Good old gentle repose.
Taly, ah, but can you be something other than evil, after you become a lich? Centuries wear on, the novelty of evil fades, so a dm ran a neutral lich we encountered.
It might have something to do with the fact you locked your humanity in a box and are being kept alive by energy from the negative plane. As time goes on that is just going to drive you deeper and deeper into your own little world. There is no turning back, you can not undo becoming a lich, it is done, and you have forsaken humanity forever. Creating undead is an evil act, this also applies to yourself.
If a mummy merely guards and kills trespassers into its ancestral pyramid, how is it evil? Just a lawful guardian.Again I think part of it has to do with the whole infused with negative energy, trapping the persons soul until destroyed thing that goes along with being undead. Also if you lined up 10 little girls the mummie would smite each and every one of them, it guards and kills without any sense of right and wrong. Mindless killing machines made with negative energy sound rather evil. For the more mindful mummies, see Lich above.
I am not sure why everyone assumes Lich and Immortal are synonymous. Liches are immortal, but there should be other ways to achieve that immortality without giving up your humanity and devoting yourself to a life of undeath. Aroden lived a pretty long life before he became a god, so you can live for awhile and accomplish a lot of good without sacrificing your soul.
Really the simplest thing to do if you want to live a very long time is under race, write Elf, problem solved.
Neutral clerics can channel negative energy from the negative plane, death and negative sources, wave that right around, kill enemies with it with requirement that they go evil.
I've seen this before, confusing negative energy with evil. Not the same thing. Anti-life isn't evil by default. Life and death are a cycle, two sides of the one linked coin.
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I've seen this before, confusing negative energy with evil. Not the same thing. Anti-life isn't evil by default. Life and death are a cycle, two sides of the one linked coin.
Indeed. There are even fun stories about how borked the world would be if someone did indeed 'beat' nasty old death and make a world without death, from Death Takes a Holiday, to the Sandman variation on that story, to Torchwood's 'Miracle Day.'
Negative energy's always been quiffily defined.
*If* negative energy is seen as a devouring force that absorbs and annhilates other forms of energy, then [cold] and [darkness] descriptor spells, as well as spells like dispel magic and anti-magic field, should probably be perfect examples of negative energy spells, draining away and devouring light energy or heat energy or arcane/magical energy.
*If* it was all corruptive and corrosive and seen as the raw seething material manifestation of the entropy death of the universe, then [acid] descriptor spells would be the perfect example of negative energy spells.
Instead it's all blood and bones and bugs and fear, which makes for a theme of 'WTF?'
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Nice to see the gentle repose thing was already stated, now if you're still looking for a good barometer on when a player should be able to become a lich i would say to check out heroes of horror from 3.5 which introduces the dread necromancer class which eventually becomes a lich as part of it's level progression.
As for a lich that becomes nonevil after enough time due to boredom, I think a lot of that is negated by the existence of the demilich which is stated to happen when a lich literally becomes bored and no longer keeps his mind and body as active as he used to and becomes a literal fragment of his former self trapped in his skull. So in essence the sociopathic, paranoid, crazy genius thing is just as much a survival mechanism since it keeps them busy plotting and planning.
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The problem with the atonement idea is kind of two fold:
First it is stated that though each trip to lichdom is unique all of the ways there damn the soul of the participant requiring them to perform unspeakable acts that will take you down the path of evil. If you want some examples on what this could entail look into some of the obeisances for followers of demon lords, the acts are built to ferret out all but the most evil by design leaving only those most willing or desperate to attempt it.
The second problem is that when you cast atone it's not like it just wipes the slate clean you have to perform some tasks at least equal to the crimes you commited to earn that atonement which can be everything from large vaunting quests for forgiveness to potentially crushing your phylactery and being destroyed so that you can pass on into the great circle of life & death. There is a great written example of this in the carrion crown adventure ashes at dawn if you have access to that.
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How about evil lich + mirror of opposition = good lich?
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Look at all the potential Liches in this thread trying to rationalize their wicked horribleness. Maybe I should round up the Paladin Posse. ^_^
Seriously, though: You want an immortal character? There are lots of ways to do it. If you want to be a good inhuman immortal, get together with some Agathions or Azatas and find a way to become an undying saint. If you want to be a neutral inhuman immortal, just transfer your consciousness into a construct or something. Or do some crazyness with a "clone" spell and "Magic Jar". Or anything else you can dream up.
