and himself on utterance. Destroying the victims souls forever as power to transfer the lich's into the phylactery.
>>46469724
but why only bone
>>46466349
A Lich is much more durable than a human and his mental traits are sharpened.
Also the advantages of undeath are much greater than flesh: immunity to compulsion and charm, immune to polymorph, immune to stuns/crits/poison, DR15/magic AND bludgeoning (not OR, gotta be both) and you use your wisdom instead of your constitution for saves because you're are powered by your own will (which as I said before is much sharper than a mortal)
>>46471960
To keep it spoopy
>>46458983
What is oxford comma?
>>46459546
more like
- it's over, lich! we've destroyed your minions, covered everything in an anti-magic field and confirmed your phylactery is here! before we destroy your skeletal form, explain what you were trying with your nefarious plan.
- it was to change the immutable laws of nature, undo the crime of my lichdom ritual and bring back the loved ones I sacrificed for my power. though i defied every god, no way was revealed to me... the phylactery is right over there. just destroy it.
(item he points to is destroyed)
- by phylactery I mean the anti-magic field dispelling trap. hold person. hold person. hold person. I wonder what will happen if I build a temple of skulls to try the rituals in...
- you're insane! what you're trying is impossible!
*shrug*
- disintegrate.
>>46471862
Yeah, but the idea is mind over matter. The triumph of the will. Do you have the willpower to transcend your flesh?
>>46458687
Becoming a lich requires great sacrifices.
The ingedients you gather must be fresh. There is magic in blood and sinew, and letting them decay only lets that magic decay.
The ritual might call for the blood of a newborn baby. It looks at you before you dash its brains on the wall. You feel a tinge of regret, but there is work to be done.
Perhaps you must kill a creature of good; a unicorn, a fae, a metallic dragon. You find this creature, a protector of the natural order, and you slay it. Then you collect its horn, or its wings, or its scales, whatever your ritual calls for. Ancient and mystical creatures, the kind that legends speak of, reduced to mere components for your selfish search for immortality.
Even more strange, it calls for the ring finger of a newly married virgin. You stalk the village, watching and waiting as the ceremony takes place. Such a pretty girl, so sweet and naive, her beautiful eyes so full of hope. You watch these eyes glaze over as the dagger slips between her ribs into her heart. She never got to feel her lover's embrace; he lies dead in the corner, an unnecessary factor that would only complicate the ritual.
You prepare the phylactery. An ornate box carved with symbols, you cast your spells upon it, imbuing it with the power to hold a soul. You look at the vial of liquid sitting near it; a concoction of horrid poisons that will kill any mortal man in mere seconds.
You stand before an altar and prepare the ingredients. You drink the potion, and your world turns to black as you feel your body die.
Your eyes open again, two blazing points of light in your skull. Lying there, looking out at the world with new perspective, you feel nothing. It is then that you realize, in the end you gave the biggest sacrice of all.Your humanity.
>>46466349
Gimme a hug anon
>>46466349
>brittle
>DR:15 Magic and Bludgeon
>>46475033
Cue "but what about good liches anon" idiocy.
>>46475155
There is actually some out there, but those need a fuckload of magic from a god.
>>46458687
You must find out the wish of a being who is pure and good and then utterly corrupt or subvert the wish so as to bring the most ammount suffering to the good being.See the ending of Selector Infected Wixoss, possibly the best anime about card games
>>46475183
They're not liches though.
>>46475205
In the sense that they aren't an evil wizard that performed an evil ritual to turn themselves into free willed undead, no they are not. Hence why they have different names, like archlich and baelnorn.
>>46475155
I despise the entire concept of good liches. If you're a good person, and then you become a good lich, it's basically just giving you superpowers, which is completely antithetical to the concept of lichdom.
