I know that there is an undead book coming out in a few months, is there anything else out there that discusses Lichs in any detail?
(Is looking at Carion Crown and thinking about the potential for extra foes as filler adventures)
My advice:
Persistent Heightened Command Undead.
OR disintegrate on his phylactery.
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Write-up for Undead Revisited:
The horrors of unlife stagger from their darkened graves in this wide-ranging 64-page resource for fans of the unquiet dead! Learn the secret pasts of the haunted spirits known as bodaks, discover the dark delicacies of devourers, test your arms against the deadly graveknight, or tempt the world’s most insidious arcane evil by going face-to-face with a treacherous lich! Undead Revisited provides tons of info and fresh new perspectives on 10 of the most vile undead in the Pathfinder world, including murderous morhgs, deadly nightshades, silent shadows, bone-chilling wights, the spectral dead (wraiths, specters, allips, and banshees) as well as the villainous ravener, otherwise known as an undead dragon!
So, it seems there will be a section on the Lich.
Edit: In addition, AP issue #33, part three of Kingmaker, had an Atrophied Lich - essentially, a much weaker version of a normal Lich.
You are an evil undead bent on knowledge and have no time constraints make plans and contengentcys and know your enemies. Plan whatever they might do, have a really screwed up hiding place for your phylactery, like hidding in a live innocent persons chest and if they remove it will kill them or broken into pieces hidden on multiple planes
Generally I find liches are pretty nasty, since around the time you're a lich you can hide the phylactery in another solar system, and possibly with spells warding it from divination magics.
PS: Liches make the best astronauts.
Creative Director
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Never understood, why liches have to be evil...maybe it's just a guy who wants to know so much, that he grew old and decided to abandon his life in order to know more.
Because the path and ritual and magic you have to use on yourself to become a lich is evil, for one thing. The preservation of your own life at the expense of others, and the open embrace of negative energy into your body are things that will infuse you with such a degree of evil that you pretty much have already BECOME evil as a result of simply attempting or preparing for the transformation.
There are indeed non-evil liches in other campaign settings (Forgotten Realms comes to mind), but for Golarion (and Pathfinder in general) that's just not the case. Partially because of tradition (liches were evil at the start back in the 70s, after all), but mostly because that direction appeals to me and to Paizo much more. I'm not a fan of "diluting" a monster's role in the game by playing fast and loose with alignment restrictions.
We're VERY unlikely to do much with non-evil undead in Pathfinder at all, but if and when we do, and if and when we want something akin to a "good lich," it'll be a brand new template with a different name. Which is sort of what previous editions did with creatures like the archlich or the balenorn. We currently have no plans to do anything like this, but time can change all things.
Well, this isn't specific to the lich... but here is my advice.
Mess with your players. This is especially true if they are longtime players and have all the books and everything.
Lichs need to be humanoid and be wiz/sor right? No. You can make them from a dragon, a ogre mage with druid levels, a storm giant bard... almost anything. The only requirement is, "Each lich must create its own phylactery by using the Craft Wondrous Item feat. The character must be able to cast spells and have a caster level of 11th or higher". Beyond that, it is wide open.
My thought is some kind of druid that keeps shambling mounds around, and uses lightning like it is going out of style. Maybe even a half-blue dragon, or blue dragon.
As others have mentioned, lich have no time limits. Think of things that would take preposterously long, and have the lich do it.
Do whatever you can to hide the fact that it is a lich (Alter Self is nice) so the players don't even think to look for a phylactery until the second or third time they defeat it.
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I'm not a fan of "diluting" a monster's role in the game by playing fast and loose with alignment restrictions.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, of course, and as a developer, it is certainly your domain. But just to offer my own opinion, I've never personally been fond of the whole concept where if you belong to a particular race, you must be a particular alignment. I find such restrictions tend to subdue game dynamics and encourage metagaming. In a game where your alignment isn't entirely dependent upon the circumstances of your birth (or creation), I find that role-playing (versus roll-playing) becomes a much more important factor when you have to first determine if the person or creature you're looking at is actually an enemy before you rush in guns a-blazing. A game that can include roguish, thieving gold dragons and succubi paladins just seems more interesting and more dynamic to me. It suggests that the monsters in the game are agents in their own destiny, not just carbon copies churned off an assembly line. That's just my two cents, anyway.
My advice:
OR disintegrate on his phylactery.
That is certainly an option. All you have to do is figure out which plane he hid it on, where on that plane it is located, and fight through the army of baddies he has unwittingly guarding it.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, of course, and as a developer, it is certainly your domain. But just to offer my own opinion, I've never personally been fond of the whole concept where if you belong to a particular race, you must be a particular alignment. I find such restrictions tend to subdue game dynamics and encourage metagaming. In a game where your alignment isn't entirely dependent upon the circumstances of your birth (or creation), I find that role-playing (versus roll-playing) becomes a much more important factor when you have to first determine if the person or creature you're looking at is actually an enemy before you rush in guns a-blazing.
