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qm-vox · 2 months ago

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Ancient Evil Survives - Liches In D&D

(Art of Vox-Tan by Domochevsky. Yeah I used my avatar for the lich article, my hubris is without limit and there is not weapon you can turn against me that I will not eroticize.)

Liches are one of the most iconic D&D antagonists. They are arguably more famous than copyrighted monsters like the Beholder (whose spread into fantasy in general has been greatly hindered by, uh, litigation), more representative of D&D's "brand" than fucking dragons, and more used as antagonists than any other "kind" of single-entity monster with the possible exception of vampires. Liches are also, appropriately, old, first appearing in known genocide enthusiast Gary Gygax's home games, except they're also even older than that, with true roots in the sword-and-sorcery stories that greatly influenced Dave Arneson and Gygax. The image of an ancient, moldering spellcaster, gone insane with the passage of time and possessed of power lost to memory, is appropriately eternal. Liches lurk in the dark places of every setting, steeped in their own malevolence, traps that spring shut upon the unwary, the unprepared, the weak, and the arrogant.

This article's title is sourced from, of all things, the build confirmation of the Lich from Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. It would not be possible without the research contributions of Afroakuma, my eternal partner in these endeavors, as well as Matt Daley, gralamin [sic], @criticaldiplomacyfail, DragoonWraith, Nekoincardine, and Vhaidara. It needs content warnings for child murder (yeah, we're starting there), insanity, loss of the self, possession, normal murder, desecration of dead bodies, touching on sexual assault (related to the possession), mind control, and violence, just, so much violence.

One final note on terminology. The word 'phylactery' is generally used to describe the vessel that guards a lich's soul, without which they cannot return to unholy life. I will be using 'reliquary' in its place. It is entirely possible that known incompetent Gary Gygax chose a word he thought sounded cool to describe this, but given that Gary fucking Gygax was also a known fanboy of both the Crusades and fucking genocide, I am not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on using a word strongly associated with Judaism for his evil spellcasters that literally kill babies. If you have some objections to this, then in my usual spirit of debate I invite you to go fuck yourself. This is not a point upon which I am entertaining debate, nor am I available to be persuaded upon this score.

Now, without further ado...

Beasts of the Sword Logic - Liches Through the Ages

Liches are nearly as old as D&D itself; they appeared both before and after BECMI, became entrenched during AD&D 2e, and have only become more used, more iconic, and more entrenched ever since, especially as early in 5e's life cycle known videogame voice actor Matt Mercer centered the first campaign of Critical Role on his depiction of the ascension of Vecna on Exandria. Their specific details have changed remarkably little through the editions of D&D, but their deployment and narrative role has changed quite a bit, and they have influenced works beyond D&D that have hit far larger audiences who then absorbed expectations about liches that were first set up by Arneson and Gygax. So let's play the oldies, shall we?

Pappy Badtimes - OD&D <--> 1e Liches - Liches showed up early in D&D. As best as Afroakuma can discover, the first lich was actually what would later be called a demilich, an enchanted skull left behind (more on this later) by the entity which would later be named Acerak, in the Tomb of Horrors. In that particular infamous adventure, the lich functions as a sort of trap, in which the PCs have their souls stolen before getting their asses beat into the ground should they be stupid enough to disturb the lich. This would become something of an ongoing theme; the second-ever lich, and the first one to be named, is a gentleman called Asberdies who lurks behind an illusory wall in the side area of a dungeon and attacks if he senses spellcasters. Man opens with time stop, this is just a trap that Kills You. Asberdies begins the tradition of liches as you understand them today, which were initially presented with the following description:

("LICHES: These skeletal monsters are of magical origin, each Lich formerly being a very powerful Magic-User or Magic-User/Cleric in life, and now alive only by means of great spells and will because of being in some way disturbed. A Lich ranges from 12th level upwards, typically being 18th level of Magic-Use. They are able to employ whatever spells are usable at their appropriate level, and in addition their touch causes paralyzation [sic], no saving throw. The mere sigh of a Lich will send creatures below 5th level fleeing in fear.")

This depiction of the lich is almost certainly from the story Sword of the Sorcerer, part of the Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman series by Gardener Francis Fox. D&D was strongly influenced by this genre and we know Gygax read it; further, this story is where we get the use of the Old English word 'lich' (itself derived from a nearly identical Proto-Germanic word), which was used to mean 'dead body' and can be found in archaic phrasing such as 'lichyard'. This depiction plays all the later hits - incredible magical power, a frightful presence, paralysis (albeit not by touch), and is distinct for sharing the basically-a-trap nature of the "inactive" lich. Our man here would really like to just chill out being mostly dead, and awakens to answer social obligations to other magicians, a thing he doesn't like doing but has enough honor and courtesy to do anyway.

However, there is notably something missing from this depiction of the lich and its successor in BECMI. I don't blame you if you haven't spotted what's gone, since I gave so little description to begin with - it's their fucking reliquaries. This iconic, some might say essential, component of the lich was not part of its first two iterations, three if we wanna count Acerak as a separate one (him being a demilich and all). The reasons for this are pretty simple and easy to point at; those incarnations of D&D were much closer to a skirmish game, hewing towards their roots in wargaming, and as a result a need for recurring enemies or recurring villains was pretty low. And if you wanted your lich to show up again, well, it's already a powerful Magic-User, dude can just cast teleport like a normal Magic-User, problem solved, right? This attitude was influenced by D&D's roots in wargaming communities, to be sure, but it was also heavily influenced by tournament play which used to be a thing. I've touched on it lightly in some other articles but legit folks used to go to like, tournaments with cash prizes and scoring systems, and as a general rule being the last man standing, slaying enemies, and getting treasure got you a good score. When you might end up being in the same module multiple times in one night as a result - this is also where the random tables come in, by the by, to add an element of difference to each run, an aspect which would go on to define a game called Rogue you might have heard of - you just really do not care why the lich is there. You care that he TPKs the party and you're not winning a thousand dollars.

The BECMI version of the lich was broadly similar. It continued the idea of the lich as an essentially passive force ("A lich is not normally found wandering, but instead remains in or near a very well-defended lair.") while explicitly enhancing certain aspects that were, previously, kinda logical extensions but not official. For instance, the BECMI lich explicitly carries around "4-5 magical items in case of trouble" which the DM is instructed to select, rather than roll for. These liches are noted to have 1-2 spells permanently cast on themselves ("most often detect invisible or fly) and to keep their lairs well-stocked with minions, but joining the party here temporarily and only coming back sorta in 5e is a summoning table, which enables the lich to call other powerful undead to defend itself - including vampires that may themselves be Magic-Users or Clerics! Here we have the lich not only as a sort of trap (although, yeah, they're still that) but as a genuine boss fight, the culmination of a dungeon or a dangerous entity from which to flee in an exciting action sequence.

In the edition generally thought of as 1e, we finally get the reliquary. This lich actually pre-dates the use of the word 'phylactery'; indeed, their reliquary has no formal name, and is instead referred to in Dragon Magazine as the object they will "jar" into via the spell magic jar, which will be a formal pre-requisite of lichdom from here through 2e until affairs change again in 3.0. Now, for those of you joining me from D&D 5e as your first edition of D&D, I need to introduce a concept here; a lich's reliquary did not sustain them on its own back in the day. Instead, for this version of the lich, they required access to their own corpse in order to return to life, and it had to be close to their reliquary. If they didn't have access to their corpse, another would do, but those corpses got saving throws to resist being taken over by the lich, and the lich could only return in a "wightish" form with greatly reduced abilities - potentially, even without spellcasting - essentially meaning they had to go on a corpse run like a damn MMO character. Now, this is where I need to interrupt myself to introduce another concept here.

You see, turning into a lich doesn't turn you into a lich.

Becoming a lich is a multi-stage process. In the first stage, one drinks the potion I've been alluding to above; this "prepares" you for lichdom. Later on in 2nd edition, this stage of lichdom - where you are prepared but not actually dead - will be named 'lichnee'. Now, to be clear, you are on a bit of a fucking clock at this point. Your body is not healthy or pleasant to be in and you sure did chug a shitload of arsenic and magical poison alongside, and I do not hesitate to repeat this, several quarts of human blood, you really just went for the forbidden lean. After, I cannot stress this enough, after you drink the potion, then you create your reliquary ("the object the lich will "jar" into [via magic jar]") using a slightly modified version of the magic item crafting rules. Notable here is that "no charm will make the lich candidate reveal where his jar is!" and that planar boundaries and imprisonment cannot stop the lich-to-be from returning to its reliquary upon its first death. So you're a lich once you die, right? Wrong.

The lich-to-be's life force returns to their reliquary upon their first death. At this point, the ideal situation is that the lich-to-be's original corpse is within 90 feet of their reliquary, and they can possess it and become a lich at last. If this is not possible, any corpse that has been dead no longer than exactly 30 days ("from a mouse to a kirin") will sort of do, causing the lich to rise with "no more than four hit dice" and, if the corpse could cast spells in life, the ability to cast up to 4th level spells. The trick here is, the corpse gets a saving throw, which, if it succeeds, prevents the lich from possessing that corpse forever; only their own corpse can be subjected to repeat attempts. No eligible corpses within 90 feet? Sucks to suck bone boy, welcome to imprisonment within your reliquary, please enjoy slowly pickling in your own madness, unable to communicate with the outside world, while your mutilated soul degrades and you end up in the afterlife anyway! What an excellent decision has been made here.

If, if, there is a corpse in range that fails its saving throw and the lich possesses it, they must track down their original body - in whatever state it's in - and then EAT THEIR OWN CORPSE, at which point they slowly change form into a corpse-like version of their original self over the course of about a week, and are, at last, a lich. Given all the risks and rigamarole involved, most people who aspire to lichdom quite smartly kill themselves (thereby possessing their own corpse and skipping the transformation) after their preparations are made rather than risk having to go on a fetch quest for their fucking bodily autonomy.

Mind you, every time they return to the reliquary they gotta do the fetch quest anyway. And it does get worse; these 1e liches cannot gain experience points. They cannot level up. They cannot change which spells they have memorized. Furthermore, reducing them to 0 or less hit points fully destroys the lich! Like! Instantly! They just fucking die! The most they use their reliquary for is the ability to return to it on their turn as their whole turn, at which point they're on the fetch quest again and they lose one (1) whole character level with all that entails.

Being a lich in 1e fuckin' sucked y'all.

That said, the news isn't all bad. The lich's reliquary was shockingly protected, being unable to be located by means less than an actual god, standing incarnate in the world, within 100 fucking miles of the reliquary, casting the spell locate object. Further, all pieces of the lich's corpse "emanate locate object with an unlimited range", though actually getting to them is still the lich's problem to solve. While "teleporting" to your reliquary (see: yeeting your soul into your fucking jar) costs you a level and leaves your original corpse on the floor where you gotta go find it and eat it again, no force can gainsay that teleportation - you'll always live to die another day, unless you've managed to fuck up enough that you were first level again to begin with. Which, while we're here, wild to contemplate that one might encounter and have to somehow deal with a degraded lich well below its former power level! That is not a thing that happens any more!

