Got one with 10,000 years experience? Devils come up with some really imaginative clauses and novel interpretations you may not see. Or you do all that, suggest changes, and they refuse the contract. It's take-it-or-leave it, their way or no way. Devils are evil, they will NOT agree a contract that doesn't give them the advantage in getting what they want: your soul.Or have a trusty Lawyer/Mage/Priest do it for you.Check the fine print.I think it is also possible to negotiate with Devils for "automatic promotion" if you fufill your contract and sell your soul (although I imagine you would be still low on the totem pole of devils).Yeah, but devils lie and they don't like the idea of anyone getting more power than they do, it's in their best interests to deceive you about this and not deliver.
Or you figure out a way to force them. Good luck with that.
From one viewpoint alignment wise the Chaotic good is the same two steps away from the Paladin's alignment that the Lawful Evil is. He's not respectful of the background of society so he can be to a Paladin's eyes,equally destructive to what the Paladin is trying to protect.
Disagree there. Thinking from a LG perspective, LE is much worse. LE actually warps the legal code as much as possible, to create lasting damage. Most of what a CG does is inadvertent, at worst. At best, they mean well but screw things up. Their passion is to be admired, but their execution sucks.
I can cite at least one real life LE example from politics, actually. Pretty sure he meets the psychological definition of Antisocial Personality Disorder, aka psychopathy. He's actually done a fair bit of damage over the years in his personal and work life, once you start digging. Only thing is, the people who keep electing him in don't seem to know any of it.
I'm extremely leary of using Alignment to describe real life people. Alignment is okay for storybook characters who are generally ciphers from an authors gristmill. Real people are generally more complicated than story characters.
Not if it's a good story. :)
(Btw, I'm agreeing with you. :P)
Becoming saints. Combining the arcane power with that of divine righteousness. Learning and prepping spells with the good descriptor. Being true warriors of the light..........
Yes, they are, but he shows most if not all the signs of a mental disorder, a severe one. That mental disorder happens to sound a lot like LE.
In regards to Lesser Astral Projection: If it doesn't let you return to your plane of origin as a projection...what does it actually do?
If that is in fact prohibited, then I can't think of a single good use for the spell.
Necro much Ravingdork? :P
I hate letting things go unresolved for long.
Yes but you generally don't wait until the corpse qualifies as a skeleton before trying to resurrect it. Look at the pitiful thing now wishing you at least had the sense of mind to cast desecrate and the necessary spell to make it a blood skeleton. Shame on you ravingdork. Shame.
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Perhaps good is for cowards and the unmotivated?
Good is for anti-capitalists.
Evil is for those who are self starters and driven to always improve themselves.
Just the opposite! Good is for hard workers who do it themselves and then are satisfied with their reward. Evil is for the lazy! Always looking for a way to avoid the consequences of their actions.
I liked Dark Sun's preserver/defiler dichotomy with preservers becoming avignons and defilers becoming dragons (although both options are lvl 20+ and wizards would have the option of the immortality discovery anyways).
Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
If you allow 3.x content, then good casters become liches too (arcliches and/or baelnorn which are basically the same thing; they are mentioned in both the Monsters of Faerun 3.0 book, and the Libris Mortis 3.5 book).
Alternatively, create undead / create greater undead can work but you won't have the same "haha, I'm hard to kill" flavor.
You call that living? Seriously if you can't enjoy a good cup of coffee, and you you have to ban mirrors because of what you look like, it's not really an option I'd want to take.
Actually there are ghouls and ghasts that don't even look strange. I had an undead PC with the Civilized Ghoulishness feat who passed for human all the time. I don't see why you couldn't enjoy a good cup of coffee though. Turning undead doesn't rob you of your senses and you can still eat (it just does nothing useful for you), so I suppose you couldn't get high off of the caffeine, but you could enjoy that nice moca latte.
Being good is really it's own reward. It means that you're not nearly as haunted by your deeds as you might be, that there are more likely a lot more people that care about you, and that you have a greater stake in life itself.