I'm pretty much in agreement here with Nightwish. This sort of stance does nothing but diminish roleplaying (and roleplaying opportunities), and also makes Pathfinder as a system look heavily biased towards the Golarion campaign setting (which my knowledge is not supposed to be the case) instead of a good core system for different peoples campaigns. By enforcing the idea that being composed of negative energy automatically makes you evil (when negative energy isn't evil) and that positive energy makes you good (when demons and devils are fueled by it), it forces a very specific assumption onto the games which is neither asked for nor sensible.
I cannot (currently) see any benefit for going this route either. It seems to encourage they "Well he had to die 'cause he's a gnoll and gnolls are bad" mentality, which even my brother at the age of five would have quirked a questioning brow to. I cannot see positive side to this either, as I cannot see what is being gained from having black & white alignments based entirely on race that cannot be gained by cultural considerations. Do you think all humans are evil because Nazi Germany would be considered an evil society with an evil ruler? Probably not (and I'm not accusing anyone of that), which is my point.
Now the opposite of this can be just as goofy. If over-emphasized, it makes little sense to see a battalion of succubi paladins every other adventure doing battle with the chaotic evil celestial gold dragons; but I've never or heard of such a level of extremity. It seems people in general just want the option of choice; because this black & white nonsense just throws a monkey wrench into building and running worlds that are even slightly believable.
EDIT: However, I'm willing to hear an explanation for the perceived benefits of such a system. Bonus points if it's not something like "it makes it easier to know what to attack".
As for the concept of "good drow..." That's not something we're ever likely to do in print, but that doesn't mean you can't do one in your home campaign. Your GM's the one who gets to make that call in your game, not us.Does that generally apply to all creatures who have traditional alignments (Orcs, Red Dragons, Gargoyles, etc.)?
Note: I'm not looking for a rule here, just a general assumption.It does indeed apply.
As a general rule, if a writer wants to include a good version of a normally evil creature in a product, that writer has to be VERY GOOD at justifying the choice with great writing.
Good guy versions of normally evil races can be very compelling (see Drizzt), but they also take the teeth out of a race that's handy to have around as a bad guy race (see Drizzt).
That is certainly an option. All you have to do is figure out which plane he hid it on, where on that plane it is located, and fight through the army of baddies he has unwittingly guarding it.
I see he's an amateur... a professional knows to make it a holy artifact on a prime plane -- mortals will move the universe before they'll let someone destroy a religious symbol of significance to their faith.
Besides an army of baddies would probably have a fun time messing with a reforming lich -- whereas the mortals can easily be duped into believing that it is a messiah returning to them.
I know that there is an undead book coming out in a few months, is there anything else out there that discusses Lichs in any detail?
(Is looking at Carion Crown and thinking about the potential for extra foes as filler adventures)
Libris Mortis(3.5) had pages devoted to specific undead.
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Creative Director
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Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, of course, and as a developer, it is certainly your domain. But just to offer my own opinion, I've never personally been fond of the whole concept where if you belong to a particular race, you must be a particular alignment. I find such restrictions tend to subdue game dynamics and encourage metagaming. In a game where your alignment isn't entirely dependent upon the circumstances of your birth (or creation), I find that role-playing (versus roll-playing) becomes a much more important factor when you have to first determine if the person or creature you're looking at is actually an enemy before you rush in guns a-blazing. A game that can include roguish, thieving gold dragons and succubi paladins just seems more interesting and more dynamic to me. It suggests that the monsters in the game are agents in their own destiny, not just carbon copies churned off an assembly line. That's just my two cents, anyway.
It's actually more than my opinion. It's my job as Paizo's Creative Director. I get paid to set the realities of Golarion, and one of those I've decided upon is that all liches are evil.
Liches, in any event, are not a "race" per se. They're magically created undead from a complex ritual that requires evil acts. In a lich's case, its alignment is indeed entirely dependent upon the circumstances of that creation.
For actual races, like, say, goblins or minotaurs or bugbears or chokers, I agree with you—there can and sometimes SHOULD be variants in the alignment category. We've had non-evil orcs and so forth in our adventures plenty, just as we've had evil aasmiars and normally GOOD things in our adventures.
But when it comes to creatures created by evil acts (such as undead) or creatures that are living personifications of alignments (non-native outsiders), deviations from the alignment norm should be and ARE fantastically rare, if not impossible.
I could see a roguish thieving gold dragon in Golarion as a result (heck, we've already got a non-good kinda scary gold dragon ruling one of the nations in Golarion!), but a succubi paladin? You'll probably never see us print that character, becasue succubi are fundamentally chaotic and evil. Demons (and all outsiders) are NOT really in control of their own destiny. They don't really have free will. They're very much bound by their alignment.