You want to be liche, be a liche - but you gotta own it, man! Jump in feet first, wallow in the undeath and ickyness. Girls dig bad boys, and guys find creepy girls strangely alluring. Not that it's gonna matter, because you're going to be a dead husk of a walking corpse and let's be frank, that revelation is right up there with merfolk reproduction when it comes to turn-offs for people who aren't also fish. Still, you can use paralyzing touch on the person who rejected you, then turn them into a zombie and laugh as their soulless corpse does your dishes. Not that you're going to have dishes, because... alright, we're going in circles here, but you get the idea. Liches be evil. Embrace it. Love it. Live it. In Osirion they have a name for people who want to be "Good" liches:
Poseurs.
You are going to have to take that up with every Zombie Show/Movie/Book ever written ever since that is the general sense of it.
And those are ghouls in ever game as zombies in D&D:
a. don't eat brainsb. Do anything unless ordered, take no Initiative remembered
c. Make more when bite you
Honestly though, I am not sure why Golems are fine and Mummies are evil other then the whole Negative Energy thing, since I feel like Golems can be mindless killing machines as well.
Mummies weren't all evil in AD&D, that was 3.0's fault.
How about evil lich + mirror of opposition = good lich?
A truly intelligent lich, that was a good guy that wanted to live forever, and knew he would go dark eventually as he sought to transform (by the rules of Jacobs lol), could use that to good effect.
There are a few other alignment changing items as well, lich opts to fail the save.
Now I can be good forever!
My personal retcon is that the deathless subtype does not exist...It's only a retcon if you had it existing in the first place. :)
Yeah, I really disliked the changes to the Isger hellknights, that came about officially, just as I started to run an Isger game.
Told my players, okay, we are using all Isger material back from this point lol, but not the new stuff. And what the hell did they do to the map and that river? Urgh.
Yeah, some changes I feel don't need to be made. Deathless only came around in 3.5 because they (WotC) wanted good undead but didn't want them powered by negative energy because negative energy is "evil".
I think the negative energy = evil trend started at the beginning of 3.0 when healing magics changed from being a necromantic effect to a conjuration effect.
Of course there are probably plenty of people who like the change and even more who are somewhat ambivalent.
You are going to have to take that up with every Zombie Show/Movie/Book ever written ever since that is the general sense of it.
And those are ghouls in ever game as zombies in D&D:
a. don't eat brains
b. Do anything unless ordered, take no Initiative remembered
c. Make more when bite youMummies weren't all evil in AD&D, that was 3.0's fault.
Honestly though, I am not sure why Golems are fine and Mummies are evil other then the whole Negative Energy thing, since I feel like Golems can be mindless killing machines as well.
My antivirus isn't evil.
Yeah, some changes I feel don't need to be made. Deathless only came around in 3.5 because they (WotC) wanted good undead but didn't want them powered by negative energy because negative energy is "evil".
I think the negative energy = evil trend started at the beginning of 3.0 when healing magics changed from being a necromantic effect to a conjuration effect.
Of course there are probably plenty of people who like the change and even more who are somewhat ambivalent.
I prefer the assumption that liches are evil, since that's how I remember it in AD&D (although i think they were actually neutral with evil tendencies).
Making things like good drow, claustrophobic, clean shaven dwarves and altruistic undead always seems gimmicky to me. I prefer my stereotypes.
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Making things like good drow, claustrophobic, clean shaven dwarves and altruistic undead always seems gimmicky to me. I prefer my stereotypes.
Heh, I'm pretty sure that the outcast good drow now outnumber the evil drow. There is probably only a handful of evil drow in the underdark who are wondering where the rest went.
My favorite Elder Evil from....Elder Evils was Ragnarra. Positive Energy charged embodiment of horrible horrifying life.
Yeah. Ragnarra was terrifying. For some time I planned to run a Ragnarra campaign but I was running another campaign at the same time and people moved away and stuff. Didn't have the time.
If you want a good lich, about the only way to have that happen is to use this.
Do you have a source for this? AFAIK there was no character level adjustment for templates in PF by design.A lich is a CR 2 adjustment, which means at early levels, it counts as a +2 level adjustment, and after a few levels, it becomes a +1 level adjustment.
However, since it's pretty impossible to become a lich at low levels, the lich will simply always be one level behind.
Example: In a party of 10th level characters, a lich would be a 9th level character with one level of "lich" and will cap out 19th level.
There are no liches under 11th-level due to the prerequisites.
Paizo made a conscious decision not to have non-evil undead. I guess that works to make a "sane" set of "core" books where things don't get too weird.
Except for ghosts that is...