Which seems like a good time to segue into what fighting spellcasters in general, and not just liches, was like. 'Cause, y'all 5e folks? You have not the faintest comprehension of how good you have it. Much like the lich I am, permit me to discard my mask of human courtesy and become an old man yelling at the youngbloods; that whole 'concentration spell' thing you're used to? That's new. That's extremely new. 11 years old in the canon of D&D, that's nothing, that's a flash in the fucking pan. You roll up on a lich any time before the release of D&D 4e (or in Pathfinder 1e, which hews to 3.5) and that bony mother fucker is coated in buffs and defenses, unironically he just wakes up every day or detects the living and they do this with no edits other than the spell names. Take them by surprise? They cast time stop and then do that anyway. So they have a lot of defenses, right, okay, surely the pain train stops there IT DOES NOT; these liches (and, again, all spellcasters) don't have concentration slots for offense either. That lich casts wall of stone? That's an instant, permanent wall of stone forever, which you cannot dispel and must instead deal with for the entire fight. Lich casts banishment? Sucks to suck bitch, you're out of the fight and the lich is gonna do that again to someone else next turn. Control effects like Evard's black tentacles are set-and-forget, spells like flesh to stone are permanent save-or-die effects, and this is on top of any damage-dealing spells the lich might want to cast, you know, for fun, and their magical items, which they own and use. A lich by itself is a powerful solo encounter that could easily be the culminating boss fight of an entire campaign, and uh, it's not going to be alone for long. That summon table and the various summon spells have some thoughts about whether or not this fight comes with adds (the thoughts are "yes, yes it does"), and by Nerull those adds are gonna suck for you. The lich is already evil and its soul is already kept from the afterlife, what's a demon or fifty between friends at that point? And, not to leave this unsaid, if you can't completely destroy the lich before its turn comes up, it goes back to its reliquary and you get to do this again. Easier, every time, sure, but how lucky did you get the first time? How lucky are you feeling next time?

"Alright Vox," I hear you saying. "This is when you open a quote with dialogue from a strawman reader and reveal that there's another layer you haven't even talked about yet." And to this I reply: fool, I'm saving that for later in the article! This is when we talk about what these early depictions of liches contributed to lichdom, and uh, well, not to say the obvious thing but: lichdom. Lichdom is what they contributed. Every iconic piece of lichdom starts here, and while the bits change, their presence never truly does. These early liches very much favored a sort of inactivity, in which the lich is basically minding its own business and you personally stick your dick in this toaster, either on accident or, for many adventurers, on purpose. Not to leave this on the table at all, liches as villains were essentially absent at this stage. The first villainous lich was introduced already wholly destroyed, in fact, and was relevant only as backstory for powerful artifacts that he left behind before the final annihilation of his soul. You might have heard of him - he was this greasy little shit going by the name Vecna? I'll leave you to chew on that while we move on.

Once More, With No Feelings - AD&D 2e - AD&D 2e barely changed the lich at all from the 1e model, and why would it? There were, however, some refinements. The exact process of enchanting a reliquary changed, the recipe for the lichdom potion changed (including a titanically awful specific requirement which, for my sanity and yours, I will both not explain and presume to be an editorial mistake), nothing major there. Newly major, however, is that any corpse a lich possesses is the lich; the "wightish body" is gone, as is the lich losing power as it returns to its reliquary. Getting even worse, the lich now returns instead of being destroyed when reduced to zero hit points - you gotta track the box down, and you can't wear the lich down over many successive victories. On top of that, the passive defenses of the lich, the things it gets from being a lich at all, have a longer and more robust set of immunities, including immunity to many kinds of weapon attacks. Notable here, however, is that it costs 1 level to become a lich at all. Also notable is that the reliquary can take any form, so long as it is made of inorganic material and prepared properly via magic. This idea, that the reliquary can be literally anything, will be carried forward into all forms of the lich hereafter. That said, the reliquary also lost its incredible passive defenses, and now requires that the cautious lich actively take steps to protect it while also keeping it near a supply of recently dead corpses.

However, where AD&D 2e differs from its predecessors is a greater interest in liches from both the adventures and the novels, setting books, and other such materials. Nearly every famous lich in D&D gets their start here; Vecna becomes the lichgod and eventually God of Secrets, Larloch enters the canon of The Forgotten Realms at this time, Azalin makes a splash into Ravenloft as the immortal fascist dictator of his own Domain, alhoons (mind flayer liches) become a big deal, dracoliches enter the canon for the first time (more on them later). Many of these liches are still classically inactive, but a few regularly interact with the living in one way or another, and so here we have our first villainous liches, motherfuckers who want something and believe they can have it and enjoy it while being undead. They are, you see, wrong about this, and that's the joke that would be much funnier if it weren't for all these stacking corpses. They still weren't employed that way a lot in adventures, still being used as traps or incidental encounters, but the prior activity of these inactive liches is now a much more important element, and one players can potentially use to avoid a fight, acquire a dubious ally, or even attempt to outwit the ancient spellcaster. The Forgotten Realms was and will continue to be notable in the arena of lichdom because of the background element of Netheril. Now, you may have heard of Netheril while playing hit CRPG Baldur's Gate 3, but I wanna stress here that back when those jackoffs were flying the peaks of mountains around and doing doughnuts in the parking lots of the gods, your pappy and mine Jergal, LORD OF THE END OF EVERYTHING, was god of death, hatred, tyranny, murder, the hunt, fascism, cannibalism, the dead themselves, and even more. The Netherese rightly took one look at that guy and went 'I must never die' and just shat out an infinite supply of undead spellcasters whom you can plop into any adventure at any time for any reason. Add one to your game. Hell, add five! There's plenty to go around!

I Feed On My Own Fire; None May Harm Me - D&D 3.5 - My hat to Abbadon (Kill Six Billion Demons & Lancer) for the quote; it was too good for this not to steal.

Finally, a lich I can just give you a link to! First we need to talk a bit about some design technology from 3.5; you may notice "lich is an acquired template" in there. What's a template? How do you acquire one? The short version is that templates, at first, helped formalize a great deal of monsters or monster-adjacent things that a player could become, which could be used for diverse villains/antagonists, or both. Liches, certainly, but also half-fiends, celestial creatures (ex. a bear but from the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia), werewolves, etc, etc, etc. To make a creature or character with a template, you make a normal version of that creature, then modify it in the ways laid down by the template. In the case of liches, this meant that the Dungeon Master made a spellcaster as if they were making a player character (this being 3.5, mirror matches were a common and accepted action; the idea was that players and enemies used nearly the same rules, though Terms And Conditions Fucking Apply to that statement), and once they were happy with that character they would apply the effects of the lich template, which would change things.

So, what changes, what benefits is lichdom giving this person? Ignore the reliquary entry at the end, we're getting there. On the lich page that I linked you can see that the lich has kept its deathly, paralyzing touch, though now it deals negative energy damage (necrotic damage is the closest idea for you 5e kids). It has its fear aura, it resists Turn Undead, and any weapon damage not dealt by a magical bludgeoning weapon is reduced by 15 points before any other resistances, such as from spells. Additionally they're immune to cold damage, immune to electrical damage, immune to hostile shapeshifting, and immune to mind-affecting attacks (so no charm, no suggestion, no hold person, no mind-affecting illusions, nothing, all attacks on the lich's mind fail automatically). Pretty sick, right? Oh, but dear reader, we're not fucking done. Take a gander at the laundry list of immunities provided by the undead type for me. You see all that shit? Good, so do I, and it's fucking terrifying. Rogues can't Sneak Attack a lich, critical hits do nothing to it, it can't be turned to stone, level drained, or have its mind or body weakened in any way. Nearly everything you normally use to make a caster stop operating is off the fucking table, forcing you to have an actual-ass wizard duel with this ancient evil - and just like 1e and 2e, he is very, very able to stack buffs, engage on his own terms, escape whenever he feels like it, summon as many adds as he pleases, use all his magical items and, oh right, killing the lich doesn't weaken or hinder it in nearly any way.

You can scroll down to the reliquary entry now.

When you kill a lich in 3.5, it simply reappears near its reliquary in 1d10 days. No corpses, no range limit, no needs of any kind. It loses any items that were on the body you killed, for obvious reasons, and while that's not nothing it's definitely not enough; the lich is gonna be back with its full complement of spells, any items it keeps in its lair, and some serious beef. Your only way out of this is to either convince the lich to cease its attack on you and/or your bloodline and/or your entire lineage of teaching and/or your nation and/or your species, or to pierce the defenses around its reliquary, find the thing, and destroy it. And then, if you're unlucky, you also have to fight the lich again - destroying the reliquary doesn't kill a lich currently in a body, just traps it in the current body and makes it vulnerable to destruction, and now you're on a clock to stop it from building a new reliquary and, oh yeah, it's definitely not being talked out of fighting you now. Good luck fuckers.

Also new to 3.5, and continued in Pathfinder (though swiftly abandoned by 4e and 5e) is the idea that any spellcaster, not merely wizards and clerics, could become a lich. To become a lich you need to be able to take the Craft Wondrous Item feat (available once you have a caster level of 3 or higher), "be able to cast spells", and have a personal caster level of 11 or higher. What's a caster level? It's a sort of derived score that represents how good you are at the fundamentals of magic, and which determines several things about how your spells interact with other spells, the power scaling of your spells, as well as certain options a character can or cannot take. So, who all qualifies under that? Well, the list includes, but is very much not limited to: bards, clerics, druids, paladins (via Practiced Spellcaster or Sword of the Arcane Order and then taking the Blackguard prestige class), rangers (via Practiced Spellcaster or Sword of the Arcane Order), wizards, sorcerers, members of the assassin prestige class (via Practiced Spellcaster), beguilers, warmages, healers, hexblades (via Practiced Spellcaster), duskblades, shugenja, wu jen, warmages, warlocks (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), spellthieves (via Practiced Spellcaster), factotums (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), shamans, artificers (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), the NPC class adept, and that's not even getting into building a lich that dives deep into prestige classes that can make them even weirder than me speed rapping a bunch of character classes you've never fucking heard of.

And lest this go unsaid, while the full flower of lichly variety never bloomed, they were, indeed, extremely varied in their official publishing. Not just in adventures or as NPCs, though yes, liches in 3.5 got wild, but in terms of player support! You might, for instance, be going "a druid lich sounds like a contradiction", but the supplement Libris Mortis published options specifically for undead druids (and they were metal as hell). Bard liches were published as campaign villains, and that's not even touching the lich-like but not-lich antagonists such as the Worm-That-Walks. While the sovereignty, the full flower of the Sword Logic, of these liches is one of their greatest thematic and mechanical strengths, I very much do not want to undersell the sheer variety of them. If the DM has an idea for a lich, they can probably make that lich! The only real limit is that only "humanoids" can become liches, so no like, giant liches, no gnoll liches, no hag liches, none of that, and while in some senses that's a bit of an absurdity and a loss it is in keeping with the prior, iconic forms of lichdom. It's not as if D&D doesn't have a history of creating special liches that other people don't get - balenorns and dracoliches come to mind here - easily justifying a different tradition of lichdom for other peoples. Mind you, at that point you're doing homebrew, which means you're doing the designers' job for them, but, well, welcome to D&D. The designers haven't been doing their jobs since the 1970s. Expect more on these topics in a later section.

Drank The Kool-Aid By The Jug - D&D 4e - We return, once again, to the most honest edition of D&D. Like with most things, 4e had a divide between liches as monsters, and liches as player characters. On the monster end, lich was a template (this is gonna keep coming up) that could be applied to any monster of 11th level or higher with an Intelligence of 13 or higher that is able to cast a ritual calling upon Orcus, Demon Prince of the Undead. You might notice those requirements are very open, and indeed 4e took that shit and ran with it, introducing in its lore and adventures dracoliches, an aboleth lich, dryad liches, and new varieties of lich such as the void lich from the Far Realms. These liches had an aura of necrotic damage, regeneration that was shut down by radiant damage, the ability to add or substitute necrotic damage for other kinds of damage, and of course they return from their reliquary within 1d10 days. Due to 4e being 4e, the defenses of these reliquaries was far less insane than in older editions, and the liches themselves, while terrifying tactical encounters, are not the beasts of ruin and woe that they once were in comparison to other monsters or PCs. Hell, 4e let you fight Vecna and kill him, far more easily than any previous incarnation of Vecna except the 1e one that came pre-dead for you.