Free will, which includes the ability for a creature to choose to be an alignment other than the one that's listed for it in the Bestiary, is a powerful thing. It's something that's denied things like outsiders, and also to most undead. It's NOT something that's denied to aberrations, animals (assuming they somehow magically gain enough Intelligence—at least a score of 3—to make choices), constructs (see animal regarding Intelligence scores), fey, humanoids, magical beasts, monstrous humanoids, oozes (see animals regarding Int), plants, and vermin (again, see animals regarding Int).
Are there exceptions? Absolutely. They just have to be rare, and when they occur, the writer has to be up to the challenge of making that exception compelling and interesting. Not all writers are that good, alas.
I don't know if this applies in Pathfinder, but in 3.5 if they said a race was always evil it really meant a very high percentage and not really always(100%). I never thought that made sense, but I wonder if the always in Pathfinder is 98% or 100%.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, of course, and as a developer, it is certainly your domain. But just to offer my own opinion, I've never personally been fond of the whole concept where if you belong to a particular race, you must be a particular alignment. I find such restrictions tend to subdue game dynamics and encourage metagaming. In a game where your alignment isn't entirely dependent upon the circumstances of your birth (or creation), I find that role-playing (versus roll-playing) becomes a much more important factor when you have to first determine if the person or creature you're looking at is actually an enemy before you rush in guns a-blazing. A game that can include roguish, thieving gold dragons and succubi paladins just seems more interesting and more dynamic to me. It suggests that the monsters in the game are agents in their own destiny, not just carbon copies churned off an assembly line. That's just my two cents, anyway.It's actually more than my opinion. It's my job as Paizo's Creative Director. I get paid to set the realities of Golarion, and one of those I've decided upon is that all liches are evil.
Liches, in any event, are not a "race" per se. They're magically created undead from a complex ritual that requires evil acts. In a lich's case, its alignment is indeed entirely dependent upon the circumstances of that creation.
For actual races, like, say, goblins or minotaurs or bugbears or chokers, I agree with you—there can and sometimes SHOULD be variants in the alignment category. We've had non-evil orcs and so forth in our adventures plenty, just as we've had evil aasmiars and normally GOOD things in our adventures.
But when it comes to creatures created by evil acts (such as undead) or creatures that are living personifications of alignments (non-native outsiders), deviations from the alignment norm should be and ARE fantastically rare, if not impossible.
I could see a roguish thieving gold dragon in Golarion as a result (heck,...
How can an angel have free will to fall if evil can not have free will due to alignment?. I know it is easier to give into temptation than it is to resist, but I don't think that it should be impossible. <--If that is the answer then that is ok. I was really asking out of curiosity.
PS: I am not advocating for succubus paladins or even neutral outsiders that should be evil. After a fall the reformed villain becomes cliche, and I want it stay a rarity.
I could see a roguish thieving gold dragon in Golarion as a result (heck, we've already got a non-good kinda scary gold dragon ruling one of the nations in Golarion!), but a succubi paladin? You'll probably never see us print that character, becasue succubi are fundamentally chaotic and evil. Demons (and all outsiders) are NOT really in control of their own destiny. They don't really have free will. They're very much bound by their alignment.
The succubus paladin was an example of a one in a million thing. The original web article posted on WotC explained that she was redeemed by a celestial that captivated her, and included stats for her at several levels; including different versions for different paths she might have taken after attempting to walk the good-line; with one such example including her as a succubus/fallen-paladin (I think she had a level or two of blackguard as well) to represent the likely chance she couldn't keep it up.
However, outsiders DO have free will. Nothing in my copies of the Pathfinder books suggests otherwise. Last I checked they had a sentient intelligence score, and to my knowledge the fallen angel archtype is very much do-able. Unless you could point me to the page where it says outsiders don't have the ability to make decisions and choices; which at the end of the day is what alignment is about.
EDIT: Please understand that I'm not trying to be rude, and if I come off as a bit blunt, I apologize. However, this statement seems to have no basis outside of your specific view of how Golarion works; not the game itself which is (I thought) supposed to be setting neutral (hence "I play a Pathfinder game set in Golarion" and "I play a Pathfinder game set in Faerun" as opposed to "I play Golarion").
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, of course, and as a developer, it is certainly your domain. But just to offer my own opinion, I've never personally been fond of the whole concept where if you belong to a particular race, you must be a particular alignment. I find such restrictions tend to subdue game dynamics and encourage metagaming. In a game where your alignment isn't entirely dependent upon the circumstances of your birth (or creation), I find that role-playing (versus roll-playing) becomes a much more important factor when you have to first determine if the person or creature you're looking at is actually an enemy before you rush in guns a-blazing. A game that can include roguish, thieving gold dragons and succubi paladins just seems more interesting and more dynamic to me. It suggests that the monsters in the game are agents in their own destiny, not just carbon copies churned off an assembly line. That's just my two cents, anyway.It's actually more than my opinion. It's my job as Paizo's Creative Director. I get paid to set the realities of Golarion, and one of those I've decided upon is that all liches are evil.