Exactly. Being good is its own reward (not the promise of a great afterlife). And good people have more reasons to enjoy life and people they care about enough to stick around. Good people have just as many reasons to become undead as evil guys. More in fact. Most people comment that evil characters are undead to escape the afterlife.
Good undead? They enjoy seeing their grandchildren's grandchildren grow up. They enjoy making life better. They just enjoy life. They have friends and make new friends. They may enjoy traveling and want to become fluent in every language on earth and climb to the top of every mountain before they are done with life. To them, it is the life that is the adventure, and being undead means you have a longer time of it before you retire.
And if you're capable, there's a whole multiverse or even space to explore as an undead creature! Not even the sky is the limit. Good people have way more to gain from immortal bodies. Good people enjoy it to the fullest, while most figure evil people are into it just to escape punishment. Good has no punishment coming. Just beautiful rewards both here and beyond.
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Urgathoa approves of Ashiel's message.
Urgathoa approves of Ashiel's message.
Ashiel approves of Urgathoa. She's much cooler than Pharasma who is a hack and a fraud.
EDIT: In fact, Urgathoa's minions tend to keep to themselves. From the PF wiki:
Urgathoa's priests are primarily composed of clerics and necromancers. They have few responsibilities to uphold, other than helping those who desire undeath, and protection of their own. Understandably, they often are secretive of their religious inclining in public. The priests have been known to compel their enemies to eat their own fallen comrades.[4] The ceremonial clothes of Urgathoa's worshipers are a loose, floor-length, gray tunic, with a white or gray cape. The lower half of the tunic is usually shredded. Most ceremonies involve consuming great amounts of food and drink.[2]
Temples and Shrines EditUrgathoa's temples are modeled after feast-halls, with a large table serving as an altar. Usually temples are near a graveyard or a crypt, both of which are inhabited by ghouls. Her greatest temples are often guarded by daemonic servants.[3]
We got this loose knit folks who all believe in giving the neutral aligned hack-goddess the finger, and helping people achieve undeath, and protecting their own people. And when they have a ceremony or party they do it in festive halls and have a party feasting. They even let the ghouls (who likewise literally just want to be left alone and don't want to hurt living creatures) hang out in their graveyards. These guys are awesome.
Contrast to Pharasma who is just the biggest fraud and hack you'll ever see in the pantheon, even moreso than the god who drank irresponsibly and ended up as a god, who tells other people to drink responsibly.
Pharasma? Well this chick and her followers can't keep their nose out of other people's business, all the while claiming that she knows everything, except when she's proven wrong. Even her "I'll reserve judgment until the end, even though I know what's going to happen" is just a con-job. It's a great example of how she's a fraud but doesn't want to admit it. For such a deity of prophecy and judgment she couldn't even stop Pharasma from escaping her own realm when she died as a mortal (so much for that fate thing).
Even many of her own clerics wised up and realized she was a fraud, while the ones who couldn't accept it instead downplayed her whole fate and fortune thing and insisted she's really all about babies and stuff. All the while hunting down ghouls and such who just want to be left alone. Neutral my ass, these people are chaotic evil. :P
At least Urgathoa's honest.
At least Urgathoa's honest.
And a cannibal, and a disease spreader (disease is under her purview as well), and evil. Perhaps not actively malevolently evil as Rovagug (who is the only one who is truly active in his evil). But no less evil
At least Urgathoa's honest.And a cannibal, and a disease spreader (disease is under her purview as well), and evil. Perhaps not actively malevolently evil as Rovagug (who is the only one who is truly active in his evil). But no less evil
Cannibalism doesn't bother me, and doesn't bother alignment either, so that's pretty irrelevant. :P
And I keep hearing that disease started with her return to the planet. Do we have anything actually saying that she intentionally spread disease, or was it a byproduct or accident or something pharasma did when she escaped?
I'll agree she's evil. But I'm okay with that because she's at least honest about being evil and isn't trying to piss in anyone's cornflakes, as opposed to Pharasma and her clerics who actively engage in a form of prejudice-driven genocide against anything without a pulse regardless of whether it's doing evil or not.
