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They're all megalomaniacs with too much knowledge and power to get along well. Yes, a mass invasion of Eoxian bone-sages would spell the end for Golarion, but they're not even the Legion of Doom (who could work together maybe 50% of the time). They're a bunch of super-villains frequently at odds with each others' agendas. Even their deadly space platform requires heavy vetting because some lunatic Eoxian may decide to bombard Eox itself and finish the job.
A lot of their get-togethers feel more like hobbies, fading memories of actual life, or vicarious reality TV viewing instead of cohesive planning.
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Presumably they've got the power to raise tens or even hundreds of thousands of dead Eoxians who *weren't* 11th level spellcasters as wights or whatever under their control, so, while there might be 'only' a few thousand Bone Sages, some of them might command hundreds or thousands of lesser undead minions.
So yeah, they'd probably want to 'build big' to house all the hoi-polloi.
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I imagine the planet itself pretty inundated with non-bone-sage undead. The apocalypse that ended the planet surely created piles of ghosts and other angry spirits, and the bone-sages prolly had plenty of servants and lower-level apprentices who ended up as undead fodder. The bone sages canonically created the tzitzimitls, so they're obviously not averse to new experimentation. And let's not forget the bone sages are only a flying spiny death-ship away from a body harvesting.
So yeah. High-hundreds, low-thousands of bone-sages (11th+ lich spellcasters all), tens to hundreds of thousands of other corporeal undead, prolly hundreds of thousands of incorporeal undead, possibly manifested in swarms of ghostly horror like the ghost storms outside of Gallowspire.
The math seems "safe" until you realize sixteen CR 21 liches (there's gotta be at LEAST sixteen liches that tough) tag-teaming your PCs is a CR 29 encounter, and when you're done with them, there's still hundreds more liches to go.
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HOW TO MAKE EOX SCARY
1): Take favorite high-level caster stat block of your choice. Add lich template and an extra +2 racial bonus to Int (+4 if the race originally did not have an Int bonus). For my mind's-eye example, I'm imagining Karzoug with better spell selection and a focus on necromancy.
2): Give 'em some tzitzimitls in the final encounter to eat some attacks while it blasts PCs into goo.
3): Add a spaceship made of bones, steel, and flame.
4): Drop it on the Rusty Dragon in Sandpoint.
5): Repeat until satisfied.
Int 40 (18 + 4 racial + 5 levels + 5 wish + 6 headband + 2 lich) = +15 bonus.
Add Spell Focus and Improved Spell Focus in the school of your choice. 9th-level spells from that school have DCs of 36. Make that first spell something like wail of the banshee and you may have solved any meddling PCs issues your bone sage was facing right then and there.
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Overall, though, I assume vast swathes of Eox are uninhabited, save maybe being walked over by free-willed undead or undead in service to one bone-sage or another going somewhere. The necropoleis might be big because they once were Eoxian cities that survived the big ouchie.
If I got to be the Duke of New York, I'd put my hordes of zombies to keeping that bad boy running, believe me. It'd be like The Warriors but with better-spelled graffiti and 99% less Baseball Furies. And ZERO 80's hair.
It's entirely possible that they might see fit to "recruit" the few promising specimens of their little living-Eoxian menagerie as apprentices and potential new Sages...
I imagine the planet populated by thousands of Marvel Comics Elders of the Universe-style lich wizards; rarely interacting, mostly locked away in their dungeons/labs/crypts/keeps and obsessively pursuing their singular interests.
Of course, when those interests intersect or collide, you get some wild spectacles.
Loving this thread. :)
I've been thinking that using Eleti, a race created by Fantasy Flight Games for it's d20 settings as the "common" population of Eox would be appropriate.
Contributor
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I imagine the planet populated by thousands of Marvel Comics Elders of the Universe-style lich wizards; rarely interacting, mostly locked away in their dungeons/labs/crypts/keeps and obsessively pursuing their singular interests.
Of course, when those interests intersect or collide, you get some wild spectacles.
Do liches need glasses? I guess my daughter's pink sunglasses with rhinestones might work for pesky light sensitive issues, but that's not so much a lich thing.
Is your daughter Dame Edna? :O
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Seriously, though there's got to be some significant variation among Eoxian Liches. I can imagine some some strangeness arriving just because of boredom and high-school style politics.
On the one hand, it makes sense for *all* liches in Golarion to be potentially wildly different, since it seems that the process to become a lich is different for every person and there is no 'one size fits all' formula.
But the Eoxian liches seem to have mostly been transformed by some sort of mass produced single process, which could justify most, if not all, of them being very similar, if not identical in 'racial' characteristics.
However, as they were artificially pushed into lichdom, it's also very possible that the process was less stable than that of an individually researched lichdom tailored to a specific person, so that different Bone Sages have had to undergo all sorts of 'touch up' procedures over the centuries and millennia, to keep their 'assembly line' bargain basement immortality going, and these refinements and procedures could have resulted in different Bone Sages 'evolving' into very different undead forms, finally developing into more unique and personalized liches, and not 'generics'.
On the one hand, it makes sense for *all* liches in Golarion to be potentially wildly different, since it seems that the process to become a lich is different for every person and there is no 'one size fits all' formula.
But the Eoxian liches seem to have mostly been transformed by some sort of mass produced single process, which could justify most, if not all, of them being very similar, if not identical in 'racial' characteristics.
Alternate hypothesis: with their superior intellects, they were able to systematize a lichcraft "plug-and-play formula" by which they could easily calculate each individual's exact path. (Finding an individual person whose lich formula happens to be exactly identical to that of an existing lich is a story element in a certain Paizo-published adventure, so it seems like this is theoretically possible.)