Liches, in any event, are not a "race" per se. They're magically created undead from a complex ritual that requires evil acts. In a lich's case, its alignment is indeed entirely dependent upon the circumstances of that creation.
For actual races, like, say, goblins or minotaurs or bugbears or chokers, I agree with you—there can and sometimes SHOULD be variants in the alignment category. We've had non-evil orcs and so forth in our adventures plenty, just as we've had evil aasmiars and normally GOOD things in our adventures.
But when it comes to creatures created by evil acts (such as undead) or creatures that are living personifications of alignments (non-native outsiders), deviations from the alignment norm should be and ARE fantastically rare, if not impossible.
I could see a roguish thieving gold dragon in Golarion as a result (heck,...
I have to agree with James here, and am glad he pointed out what I intended bring up: Liches aren't a race, nor is their transformaiton to evil something that was out of their control -- the path to lichhood is a deliberate and premeditated one, requiring not just a choice, but the repeated reconfirming of that choice with every step along that path.
Furthermore, I reject the trope that "Moral ambiguity is necessary for good storytelling/roleplaying". Yes, yes, moral ambiguity CAN be an excellent plot device and roleplaying vehicle, and I know it's so old school and passe to expect villains to be villains, and heroes to be heroes, and to be able to tell the two apart, but God help me, sometimes it's FUN. And I've NEVER been accused of being a roll-player instead of a role-player, even if I refuse to play my rangers as anything but Good alignment, and even if I assume that pureblooded orcs are probably gonna be evil when I encounter them. Besides, as James points out by agreeing with you regarding actual races, it's possible to have both concepts in one game, even in one setting: Creatures that are evil by definition, and creatures that are usually evil but with exceptions to the rule. After all, without black and white, there would be no gray.
I think James was specifically concerned with Golarion. What people want to do in their own games is less of a concern to him. I think in that case it is completely up to the DM.
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It's interesting to hear that the process to become a lich in Golarion requires evil acts and acts that require the lich to 'sustain it's own existence at the expense of others.'
While the Bestiary didn't include anything other than material cost, level requirements and the Create Wondrous Item feat, there's certainly plenty of leeway to flavor the process to require the sacrifice of thirteen sexually-inexperienced paladins and summoning a lantern archon and forcing it to light-ray-blast a unicorn to death or something, just to 'evil it up.'
Plus, if the new process requires the lich to sustain itself at the expense of others, perhaps liches now have to feed, like ghouls and vampires, through some as-yet-undetailed process, hovering over cribs and stealing breath from babies, or keeping a certain number of paralyzed people stacked like cordwood in the basement, and only being mobile and functional as long as it keeps the right number of them alive and paralyzed, their vital energies sustaining it's fragile and spectacularly-failed attempt at making itself immortal and beyond such mortal necessities as feeding itself.
It's a new take on liches, to be sure. Failures. Crazy old coots that attempted to become immortal and beyond fleshly concerns, but still have to run around like roaches, stuffing food in their maws, desperately trying to avoid running out of whatever evil mojo keeps them functioning.
Scary, but also kinda pathetic, since they could have saved 120,000 gp and years of research and just gotten bit by a ghoul.
I think a lot of it depends on how you define "evil" and also different gradations of evilness. There's also the whole question of free will and of redemption.
There's also the case of politics making for strange bedfellows. Asmodeus and Zon-Kothon, for example, are both extremely un-nice gods, but they both agreed with all the good and neutral gods that Rovagug was simply bad for business and needed to be dealt with. Or at least Asmodeus thought that. Zon-Kuthon probably just thought sewing up another god into the planet was a chance for some world-class bondage with no safeword.
In any case, liches are likely much the same, and a number of them are likely affably evil and are perfectly willing to get along with good and neutral sorts so long as it suits their shared interests, and just because you detect as evil doesn't mean that you vote or attend the Evil Party Fundraiser.
As I see it, liches are mostly coasting on evil laurels. It may take sacrificing a thousand souls to gain their second-rate immortality, but they'd willingly do it again because it beats the alternative. If the price was saving a thousand souls they'd probably do that too.
Then of course comes the theological question that if you go with Martin Luther and the only good deeds that count are those done with a joyous heart, does the same go true with the evil deeds? Does sacrificing souls have to be done with gleeful malice, or will bored ennui do just as well?
In any case, once having broken those eggs to make that omelet, or at least that phylactery, the lich then gets back to whatever it was that motivated them in the first place. That may or may not have been a good goal, but was most likely something involved with research or scholarship.
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Never understood, why liches have to be evil...maybe it's just a guy who wants to know so much, that he grew old and decided to abandon his life in order to know more.Because the path and ritual and magic you have to use on yourself to become a lich is evil, for one thing. The preservation of your own life at the expense of others, and the open embrace of negative energy into your body are things that will infuse you with such a degree of evil that you pretty much have already BECOME evil as a result of simply attempting or preparing for the transformation.
