Vigilante Archetype - Split Identity without awareness of each other?

[quibblemuch]

Is there a vigilante archetype where the social and the vigilante identities are two different personalities, with each one not knowing about the other? Bonus points if it's magical.

My regular group don't read this:

The idea is to have a lich who has grown weary of immortality and evil. But he knows that the dark forces animating him won't allow him to end his own existence. In fact, they will do everything possible to prevent that. So he creates an alter-ego who is good, but suffers from amnesia. The PCs wind up recruited by this alter-ego to uncover his past and, eventually, to destroy the "lich who cursed him"--who of course is himself. I can always just handwave the two identities, but the vigilante seemed like a potentially cool way to make that work.

[Dave Justus]

I don't think that their is such a thing, some Vigilante archetypes play with alignment or other things, but not to the point of not knowing who they are. From a game perspective, since characters have choices when to change etc. that would be difficult to do. And of course a player couldn't really be ignorant anyway, making this something that would be hard to play if it was an archetype.

Rather than go with a class based ability anyway, I'd have it be a custom magical item, possibly even artifact or close to artifact level. There is magic out there that changes memories and alignment already, and crafting items is related to your concept already.

[quibblemuch]

An item feels like it could create unwanted issues--its physical presence is a giant ping, if it's an artifact that can do it once, why hasn't it done it a lot, etc...

If there isn't a vigilante archetype, perhaps I'll just call it a custom spell--a one-time ritual, perhaps, that created the current plot situation.

[Gulthor]

Could this be achieved by a slight tweak to your lich?

An alchemical lich with the master chymist PrC achieves this dichotomy pretty well. Lichdom as an expression/alternative of the search for the mythical philosopher's stone is also pretty thematically appropriate.

In fact, the Mutagenic Form class feature is so slippery, that not only does the mutagenic personality have a different alignment, but can also appear as an entirely different race - perhaps even appearing alive?

For further fun, maybe the mutagenic personality is the one that went through the process of becoming a lich and it's the primary personality that's still Good?

[quibblemuch]

Ooo! I like that! With a few tweaks, it could work quite well...