I think Urgothoa is a hedonistic and egocentric witch. But she's one that doesn't bother me and isn't trying to lie to me. Pharasma is just an ass.
Is it genocide if your target is already technically deceased?
The way I've always seen it is the same way I evaluate slavery in a fantasy game. If it has a mind. Undead are effectively "alive" with negative energy. It's like the opposite side of the coin.
You have alive (corpse powered by positive energy). Dead (the state of being neither alive nor undead). Undead (corpse powered by negative energy). Similar but functioning under different rules. Any sort of harming, killing, or oppression of these sentient beings is evil.
If you had a race of sentient magic items that you destroyed on sight I'd still consider it a form of genocide because you're still killing something that has a mind, an alignment, and the capacity for choice driven thought.
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Is it genocide if your target is already technically deceased?
We prefer to call it "alternate living".
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And before anyone goes on about "oh you just want all undead to be good", let me go ahead and nip that in the bud. Most of my undead NPCs in my campaigns are neutral or evil. Further, the evil ones (commonly things like vampires and evil cleric mummies or evil cleric ghasts) are evil. But not because they are undead. They are evil because they are evil. They would be evil even if they were alive because that's the sort of person they are.
The vampire may have been unable to get away with giving into his desires at the cost of others if he wasn't a vampire, but he still would if he had the chance. Being a vampire just gives him the power to exert over others and so he relishes in doing so. He's evil not because he has fangs, he is evil because he loves using them.
I will say however that while while I find Pharasma the persona to be a hack, she's really cool from a purely stylistic perspective. Her avatar, heralds, cleric vestments, chapels, etc are all really sexy looking.
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Genocide is the extinguishment of a specific race of beings; undead are merely transformations of existing beings. Eliminating undead is more like eugenics; culling undesirable attributes from the species.
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Good guys get immortality fom lvl 20 wizard or oracle but can still be killed, just not killed by age. Liches are immortal but can still have their bodies killed, but their bodies will keep coming back as long as tbeir pythantrophy isn't destroyed.
Lvl 20 monk gets a better deal than everybody as in they do not age and cannot be killed by age. Yes tbey can be killed but they will always respawn somewhere 24 hours later. You can't stop it like u can a lich
Good guys get immortality fom lvl 20 wizard or oracle but can still be killed, just not killed by age. Liches are immortal but can still have their bodies killed, but their bodies will keep coming back as long as tbeir pythantrophy isn't destroyed.
Lvl 20 monk gets a better deal than everybody as in they do not age and cannot be killed by age. Yes tbey can be killed but they will always respawn somewhere 24 hours later. You can't stop it like u can a lich
What are you talking about? Monks don't respawn. You have to resurrect the like everyone else. Liches get a get out of jail free card (doubly so since they can hide their phylactery anywhere, including some other plane, or anywhere in the universe).
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Where do bad folks go when they die
They don't go to heaven where the angels fly
Go to a lake of fire and fry
See them again 'till the Fourth of July
Oh well, he should have said "A Monk of the Four Winds". To say "Monk" or "Monks" would be very misleading. :P
Hmm.. where did my comment go?
Good spellcasters go to Heaven and live happily ever after.
Evil spellcasters become Liches to avoid going to Hell and burning for all eternity.
This is actually wrong.
One of the things that people don't seem to get about Golarion, and other settings where there are actual Gods of Evil, is that people who serve Evil Gods Don't get punished for it.
The Evil Gods reward evil behavior. You think Asmodeus is going to punish people for following his doctrine? He'd have no followers.
Evil Wizards who revere an evil god aren't trying to avoid punishment. They have their own sinister rewards waiting for them when they die.
The only characters who ever have to worry about being punished by their gods are Betrayers (and sometimes, depending on the god, Failures). If a character turns their back on the god they followed, that god will punish them in death (unless they follow a new god who is stronger, and prove themselves enough that the new god wants to intercede and get into a tug-of-war about who gets that person's soul in the afterlife)
Becoming a Lich usually doesn't have anything to do with being afraid of dying. It's usually just because the person becoming a lich simply doesn't want to die yet.