There are indeed non-evil liches in other campaign settings (Forgotten Realms comes to mind), but for Golarion (and Pathfinder in general) that's just not the case. Partially because of tradition (liches were evil at the start back in the 70s, after all), but mostly because that direction appeals to me and to Paizo much more. I'm not a fan of "diluting" a monster's role in the game by playing fast and loose with alignment restrictions.
We're VERY unlikely to do much with non-evil undead in Pathfinder at all, but if and when we do, and if and when we want something akin to a "good lich," it'll be a brand new template with a different name. Which is sort of what previous editions did with creatures like the archlich or the balenorn. We currently have no plans to do anything like this, but time can change all things.
I understand. If you use evil to get what you need or want, you are evil in the eyes of observers. Even if you did it for a good cause, you are still evil in a different way.
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I don't know if this applies in Pathfinder, but in 3.5 if they said a race was always evil it really meant a very high percentage and not really always(100%). I never thought that made sense, but I wonder if the always in Pathfinder is 98% or 100%.
That is indeed the way it works in Pathfinder, although whether that means 99%, 98%, 95%, 99.9% or 99.999423% is up to each individual GM's tastes.
For Golarion, the number I use varies by race.
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How can an angel have free will to fall if evil can not have free will due to alignment?. I know it is easier to give into temptation than it is to resist, but I don't think that it should be impossible. <--If that is the answer then that is ok. I was really asking out of curiosity.
PS: I am not advocating for succubus paladins or even neutral outsiders that should be evil. After a fall the reformed villain becomes cliche, and I want it stay a rarity.
Anything is possible. Including a creature without free will breaking those constraints to fall from grace. It's rare enough that when it happens, it does because it's part of the backstory of someone like, say, Asmodeus.
It's not impossible. But when it does happen, it's legendary.
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I understand. If you use evil to get what you need or want, you are evil in the eyes of observers. Even if you did it for a good cause, you are still evil in a different way.
Doesn't work that way in Pathfinder.
Evil and good in the game are actual quantifiable things. It doesn't matter if you think your'e doing something good even if it's an evil act. It's still an evil act.
The sketchy part comes in via the GM, because what one GM might call "evil" is not what another might call "evil."
Except I'd use the acronym "GM" instead of that other one that's copyrighted. :-P
I know. I just forget sometimes. It is hard to break old habits. :)
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While the Bestiary didn't include anything other than material cost...Not quite true. Note the Alignment restriction for liches says: "Any Evil." Same goes for vampires.
So, if the evil alignment is proof that liches have to actively do something evil to become liches, does that mean that vampires and ghouls (wights, wraiths, shadows, spectres, etc.) have to actively do something evil to become vampires and ghouls, and, if they choose not to, someone slain by one could just choose to 'stay dead' rather than rise as undead?
That's not how it seemed to me, but would certainly be an interesting option.
It would limit the option of having vampires or ghouls that were nice people in life, and subtract from that horror option (since anyone who was an evil undead *chose* to be an evil undead, or performed some evil acts to become undead), but also makes the world a bit more comfortably black and white, since you never have to feel any sort of pity for the miller's wife who got captured and turned into a vampire, since the fact that she became a vampire instead of just staying properly dead means that she actively chose to be evil.
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Not that I want to see Pathfinder 2 anytime this decade, but when it does come out, please make negative energy and the negative energy plane explicitly evil and put a stake in this conversation forever.
The notion of turning evil because you replaced the mindless neutral positive energy animating your meat with mindless neutral negative energy is just eye-rollingly eccentric.
"Oh help, I'm all filled up with seething neutrality, and it's turning me evil!"
While the Bestiary didn't include anything other than material cost...Not quite true. Note the Alignment restriction for liches says: "Any Evil." Same goes for vampires.So, if the evil alignment is proof that liches have to actively do something evil to become liches, does that mean that vampires and ghouls (wights, wraiths, shadows, spectres, etc.) have to actively do something evil to become vampires and ghouls, and, if they choose not to, someone slain by one could just choose to 'stay dead' rather than rise as undead?
That's not how it seemed to me, but would certainly be an interesting option.
It would limit the option of having vampires or ghouls that were nice people in life, and subtract from that horror option (since anyone who was an evil undead *chose* to be an evil undead, or performed some evil acts to become undead), but also makes the world a bit more comfortably black and white, since you never have to feel any sort of pity for the miller's wife who got captured and turned into a vampire, since the fact that she became a vampire instead of just staying properly dead means that she actively chose to be evil.
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Not that I want to see Pathfinder 2 anytime this decade, but when it does come out, please make negative energy and the negative energy plane explicitly evil and put a stake in this conversation forever.
The notion of turning evil because you replaced the mindless neutral positive energy animating your meat with mindless neutral negative energy is just eye-rollingly eccentric.