At the end of the day a lich is a walking corpse; it's an unnatural thing, an abberation of nature brought forth through arcane ritual. Not to mention that a lich is completely and utterly disconnected from the concept of human morality, in that they literally shove their soul into a fucking box just for a chance to "live" eternal.
shit, you may live forever, but it would mean having to live forever with no genitals. fuck that.
>>46475361
>not freeing yourself from base instinctual urges to push disgusting meat together
>not pursuing higher truths and knowledge
There is no need for offspring when you are eternal.
Blood sacrifice.
The more the better.
Let's say it's percentile. Starting rate, requiring one innocent, is 5%. Adding another soul improves the rate by .2% each to a maximum of 80%. (Where are you getting 376 people to slaughter, though?)
They have to be intelligent and they can't be Evil. Good souls are worth five times as much if they are tortured to death. (Thus, torturing 75 [+1] Good people to death is the most efficient route.) The initial innocent must be Good, of the same base race as you, and can't be an adult. They must die in extreme agony.
The ritual (i.e. festival of death) lasts twelve hours on a new moon after sunset until sunrise. Even if you're only doing one (with your pithy 5% odds), you'll have to torture them all night. Even in the best case you'll still have a 20% chance of dying because anchoring your soul externally ain't easy, chump. The echoing emanations of death surrounding you for hours and hours makes it easier, not perfect.
You thought it was complex? No, it's just expensive and either suicidal or incredibly, unthinkably brutal. Why do you think people know what liches are? If it was really hard they'd be myths.
>>46475262
Archliches always have a purpose to becoming a lich, they have some overriding directive that forbids them to die.
Usually they must guard something for eternity or act as a living library for things that must not be forgotten.
It fits the concept. They're still unnatural things, but more like a twisted, pitiful existence rather than a malignant and horrific one. Cursed to remain forever to serve a higher goal, just as disconnected because they are now a machine.
If they became an archlich just to live forever, well, they're just a lich who's trying to trick you into not murdering them.
>>46475458
That sounds nerd as fuck.
>>46475510
Yes and your point?
>>46475475
I'm certainly glad your not my gm if your trying this hard to make it edgy and bad, seeing as you really gave no information on the ritual besides that it's bad because you hurt people and the fucking name.
Christ even piazo made a better ritual than you.
>>46475033
>your humanity
Quite honestly this is a wizard we are talking about, he was bound to powderize, and snort his humanity sooner rather than later anyway.
>>46475607
There's no real ritual in my view. It's just a shit ton of violence followed by ripping out your soul and jamming it in a box.
The violence just makes it easier.
It's not edgy so much as purely distasteful. You don't want to kill so many people? Don't become an undead monstrosity.
It is meant to be unpleasant and not cool or interesting. It is getting your hands incredibly, incredibly dirty.
>>46475651
>there's no ritual
Maybe if your a shitty sorcerer or something but I'm pretty sure, at least if we're following some kind of logic or something, that every single edition of at least DnD has called for one, unless we're talking you speshal home brew setting in which case I stand by my statement earlier because random murder is an everyday fucking thing for a party and this sounds no different.
In my homebrew setting, there's three types of Liches:
The usual necromancy Lich of which there are only one in the world, though another wizard is very close to becoming one. The ritual to become one involves great arcane magics where one must destroy that which he cares about most in the most decisive manner and ritually bind the memory of that single moment of loss with his soul, transporting this mixture of essence into a vessel or container specifically constructed to hold the raw soul-stuff. The ritual is also incredibly easy to fuck up, as it requires many high-level castings in a specific order over a considerable span of time.
The second type is the Demilich. Essentially extremely powerful wizards whose magical powers were so great that they simply never got around dying and eventually forgot about it. Only reason they're even relevant to the setting is that the ruins of their places of power are of great interest to adventurers. Demiliches almost never take interest in mortal matters, as their time is spent traveling the boundaries between planes and unraveling the secrets of time and space.