On the player end we have the Archlich Epic Destiny. I'ma post a screenshot of it here, and then summarize it. I don't know how to do image descriptions on this fucking hellsite and even if I did I'm not transcribing the whole fucking thing, my apologies in advance.

Archlich is an Epic Destiny, a path your character can take towards the end of their career. While it is technically only open to arcane casters, multiclassing in 4e means that it's very easy for a caster of any other kind to become an archlich. It plays a lot of the hits! You have a reliquary that sustains you (and even rescues your items when you die, a first and last for liches), you gain some undead resistances, you can deny death once a day, get your spells back, and radiate a deathly aura that you control so that it doesn't hurt your friends. Put like this it doesn't sound terribly impressive, but honestly for 4e, this is a rock solid choice both in narrative and mechanical terms; narratively, the idea behind Archlich is that you have been seeking a means to sustain yourself that is not controlled by Orcus, and you finally found it, permitting you to finish the great business of your life in safety and then retire as a sort of guardian of the world, becoming a recurring NPC for all future campaigns.

D&D 4e runs sideways with the sheer variety of 3.5's liches; the idea of liches having incredibly varied "class features" is all but gone, but in exchange lichdom is now anyone's game, provided you're stupid enough to look at Orcus and think, "would" or you're a player character smart enough to look at Orcus and think, "this guy is bitch made". The ease and simplicity of adding the lich template to a monster in 4e can't be beat, not before or since, but where this vision is weak, it's weak due to 4e's own weaknesses - a certain genericness to the setting, a de-emphasis on player characters and monsters as members of the living world, and a general weakness in the arena of non-combat roleplaying. So...I guess we need to talk about Pathfinder.

Majoring In Necromancy And World Domination - Pathfinder 1e - So the thing about liches qua liches in Pathfinder is that they're just the 3.5 liches. Mostly. Note there that "any living creature" that can create the reliquary can become a lich, which kicks down the last of 3.5's closed doors and opens lichdom up to anything that might be interested, which Pathfinder certainly ran with - among other things, named liches in Pathfinder include a cyclops and a hag. By this move, Pathfinder elegantly combines the strengths of the 3.5 lich with the strengths of the 4e lich and creates an arena of lichdom which players intuitively understood to already be the case but which was, in fact, not the case; I am handing Paizo a rare unqualified W on this one. But since the mechanics are nearly identical, we must then ask the question: what is the lore on liches in Pathfinder's only setting, Golarion?

Differing vastly from all prior liches, and all current liches after it, PF 1e and PF 2e both posit that lichdom does not have a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, every spellcaster who seeks to become a lich must research and perform a ritual that will only work for them uniquely. This isn't a case of like, reality only has so many slots for lichdom so you can't repeat someone else's ritual; instead, it balances on the idea that because every soul is unique, you require unique tools and surgeries to mutilate your own soul enough to become a lich. You can get the help of someone who has already become a lich but the base problem is still irreducible; it's less learning how to become a lich and more getting your PhD in necromancy, essentially. Though every ritual is unique, all are quite fucking evil; the least collateral damage of the canonical lich rituals involved torturing 13 dryads to death and the body count & atrocities only go up from there. Strangely for Paizo, no dead children on the canonical list except by implication (the massacre of an entire city), which is oddly restrained for them and a rather distinct difference from liches at AD&D 2e and backwards.

This, then, is the great strength of Paizo's liches, which welds them to their role in Golarion. Not only is each lich unique, but the kind of people who become liches must be willing and able to pro-actively harm others, and therefore have some goal beyond lichdom which requires it. These liches are motivated actors in the world, each one a particular villain who needs to be fucking dealt with and whose schemes will unleash atrocity, corruption, and harm on a staggering scale. That this makes lichdom of ironically limited utility to them is engaged upon, and worth engaging with! They have become beasts of the Sword Logic and then discarded nearly every advantage gained thereby, putting themselves into conflict with "lesser" beings that motivates those beings to find their one weakness and attack them through it. The end result is extremely striking and potentially unique and involved campaign villains, though here Paizo fumbles the ball a bit; its liches are rarely deployed as long-term antagonists in its adventures, instead used as a problem within a specific section. Meet the lich, fight the lich, find the reliquary, done - they're sidequests, essentially. But the potential, especially for the big-ticket liches who get their names in the articles and sourcebooks? Oh, it's there. Yet again, rare Paizo W, as much as I physically loathe saying it.

Holes In The World - D&D 5e - 5e's liches retain the fiendish connection from 4e, though while it is "often" Orcus, it doesn't have to be. This means that these are all people who made a fantastically bad choice for themselves specifically who are on the hook to an evil power. I'm not gonna lie, I despise this aspect, the more because it conflicts internally with what 5e says liches are like - sitting in tombs like the liches of old, rarely emerging when reminded of memories of life, and otherwise not bothering people. Like, I dunno about you, but if I am a demon lord I'm not letting my pet 18th level wizard sit in a hole doing nothing. That man has work to do.

So, what are liches aside from slaves to demons? Well. For the first time, they're Wizards Specifically, that is a new thing 5e did that I also don't like. 5e would later attempt to solve for this problem by introducing creatures like the Deathlock as cognate to like, Death Knights, but I'll be real, I consider this an error and I am not pleased or enthused by Tumblr posts out here trying to make a lich equivalent for every base class. Their actual statistics and abilities fall in line with classic lichdom, albeit downgraded; they are now resistant to cold, lightning, and necrotic damage, they retain their classical immunities (with their damage resistance being upgraded to all non-magical weapons), they have a paralyzing touch, they're 18th level spellcasters off the Wizard list. New to the lich is being a Legendary creature, giving the lich a pool of actions it can use at the end of other people's turns, including a terrifying gaze (same idea as the fear aura, but it works on any one person at a time), an AoE necrotic blast, and just spamming even more fucking spells at you. Getting better, liches also have Lair Actions, making facing them within their dominions even harder, including the wild-ass ability to bond with a victim and force them to share half the damage the lich takes. Cruel! I love it! Rejuvenating from their reliquary is once again 1d10 days, no corpses required, and I honestly do not anticipate this changing in official lich stat blocks any time soon.

Ecologically, these liches are the least sovereign they have ever been. To sustain their undeath they must regularly capture people with the imprisonment spell, sending the victim into their reliquary where their soul is devoured over the course of 24 hours. As fates go, it's horrific, but it also means that the difference between a lich and a wight with a spellbook becomes even smaller; Peepaw is hungee, and if he doesn't get his snacc he dies. This further conflicts with the written role of liches as sitting in the bottom of dungeons, which, I wish I could be surprised, but I can't. 5e's early writing had a lot of...this, really, which I am extremely willing to lay at the feet of Jeremy Crawford (managing editor). The buck stopped at your desk, Jeremy, the fuck were you doing? Meditating on the dreams of twink supremacy you would bless 5.5 with? Like I'm not complaining about the twink supremacy I just wanna know why you had to do my grandpa this dirty. Small, but perhaps worthy of note, is that these liches build their reliquaries first, then take the vile lich potion that contains the soul of a sacrifice. The 'lichnee' concept is well and truly gone here; the forbidden lean just fucking kills you immediately, at which point you become a lich. Which. Mood. Send me some of that immortal sorcerer HRT, I'm tired of this fleshly bullshit.

So, what does D&D 5e bring to the table of lichdom? A boss fight. For all the terror and power of older depictions of liches, they are, ultimately, quite similar to fighting any given spellcaster - just tougher and you get to do it again and again until you smash his collector's edition Dune theater cup. If you wanted to sell them as unique and dramatic that was entirely on you, the DM, to paint a picture with your words and do the goofy voices. This is no longer solely on you; the addition of Legendary Actions and Lair Actions really cannot be over-stated in terms of how well they make the lich fight feel unique and dramatic, how they bring out long-standing but little used abilities (the paralyzing touch in particular hasn't been rolled as an attack on purpose in the entire history of lichdom until 5e), how they sell the idea of a lich's place of power and make a potentially final confrontation in the lair in which it keeps its reliquary a desperate all-or-nothing fight. That isn't to say that you should run liches solo with no backup, the action economy does not respect the laws of dramatics, but it makes the lich the absolute centerpiece of the fight, especially as it interrupts the flow of combat to bring forth fresh horrors upon would-be heroes and turns the tide with its powerful magics. This design technology is worth stealing for any depiction of lichdom you care to hold forth on, and I heartily endorse doing so.

Hell Is Full - Pathfinder 2e - There's not a lot new to cover here in terms of NPC liches; the ecology and mechanics of lichdom are basically unchanged since PF 1e. They're still unique beings, still motivated to scheme against and assault the living, still up to schemes to take over and/or destroy the world, all that jazz. There's just this one thing. This one little thing going on. Barely even worth talking about. Tiny thing.

Player characters can become liches in Pathfinder 2nd edition. I would like to personally invite James Jacobs to huff my nuts. Man threw a bitch fit about people wanting to play undead characters for all of PF 1e and all of Starfinder and he finally had a real adult tell him that he sucks and can fuck off. Oh glory FUCKING be!

For a player character to become a lich, they need to take the Lich Dedication Feat. This requires them to be able to cast 6th level or higher spells via spell slots, to craft a soul cage (quick aside, I did not suddenly pick a different word than 'reliquary' - the Paizo writing team abandoned 'phylactery' in favor of 'soul cage', a move I heartily approve of), and to complete their unique ritual of lichdom. In exchange they get a host of benefits for being undead and for being a lich, albeit slightly nerfed for game balance reasons. I understand the logic - player characters and enemies have different roles in a campaign, and therefore different design needs and concerns - but it does create a ludonarrative friction where like, you as a lich will always be a secret second lesser kind of lich that isn't quite as resilient as a 'real' lich. To be clear, this isn't a D&D 4e situation where there's a non-evil path to lichdom, this option is only open to absolute mother fuckers, but, y'know, those can be PCs sometimes? It's fine? I am here for it, and I am eating.

Notable here on the ecological end for both PC and NPC liches is that a lich deprived of its soul cage is not immediately destroyed, but does begin to degrade and will eventually become a demilich, losing much of its power. As long as the soul cage is intact, the lich revives within 1d10 days as has become normal, no need for further input. However, all undead in Pathfinder 2e, liches very much included, have an "undead hunger", a hollow place in their ontology which they need to fill with something. For wights it's souls, for ghouls it's flesh, and for liches it's...knowledge. Peepaw has a serious book addiction and if he doesn't get his fix he's attacking the kingdom so he can snort the entire bibliography of Fabio. More seriously, this is also the kind of thing that compels these liches to go on adventures, to conduct magical experiments, to engage in classic cartoon villain behavior (ex. "it will be interesting to learn your pain threshold"), and the like. I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it means that the average lich has reasons to not be a sovereign thing, and therefore to participate in the living world. On the other hand, it means that the average lich has compelling reasons to not be a sovereign thing, damaging the thematic resonance of them as beasts of the Sword Logic that need nothing and no one, and yet are galled, needled, aggravated by their single weakness into realizing that they are not, in fact, perfect and removed from the real reality they foolishly thought to escape. More on this idea later.

Wearing Their Parents' Clothes - Warcraft - Surprise motherfuckers! I'm not going to stay here, or return here, but given the significant interchange between D&D and Warcraft, and the way World of Warcraft influences fantasy gaming - doubtless many 5e players started in WoW well before 5e even released in 2014 - it felt intellectually dishonest to leave them out of the conversation. My hat is off to my friend Drake for additional lore here, though my primary focus is on liches circa the events of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft 3: the Frozen Throne.