Becoming a Lich usually doesn't have anything to do with being afraid of dying. It's usually just because the person becoming a lich simply doesn't want to die yet.There's a lot of paths to evil that start out with simple basic fears.
The thing is... you're not selling Girl Scout Cookies to make that phylactery... You're making cookies OUT of Girl Scouts, or something along those lines of evil to get it done.
Unless you're an arclich, in which case you're probably doing something awesome to become a lich. :P
Hmm.. where did my comment go?
I don't know. I wish I did. I like your comments. :P
Eh, the lost comment has me disagreeing with you about Pharasma and Urgathoa :P
Eh, the lost comment has me disagreeing with you about Pharasma and Urgathoa :P
That doesn't mean I wouldn't still like it. You might be surprised as to how much I can enjoy someone disagreeing with me when they're doing a good job of it. :P
Arcliches are a setting specific thing. They don't exist on Pathfinder's default world setting. We're talking general rules here.
No, Golarion is a setting specific thing. Arclich is the generic good-lich which is found in manuals such as Libris Mortis.
They are simply good aligned liches. Not much more complicated or setting specific.
EDIT: Baelnorn on the other hand are setting specific I think. AFAIK that's the name of the elven good-liches from Faerun; but it may have some roots in some sort of non-FR lore, so I'd have to check.
Archliches were invented in Forgotten Realms lore and imported into Libre Mortis, which is a specific 3.5 supplement, so none of that material is "generic".
Not OGL does not mean not generic. You don't get much more generic than archliches. It is just a good-aligned lich.
If you have a good-aligned lich then by all accounts fits the bill. If you wanted to publish one you could just call them a lich. Or high lich. Or something fanciful like Pale Saint or whatever.
Archliches are no more Generic than Liches
but i'd rather just simply allow liches to be good or neutral to begin with.
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Archliches are no more Generic than Liches
but i'd rather just simply allow liches to be good or neutral to begin with.
One of the more amusing adventures I ever ran involved a lich (the normal kind) beating the stuffing out of a party of 13th level characters, resulting in each of the party members cutting and running for their own lives, with the Paladin being the last one to leave the fight willingly (after he had de-petrified the party's sorcerer twice). The only one who remained was a cleric whom everyone thought was a damn fool for refusing to leave (but the player exclaimed that if she was going to die in a fight she wanted it to be this one because it was just too epic).
Since it was an online game, everyone who left the fight also left the room to head back to the lobby where other stuff was going on. The cleric and lich fought, and fought, and fought, and fought. Until both of them were basically doing the spellcaster equivalent of panting at each other and waiting for the next move.
They basically stared at each other for a bit and decided to call a truce. Neither of them seemed to be making any great headway in beating the other to a pulp, and the lich had tried to talk it out with the party (she was evil but smart and sophisticated dangit :P). So the cleric and her dropped their spellcasting and - hesitantly - moved to the lich's study where the lich and the cleric discussed why they were raiding her onyx tower, and the two played a game of chess as they discussed their activities.
Turned out the lich wanted to do a project and attempt to create a Utopia (mostly because she was bored, but also at the urgings of her daughter - another lich - to use their power for something a bit more meaningful than seeking power for power's sake). The locals were not really big on the idea however and some conflict was created. The cleric, after discussing with the lich made a few deals, noting that while she didn't particularly care for the lich she wasn't finding much fault with her intentions and would be willing to talk to the rulers of the land as a mediator between the lich and them if it would settle any conflict. The lich was so amused by the cleric's civility that she gifted her with a sentient magic sword the lich kept in her study (that sword was pretty funny sometimes) to signify her as a friend of the lich and her subordinates.
So while the rest of the party fled the tower and left the cleric for dead, the cleric ended up walking out of the tower, unharmed, with the sword from the lich's study, like a boss. It was funny because the next day in the gaming lobby everyone was like "omg, you're not dead!?", and she was like "Nope". And they were like "You killed the lich!?", and she was like "Nope". Everyone was like "O.o, wha!?", and for a while they thought she must have gone to the dark side. XD