The third type is the most fearsome and powerful, known as the Archlich, of which there is also only one in the world. The Archlich is a mortal being who was just born wrong, somehow irredeemably evil and without a single hint of goodness. As such, they essentially skip the "sacrifice the thing you care most about" part of lichdom and jump right into "immortal monster" part.
It's pretty simple and black/white, but it's D&D 5th, so who gives a fuck as long as the group has fun.
>>46475707
Random murder is often as quick and efficient as possible for a party, not an extended fiesta of blood and screams for twelve hours.
And if you're playing with a party of edgemasters who don't mind that, then why even try to prevent them from becoming a lich? Let them be liches. If you don't like their behavior you shouldn't play with them, impeding them with minutia is just wasting everyone's time.
Otherwise they do find it disagreeable and they should find it disagreeable. It is not meant to be appealing.
>>46475756
>not meant to be appealing
You forget that the one doing this already makes corpses, as my gm has so colorfully described, dance, how does this not appeal to them? "Some more murderand corpses for me to raise? Ok." Again all of these negative features you describe are lost in that evil party, and honestly I feel trying to discuss this anymore will just leave us running in circles. All I can say is that sure it can be dark but you loose the point of being a wizard without ritual, and it can be edgy, but just let it be so, don't focus on it, focus on the guy becoming the Lich.
>>46475852
Why the fuck should there be negative features for an evil fucking horror wanting to become yet more of an evil fucking horror?
It's lost on them because it is exactly what they are and therefore ascension towards exactly what they want to be, a natural progression towards their character's apotheosis.
>>46475872
If you want to play a numbers only game, go back to 4e or play some WhamFantasy crap. Fluff has a place, and it' certainly not in your game.
>>46475918
Fluff is fine, but there shouldn't be a punishment for a character following their path and becoming a more ideal version of their current self. It is what they want to be, walking forward to their perfected form.
If this is being a bloodthirsty cunt becoming the bloodthirstiest cunt, what the fuck ever.
>>46458687
I usually have them make a pact with even more powerful undead or demons, the idea being that you have to build upon a foundation of "eternal-ness" in order to get there yourself. Form there the ritual is just something to please their patron.
>>46475872
Naw man, sorry if that came out wrong but I agree, fluff is great, but by the point in which you try to be a Lich, you jumped into the deep end ages ago, and been prepared for this, why the fuck would this effect you when the end result is undeath anyway?
>>46472552
When you add a comma before "and"
with oxford comma: I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty.
as opposed to
Without oxford comma: I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.
>>46459368
>specific feat of evil unique to the person and their situation.
Reminds me of the behelit sacrifices from Berserk, to become an "apostle"
>>46458983
>The phylactery, which can be almost any manner of object, must be of the finest craftsmanship and materials with value not less than 1,500 gold pieces per level of the wizard.
I wish they made this a point in later editions, because the "clever" players who insist they an enchant a grain of sand as a phylactery and throw it in the ocean are annoying.
Even worse are the ones who insist that the value of the phylactery is subjective, and if they say it's worth 1,500 gold per level to them it must still count.
In my DM's setting, sorcerers and wizards always complete rituals to 'level up', usually nothing serious, just a formal show of power and servitude to magic, and after a certain level and age, instead of simply becoming immensely powerful casters and sooner or later die, their souls refuse to leave their bodies, and their energy and iron will keeps them animate. They become Liches, and though the older ones usually prefer solitude to search for more knowledge undisturbed by others, some of the more open-minded individuals form a cabal in wich they can sare wisdom for the sake of sharing it.
Liches just become. It's just an affliction that won't matter to the one afflicted. No evil stuff needed, just a lust for knowledge / power, and patience.
But what about the Demi-lich??
If a ritual to create a Lich is bad, the Demi-Lich would involve killing and/or using the soul of a very powerful entity or entities.
Like, slaying a Titan and consuming his blood, or corrupt a Metallic dragon or something more epic... any ideas?