So, what are Azerothian liches? They are the specific creation of the Lich King, and the majority of them began their lives as orcs. Well. I say "began their lives", but the thing is, the timeline between the invention of the lich and the present is less than 20 years. Orc liches are, statistically speaking, at their oldest Your Grandpa, and human liches are even younger! Hidden lore revealed by the Lich King taught them spells of frost and cold, and as undead spellcasters they favor magic that kills, decays, and blights, but at the end of the day these dudes like, just finished grad school and turned into fucking bones. World of Warcraft would later introduce reliquaries for its liches, which feature in raid fights against them, as well as expanding their skill set to fold in the abilities of the Necromancer generic unit from Warcraft 3, but man, I really cannot stress this to you enough. Your average lich on Azeroth has been a bone dude for 10 years or less, and 'or less' is winning that fight by a lot.

So, what does Blizzard do with the incredible, mind-boggling youth of liches and undead culture in general? Nothing. Fucking nothing. If you tilt your head and squint the wild-ass decisions of the Forsaken (themselves extremely traumatized by their murders and subsequent undeath) could be blamed on their youth but honestly I am not about to be out here giving Blizzard that much credit. There is a huge well of untapped potential here! Lichdom was the consequence of a literal invading army of literal, actual demons! It was taught and spread by a dude who worshiped a suit of armor in a frozen throne that ran the undead as a loose hivemind! Undead as an idea are barely older, first introduced by the invading orcs during their war against Lorderon and the Alliance, and people were still grappling with that when the Lich King decided to play his funny prank with the granaries. And aside from the temporal horror of being invaded by your own dead loved ones...we don't...get a lot about this. And that's a bit of a let-down to me. What do the survivors of Lordaeron think about these incredible changes to their understanding of the magical world? What is it the temples in Stormwind preach about the unexpected discovery that their holy magic is particularly effective against the undead? What does that mean to the Forsaken? What compels someone to attend Scholomance? I dunno. There's a lot of potential here, and it's potential you could maybe bring out in your own depictions if you have an interest in portraying liches not as an ancient evil, but as a new technology whose motion is only now beginning to blight the world.

For All The Marbles - D&D 5.5 - Mark your fuckin' calendars y'all, 5.5 hard swapped to 'spirit jar' over 'phylactery', calling itself all the way back to the original 'jar' terminology and finally doing a really basic 'don't be a dick' move. It also comes with a sample table of jars for your lich that honestly has some pretty metal ideas, with my personal favorites being 'the first magical item the lich ever created' and 'the skull of the lich's mentor'. Our liches here are arcane casters and specifically wizards (with a special rule that lets them attune to magical items as if they were wizards for prereq purposes), who utilize a variety of powerful spells that evidence 5.5's newly-focused concern on verisilimitude; your 5.5 lich comes locked and loaded with detect thoughts, prestidigitation, scrying, and, within her lair, unlimited uses of clairvoyance per day - all spells that influence the lich as a boss fight not at all, but which give them remarkable versatility as NPCs and sell them as forward-thinking, ancient spellcasters.

That said, the actual boss fight(s) are fucking terrifying. Rolling in at CR 21 as of the standard stat blocks, these liches have returned to their ancient D&D origins as unholy terrors whose mere presence is a sign that you have done fucked up. They remain resistant or immune to many forms of magical damage in addition to having counterspell and shield once per round, unlimited times per day. Additionally, liches in 5.5 have Truesight out to 120 feet, rendering them de facto immune to illusions and other forms of high-level stealth in addition to the aforementioned information-gathering spells that mean the lich has a very high chance to know what you do and what you're about before you ever breach her sanctum. Get into melee? The Deathly Teleport legendary action says no, but the lich can also stay in melee and use her new Multiattack option to paralyze 3 people in a single turn 'cause fuck you - oh, and then she teleports out at the end of your (paralyzed) turn. Also in the legendary action toolchest for the lich is off-turn fear, scattering the party unless they've specifically defended themselves, and finally Disrupt Life as the lich's second-strongest but most consistent blast, laying down 9d6 Necrotic within 20 feet of the lich once per round, every round. Don't let her wear you down - the lich has power word: kill prepped once a day and she's itching to use it, and for those situations where you're out of range there but she might want to gamble anyway finger of death is also locked and loaded.

Oh, and one last thing. One last little thing. Hardly bears mentioning at all. Permit me to quote Page 196 of the 2025 Monster Manual for you: "Inevitable Siphon. Whenever a Humanoid dies within 1 mile of the lair, its soul is immediately consumed by the lich. A Humanoids whose soul is consumed this way can be brought back to life only by a true resurrection or wish spell."

This fight is for all the marbles. Don't fuck it up.

So, what did 5.5 write for the narrative end of liches? They didn't, thanks for attending.

Okay, no, I can't do that to you, as funny as it would be. Unfortunately it's not entirely a joke; almost all of the lich's entry is spent describing their aesthetics and giving potential candidates for their lairs, but very little is spent on who becomes a lich, how, why, or why liches are solely arcane casters. The situation here is so fucking dire that no explanations or theories are even given for why the lich is devouring souls. This, broadly, is a weakness of the 5.5 Monster Manual in general, which provides a very light overview of uh, everything, alluding to older lore but attempting to keep itself lightweight and moving forward, but for an edition of D&D that is for the first time in literal decades most concerned with the player characters being real things in the game world, it's bizarre that the NPCs just kinda fucking aren't. Additionally, it inherits 5.0's weaknesses in this arena - PCs cannot become liches, and liches have lost the breadth of origin that they had even back in their original incarnations where they could also be Clerics. Any attempt to reinstall such things is going to be a lot of effort on the part of the DM and/or play group.

Now that we've journeyed deep into the crypts of Full and Complete Context, I can write the actual article! Will I make that joke every time? Don't you already know the answer to that?

The Lords Of Shrouds - Liches In The World

This section is going to deal in the various ways liches exist in the world of the game; who becomes a lich (and why), the psychological and ethical effects of lichdom, the advantages and obstacles of lichdom, and varieties of the lich that have been published through the ages, along with a brief refutation of undead that are kinda lich-like, but ultimately are not liches. Let's start this off right, shall we?

Taste The Kiss Of Death - Becoming A Lich

So you may have noticed some shade being thrown at liches up above. Some of them, like the early liches, seem almost nakedly not worth the cost; others, like the 4e and 5e liches, involve sticking your dick in a blender and praying that the demon who owns the blender keeps it on a low setting (they won't). So why become a lich? What is so appealing about this idea that presumably very intelligent, wise, charismatic, or all three, people keep making this choice? Walk with me.

My Constancy Assured - The first, most obvious, and most alluring aspect of lichdom is that it halts and in many senses negates one's failing body in a way that is nearly unique amongst the undead. Liches do not have an animus, the negative energy equivalent of a soul; instead, they use their own soul. They mutilate it, yes, they harm themselves, but they don't die in a metaphysical sense, and they are not overwritten the way vampires are or replaced the way wights are. To be a lich is to ensure continuation of the self, and to be destroyed as a lich is no worse than dying already would have been since, you know, you were evil in the first place and therefore at least a little fucked (terms and conditions apply). But permit me to step outside metaphysical concerns and call in a targeted airstrike on my own position and, based on my circle of friends and mutuals, also yours.

To be a lich is to have a body that stops failing you.

That degenerative spine condition that's afflicted you with chronic pain your entire life and made the simple act of walking down the street an unbearable trial? It's gone. That leg which healed badly after a childhood injury, it doesn't hurt any more, and it bears up your weight. Your Parkinsons is cured. Blind eyes see once more, your cataracts cleansed by the tincture of death. Chemical imbalances that lead to depression are lifted as you become a thing that no longer uses a brain to think, giving you a clarity of mind represented in the many editions that give liches bonuses to their mental ability scores upon transforming. Nerve disorders, gone, paraplegia cured with one sip of the forbidden tonic. Never again will you need crutches, or a wheelchair, or a cane, never again will you have to ask someone else to fetch something for you from within your own home, never again will you have to so much as don a pair of glasses. You have remade yourself within death's fires and emerged as something whole, freed of the shackles of flesh that was ill-made for you and lifted high, so high, above the agonies of life.

Compared to this, being free of physical needs seems almost petty, but it's not nothing. A lich does not need to eat, or drink, or sleep, or breathe. All of the frailties of a mortal form are removed from them, freeing them to pursue their interests and desires without pause, to chase their thoughts without interruption, to work and experiment and seek their leisure as they so wish. The base act of existence no longer costs you money, or labor, or time. You are sovereign in yourself, freed, at long last, from having to ask and to answer for your own life.

A World Of Toys - To be a lich, sovereign in yourself, is also to be at a remove from society, from the living world, to be above it and aside from it, able to observe from the outside. If you have something within it that you treasure, you may now devote your time to its upkeep and constancy as you so wish, far more safely than you ever could as a living thing. What does it mean to you that you might lose this body delving into a deadly dungeon so that you can fund your son's inheritance or donate to the orphanage that once sheltered you? It's just a body. It's probably not even yours. Sacred places can be kept up, through labor or, later, through servants. You can read every book that catches your fancy, and many more besides, experience any culture you so choose, learn whatever languages you wish, travel to other realities, walk along the sea floor and witness what no mortal thing can even imagine. For classic liches, being undead isn't even an obstacle to enjoying the succulent pleasures of life; through magic jar, the lich can possess the willing (or the unwilling, let's be real, you killed 1-4 people just to get here, what do you care) and remember the rush of life through their bodies. Vampires, the mewling things, are so romanticized for their ability to fuck, for the eroticism of feeding, but a lich can taste a new dish, walk in the sun, feel a raging river, bask in a storm, take a lover, even bleed and die, all at no danger to itself. And when life grows wearisome, their volunteer or victim gets control of their body back, assuming it's intact, and the lich returns to its work and its passions satiated.

And the lich does all of these things from a position of supreme safety. Even a scraping mage who spent their last clipped copper simply to become a lich is now in a position to create and defend their hidden lair. Even without access to powerful magics such as move earth, your body is stronger than ever, more resilient than the living ever could be, and you feel neither pain nor weariness. You can dig your tomb with your bare hands if you have to, or even just if you feel like it, and design it until it fits the precise image in your mind. This done, you can defend, conceal, and customize it however you wish! Perhaps it might start a bit bare-bones if you aren't skilled in magically creating objects or physically creating them, but you'd be surprised what tedious work people will pay money for that even the most incompetent wizard can get done. Sign on for a few years as a lumberjack, cloaked in illusions; take bounties on monsters or to cull overpopulations of animals. Make lace and crash the fucking market like Christopher Paolini is writing you, who cares, it'll even itself out. Once you have money, which will never vanish down your belly or into medicine bottles, you can pay for higher-quality work or, for the truly forward-thinking, people to train you how to do that work yourself. You, and you alone, dictate the terms on which you engage with the living world, and few are those who could even detect you. Fewer still, those who can gainsay you.

My Works, Completed - Much hay is made over liches having access to dark and forbidden knowledge. It's not wholly inaccurate; lichdom is, in fact, dark and forbidden knowledge, after all, and further the relative safety and surety of lichdom changes the game when it comes to, say, rolling a demon and pillaging his library while your minions beat the shit out of him. For those inclined towards taboo knowledge and secret power, lichdom positions one well to seek it, and for those with the foresight to not rob demons, it gives one a strong basis for more peaceful negotiations. However, this is far from the only opportunity to continue one's work.