"Oh help, I'm all filled up with seething neutrality, and it's turning me evil!"
It seems that becoming undead does something to a person's mind, which is why most undead are evil. I can see someone who died just before a crowning achievement be evil on resentment alone that the moment was taken from them as an example. Many undead don't remember their former lives, and they just take on the base mentality of the monster.
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It's actually more than my opinion. It's my job as Paizo's Creative Director. I get paid to set the realities of Golarion, and one of those I've decided upon is that all liches are evil.
Liches, in any event, are not a "race" per se. They're magically created undead from a complex ritual that requires evil acts. In a lich's case, its alignment is indeed entirely dependent upon the circumstances of that creation.
Oh, I totally agree with you in the case of liches. I think the old 3.5 "good liches," like balenorns, either followed a different path to attain their undead status, or I think I remember something about them becoming redeemed by performing a completely selfless act. It always seemed odd to me that that would immediately shift them all the way over to Lawful Good, but I could see something like that setting something in motion, sort of like Xena's quest for redemption ramped up a few notches.
I can also see some undead who were created by virtue of their own evil acts (shadows, etc.), or who are crazed to the point that rational thought is beyond them due to the horrific nature of their death (banshees, etc.), being beyond or nearly beyond redemption. On the other hand, in some other types of undead I can totally see the occasional heroic specimen. While a vampire will always hove near the border evil, due to the things it must do to survive, they are not beyond the capacity for love, honesty and truly and sincerely good acts. Though it would be silly to have a whole world of Louis, and Angels and Spikes, and Nick Knights, and Aidans/Mitchells to be running around waxing redemptive in their brooding way, but its not beyond probability that there are a few of them out there who have learned to curb their appetites and either minimize the risk to their victims or wheel and deal with their victims for freely given blood.
I could see a roguish thieving gold dragon in Golarion as a result (heck, we've already got a non-good kinda scary gold dragon ruling one of the nations in Golarion!), but a succubi paladin?
Yeah, as Ashiel pointed out, she was a unique being, but her backstory was interesting and they covered the bases to show how and why she became good (even had obtain special gauntlets that would allow her to wield holy weapons without harm). WotC had a contest to see who could create the most interesting NPC. The winner was the succubus paladin, who is now the star of her own module published by that company. They also provided future stats for higher level versions of her, both good and evil, depending on whether she stuck to the path or strayed from it. She had a distinctive Aribeth de Tylmarande flavor to her, I thought, :) But yeah, she was a rare thing, and sort of legendary in her own regard, assuming that module and character ever become part of 3.5 canon. There have been other examples of good succubi in movies and literature (one that comes to mind is the succubus from Piers Anthony's For Love of Evil, who essentially turns good for the sake of true love after an epic struggle against her own nature ... at least I think that's the character, it's been awhile since I read that series).
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It seems that becoming undead does something to a person's mind, which is why most undead are evil. I can see someone who died just before a crowning achievement be evil on resentment alone that the moment was taken from them as an example. Many undead don't remember their former lives, and they just take on the base mentality of the...
I think vampires are an exception to that rule (as are liches, of course). Classically, vampires have always retained memory of their former lives, and if I'm reading the vampire template correctly, it can be applied at any point during a character's progression without requiring they abandon all their class levels, so I think the development team is trying to preserve that aspect, keeping them as pretty much the most human of all the undead.
I see he's an amateur... a professional knows to make it a holy artifact on a prime plane -- mortals will move the universe before they'll let someone destroy a religious symbol of significance to their faith.That is certainly an option. All you have to do is figure out which plane he hid it on, where on that plane it is located, and fight through the army of baddies he has unwittingly guarding it.
The L Ron Hubbard defense, eh? Not a bad plan - you are immortal after all. Create a personality cult around yourself when you are "alive" and make your phylactery an artifact for the religion and then "die."
It seems that becoming undead does something to a person's mind, which is why most undead are evil. I can see someone who died just before a crowning achievement be evil on resentment alone that the moment was taken from them as an example. Many undead don't remember their former lives, and they just take on the base mentality of the...
But you are a lich - you didn't just DIE. You actively made a plan to avoid your own demise.
Maybe this explains vampires or other undead, but not liches.
So where is the good-equivalent conversion? Some permanent joining with the planes of Good and positive energy? There should be some path to immortality for the forces of Good who wish to go on fighting the good fight for more than just their allotted mortal span, some apotheosis into some form of good subtype outsider while retaining class levels. With maybe a relic to replace the phylactery. Sure, the path should be hard and painful, but I'd love to see such a path even if it is nearly impossible to succeed at.
I see he's an amateur... a professional knows to make it a holy artifact on a prime plane -- mortals will move the universe before they'll let someone destroy a religious symbol of significance to their faith.That is certainly an option. All you have to do is figure out which plane he hid it on, where on that plane it is located, and fight through the army of baddies he has unwittingly guarding it.