The worst decision ever made (I am being dramatic) in the 3.x games and onward was allowing Liches that could not cast 9th level spells. They should all be pretty much 20th level. A 17th level lich would be a prodigy among liches. Sigh.
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The worst decision ever made (I am being dramatic) in the 3.x games and onward was allowing Liches that could not cast 9th level spells. They should all be pretty much 20th level. A 17th level lich would be a prodigy among liches. Sigh.
Liches should be more powerful; if I remember my 2nd ED days correctly, you had to be a minimum of 18th level to qualify, which was precisely when Wizards got access to 9th level spells. I'm fine with Liches at 17th in PF because they get 9th level spell access then.
The idea of the baseline Lich in the Bestiary as a CR 12 with a CL of 11th....just never seemed right. That and the idea of needing to spend hundreds of thousands of gold for the process just seems to scream high level.
It kinda does scream "high level". That 120k is a sizable portion of even a 20th level characters WBL, and it's only even barely affordable by 13th - and since nothing should/can be more than half your WBL, it can only be gotten by 15th.
So... 8th level spells. I have no problem with that - if a wizard needs more power to reach that last degree of arcane might, go for it.
Also, on the topic of evilness: the process will, almost always, be evil. You wanna be a good lich? It'll take a big, big quest to find a non-evil way to be a good lich.
Doesn't Libris Mortis have a template called "Good Lich"? Or am I confusing it with another book?
Wasn't Libris Mortis as far as I can tell. There was a lich in sandstorm that didn't have to be evil, and Faerun has a special type of lich for elves who choose to stay alive after death to protect their kin or centers of power. Mind flayers also have a sort of lich, but those guys are weird.
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Well if you wanted to become a lich in my games then you might as well hand over your sheet and I add him to the BBEG list. Liches become what they are for a reason, not " hey I'm an immortal spell slinging machine now, give us a high five bro!"
Becoming a lich shouldn't be a player option in the first place. They become undead so they can go off on their own and learn the secrets of the universe. Too much number crunching and not enough paying attention to the fluff.
Well, since the thread isn't too dead, I suppose I might as well add that I think the best way to add a lich in is actually with a homebrew template so its the right balance and fluff for your game and player. +5 natural armor alone can be pretty crazy, and working with your player is bound to get the best results. Maybe he wants to be some sort of crazy cyborg zombie scientist with a pretty face and another wants an insane old man spellcaster with almost no face left. Some GM's might like a change in attributes and all those cool special features, but another might find them really overpowering. Create what's best for your game and makes your player happy. Best way to do things, imo.
Well if you wanted to become a lich in my games then you might as well hand over your sheet and I add him to the BBEG list. Liches become what they are for a reason, not " hey I'm an immortal spell slinging machine now, give us a high five bro!"
Becoming a lich shouldn't be a player option in the first place. They become undead so they can go off on their own and learn the secrets of the universe. Too much number crunching and not enough paying attention to the fluff.
Would you allow players to roleplay such a character up until they become a lich? If so, I see that as no different from the traditional "become a god" style of end game.
I consider the lich powers just something you get for spending the money.
In PF there is no LA, so I wouldn't have the lich fall behind in levels either.
In 3.5 there were "paying off" LA rules, and the lower level you were the more xp you got, so eventually you would end up the same level as the rest of the party.
Thanks to the Downtime rules, one can become a lich with as little as 60,000gp. With the right traits, one can craft the phylactery for as little as 48,000gp.
Thanks to the Downtime rules, one can become a lich with as little as 60,000gp. With the right traits, one can craft the phylactery for as little as 48,000gp.Sorry but there is more to becoming a lich than just creating a phylactery. It's not just paying your GP and BAM you're a lich.
I doesn't have to be, but that doesn't mean it can't be.
Trying to claim RAW on that would be silly.
Yeah, there needs to be a series of quests involved, in-depth research on the subject matter, knowledge checks etc. There is a great deal of potential story behind the process and should be handled as such.
One true way man. You have to turn evil, you have to go through a bunch of things your GM Makes up, and its going to be hard difficult and lengthy. You have to. Have to, have to! Did I mention you had to? Because you totally have to do it this way or its wrong! It needs to be that way! [/notseriousatall]
More seriously, Actually what you do is pretty open to interpretation. I could be a really simple procedure of removing your soul that you should've learned by the time you accrued all this money and became an 11th level caster, or could be some lost forgotten art that involves mass human sacrifice. Its really left to GM's discretion as to how it all works and I don't think anything should be a 'should' or 'have to'. For what its worth, I don't think it was really meant to be a go to PC option, nor any template was tbh.