To be a lich is to have time. Endless time, with which to pursue the things which speak to your soul. Many are the lich-priests who essentially exist to manage a theocracy, to preserve holy rites, or to teach ancient lore - indeed, the benevolent balenorns are often created to do precisely this! A lich can make for an excellent guardian of a sacred place or a vista of untouched beauty, a benefactor to a family, culture, or faith. The research a lich commits to can, and often does, advance the understanding of magic in the world, and nothing compels the lich to advance only cruel and evil magics (indeed, many liches end up as unsung innovators of magical creation simply to avoid having to leave their lairs). If a mortal lifetime is not enough to truly understand your gods, why not take two? Twenty? Two thousand? When an immortal who has wronged you would have outlived the mortal you were, how delicious will revenge be when they realize that your constancy lies assured? As a lich, you will never die with the works of your life unfinished. Even something so daunting as writing the complete history of the fallen empire from which you once hailed is simply a matter of patience and ink. Behold a reach that can never exceed your grasp.

We Cannot Be Not!People - Consequences Of Lichdom

Quote sourced from the Celt, from her discussions of Glitch: A Story Of The Not by Doctor Jenna Moran.

It's not all upsides. Afroakuma stated, during our discussions on the topic of lichdom and while he was sourcing the information for the earliest liches, that "all forms of immortality are self-mutilation of some stripe". So too is it with liches. Many are under the impression that they understand the cost; they can draw the diagrams of their souls and detail each cut that will let them fit into a reliquary. They have ideas for their defenses and secrets well before they ever brew the potion that will transform them. An inability to be openly themselves amongst their own people or nearly any other? Lichdom appeals most to the lost and the lonely, this seems hardly like a cost at all.

But there is no escape from being a real thing in the real reality. No escape but a true death, in any event. The following section deals in the consequences of lichdom and common reactions to them.

Entropy & Alienation - Okay. This is gonna be a big ask from me, the writer, to you, the reader. I am on my hands and knees begging you to journey with me to a mental world that the majority of you would otherwise dismiss out of hand, and I need you to consider it soberly. Okay? Please. For me.

Turning into an 80s metal album cover is not the plan going into lichdom, nor is it generally considered a feature or a positive by prospective or, indeed, current liches.

While exceptions exist (and have been published), lichdom is mainly a blueblood's kinda game, either through having old money or, y'know, lots of new money (say, from being an adventurer). Though a certain amount of misanthropy and disregard for other people, outright arrogance even, is significant amongst those who seek out lichdom, they're not like...wizards in a box who only care about wizard things? They have status, they have hobbies, they have social, political, or military obligations and the accolades earned thereby. Even in 5e, the most narratively confused of all liches, it is noted that most liches are dressed in "rich, though rotting, garments". These are people who see themselves as having great dignity, making a choice for their own well-being or research or ambitions, and quite a few go to great lengths to preserve that dignity. The lich may well arrange for a contingent gentle repose on their own corpse to preserve it during the transformation process, and magic makes it easy to mend, repair, sustain, and even replace their garments. A simple prestidigitation, which costs negligible or even no daily resources depending on edition, can keep your regal fashion intact as if brand-new for the entirety of your undeath.

So why do they rot?

Few liches understand what they're getting into when they assure their own constancy. Removed from mortal needs they are also removed from all the little things the living use to understand the passing of time. A lich who sits down to have a serious think about something will never need to use the bathroom, eat a meal, scratch an itch. Its bones won't get sore, and its eyes will never grow weary. The classic image of a lich simply sitting in a throne doing nothing until adventurers cross its eyeline (and sometimes not even then if they're willing to neither bother nor rob the lich) isn't like, undeath afflicting the lich with lassitude, that motherfucker is just real deep on some magical equations and has been since before your species lived on this continent. But you know what does run out and require one to bestir oneself to fix? Preservation spells. Enchantments to renew one's dead flesh. Perhaps the lich spends decades, even centuries, making an effort anyway, but at a certain point, why bother? You never leave your tomb, your only visitors are tresspassers, and illusions are so much more convenient if you need to go outside for some reason. Your rotting body doesn't hurt you, and at some point in the war between dignity & self-respect on one side vs. ambition & annoyance on the other, ambition and annoyance win. In that moment, the lich loses something it may well never get back, or even understand that it has lost. They let their flesh decay, they write in their tomes while mold and mushrooms blossom in blackened organs, they start burning up bits of muscle that fall onto the ground rather than restoring their body, and eventually they become the undead beasts others expect them to be. Why bother? Why care? It's only a body.

It's probably not even yours.

The Madness Of Ages - Liches are not, usually, insane. I want to stress this. If they are, generally they were dealing with some shit to begin with, and do not experience new forms of madness or trauma merely for being liches. However, there comes a time when the isolation and apathy of lichdom stands in well for a dangerous disconnect with reality, and much like their rotting garments it is the result of neglect. When was the last time the lich left its tomb? Learned a new language? Checked in on the state of the world? When this undead sorcerer begins speaking to you in the tongues of devils it is rarely because he is so steeped in evil that he refuses to use Common, it's because the last time he knew "Common" it was called Netherese and people were still building cities on flying mountain peaks. Its conception of manners and courtesy is equally ancient, and its understanding of geography may misunderstand the shape of the coasts, the locations of cities, and whether or not there's a mountain range there. The madness of ages only serves to further isolate the lich, as time spent correcting these problems is time not sitting in their chair having a nice high-quality train of thought, and as the living become a bother and pursuing the pleasures of life through possessed victims becomes boring the internal incentives to do so dry up. Liches are not mad, and yet in their ossified sanity they are more dangerous, more unpredictable, than madmen could ever be.

Banality & Futility - Young liches die a lot, either incidentally or permanently. These are the liches still putting in an effort, whose business with the world involves those who are still living. They may have grand ambitions to take over a nation, petty revenge they are prosecuting, or simply be bellied up on their own constancy and unable to understand that their sovereignty is a lie they told to themselves. This is the most common form of the "active" lich, a dude who isn't even one (1) full elf lifetime old who, after displaying the cold arrogance to sacrifice the lives of others in order to sustain his own, believes he is entitled to power or, worse, that his reign would be beneficial for the simpering, lesser people blessed by his boot upon their necks. Here's the thing.

What is it that even the most vile, depraved lich uses power for?

No, really, I'm asking. Are they going to...build a huge harem of concubines? That seems like a non-starter. Build a gigantic palace to their own glory that they could never, ever, use as their actual lair because it's too obvious a target? Take time away from their research and contemplations to govern - and if they did, to what end? You got to this position by not giving a shit about other people in the first place, to their detriment, and now you cannot so much as lounge in a couch being fed grapes by topless elves unless you kidnap someone else to use their body to do it with. The ambitions of these young liches are self-defeating, a form of denial-meets-temper-tantrum about their new state. It is telling that if they don't end up permanently destroyed (and given how high-profile these schemes tend to be, they end up destroyed a lot), these liches generally abandon their schemes, often without comment, certainly without any intention of coming back except, perhaps, to use systems left behind for their benefit. An ancient lich who once founded the empire your character was raised in isn't still the empress, she owns a damn gem mine so she can show up every 25 years and collect spell components.

It turns out that when you don't care about other people and separate yourself from nearly everything you have in common with them, power kinda sucks to have. Power for its own sake is already an exercise in futility, but for the lich it is also an exercise in denial of their condition. All of the rewards for being a despot are off the table. Even a lich who's emotionally or intellectually obsessed with unethical sadism is going to find that it's easier to just kidnap random people from across the planet, never learn their names, and then put them in the torture machines. And the thing is...most liches are not those liches. They're more or less ordinary assholes who don't think much of or about other people who now confront the eternal, grinding drill of the banality of their own evil. They are not bestirred to help others, or to harm them; they are not interested in making a mark on history except perhaps through their obsessive ambitions, and once those run out, what're you going to do. Conjure a new obsession out of nothing? For the average lich, the only thing keeping them undead is the faint, yet not absent, fear of true death. Few indeed are the liches who can come to peace with their own amortality, and even amongst those luminaries of undeath there is always time on the world's side. They'll give in, eventually. They can't fight it forever. And in the meantime they steep in their own pathetic evil, cut off from the wonder of the world not through malice but through simple apathy, no better than the venal bandits and muggers they imagine themselves so removed from.

There Is No Escape - Let us imagine, for a moment, that you are a lich in the model of D&D 3.5. You are a sovereign being, removed from all need and nearly all weakness. Your reliquary will generate new bodies for you no matter how often you are struck down, and it needs nothing to do so. Your soul is not degrading; you experience no hunger, nothing even remotely cognate to a survival need. You are a thing which feeds on its own fire, asking nothing and answering no one.

Quick question, Dread Master - where do your spell components come from?

Maybe you don't need many material components; there's feats for that (in 3.PF) and arcane foci (in 5e), but uh. Your undead minions require expensive onyx, and that doesn't mine itself. Diamond dust for stoneskin neither mines itself nor grinds itself. Living creatures, blessedly, do die on their own without any intervention on your part, they're very polite that way, but y'know, for some reason their corpses don't deliver themselves to your door? That magical item you're making, do you think the wood logs itself, the metal mines itself, smelts itself, forges itself? No? The ink for your scrolls, spellbooks, and tomes, does that make itself - hell, does it keep indefinitely on the shelf? For that matter, the parchment required for scrolls and spellbooks - parchment specifically - do the sheep raise themselves? Do they slaughter themselves? Treat their own hides for you? The quills you're writing with, do the birds simply fly into your lair, shed their own feathers, and then cut them into a useful form? If you want a pen instead, does that make itself? If you use undead minions to get this done, do they feed themselves or raise themselves from the grave? Okay, living minions - do they pay themselves? Are they immortal the way you are? Will they always listen to you? Well shit, okay, let's try extraplanar - are the dao of the Great Dismal Delve going to give you shit for free? How about devils from the Nine Hells of Baator, they doing charity work lately? Celestia isn't even returning your calls, that's a non-starter. Maybe you try to enslave a djinn, that surely doesn't have any history of ending badly but, oh yeah, she still needs things too, and worst of all these extraplanar forces still see you as a pissant mortal.

Say you try to stockpile resources early in your lichdom, put off this problem for as long as you can. You pile gold, gems, metals, high-quality items suitable for enchanting, tools, books, and furniture in your lair. Congratulations, you are now dragon-bait the same way dwarfholds are, and Dread Master, let me tell you, dragons are high on the list of things that give you pause (though admittedly, you are high on the list of things that give dragons pause). Okay, what if you set up an institution instead, you found a school of magic or a support system for ranchers or something. That needs upkeep, not just in the sense of money (which you can't make from nothing) but in the sense that you need to check in with them pretty regularly to make sure the institutions are still serving you as well as keeping up elaborate fictions of your identity so that you can draw from them without bringing attention to your undeath. Well shit, okay, maybe being a despot won't get you the usual rewards of despotism but at least you can openly have an entire kingdom feeding your lab and you can get people to mostly run it for you, right? No, wrong, do you have any idea how much even the most hands-off king gets fucking bothered every single day? That's even worse than being the silent partner of the entire sheep industry!

The sovereignty that you have purchased through blood, darkness, and pain was and is a lie. You are not freed from the living world, nor can you be. There is no escape. There never was any escape. You have done this to yourself, and in exchange you have gotten nothing. Nothing. At. All.