The L Ron Hubbard defense, eh? Not a bad plan - you are immortal after all. Create a personality cult around yourself when you are "alive" and make your phylactery an artifact for the religion and then "die."
It's a starting point -- other options include:
1 -- Implanting it in the tarrasque.
2 -- making it out of an actual artifact (sphere of annihilation comes to mind).
3 -- Have it be intelligent, with the hidden powers and recharging abilities.
4 -- Simulacrums out and about that are "you" while you hide deeper down.
5 -- Magic Jar it (works best in concert with other choices)
6 -- Make it a place: People will destroy artifacts to win, they'll kill a creature even... but take out an entire physical country? That's a bit more difficult.
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Creative Director
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So where is the good-equivalent conversion? Some permanent joining with the planes of Good and positive energy? There should be some path to immortality for the forces of Good who wish to go on fighting the good fight for more than just their allotted mortal span, some apotheosis into some form of good subtype outsider while retaining class levels. With maybe a relic to replace the phylactery. Sure, the path should be hard and painful, but I'd love to see such a path even if it is nearly impossible to succeed at.
There is none.
Forced symmetry isn't something I'm a fan of. It's okay if there's not a good version of a lich, just as it's okay there's not an evil version of an angel.
So where is the good-equivalent conversion? Some permanent joining with the planes of Good and positive energy? There should be some path to immortality for the forces of Good who wish to go on fighting the good fight for more than just their allotted mortal span, some apotheosis into some form of good subtype outsider while retaining class levels. With maybe a relic to replace the phylactery. Sure, the path should be hard and painful, but I'd love to see such a path even if it is nearly impossible to succeed at.
Become an angel/archon/agathion/et al
Much better choice than the static "oooh I can't die!" BS...
and a lot more useful since you can then possibly be summoned where you can fight without abandon secure in knowing that you can't die while such is happening.
It's interesting to hear that the process to become a lich in Golarion requires evil acts and acts that require the lich to 'sustain it's own existence at the expense of others.'
While the Bestiary didn't include anything other than material cost, level requirements and the Create Wondrous Item feat, there's certainly plenty of leeway to flavor the process to require the sacrifice of thirteen sexually-inexperienced paladins and summoning a lantern archon and forcing it to light-ray-blast a unicorn to death or something, just to 'evil it up.'
Plus, if the new process requires the lich to sustain itself at the expense of others, perhaps liches now have to feed, like ghouls and vampires, through some as-yet-undetailed process, hovering over cribs and stealing breath from babies, or keeping a certain number of paralyzed people stacked like cordwood in the basement, and only being mobile and functional as long as it keeps the right number of them alive and paralyzed, their vital energies sustaining it's fragile and spectacularly-failed attempt at making itself immortal and beyond such mortal necessities as feeding itself.
It's a new take on liches, to be sure. Failures. Crazy old coots that attempted to become immortal and beyond fleshly concerns, but still have to run around like roaches, stuffing food in their maws, desperately trying to avoid running out of whatever evil mojo keeps them functioning.
Scary, but also kinda pathetic, since they could have saved 120,000 gp and years of research and just gotten bit by a ghoul.
Umm.... in a word no.
Many, many, many different sources of immortality reference the need for a sacrifice of some sort to take up the vacuum left by you not dying. This isn't because you have to "evil it up" but because the only way to acquire what you are desiring is through the use of others in away that isn't good regardless of their willingness or lack there of.
It goes with the idea of "you can't get something for nothing" the prospective lich must make a choice -- the magic demands to allow him to do what he wants (i.e. live forever in the form of a lich) and he must decide if he is willing to do and give what the magic wants.
It's his free choice to actually accept this and follow the path.
It could be that there are other paths that would allow a better immortality, be more secure in their immortality or even be more powerful/good -- but the expense is so much more, and some much harder that either:
1. It hasn't been fully discovered yet, being only several sketchy partial almost theorems on how it might be done if someone feels in all the gaps.
2. It's so expensive/impossible that no one is willing to do it.
Also consider that in just becoming a lich you inherently twist the 'natural order' of things. If you allowed yourself to die in all likelihood you'll end up with your soul on one of the outer planes in order to live forever without all the stuff you are going through to be a lich -- so not only are you not ending like you should -- you are also defying all the gods (to some extent) to do so, and removing yourself from the universal cycle.
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FINALLY nothing actually states that any undead beyond the lich are actually fully immortal (and possibly ghost and vampires *maybe*).
It very well could be that Ghouls can die of old age of some flavor, as can vampires, zombies/whatever. All we know is that undead rise out of the remains of life lost -- we certainly don't know how long it lasts.
I've used quite a lot "good" monsters, including vampires and liches, in many adventures I ran. Some of them really did have the Good or Neutral character. But most of them registered as Evil. Never stopped them from being the good guys when I needed it.