>>46471960
because apparently the magic only sticks well to hard parts.
if you fleshwarped yourself to have more hard parts you would have more remaining.
also some illithid wizards manage to lich themselves and preserve their fleshy bits so you can try to steal their secrets.
>>46475101
he said "you took your time killing her, didn't you? So I'll take my time as well."
Who did the blonde kill? Were they the lich's friend or adopted daughter or mother or something?
>>46475458
>There is no need for offspring when you are eternal.
you can always adopt.
>>46479267
While he was in disguise as an adventurer to gather information he joined up with some low levels and became friends with them, she killed them all slowly while he was elsewhere.
>>46475101
>papa bones will never give you a big hug
>>46458687
I would probably leave it up to a coin flip. It's the one thing that would drive a wizard insane.
>>46464382
I believe the intent is to insinuate that the permanency spell in the first case is applied to the reincarnation spell, as the lich may need to re-form multiple times, as a lich does.
>>46477346
Oh, I have an idea. What if, like, demiliches are made from a lich using too much astral travel? Yeah, like their bodies start to fall apart, until they're nothing but a tiny little skull. That would be pretty cool.Oh, wait, that's exactly what happens. Read the Monster Manual anon.
>>46482125
Wait, I thought it was because they stopped feeding souls into their phylactery their physical body kind of degraded until a skull was left? That, or the weird dudes who actually want to become one and deck themselves out with magical bling to trap even more souls.
>>46481876
No, by AD&D magic item creation rules, you're feeding [reincarnation] and [magic jar] to enchant an item], and making [enchant an item] permanent.
see >>46464833
>>46482356
>Wait, I thought it was because they stopped feeding souls into their phylactery their physical body kind of degraded until a skull was left?
This is accurate.
Demi-liches aren't powerful wizards because they're demi-liches, they're demi-liches because they're powerful wizards.
Or, more specifically, they're powerful wizards who've been astrally projecting for so long that they've completely decayed despite their decay slowing magic.
And when you astrally project for that long while trying to learn extraplanar secrets, you end up learning enough extraplanar secrets to become an powerful wizard.
>>46476449
Not just using ultrarare/expensive materal so that the object can be the size of a grain of rice and still cost 1,500 gold.
Plutonium phylacteries as the ultimate "fuck you" to the living.
I am fond of the dozens of different lich kinds in our campaigns.
There's the blood kind, requiring the standard copious amounts of blood sacrifice, including specifically newborn blood (not because it's "good" blood, but because it is "fresh", untouched by alignments). This kind is pretty easy to accomplish, and has the neat added feature that regular soaking in your blood pool rejuvenates your body, but has a downside; your phylactery is literally a big pool of blood. You better hope some motherfucker doesn't spill it, because it needs to have some depth to it.
There's the souldoll/stick figure liches, who are annoying - if their physical body is destroyed their mind always swaps places with a close sentient being if possible, or if not, goes into the doll until they can gather up their mental faculties and get that doll/figure moving again.
There's the overpowered time lich, who has the crazy survivability of reforming instantly when slain, because their phylactery is not a physical object - it is a moment in time. The only real way of killing them is to strike down their (always) defenseless body at the apex of the ritual - but this of course neccessitates time travel, thus making sure a time lich is very very hard to kill. They too have a downside, namely that they can't gain levels (the players were never informed of this however, and are convinced the sole surviving time lich in existance is going to grow immeasurably powerful)
>>46475505
The problem with that is even if their intent was never eternal life, they are still eternal.
Morality shifts when you live that long, the suffering of mortals becomes more distant, you don't feel pain any more and are distant from empathy. Lives bleed into kingdoms, bleed into dynasties, bleed into empires and all lead to dust.
To one outside the cycle, you can see the whole picture and live outside the immediate. Heroes struggle, some succeed, some fail, in a century or two the accomplishment is washed away, heroes forgotten or even made villians depending on history (which is then either erased or distorted further by more modern historians).