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you know they've released the character stats for the eox race right?
Yeh, I posted them up in an earlier thread somewhere. I'll re-post 'em now for folks to have handy: as human, but +4 Int, -4 Con instead of floating +2 bonus. Notice how their big downside is completely mitigated by lichdom. Or any undeath, really.
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Yeah, I suppose they could raise towers and buildings with <i>wish</i> spells. I just thought the image of huge cities with only a few dozen inhabitants seemed ... off. Not impossible, but off.
But with lots of minions, it fit well.
And I do like the image of the areas between bone sages' strongholds being just desolation.
There might be all kinds of interesting things still in the ruined cities of the old living inhabitants...
Oh, I *love* the idea of giant abandoned cities. I can imagine whole adventures exploring empty cities -- just because there's no active population doesn't mean there isn't still loads of danger! Dodging constructs, mindless wandering undead, traps, and environmental hazards in search of abandoned treasure -- all the while dreading the threat of drawing attention from a bone sage...!
Hollowfaust and 100% Crunch: Liches might come in handy for pillaging/inspiration.
I always wanted to run a game where Eoxian arch-liches conspired with The Whispering Way to do a massive undead invasion of Avistan ah-la Blackest Night.
Wait...
Cathedral of Silence
Whispering Way
Book of 1000 Whispers
...Something is up here.
Yes, there's still life on Eox, it's just very strange. Not just oozes, either. 30-foot-long glass serpents, semi-intelligent grub colonies, "the horned and blistered ellicoths, with their elephantine legs, mournful dirges, and relentless thirst for soul energy..."
I've always figured Tar-Baphon became a lich immediately after his alleged death and just kept quiet for a long itme, but we have Arazni as an example of someone who was forced into lichdom long after her actual death.
...And would this be a good place to restate my hypothesis regarding Eox and the Starstone?
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Distant Worlds page 28:
"As a race, the Eoxians turned bitter and petty, constantly striving for new discoveries, abandoning weaker concerns such as love and morality. The greatest among them may even have ascended to godhood through arcane means, forming their own pantheon. Yet despite their achievements, the Eoxians knew no peace, only a ceaseless desire for more.
As with the death of the Twins—with which it may be linked—the calamity that destroyed Eox’s bounty is a mystery, and even the gods remain strangely reticent about the matter. As a result of this divine silence, some theorize that the catastrophe was punishment from deities moved to wrath by the Eoxians’ presumptuous attempts at godhood. Yet the most popular theory is that the Eoxians themselves were responsible for the destruction of both their world and the Twins, seeing the Sister Worlds as rivals to their own self-important majesty. According to the residents of the Diaspora, the destruction of their ancestral homes was caused by an enormous interplanetary weapon crafted by the Eoxians, an engine of annihilation so powerful that the mere backlash from its successful firing set the atmosphere of Eox aflame..."
Page 24: "...most of the larger asteroids are safely contained within their orbits, though it’s suspected that the fabled Starstone that caused the Age of Darkness may have started life as an object within the Diaspora, knocked out of its stasis and pulled toward Golarion by the mysterious powers of the aboleths."
Hypothesis: The Eoxians who ascended did so after discovering the Starstone... where it originally lay, hidden somewhere on Damiar or Iovo. So far as the newly-divine Eoxian pantheon knew, the sarecians themselves had been completely unaware of this transcendence engine, and they became paranoid that the inhabitants of the Twins -- already the dominant spacefaring power in the system -- would, if they discovered the Stone, be in a position to send far more people to take its tests than any other world could manage, and would create a race of gods who would conquer the entire system.
So the ascended Eoxians chivvied their new flock of worshippers into creating the superweapon that destroyed the Twins, hoping to take the Starstone with it. They haven't yet noticed that it survived and wound up on Golarion after the aboleths diverted a few asteroids. Pray they never do.
Interesting theory, Lurker.
Well, there is a place called the Dim Gate that could just be the start of that.
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Dim_Gate
The real questions (asking as a GM). What would be the goal? What would be the plan?
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Who calls me back?
I got the impression from the starfinder pact worlds book that most of Eox's sentient population are ghouls, supplemented by vampires and wights and other intelligent undead, and served by a huge numbers of nonsentient undead, and of course all ruled by the bone sages.
I suspect that this is probably the case before the Gap as well.
My idea is that one Bone sage would have a way to Golarion. As he wouldn't be able to expand on Eox, Golarion would be where is empire would expand.
Well, taking a look at human history we see numerous structures that serve as monuments to a singular person. I don't find it hard to believe that a race of intelligent and creative beings might also build massive monuments to the dead, especially considering they still have exist in them.
I got the impression from the starfinder pact worlds book that most of Eox's sentient population are ghouls, supplemented by vampires and wights and other intelligent undead, and served by a huge numbers of nonsentient undead, and of course all ruled by the bone sages.
I suspect that this is probably the case before the Gap as well.
ghouls, bone troopers (skeletal champions), and corpse folk (zombie champions) being the majority of sapient population, other undead of varying rarity, plus a massive number of unintelligent 'equipment' style undead. The various zombies permanently plugged into computers, skeleton laborers. Skeletal limbs providing unlimited mechanical power (such as operating elevators). Even cloned organs and grown bone/skin that was never a creature being turned into necromantic machinery, buildings and ships.
The bone sages are simply the ones that survived the apocalypse intact. The rest were raised afterwards/by the fallout of the apocalypse.