A lich can be any living creature?
How about ... a druid casts Awaken on a sheep. For a while, they are best friends, but the druid dies in time. The sheep, distraught, soon realizes that it, too, will someday die!! So, the sheep turns to forbidden magic ...
It can be applied to any living creature. Provided that creature can make the phylactery (which requires them to be a spellcaster with a caster level of at least 11th and the Craft Wondrous Item feat).
So if awakened sheep has taken enough class levels to meet those prerequisites, yes it could be a lich.
I've always been entertained by the idea of a sorcerer/Dragon Disciple turned Lich.
There is a set of lines buried somewhere deep in Carrion Crown (I have neither the time nor inclination to look right now) that talks about vampires becoming liches somehow or for some reason.
I... really don't remember more than that at present. Sorry.
Pennywit a Lich sheep would be odd but I have heard many people speak of awakened animals taking class levels or of a caster who was baleful polymorphed. Though I don't know if I would pick a sheep I like the dodo bird myself.
Tacticslion I will go back to reading the AP.
Jeraa I assumed so but a GM can hope.
Hawktitan I to have had this though and I will be happening. And I am excited for it. Lucky for me my campaign will let me try the Lich out a few times. I know I want a sorcerer/Dragon Disciple, some kind of Cleric, the witch practically screams I want to be a Lich, and I have a great love for the Magus. If I can create it I want a Bard because, just because.
A lich can be any living creature?
How about ... a druid casts Awaken on a sheep. For a while, they are best friends, but the druid dies in time. The sheep, distraught, soon realizes that it, too, will someday die!! So, the sheep turns to forbidden magic ...
It can be applied to any living creature. Provided that creature can make the phylactery (which requires them to be a spellcaster with a caster level of at least 11th and the Craft Wondrous Item feat).
So if awakened sheep has taken enough class levels to meet those prerequisites, yes it could be a lich.
I remember reading a cool writeup for a B.B.E.G for a whole campaign who was an awakened rat turned lich... after the low level party breaks into a crypt and kills a bunch of rats (his mortal descendents) he swears revenge and spends the rest of the campaign puppeteering a campaign against them.
Also, this thread I just found.
My favorite lich was created by a curse. He then raised his adventuring companions as skeletal champions to continue at his side (bladebound kensai, bard, monk.)
Very cool.
I remember reading a cool writeup for a B.B.E.G for a whole campaign who was an awakened rat turned lich... after the low level party breaks into a crypt and kills a bunch of rats (his mortal descendents) he swears revenge and spends the rest of the campaign puppeteering a campaign against them.A lich can be any living creature?
How about ... a druid casts Awaken on a sheep. For a while, they are best friends, but the druid dies in time. The sheep, distraught, soon realizes that it, too, will someday die!! So, the sheep turns to forbidden magic ...
It can be applied to any living creature. Provided that creature can make the phylactery (which requires them to be a spellcaster with a caster level of at least 11th and the Craft Wondrous Item feat).
So if awakened sheep has taken enough class levels to meet those prerequisites, yes it could be a lich.
The rat thing is hilarious. Killing the mortal descendants is something I haven't thought of and I have made a note of it. Thank you for the good idea and the giggle.
Also, this thread I just found.
I like this thread thank you.
A lich can be any living creature?
How about ... a druid casts Awaken on a sheep. For a while, they are best friends, but the druid dies in time. The sheep, distraught, soon realizes that it, too, will someday die!! So, the sheep turns to forbidden magic ...
It can be applied to any living creature. Provided that creature can make the phylactery (which requires them to be a spellcaster with a caster level of at least 11th and the Craft Wondrous Item feat).
So if awakened sheep has taken enough class levels to meet those prerequisites, yes it could be a lich.
Its Phylactery is a wool shirt given to a poor family in the mountains.
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One thing I've noticed is Liches have incredibly good information networks. Due to being such old prepared casters they can't help but research in advance to have the perfect spells selected. Certainly some divination is needed to supplement their spys, but in the end...
liches get snitches.
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Its Phylactery is a wool shirt given to a poor family in the mountains.A lich can be any living creature?
How about ... a druid casts Awaken on a sheep. For a while, they are best friends, but the druid dies in time. The sheep, distraught, soon realizes that it, too, will someday die!! So, the sheep turns to forbidden magic ...
It can be applied to any living creature. Provided that creature can make the phylactery (which requires them to be a spellcaster with a caster level of at least 11th and the Craft Wondrous Item feat).
So if awakened sheep has taken enough class levels to meet those prerequisites, yes it could be a lich.