What mortals think is good for them and what actually benefits them are completely different concepts. You can tell them, but they reject it as either cynical or false.
Then you begin to see that what they call free-will is all an illusion leading them to repeat the same mistakes without the knowledge to know any different and that you should think for them.
They grow to despise you because you don't respect every little life that exists as a mote of dust in time and mark you as a tyrant even..... evil?
Only the good die young, because only the young believe it. The old are cynics, the ancients are assholes, and the eternal are abominations.
>>46482940
There's the transmutational lich, who have a car-sized bulky phylactery, that, while it can be moved, has some peculiar requirements to it's room. It has to be surrounded by walls at roughly 10 feets distance (meaning you probably need to teleport out when reforming), but with the real neat ability that the material of the wall dictates your physical abilities when reforming. Lead walls makes you immune to divination and pretty resistant to magic, mithril walls make you superspeeded, adamantite makes you pretty durable, and there's dozens of other materials, cheap and expensive, known to work with this method.
There are dimensional liches, who achieve lichdom by taking their mortality and tying it into another plane, effectively becoming immortal because their mortality is elsewhere. They'll usually reform fairly close to where their body was destroyed, and a dimensional lich's destruction requires either a permanent closure of his plane, or severing him from it, which is harder than one might think.
And then there's the "standard liches", notable in their feature that their phylactery can be crafted in a myriad of shapes. They don't have any real big power advantages aside from this method of trickery.
>>46482967
This^
I believe the ritual or intent don't make a lich evil, immortals are just so far and so long removed from humanity that it becomes a natural process in time.
You may not even try to be malicious but your concept of morality and your value system are so alien that the living interpret it as such.
![Sokushinbutsu4[4].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/c0Y4ill.jpg "Sokushinbutsu4[4].jpg")
Shokushinbutsu
>>46458687
Wouldn't that be a lichtual?
I think liches are hella over-rated. I mean, didn't he-man beat the shit outta skeletor all day long.
>>46485247
Im not sure what skeletor is, since he still has meat on his bones
>>46482967
>>46483112
I get what you mean but I find it a little boring immortality eventually always defualts to "evil".
>>46476449
>I wish they made this a point in later editions, because the "clever" players who insist they an enchant a grain of sand as a phylactery and throw it in the ocean are annoying.
My view on liches and their phylacteries is that they basically have to wear them for their body to keep moving (separating the phylactery far enough from the body is like the body being destroyed), and furthermore, that the form of the phylactery is determined by the requirements of the process, so it's a fairly large and obvious amulet. There might be some variation from lich to lich, but if you decide to become one yourself, you certainly don't get to specify the form.
Don't let your players rule-lawyer on you. The rulebooks are just guidelines so the DM doesn't have to think of everything.
>>46486618
Do you feel remorse when you step on an ant? Do you attempt to pay reparations to the colony that lost one of its members? Do you even stop what you're doing?
If you needed a hundred ants for an experiment that could provide insight on a previously unknown subject, or to produce something that could personally help you to grow stronger (or perhaps just heal up a wound with AntPaste or some shit), would you feel so bad about it that you wouldn't do it?
From your perspective, that ant will be dead within a few weeks at most anyways. There's really no point to stopping and caring about it, or really any number of them beyond the potential ecological ramifications of eradicating every colony in an area.
There's also another fact to consider: Ants are fucking dicks.
You show up anywhere near their colony, and they get into your stuff, crawl all over you, bite and sting you, etc. FUCK ants. Ants are shitheads.
>>46458687
Well, it depends. Do you want barebones or the common opinion?