Dead Inside & Out - Active vs. Inactive Lichdom

Liches can, broadly, be thought of as being in one of two modes. An 'active' lich is in the modern vein; this is an undead villain proactively attacking the world in some way. It might be for world domination, for revenge, for godhood, some ancient racist crusade that's on levels of Van Helsing Hate Crimes that the modern adventurer can't even begin to understand, whatever; the lich wants something, and they're trying to get it. Conversely, the traditional 'inactive' lich is the guy sitting in a tomb, though balenorns, lich-kings, and the like also tend to fall into this role. Let's talk a bit more about them

Some Serious Chair Time - Inactive Liches - As noted above, the inactive lich was the first lich presented in D&D, and also tends to be the lich most in harmony with her lichdom. These are the folks sitting in their thrones having a nice long think about magical theory, the nature of the divine, or what have you, but they're also balenorns serving as what are essentially undead park rangers (when they say 'don't feed the bears' they mean it, though blessedly you're more likely to end up teleported away with a geas to not come back than you are, say, to have your soul stolen - they're balenorns, after all), lich-priests managing theocracies, elders of the sahaugin who embrace undeath to preserve the histories of their people, and the like. As you may be noticing, this means that inactive liches don't necessesarily need to have no contact with the living, and indeed even the guy in the tomb has that 'you need material to do stuff' problem I explained above. Rather, they are characterized by long periods of inactivity, a hands-off approach to interacting with the living world, and/or specific, special roles in their societies that mediate their semi-regular interactions with the living. These liches tend to be the calmer, more mature, and more self-aware of the two broad varieties; they have had time to make peace with their undeath, and though the madness of ages is upon them and they are, not to put too fine a point on it, evil, they rarely represent a rampaging malevolence.

So why use an inactive lich in your campaign? There are a number of reasons. The classic inactive lich is great as a sudden sidequest or one-off encounter, one which might be resolved through might, magic, mayhem, or diplomacy; the players are in a location for some other reason, and a lich is also there, either because it is her lair (or her lair is attached to it) or because it has something she needs. These liches make for excellent dubious allies if approached properly, who may have a use for or interest in adventurers - perhaps the party wizard could be tempted by an apprenticeship to the Dread Master, or a Cleric might be stunned to encounter an undead creature whose relationship to their own god seems so shockingly different to their own (this one is great for Clerics of more neutral-aligned gods like Mystra or Azuth). An inactive lich might own an item the party desperately needs, or if you like giving your players rope to hang themselves with, one they simply want very badly. An inactive lich needs no foreshadowing, no prior justification for being in the campaign, and if you decide you've made a mistake by including them their separation from the living world is a convenient ripcord to pull any time you like. Certainly having to make a new lair is annoying, but it's probably not the first time. It might not even be the hundredth.

Screams Of The Undying - Active Liches - Active liches are those who are a threat to the living or possibly the entire world. These are the dudes trying to make a planet of the dead, take over a kingdom, kill a god, whatever. And they're clowns. You may have noticed in my arguments above that being an active lich solves a couple of lich problems (the madness of ages, the inevitability of dealing with the living world, etc) by more or less giving up all of the advantages of lichdom in favor of being a particularly resilient spellcaster. This is their strength and their flaw, and the flaws far outweigh the strengths; by being tied to the living in this way, the lich attracts enemies by the score, and even their victories will only create more enemies. Unless this motherfucker actually ends all life he is going to have groups of 3-8 traumatized orphans with class levels after his reliquary forever, and even a world of undeath is no protection when you remember that the undead have forever to hold on to a grudge against the bitch that killed them. Despite these problems, which become rather obvious when one sits down to have a good think about them, the active lich is far and away the most common in modern depictions of lichdom, and yet even in the relative thoughtlessness of the people pushing it (IT'S PAIZO IT'S ALWAYS FUCKING PAIZO IT IS PAIZO EVERY GOD DAMN TIME) we see some themes emerge. These liches tend to be 'young', they became liches to become particularly resilient spellcasters, and they tend to not grasp the futility of their goals. Power doesn't do anything for a lich! They get no rewards from having it or exercising it! They are, at best, hollow things, the undead version of your Elon Musk or Robert Moses who seeks what they cannot have with tools that will never give it to them.

The advantages of an active lich in one's campaign are obvious. They are powerful, motivated villains who are difficult to destroy and have had decades, centuries even, to figure out their esoteric plans. Even in a more mundane kinda goal - taking over a kingdom, say - tools like magic jar, imprisonment, various illusions, and RAISING THE FUCKING DEAD make the lich himself a particularly esoteric threat who can easily generate mysteries, puzzles, and full-scale war. But they are also, ultimately, very intelligent and driven morons whose activity is a raging scream of denial about this thing they have done to themselves, which will reap them no rewards, which cannot make them happy or even content. For a player group inclined towards diplomacy, there's a powerful, Fallout style social game one can bring to bear against these liches, turning their own dissatisfaction, hypocrisy, and double-think against them.

Callous Cruelty - Liches And Alignment

One day I will do that alignment article and then it's over for these hoes.

So, I'ma repeat something here for my argument. With limited exceptions - there's the balenorns again - becoming a lich generally means you're evil in the first place. Putting a human sacrifice and a shitload of poison into a blender before giving it the big chug is not one of those things good people do, no, not even if your virginal human sacrifice is a fucking incel. You have devoured the life of another to sustain your own as an act of selfishness and disregard for the other person, and it only gets worse as you move forward in time when ideas like soul devouring get introduced. "Hey why are you getting ahead of the idea of finding an acceptable target to sacrifice for lichdom" buddy let me tell you, I am extremely sympathetic to the idea of destroying my enemies and taking their shit, but that is not what's going on here. It comes up in the discourse a lot more often than is fucking reasonable.

The thing is, for most liches the kind of evil that motivates them into lichdom evidences the problems that liches have well before they become liches. They are distinterested in other people or actively contemptuous of them; they see the needs of being a living thing in a society or a culture as, at best, an ongoing annoyance, and generally as an indignity beneath their station, talents, or intellect. Misanthropy is common albeit far from required; the belief that anyone would become a lich if they could and you're just ahead of the curve is certainly conducive to lichdom, but one doesn't need to hate other people to find the 1-4 murders necessary for you to become undying. All you really need is to either find them to be less important than yourself, or already be primed by prejudices and other biases to consider some of them acceptable targets, and lemme tell you, that's not hard to find.

Exceptions exist, of course. The clown motherfuckers who become active liches are predisposed towards malevolence and cruelty, or at least a bitter envy and entitlement that can stand in just fine for malevolence and cruelty, but for your traditional liches this is the original problem which will inform the evil to follow. Liches are rarely active threats to the world, and often do not bother being cruel as such. Rather, their indifference towards other, less sovereign beings manifests as a callousness that can do duty for cruelty just fine. A lich may not bother killing a failed experiment to create new life before recycling it into the flesh pits; why go to the effort and waste the spell slots when it's going to die anyway? A lich might use an item such as a mirror of life trapping as a passive defense in its lair, reasoning that it can interrogate prisoners at its leisure, and never think twice about the existential horror the victims are subjected to. Ironically, killing intruders with spells like finger of death or wail of the banshee is more morally neutral; motherfuckers did, in fact, break into the lich's house, start stealing his shit, and then - in all probability - threw hands. To fuck around may be human, but to find out is divine. But this, too, is rooted in callous apathy, a symptom of the lich's alienation and sovereignty.

So what if a lich wants to stop being evil, or a PC believes they can get a lich to stop being evil? There's a lot of ink spilled on this subject. In Pathfinder 1e, Paizo spends quite a bit of page space in their dedicated lich article about how lichdom 'warps the soul' and even those going into it with theoretically good intentions are turned irrevocably evil, which is a deeply weird thing to spend a lot of page space on when, again, the least evil lich ritual in PF 1e involved torturing thirteen people to death. I would like to reject this premise. Instead, consider: getting a lich to care about other people, the first step towards a lich becoming a good-aligned person, does not actually necessitate that they become a better person. Let us ignore for a moment all of the vast incentives the lich has to continue to not give a shit and take it as given that a compelling argument for going outside to touch grass has been made. A lich wields vast power, incredible concealment of its nature, and is a civilization-level threat to the average society by itself. If you get a lich to believe that an evil empire must be stopped, that man is not walking into a courthouse to persuade people of the injustice of the law. He's going to start murdering cops and he's only gonna stop when there are no more cops. Alternatively, he will seek connections to the world which do not disturb him overmuch, which we see in Larloch of The Forgotten Realms. Larloch is a famous and classical inactive lich, a being of evil whose callous cruelty can be most succinctly expressed in his spell Larloch's minor drain, and homeboy has a whole second lich in his employ whose job it is to take down Larloch's words on the history of Netheril. Larloch and this assistant record vast and intricate tomes on the life and culture of people history has forgotten, hymns no longer sung to gods that no longer live, art that burned in the flying cities, the peasants and smallfolk ground into dust by their wizard masters, and they do it because they sincerely believe they have a duty to history and the world to ensure that those people are remembered, and that the world know that they lived, and died, and that it mattered. Not to leave this unsaid, copies of these histories are then delivered to the libraries of the living, notably to include Candlekeep, so that they may be read and understood. This upwelling of compassion and the feeling of duty to truth has not made Larloch less of a piece of shit! It is very much compatible with him being a piece of shit! People are complicated and evil people don't get mystically simplified just because they're evil.

If you can solve that problem somehow, really talk the lich around into taking some ethics courses, maybe learning modern Common, really go The Good Place on his undying ass, there are still some obstacles. Though previous editions lacked mechanics for this, narratively a lich is supposed to still be degrading, requiring either pillaging the souls of others or increasingly elaborate magical protections and remedies to sustain their immortal fire. In 5e this is explicit; a lich must consume souls, an act of pitiless evil that cannot be justified. This isn't so much a problem with becoming a more ethical person in and of itself - as already discussed, being a lich doesn't automatically make you a worse person than you were to begin with (which, admittedly, is a pretty bad fucking person) - but rather represents the closest thing these liches have to a survival need. Your lich, in seeking to be a better person, faces the death he's been avoiding for aeons. Maybe he spins the wheels a bit for a few centuries, feasting on demons and the like - they're very convenient targets for soul-stealing - but if he stays on his ethics grindset that turns out to also be deeply unethical, and then the lich faces a few choices. Self-annihilation is the most obvious one, and a lich dedicated to ceasing their own evil may well pursue it. For those who wish to finish the business of their life, ceasing to be a lich via wish or divine intervention might possibly be options, but they're risky and they definitely put you back on the path towards a true death. For most, ascension into a greater form is the only true exit, either via divinity or by becoming an astral being, more on that when we talk about demiliches later. Both options take immense amounts of time and effort, and in the case of becoming a god the lich either has to attack and defeat a god somehow - no light task even for an immortal archmage - or seek sponsorship from a deity both willing to uplift them to the heavens and who is compatible with the lich's newfound ethics.

The exit doors are all kinda scary, aren't they?

The Obituaries - Lich Variants

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that I, just now, brought up the idea that liches degrade and wonder why it didn't come up in the history of liches section way up there. This is where I repeat something I've repeated in every article so far and will repeat in every article after until people get it through their heads: in any fight between mechanics and narrative, mechanics win by default because they are the tools with which you actually interact with the game world. Which means in turn that you as a DM or a setting designer (or both) have a choice to make here; mechanically, nearly every lich feeds on their own fire, sovereign and sustained. I believe I've made a pretty good argument for the thematic value of that so I won't repeat it. However, there's something to be said as well for the drain of ages, the way exposure to the Negative Energy of their own undeath harms the lich's soul and requires answer.