Let's call this lich Woolburn.
Woolburn is a mythic sheep lich, so the phylactery is an artifact. Whoever wears the wool shirt becomes .... a phenomenal shepherd. If somebody wears the wool shirt, he gains a +20 bonus for any skill roll related to sheep. I know, I know, this sounds really pointless, right? Not so!
Adventurers aren't going to care about a wool shirt that makes them better shepherds. But a family of shepherds will very, VERY deeply care about this wool shirt. It helps make them money!!
But here's the thing. Because it's a phylactery, it also slowly corrupts its wearer over time, and makes him more susceptible to any spells that Woolburn casts. In fact, Woolburn survives for centuries because he blends in with sheep herds. If he feels that adventurers or other do-gooders are too close, he slays his current shepherd, takes the wool shirt, and absconds ... usually leaving the shepherd to take the blame for whatever atrocities Woolburn committed.
Oh, one more thing. Woolburn's could also have corrupted, enchanted wool. Any person who wears clothing made from Woolburn's wool will slowly take Wisdom damage over time, eventually succumbing to madness as he hears Woolburn's voice...
For the record.
In my younger days (2nd e)
I had aspestous sheep, immune to fireballs.
Love the litch discussions....
You mention servents.
In all seriousness, would they not have simulacrams like crazy?
Even with a powdered ruby cost (3e), I would think they would have those as well as lots of undead servents.
Do we even have official stats for sheep?
The Dread Lich Woolburn: He's not just evil. He's baaaaaaaaaaaaad.
lol!
There was a thread a while back that asked about making oddball Lich builds, opening it up to any class build (using master craftsman or SLAs, etc). The commoner Lich was pretty good.
I had an idea, though I'm not sure if I ever posted it, since the thread had moved on a while before I found it. I wanted to figure out how to build an inquisitor Lich... but not the easy way (like, of an evil god like Urgathoa or something).
So I went with a Lawful Evil Heretic Sin Eater Inquisitor, follower of Abadar.
He was a City Investigator that joined the Church of Abadar when his faith called to him that he needed to do more. He quickly became an Inquisitor of the Church used to track down and enforce the Laws of Commerce. Joining the Sin Eater sect, his typical goal was to track down and punish those that would attempt to gain excessive wealth through forging identities, and faking or hiding deaths to bypass taxation laws and hereditary passing of wealth.
As he gained talent, so did his dedication, but then so did his social isolation. Never gaining any real friends, but certainly enemies, he focused entirely on the hunt for the next offender.
On one such long and truly diabolically twisted hunt, he found his target: a high ranking cleric of Abadar of another church. This cleric had long ago strayed from the path of law and civilization in the name of greed, but hid it well, unfolding his plan of pure tyrannical control from the shadows. His plan: to fake his death, but to live forever as undead and use his contacts (bribed, coerced, and planted allies) to control the direction of the church.
He could not hesitate, as the rituals looked near completion. He destroyed the ritual, and killed the arch-cleric. Taking the dark texts as proof of the fallen cleric's actions, he went to report his success.
Upon return, however, he was met with a hearing to determine the punishment for his infraction. He had taken direct action against another church, in fact, slaying a high member. His dark findings were never brought to light, for while he had cut the head of the beast, this cult of greed was a hydra, and former contacts of the arch-cleric quickly rose up to wipe away any trace of it.
Branded a heretic and remanded to prison until his ultimate fate could be determined, his mentor and possibly only friend left helped him escape, giving him back all his belongings and all wealth he had gained in service with the church.
The burning goal to anihilate that cult of greed drove him to single minded purpose. In the books he had taken from the arch-cleric, he found the research on becoming a Lich. Spending all his wealth from the church, and years combing through catacombs and tombs for dark texts, he eventually deciphered the rituals to Lichdom.
Decades have passed, and one by one, aristocrats, clerics and other "untouchable" high ranking nobles disappeared or left behind gray emaciated corpses. From the very shadows that his enemies attempted to use themselves, he kills any who would deter him from his hunt.
Phylactory: A heavily laden keyring with a particularly large key standing out as inscribed with runes and symbols. This keyring gains additional smaller keys as he eliminates each offender. Located deep in a normally unaccessible caved-in section of the catacombs of the Church that had ex-communicated him. While he has given up on ever returning to the Church, he still feels he is doing their good work.
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I won't go into too much detail on the build, but here's the thumbnail description:
Race Aasimar (w/ exalted resistance, scion of humanity & truespeaker)
Classes Heretic Sin Eater Inquisitor 12, Archaeologist 8
- Only thing he loses out by being a lich is the stern gaze benefit (morale). Everything else is luck or other bonus types.