Common belief amongst those aspiring to lichdom dictates that you must capture an angel of some description and ''render it down'' to produce a raw resource from which you create your phylactery. Then, on a night when the moons shine blue, all 3 of them, you must bind your soul to the vessel you have created. This requires you to imbue it with some of your physical essence and ''rend your soul with an act of unspeakable evil''. Then, your phylactery will be complete but you will need to keep it powered with souls by sacrificing people and drawing their souls into it once a month, roughly, though soul energy can be ''stored''. One soul does you for one month. Provided you have conducted everything properly, you will neither age nor degrade and remain immortal and perfect.
In reality, you need to create an item from any desired material which you must then cast a series of spells on that object or with that object as the target. These are Clone and Magic Jar, though other spells can be added to protect the phylactery. These must then be repeated and a daily basis for 100 days to render the effect permanent.
Next, one must cast Animate Undead on ones own corpse for the same period, rendering the spell permanent as well. This is made possible through the previous work with the phylactery and is thus highly dependent on the success of the phylactery stage. This has the disconcerting effect of leaving one essentially piloting ones own body rather than actually living in it but Liches get used to it quickly.
Finally, once both preparations are completed, one must construct a potion of immense toxicity, imbue it with a healing spell powerful enough to counteract it, and consume said potion. This must be performed once a day for 100 days. At the end of this cycle, one will have been rendered into a permanenet state of undeath, negating aging and such. This can be skipped if desired.
>>46487556
>>46458687
This has resulted in a lot of dark and edgy ''liches'' in my setting, whom aren't actually liches and typically just live a natural lifespan believing themselves immortal, and a rare few actual liches.
Surprisingly enough, the false liches are often the more dangerous of the 2. Ya see, they aren't just powerful, like the other liches, they are greedy enough to engage in acts that require them to perform acts of unspeakable evil and foolish enough to believe that that sort of convoluted nonsense could grant one lichdom while also being utterly sure of their immortality.
The true liches are not inherently evil and are generally just immensely wise scholarly types or the ilk. They can be just as dangerous as the false liches but oftentimes they just curate their own massive library and add to it whenever they can. One even took over as ruler of a country, having been the former lord of a fiefdom and seceding after having achieved lichdom. Everyone assumes that the lich killed the lord and took over and turned it into a horrifying world when, in reality, hes been using soulless undead to reduce the amount of manual labour required and generally striving to improve peoples lives.
>>46479217
Marrow is soft, though.
Do liches end up with hollow bones?
Are they light and easy toprincess carry?
>>46486874
>>46486618
>>46482967
What I see as the proper reason for immortals to normally be evil in D&D world is that there are objectively real, confirmable gods and heavens and hells. I mean, Hell's a place you can go visit, see how awful it is, and confirm that bad people go there.
If you're a good person, becoming immortal is denying yourself heaven. If you're evil, becoming immortal is avoiding hell.
The way I see the D&D universe is that the Inner and Outer Planes are in a pocket of order cut out of the chaos of the far larger (possibly infinite) Far Realm. There may be other such bubbles, but the Far Realm can't be crossed. The cosmic goal of Good is to expand the Heavens with pure souls, while the cosmic goal of Law is to beat back the impinging chaos of the Far Realm. So the cosmic difference between Lawful Good and Chaotic Good is that LG would defend even the Hells against the Far Realm, while CG would prefer for the Far Realm to subsume the Hells. The Abyss is notable among Hells because it blends into the Far Realm with no clear boundary. Limbo shares this trait, but also lacks any fundamental passion to extend itself, while the goodness of Arborea includes a desire to preserve itself against the Far Realm at its root. The True Neutral of druids has a cosmic goal of preserving the Prime Material, and denying Heavens, Hells, or the Far Realm the stuff of its life. The Devil Princes see the concordance and pleasantness of the Heavens as unnecessary weakness and distraction from the war on the Abyss.
Desiring to withhold your soul from heaven is itself the most fundamental deviation from Good possible for a living creature. A willingness to pervert the natural order to achieve this end is Evil.
>>46480034
So is this in a game? Are there any consequences to her dying? The Wikipedia article is shit describing the setting.