The exact methods for each spellcaster's transformation are left to the GM's discretion
Thanks to the Downtime rules, one can become a lich with as little as 60,000gp. With the right traits, one can craft the phylactery for as little as 48,000gp.Sorry but there is more to becoming a lich than just creating a phylactery. It's not just paying your GP and BAM you're a lich.
Yeah, yeah, you're going to be going on quests of some kind or another anyways. The only thing left are the baby chick sacrifices or [insert other irredeemably evil deeds]. ;P
Yeah, yeah, you're going to be going on quests of some kind or another anyways. The only thing left are the baby chick sacrifices or [insert other irredeemably evil deeds]. ;PThanks to the Downtime rules, one can become a lich with as little as 60,000gp. With the right traits, one can craft the phylactery for as little as 48,000gp.Sorry but there is more to becoming a lich than just creating a phylactery. It's not just paying your GP and BAM you're a lich.
Not just one baby chick, but 5! Eat tthem. Prove your evil!
Just uhh... not in front of me. I'm kind of squeamish about that sort of thing. Oh gross! That crunch. I think I saw its leg twitch.
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Yeah, there needs to be a series of quests involved, in-depth research on the subject matter, knowledge checks etc. There is a great deal of potential story behind the process and should be handled as such.One true way man. You have to turn evil, you have to go through a bunch of things your GM Makes up, and its going to be hard difficult and lengthy. You have to. Have to, have to! Did I mention you had to? Because you totally have to do it this way or its wrong! It needs to be that way! [/notseriousatall]
More seriously, Actually what you do is pretty open to interpretation. I could be a really simple procedure of removing your soul that you should've learned by the time you accrued all this money and became an 11th level caster, or could be some lost forgotten art that involves mass human sacrifice. Its really left to GM's discretion as to how it all works and I don't think anything should be a 'should' or 'have to'. For what its worth, I don't think it was really meant to be a go to PC option, nor any template was tbh.
The exact methods for each spellcaster's transformation are left to the GM's discretion
...but should involve <insert string of extraordinary requirements as opposed to simply hand-waving the Lich into existence>. Also, I'm not inherently stuck on the idea of the evil Lich, up-thread I mentioned my first experience with the good variety.
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Yeah, there needs to be a series of quests involved, in-depth research on the subject matter, knowledge checks etc. There is a great deal of potential story behind the process and should be handled as such.One true way man. You have to turn evil, you have to go through a bunch of things your GM Makes up, and its going to be hard difficult and lengthy. You have to. Have to, have to! Did I mention you had to? Because you totally have to do it this way or its wrong! It needs to be that way! [/notseriousatall]
More seriously, Actually what you do is pretty open to interpretation. I could be a really simple procedure of removing your soul that you should've learned by the time you accrued all this money and became an 11th level caster, or could be some lost forgotten art that involves mass human sacrifice. Its really left to GM's discretion as to how it all works and I don't think anything should be a 'should' or 'have to'. For what its worth, I don't think it was really meant to be a go to PC option, nor any template was tbh.
The exact methods for each spellcaster's transformation are left to the GM's discretion
Each GM can do as they like but I don't want to see some sort of RAW claim BS that you can become a lich as easy as 123.
Actually, I'm sure it is easy. You just need the Craft Wondrous Item feat, enough resources, the secret knowledge of how to become a lich, and a distinct lack of morals.
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I think I would allow a PC to turn lich as a result of significant questing, and even allow the PC to play a couple more adventures. However, it is definitely a game-changer.
One PC goes to a significantly higher power level. Previous challenges aren't so hard anymore given the new durability and inexhaustible powers the caster now gets.
I'd be worried about party balance if the other party members didn't also gain some sort of upgrade. However, I wouldn't want to trivialize the work the lich PC did to get there, so I wouldn't give the other PCs equal power for free. It'd require some more plotting to balance things out in a fair way.
I think it would probably also start a retirement arc in the campaign, possibly just for that character. The player definitely gets to play with his new toy for a bit, but probably only for a few more adventures. It's a good moment to increase the stakes of the campaign and head to the final confrontations of the metaplot.
In that respect, it's really no different from a PC ascending to some sort of demigod status. I'd want to give the player the option to enjoy his achievement before arranging a retirement.
Meh, I estimate that by the time you are high enough level to get it, lichdom is worth approximately two class levels.
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"Move Lich get out the way"
That is all.