- Rogue Talents picked were Terrain Mastery (+4 Urban, +2 Underground)
- He ends up with Evasion for all three saves with Archaeologist's Evasion, and Inquisitor's Stalwart.
- Great skills overall, major Knowledge abilities, knows every Language (except Druidic), great Initiative, Sin Eater ability to prevent a creature from raising undead spawn. A really neat combination of abilities.
- Since we are talking 20th level, ring of spell knowledge and pages of spell knowledge for things like Freedom of Movement, Haste and Fly.
His modus operandi would be to disguise himself as needed to root out another target, using any means (including torture) to get his information, and then track down and proceed to slip in with spells and stealth to confront his target.
Combat tactics would include Spell Perfection (unwitting ally) to be able to benefit from it on the same round and gain teamwork benefits while completely alone. Extra damage from Huntsman weapon effect if he tracked his target first.
After the first time he failed and had to track down his expensive gear, he added a permanent Contingency Word of Recall to his phylactery, so his gear-laden corpse will return to the phylactery on destruction. 200k cost, but worth every penny.
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Considering he's still within one step of Abadar's alignment, and still doing his work (rooting out offenders of his Law), it's quite possible he wouldn't even fall.
One thing I learned in this thought experiment was that the Inquisitor/Archaeologist build looks like it would be *really* fun to play!
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One good method for a liches minions is to use suggestion or charm to command good or neutral people to his cause, I have had a lich trick a group of crusaders into collecting artifacts for him. He was disguised and bluff was high (cleric of the trickery domain) so the knights thought they were doing gods work collecting artifacts for the "priest" while the lich just had to bluff every so often.
Edit: that odd lich thread Kaisuko mentioned was one I poster a few , I made a ninja, antipaladin, summoner (with an imp who is also a lich), and voldemort himself. I gave them tactics and a small backstory too if you are interested.
In the vein of the "I did it for immortality" theme, I was surprised to see that there wasn't any similar-to-lich clockwork version.
Basically, the idea would be that the creator would imbue his soul into a "catalyst device" (usually in the form of some perpetual motion device, lol), which would reconstruct a clockwork body on death.
A few neat differences:
- Doesn't have the "must be evil" stigma of undead.
- Construct rules instead of Undead rules.
- Can control more directly what kind of body is made (since you basically shed your normal body and control a completely fabricated one). A giant doing this can still become a Medium sized construct. This limits the stats so it can be more manageable.
- The very idea of an immortal clockwork construct implies that you could potentially improve the design over time, adding on things (see Building Constructs for ideas on that).
Would be a neat divergence from the typical "eeeeevil undead immortal thing".
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In the vein of the "I did it for immortality" theme, I was surprised to see that there wasn't any similar-to-lich clockwork version.
There's the soulbound shell, which is similar to what you describe.
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Found the Lich Buildoff thread, in case that helps give ideas!
Thanks Falcar! I found it doing a search with your name + lich, lol.
In the vein of the "I did it for immortality" theme, I was surprised to see that there wasn't any similar-to-lich clockwork version.There's the soulbound shell, which is similar to what you describe.
Close, but that one kind of fixes the caster into one state, whereas my idea was more along the lines of "I want immortality to continue my research!" type of thing, which implies growth.
Still, I hadn't seen that (hadn't really checked out the latest bestiary), and it's good for ideas on the physical build itself!
Friend was making a campaign that had a council of 5 gnome liches.
Long ago, there was a quite vile bad guy. Tried to commit genocide on gnomes (or something similarly horrific). A team finally put him down. But by then the hate was so strong, that wasn't enough. They wanted to make an example of him so no one would ever try that again.
They imprisoned his soul in something so they could taunt it and it could watch them hunt down his friends and family.
They made an artifact that would identify the next closest living relative of Mister Vile.
Didn't want to run out of time before they ran out of relatives, so they made themselves into liches so they could continue.
Centuries later...
The artifact identifies someone, they do research to figure out who and where, then send out the assassins.
The council theoretically rule the nation since no one can stand up to them. But in actual practice they don't really care what happens as long as it doesn't interfere with their hunt.
So actual governance is by a moderately (or maybe seriously) corrupt bureaucracy. They are limited by the fact that twice in history, the government got so bad that revolution threatened to interfere with the council so they just completely wiped out the government.
The campaign hook was a team of grey cloaks (council assassins) tries to kill one of the party. Apparently, the artifact has identified 1 of them as distantly related to Mr Vile.