There have been, over the years, many potential solutions to this. Many liches simply kick the can down the road as long as they can, inventing new and more elaborate spells to protect, shore up, or even heal their souls if they can, though that last isn't an option for every lich. Most will eventually predate upon a souled being, though again the idea is to minimize time out of the chair; summoning a Planar being and then devouring them works just fucking fine, and you barely have to walk the five feet to your ritual circle to do it. For the truly arrogant and brillaint, you can stop cutting into your chair time to eat souls if you could find a way to link your soul to a source of Positive Energy, renewing it with no further effort on your part, which has many obvious advantages and the slight disadvantage where the tiniest error will annihilate you instantly. As a result, most liches who grind their faces against this problem for thousands of years eventually seek an astral ascension or godhood to solve their problem. Godhood isn't the best idea, but it does solve the problem they want to solve.

In addition to this basic question of the sustainability of lichdom, there have been many variants of liches across D&D and Pathfinder. Here's a few of the more notable ones, and a refutation of a being often thought of as lich-like.

Balenorns (D&D) - I keep bringing them up, here they are. Invented by elves, the balenorn is a lich variant greatly concerned with not being a hole in the world. They achieve undeath through a wholly different process that does not produce or require a reliquary, instead using clone and a specialized spell that creates and sustains their undead state so that they can transcend mortal limits and mortal needs. Rare even in the context of the rarity of liches, balenorns are typically employed as the teachers of ancient and complex lore that cannot be written down (for reasons that might be sacred, practical, or traditional), as the guardians of holy places, or as something akin to park rangers for elven roams. They typically train their own replacements. A balenorn is an unambiguous candidate as an ally for a good or neutral-aligned party of player characters, and an interesting ambition for an elven spellcaster, especially one greatly concerned with the traditions of their people.

Dracoliches (D&D) - Pop quiz, what settings are dracoliches native to? If you answered anything but The Forgotten Realms I have some bad news for you! Though the idea of the dracolich has spread to fantasy in general and has many variations (Seath the Scaleless in Dark Souls comes to mind), the origin was in the work of Ed Greenwood, where it is wild as fuck. There's a cult that thinks they worship dracoliches but essentially worship Fantasy Nostradamus and they're trying to take over the world because they believe the world will be ruled by "dead dragons" and they are not chill about that shit at all. In an extremely related story, becoming a dracolich is not something a dragon can do by themself, and therein lies the trap. You need multiple high-level spellcasters to make a dracolich, and that in itself is a bit of an obstacle; dragons draw their personal space bubbles with maps. Then these high-level spellcasters need to talk the dragon into letting them turn it into a dracolich, which involves, at a bare minimum, THE DRAGON DYING AND LETTING THESE ASSHOLES FONDLE THEIR SOUL. But hey, say the wyrm goes through with it, its constancy is assured! There's just this small problem where all those high level spellcasters and their minions own its reliquary, know where it is at all times, and want the dragon's help taking over the world. Fucking oops.

Dracoliches are excellent 'active' liches and high-level threats who cannot have a normal relationship to lichdom because there's a gun to their head. They cannot control the fanatics who ostensibly worship them, and even if you take the idea outside of The Forgotten Realms I highly suggest keeping that push-pull relationship between the dracolich and its assistants, as it both impels the creature to be a threat of some kind and provides an angle for cunning parties to play both sides against the middle. It's a ton of fun, trust me.

A brief note for PF1e specifically; Pathfinder's liches can be "any living creature", so explicitly in Golarion a dracolich is just a normal lich and none of the above applies. They also don't get different abilities the way a traditional dracolich does. I'm not necessarily saying this as a criticism, just a 'keep this in mind'.

Psychic Liches (Pathfinder) - Rooted in Pathfinder's 'occult magic', psychic liches are the ultimate end point of its active liches; spellcasters who sustain themselves by turning the legends of their atrocities into a reliquary. They are, universally, idiots. Like, liches on Golarion are already having a bad time, they kinda have to do some high-profile shit just to become liches, but when you need to sustain yourself by continuing to commit herostratic crime eventually even the other evil people are going to come after your ass because they don't want to tolerate a wildcard. I am torn here, because on the one hand I find the concept deeply stupid, but on the other hand it being deeply stupid has narrative value. Then again, it only really works with occult magic or something like it, so, call your shot.

Forsaken Lich (Pathfinder) - The other end of the spectrum from the psychic lich, the forsaken lich is a load-bearing pillar of Golarion's lich worldbuilding; these are victims of failed lich rituals or spellcasters who accidentally (or on purpose) tried to use someone else's materials to become a lich. Most of them explode pretty quickly, and the ones that don't are bound to a single location which sustains them. Honestly they don't necessarily need to come up even in a lich-focused campaign, but their existence helps gird Golarion's themes around the uniqueness of lichdom and the soul. Rare Paizo W.

Horde Lich (Pathfinder) - This one is just funny and might be worth stealing for a non-PF system; horde liches are essentially normal liches, but they have built their undead bodies to be many bodies that they Voltron together, and which they can shed during combat to make additional minions. As boss fights go, a boss who is his own adds is deeply funny to me, and a potentially interesting tactical situation especially with a couple more elite minions (say, an evil Cleric) to back him up.

Demilich (D&D and Pathfinder) - So in Pathfinder and D&D 5e, a demilich is a degraded lich. In Pathfinder, they lose most of their spellcasting; in 5e, they're still a dangerous, high-level encounter that steals souls. Ultimately, though, they're the same concept, the idea of a lich's futile war with entropy finally being lost, and they're perfectly servicable in that role, though they are also, y'know, definitely in the vein of the original Acererak - this is a thing you find at the bottom of a dungeon and nowhere else.

This was not the case in prior editions. A demilich isn't even, metaphysically, the lich. The entity once known as the lich, seeking truer sovereignty (or, in extremely rare cases, an ethical end to their lichdom that isn't suicide) dedicates the work of ages to an Astral ascension, becoming a new kind of being further beyond mortal concerns - ironically, going through a process much like just dying in a regular-ass fashion from the other direction, as it turns them into a beast of Thought and Belief, much like a Petitioner or an Exemplar. However, this being still has strong connections to the mortal it once was, even though it has changed far beyond that person. These connections, especially its former reliquary, its last body, and its possessions, can be used to form sympathetic magical attacks against the ascended lich, and so they leave something behind that is a bit like a clone of themself, and a bit like a guard dog, and a bit like a door bell. This being is known as a demilich, and it is under the rather distinct impression (most of the time) that it's the original. They lurk in well-hidden lairs, either to receive an ever-dwindling list of acceptable visitors, to work on projects it believes are still important (and which the original has abandoned), or, you know, to kill anything that disturbs it on sight.

Official stats for these ascended liches do not exist. As plot hooks and opponents go, they're in the same sort of weight class as like, a demigod. But there remain narrative opportunities here, especially for those seeking truly ancient lore, or evidence of forgotten knowledge. Notable is that a lich who ascends to divinity may well prepare a demilich beforehand for similar reasons, and that entity is a self-protecting weakness; if you can cripple and capture it, you have something in your hands that might be used to attack a god, perhaps even usurp it. Awfully tempting, isn't it?

A brief note here; though the iconic form of the demilich is a yellowed skull with many soul gems inside of it, this has never strictly been a requirement. It's iconic for a reason, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of the floating skull. However, those soul gems could be the joints in a skeletal hand, a disembodied spinal column, hell if you're running a comedy campaign make the poor thing a single leg with the soul gems as the toes on its foot. You really only need one relatively continuous body part that you can replace bones with gems on, you got options.

And now for the one I need to refute...

Siabrae (Pathfinder) - Click the link. Read the flavor. Read the abilities. Read the abilities again. Tell me if you spotted the problem. There's a lot I could say here about the blatant pillaging & blaspheming of Celtic faith (do you have any idea how hard you have to try to blaspheme there? It is genuinely fucking difficult), the internal contradiction of Paizo's own worldbuilding (how is a demonic corruption undead exactly?), the way the sustainability of these druids makes them a problem even more thorny and impossible than a normal lich, but I'm not going to do any of that. I am instead going to point out that these entities, being undead creatures sustained by and hellbent upon revenge, have more in common with ghosts and revenants than liches. Indeed, Pathfinder has a whole-ass ghost wizard running a necromantic nation! This is not a lich.

Lab Safety And Other Eternal Concerns - A Lich's Lair

There are certain universal concerns and incentives when designing a lair or other base of operations for a lich. Many of them are the same kind of concerns any high-level spellcaster may have! While the image of a lich simply moldering in her tomb is fairly accurate - given that a lich can devote literal centuries to really following a good train of thought down, chair time is most of their existence - they do have projects that they're working on. A lich attempting to make large-scale constructs or undead, such as, say, zombie giants, will need large open spaces. While a lich rarely has to worry about concerns like ventilation (which can make an underground lair extremely appealing as they do not need to compromise its structural integrity), an exploding alchemy lab may harm other projects; likewise, clouds of poison or toxic runoff might harm the lich's scrolls, tomes, holy texts, or delicately forged magical items, which means that like a living wizard, such labs go near the top floor. While smoke and soot from a forge will never affect the lich, it may damage its lair, and so such facilities may in fact need ventilation or even to be in a separate place from the main body of the lair itself.

There are, however, other concerns. Liches are holes in the world through which Negative Energy seeps; rarely do they find some pre-haunted forest to bury their tombs in, and instead they tend to be the generative cause of such hauntings, afflicting the living world with the abrasion of centuries. Young liches often do their best to mitigate this damage, as it's a fairly obvious sign of undead presence which in turn brings annoying people to their doorsteps, but at some point when you get up from a hundred and fifty years of high quality Chair Time it's just not worth the bother to clean up the mounting taint. This, then, becomes both the sole warning people get (posting actual warnings also brings annoying people) and the reason liches almost inevitably move to rural lairs far from the living. It's one thing when a stretch of an uninhabited forest is haunted. It's quite another if the city parks are.

That said, many liches will end up with more than one lair over the course of their unlife, for various reasons. Younger liches with more alive-seeming bodies, especially those who routinely interact with the living, may simply stay in their towers, mansions, or temples. There are many advantages to this, not least of them being that one has, presumably, already built the facilities. They're well-ventilated, hospitable to the living, not suspicious, and close to any business the newborn lich wants or needs to wrap up. These youthful liches may well be finishing the training of an apprentice or acolyte, preparing to create a new, more isolated lair, simply enjoying access to victims and/or kinky motherfuckers who want to get possessed (that particular entertainment can last awhile), wrapping up career obligations, under the mistaken impression that they can pretend to be alive long-term, or any combination of the above. Additionally, there is a certain adjustment period to lichdom. While the lich is now immune to, say, poison, a young lich may well still value safety features in her lab because she does not emotionally understand this; as Afroakuma put it, the situation is quite similar to getting a new upgrade in a Metroidvania that makes you immune to spikes, but forgetting this because it's so new. However, these relatively public abodes also come with a certain floor of scrutiny; with many eyes on the building, and potentially many wandering hands, keeping one's less savory experiments secret may be difficult, and as the lich begins to experience Chair Time or yearn for the same, the living become an annoyance. Those liches who remain in this position long-term are, inevitably, balenorns or those evil-aligned liches in a similar social position.