I strongly believe that within each of the nine possible characters, wiggle room exists. Some True Neutral guys are just indifferent to cosmic struggles of worldviews, while others seek to uphold a certain ideal of cosmic balance. The same can be said about Evil guys - some are black crusaders, some have insatiable ambitions, while some are just jerks.
Liches, the way I see them, run the whole gamut. Some become liches to better serve some evil power. Some seek undeath to become stronger and to build evil empires. Some are just selfish enough to figure their continuous active presence on the First Material Plane is well worth whatever gruesome price must be paid to become a lich. Actual motivations range wildly, from superficially noble ("I have sworn to protect the Royal Family, and I won't let death stand in the way of my duty") to extremely petty ("There are many angry people waiting for me in the Afterlife, so I'm not exactly in a hurry to get there"), but it's all ancillary to the fact that you're flipping the bird at the laws of cosmos and turning yourself into an undead monstrosity.
However, just because I wouldn't like to see any lich at my Christmas table doesn't mean every single one of them is plotting something horrible at the moment, or that he ever will. Nor does it stop him from being cultured and sympathetic. In the games I run, a random lich found in a crypt may attack the PCs or try to manipulate them into serving him, but he might as well invite them to a friendly game of chess, ask about local gossip and offer a handsome reward for shaking down those annoying ghoul neighbors. Sometimes, he may even offer help in dealing with something evil, for reasons not necessarily nefarious. I think it's much more fun this way.
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This thread has me wondering what exactly a ravener is. Is it supposed to replace the dracolich or is it something else entirely? It is presented with the same flavor of something trying to attain immortality and also requiring an evil alignment.
I agree that these good versions of monsters should be far from the norm and used only in very rare cases with great care. Drow are the example that come to my mind whenever this situation comes up. It's obvious that good drow are an interesting concept especially when its original and well thought out. But when it is overdone in such a way that it becomes common it just gets old.
So yes a good lich could and should exist in some campaign if the DM feels it belongs there. But there should be a very compelling story to tell with a character like this, otherwise it just feels fake and forced.
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Creative Director
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This thread has me wondering what exactly a ravener is. Is it supposed to replace the dracolich or is it something else entirely? It is presented with the same flavor of something trying to attain immortality and also requiring an evil alignment.
Raveners are indeed our version of the dracolich. They're from Bestiary 2.
Evil and good in the game are actual quantifiable things. It doesn't matter if you think you're doing something good even if it's an evil act. It's still an evil act.
And I personally like it that way. It actually improves roleplaying to have some things be black and white. It orients the characters in the world by providing the framework everyone works off of.
If the designers don't establish that 'devils are evil as far as we are concerned', nonevil devils won't be as extraordinary. Each race or monster type should be evaluated individually based on its unique lore and biology of course. In the case of liches I personally could go either way, but I respect and appreciate the fact that Paizo is establishing the hard extremes in these matters. From the sounds of it there will be plenty of PF lich lore that establishes them as Evil, so that should help.
If you are going to roleplay alignments compatible with 3.5 DnD, it's practically imperative to have Good and Evil stated in RAW so everyone has a common reference to judge the different shades of gray by. Not that there still won't be plenty of differing opinions on whether the game designers made the right call for this or that race, that's where rule 0 kicks in fortunately.
I see he's an amateur... a professional knows to make it a holy artifact on a prime plane -- mortals will move the universe before they'll let someone destroy a religious symbol of significance to their faith.That is certainly an option. All you have to do is figure out which plane he hid it on, where on that plane it is located, and fight through the army of baddies he has unwittingly guarding it.
The L Ron Hubbard defense, eh? Not a bad plan - you are immortal after all. Create a personality cult around yourself when you are "alive" and make your phylactery an artifact for the religion and then "die."
It seems that becoming undead does something to a person's mind, which is why most undead are evil. I can see someone who died just before a crowning achievement be evil on resentment alone that the moment was taken from them as an example. Many undead don't remember their former lives, and they just take on the base mentality of the...But you are a lich - you didn't just DIE. You actively made a plan to avoid your own demise.
Maybe this explains vampires or other undead, but not liches.
I was not talking about all undead, just the ones like wraiths and ghouls.
As for Liches dealing in such things is an evil act in the game so you were evil before you became a lich anyway. Now it is possible for a lich to repent for his actions and try to be good, but it should still be a rare thing. I can also see a vampire that only hunts evil people.
So where is the good-equivalent conversion? Some permanent joining with the planes of Good and positive energy? There should be some path to immortality for the forces of Good who wish to go on fighting the good fight for more than just their allotted mortal span, some apotheosis into some form of good subtype outsider while retaining class levels. With maybe a relic to replace the phylactery. Sure, the path should be hard and painful, but I'd love to see such a path even if it is nearly impossible to succeed at.
There are some things that should be done on a by group basis. There does not need to be rules for everything. If you want to do it just do it, or try to convince the DM. :)