Unfortunately, we never got to run the campaign. So I don't know how it turns out.
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If I have an NPC bad guy who becomes a Vampire or a mummy could the person become a Lich later? Do those templates stack?You can't apply the Lich template to something that is already undead.
“Lich” is an acquired template that can be added to any living creature (referred to hereafter as the base creature), provided it can create the required phylactery. A lich retains all the base creature's statistics and special abilities except as noted here.Vampires have the same wording, so an already undead creature can't become a vampire.
Of course, the GM can always decide differently.
It can be good if used sparingly. I used to have a GM, that liked to pile on templates.
We'd encounter a feral, two-headed, insectoid, half-dragon, lizard folk.
Then a vampiric, ghost, were-tiger, awakened, fiendish, axebeak.
We stopped even bothering to listen to his descriptions of these bizarre beasts. half a dozen templates would make them immune to most magic spells we might want to try OR at least they would have all very high saves. So it just became:
Encounter something a standard knowledge check doesn't identify but it looks weird.
Buff up the martial with the adamantine weapon.
He wails on it until it is dead.
Move along.
Kaisoku that is an amazing idea and I might hack it if I can find a place to put it just cause its so awesome. I haven't looked into clockwork at all but if I can manage to familiarize myself with it there is potential. And thank you for finding that thread I am going to read it.
Kydeem de'Morcaine if I didn't already have an evil Lich for my final boss this could be fun. I will remember it for future campaigns. And I love templates but I have been trying not to stack lots of them on one critter. If the templates make it immune to too much I ignore parts of it. Though with this being a mythic campaign I have to buff up most things or it is a cake walk.
Falcar I like this idea and will attempt to build towards it
So I have a few questions about the wonderful creature that inspires fear into the hearts of the most stalwart of adventurers. I would love to hear about the various amazing/horrifying Lichs you lovely people have dealt with over the years? Either as a player or a GM. How were they introduced? Was it a special ability that made them terrifying or just luck?
Well the worst lich I have ever met was in Tomb of Horrors. We made some incredibly lucky decisions and got through without losing anyone. We found the demilich at the end and lost 4 out of 6 of the party but got lucky again and killed it.
The best lich was Azimer in the ruins of Myth Drannor. He was what was left of the Naturalist's Guild. One on my characters had a Deck of Many Things fighter who always wanted to be a mage. She could never find a reputable teacher. Azimer was the crotchy old professor, asking, "Have you been studying your school books today?" Azimer was ridiculously tough. The drow and demons left him alone, like lets move by the old ruin on tip toe quiet. So Azimer taught Turuvielle how to be a mage . . . and thats how she became a Wild Mage. And foster mother to a red dragon named Baby.
What sort of guards should a Lich have? Armies, a well trained personal bodyguard, be part of a group of Liches, a well stocked dungon/castle, ect?
The liches that I am used to are all capable of casting wish. Basically, any bodyguard they want. The crazy ones are especially devious, like scribing thousands of scrolls of 'forget' so you permamently forget all your experience points.
Is there a certain level of spells a caster must be at to become a Lich?
You need a wish and research a ritual specific to you. Consulting with major demons, daemons, or devils is a good idea (pardon the pun).
Is there any way for martial with UMD to fake it and become a Lich?
Liches can make you a lich. Basically, you have to either perform a ceremony or be the target. A lich could make a one-shot ring of spell storing that you can use.
Could I use a Bag of Holding for the phylactery? Could the Lich leave the bag with all the things it wanted from the bag?
A phylacerty is a device to remind you of who you are. It is usually a token or scroll in a small box that you tie to yourself. Liches regenerate by coming back as wight like creature that eats the remains of the last body. This may not be PF or even WofC canon, but thats how it works from the early days.
Interestingly, under PF rules, the magic user's hp go frm d6 to d12. Just double whatever you rolled. You have no con, so you get a charisma bonus, modified by any feats, etc., for hp bonus. You could easily have dracoliches with thoussands of hp and characters many hundreds.
Interestingly, under PF rules, the magic user's hp go frm d6 to d12. Just double whatever you rolled. You have no con, so you get a charisma bonus, modified by any feats, etc., for hp bonus. You could easily have dracoliches with thoussands of hp and characters many hundreds.
This is not entirely true.
In 3.5, from what I recall, it was true.
But, in PF, racial modifiers all become d8 (as a side-effect of tying the BAB to the HD), the lich template specifies "All Hit Dice derived from class levels remain unchanged", and the official statted out lich still has his d6s.
PF eliminated a lot of the "now everything's different from the original" thing that 3.5 did with their templates (especially undead).