Most liches will be encountered in a kind of undead middle age. These are the liches who look like mummies or heavy metal album covers, and the ones who will be most commonly encountered, either by enterprising adventurers raiding their tombs or because they have emerged to enact something. They tend towards isolated, rural lairs for the reasons explained above, and almost all will eventually build something underground to better defend against scrying, teleportation, and other means by which annoying people might bother them. However, here we see a bit of a split. More arcane liches - bards, wizards, sorcerers, and the like - trend towards the classic tomb. Divine liches need sacred spaces to work with, and given the limited number of gods tolerant of lichdom many divine liches will be more active than their arcane counterparts. A lich sworn to, say, Bane, has some shit to do on a regular basis; a lich devoted to the likes of Mystra may be holding on to ancient traditions such as the now-forgotten rite of stocking dungeons with magical items before new monsters move into them (no, really, no, really). A druid lich may be protecting a sacred grove or holding back an otherworldly corruption such as a portal to the Abyss, and therefore ironically be among the least visible liches despite their Healthy Outdoor Living (it's not healthy and birds have eaten their flesh). While these liches have access to powerful teleportation magic and have had plenty of time to get used to being liches (lairs with no entrances may be favored as a result), there is still a certain appeal to...convenience. A lich who needs to operate a forge may well make her lair in the mountains so she can just go mine her own metal, for instance, while a lich devoted to a god likely needs to make his shrine at least theoretically accessible to other worshippers.

Notable for these middle-aged liches is that harm to the lich is less annoying than harm to the lich's possessions and projects. The lich repairs itself; bookshelves don't. Their magical traps and defenses often lean on necromancy, save-or-die effects, and items like the mirror of life trapping not solely out of malice (though, yes, callous cruelty is certainly a factor) but because a door that casts wail of the banshee on intruders doesn't fucking blow up their lab. If for some reason the lich has made a grievous mistake and needs these people to not be dead, imprisoned, or trapped in a mirror, their vast wealth and magical power often makes reversing the problem trivial; at worst, such as a person refusing a raise dead cast by the lich, they can mantle themselves in illusions and deliver the unfortunates back to a living person who can do that for the lich, and then get back in touch via magic to make whatever apologies, threats, or social calls might prove necessary. Nothing pisses a middle-aged lich off quite like her Chair Time being interrupted, so you can bet your ass she's going to handle her business quickly.

Elder liches are the rarest and also the hardest to categorize, because they are not really a function of time per se. Rather, an 'elder' lich is one that has gotten fed up with the limits of lichdom, and seeks an ascension to remove their final weaknesses, to escape the trap they have built around themselves. A lich seeking an astral ascension requires isolation so that they can devote absolute thought and time to the work. One thinking completely rationally may well build a new lair with no entrances or exits, such as a demiplane (through the spell of the same name) or by shapeshifting into an earth elemental before teleporting into solid rock to carve out a bubble in a mountain. However, a lich that has had enough time to work on ascension may well be under the impression that their current lair is just fine, and simply tighten the defenses while making it clear to any extant social contacts that they are going in for the best fucking Chair Time of their life and that they are not to be disturbed upon pain of death. This, then, is where we get demiliches in frontier tombs and forgotten ruins - the fruits of successful ascension, girded by the most formidible magics the lich could bring to bear in protecting any scrap of their old life that could be turned against them.

Seeking divinity is certainly the riskier and more high-profile option, making it seem more common than it is, but it is also the faster option. For many liches who decide to escape lichdom it might seem like the only option; their research has failed to uncover the possibility of astral ascension, they have powerful enemies hammering down the metaphorical gates, or they simply misunderstand divinity and are under the hilariously mistaken impression that being a god will make them ever-more sovereign and removed from the world. The advantages of seeking divinity is that gods are available to be usurped and have some very storied and famous histories of dying and being devoured that one can research, if not easily, at least more easily than figuring out how to transmute your soul from base principles. Slightly more complicated, but much safer, is attempting to ascend without usurping a god, which often involves gathering divine energy, scraping fragments of divinity from many lesser gods, and the like. However, even these 'safer' methods run into the politics of the divine, and not to put too fine a point on it, usurping a god means going head to head with a fucking god, who may well attempt to interrupt your attempt ON THEIR LIFE and whom you may need to defeat in single fucking combat. It's not easy, but the reward for success is divinity and all that implies. These lichgods are now beings of Belief; worse, their lichdom is now an inextricable part of their divinity, no more easily removed than Odin having only one eye. Many discover, too late, that while they are no longer dependant upon their reliquary, it now forms a weakness that they cannot destroy without harming their own godhead, chaining them to the items that have become part of their legend in a manner that tempts with opportunity and damns with vulnerability. Fucking oops. And since their lairs need to be somewhat accessible so that they can go on the adventures and quests needed for their fell purpose, congratulations to the newly divine lich - you need to get a church around fast, and get them to hide your shit for all your new life is worth. Good luck.

The Ungrateful Dead - Liches In Your Campaign

The following section covers liches in your D&D campaign from both a DM perspective and a player perspective. Talk to your fucking group and get on the same page if we're seeing liches on the player end, as this may well influence the players' plots relating to these liches! That said, let's start from the pure DM end.

...And Then The Body Moves - Liches For The DM

Consider the following when you're looking to introduce liches into your campaign and game world.

Sovereignty - You may be noticing up above that there are many versions of the ecology of lichdom, and they break down into two general camps. The first is that the lich is wholly not sovereign; she requires corpses to return from the dead, she needs to eat souls, whatever. The second is the 3.PF model; the lich needs nothing (except all the things she needs) and is wholly sustained by her own fire. Each approach has some advantages.

A lich that isn't sovereign is one that has a lot of angles of vulnerability. They become a sort of puzzle with many solutions; separate the lich from the ability to eat souls, burn her stash of bodies, destroy her reliquary, maybe even negotiate! Or run! These liches must be more actively cautious, and are ever-more inclined to be retiring and inactive as a result. These liches are great as random encounters, sidequests, and one-off antagonists, though they also have potential for recurring antagonists who are particularly subtle and concealed, moving in the world through minions.

The more sovereign lich is great as an active villain because they have less to lose and are less vulnerable. Narratively, this may be the strongest mode of the lich as the sole nearly-sovereign thing, with but a single grain of sand that gives lie to their perfection, is such a sharp contrast to player characters who are living things in a living world. The trouble is, this mode has not actually existed at the same time as characters that are living things in a living world. It exists in 3.PF, where characters are windup dolls who go on an adventure and then go into a closet when they're done. If you want this lich, you need something like the Bastion system in the 5.5 DMG, which strongly loops your character into the world and creates that contrast.

Either approach is good, but you're going to have to pillage mechanics and lore to fully commit either way.

Thematics - So uh, who is your lich? No, really - are they an arcane caster? A divine one? What sort of projects fascinate them and how might that theme their lair and defenses? Are they still holding a grudge about something, and do they bother to prosecute it? There's a lot you can do here, ranging from drawing on funerary traditions for their lair - for the morbid, realistic, or just culturally proud lich who has come to terms with their undeath - to emphasizing differences in how the lich casts spells (in a different language, with different somatic components...), even the language your lich attempts to speak to the living with might be relevant. Is that truly ancient being speaking in, say, Infernal because he's a piece of shit, or because he correctly deduces that Infernal has very little linguistic drift and someone educated in this group of intruders surely must speak it (other fun and potentially thematically resonant candidates for that include any of the elemental languages, Celestial, Abyssal, Dwarven, or Giant)?

I wanna say again that the classic lich look with the crown and the rotting robes and so on and so forth, it doesn't exist for no reason. The kind of mother fucker who sips the forbidden lean in the first place is pretty arrogant, y'know? But even if it's all a front, if that lich was never a king, never a ruler, never greatly respected by their society...if you intend to use your lich as a recurring antagonist, or a recurring ally even, it pays to pay attention to how they present themselves and the ways in which their lair, their attire, and their actions hint at who they are and how they think. A lich is not an alien malevolence from beyond mortal ken; quite the opposite. Give your players these hints and nuggets of information in good faith.

The Reliquary - Okay, so. Here's the thing. There is a sort of default dichotomy between liches and their reliquaries where either they hide their one weakness away as hard and deep as possible, gladly sacrificing convenience & access to their own possessions in exchange for a more certified revival, OR the reliquary is 15 feet away during the boss fight in plain view (thanks World of Warcraft). Lemme trouble this some. While it's quite true that the cautious lich may well go to a lot of effort to bury their reliquary deep, they do have like...needs? Needs and limits on their resources. Every moment spent gathering money to pay for a separate set of defenses and concealments, and then to maintain them, is a moment that does not involve Chair Time. In many cases an inactive lich "lives" near their reliquary because even for the undead convenience will beat out caution quite often - and with such dire defenses in place for their projects, what more could the lich do to make the reliquary truly safer, especially since putting it in a separate location means it loses an important line of defense in the form of the lich itself? An active lich has plans in motion which are going to be time-sensitive either from the lich's perspective or from an objective one, and they may well choose to rely on concealment over other forms of security; the bard lich published in Libris Mortis, for instance, uses a wooden spoon as her reliquary which is concealed in the castle kitchens where she works among many other such spoons. Is that the "rational" move? Sure! She's got shit to do! People to scheme against, a kingdom to take over, the living to manipulate, girl is on a fucking schedule - should her body be destroyed, she can't afford to tack even more time onto her 1d10 days of revival. She has willingly accepted a potentially greater risk of permanent destruction in the name of her goals, and if she survives that decision she may well have different priorities later in her unlife.

On the other end, a lich whose reliquary is there for the fight, there's a few ideas. The most obvious is that the party has found the reliquary of a more cautious lich and it has showed up to defend its one weakness; this can be great for a tense combat encounter in which stopping the lich from escaping is as important as attempting to kill it, especially if the players don't have control over the reliquary yet. However, I want to make a case for a lich that carries their reliquary around with them and what that might look like. It does seem, on its face, to be a fantastically bad decision, and indeed if you go this route the resilience of the lich is at least hypothetically very damaged. While spells like nondetection or magic aura can make the reliquary a less obvious target (potentially causing the lich to revive quite close to its slayers), it's a lot of risk regardless! So why? The easy answer might be that in your game world, it's required; the lich can only be sustained within a certain range of their reliquary, necessitating that they or their familiar carry it around. If they're going to have to carry it around anyway, they may well enchant it into a power source, a weapon, or other useful item; a ring turned into a reliquary is worked further to become a ring of spell storing, for instance, which also masks its nature as a reliquary and makes Ye Average Adventurer reluctant to destroy it. For more martial liches - your rangers, duskblades, bards, and the like - they may simply carry their reliquary around with some form of concealment or disguised form because they recognize that they cannot build the usual terrifying magical defenses that characterize another lich's lair; indeed, they may make an actual weapon into their reliquary and then enchant it further, relying on its power or curses layered into the blade to keep it safe.

Whatever route you take for your own lich(es), the thing to keep in mind is that you need a reason that your players can interact here. Certainly if you're better at the mechanics than your players are you can create an ironclad defense for your lich's reliquary that cannot be touched, but that's no fun, y'know? When deciding how the lich treats and defends her reliquary, look at her values, her goals, and most of all, the convenience and costs of her chosen solution. And while you're at it, go look at Crimeworld, published in Fate Worlds II: Worlds in Shadow and written by the writing lead from Leverage. It's from a different game system, sure, but the advice is invaluable in any context in which you want to think about the pressures and incentives of a character's security systems as well as for heist plots - and what is going after a lich's reliquary but a heist where the Score is the undead sorcerer's immortal life?

Lair vs. Bastion - The Bastion concept re-introduced in 5.5 (Dungeon Master's Guide, 2024) is the long-awaited official return of an idea that was last mechanized during AD&D 2e under TSR. It is, perhaps, worthy of its own article, but the brief summary is this: as the PCs level up, through their great deeds and accumulating wealth, they gain access to a building or buildings and land upon which they themselves may build further. The genius of the Bastion is to tie the player characters to the world, binding them strongly with the twin incentives of narrative power (favors from their lords, economic leverage, military might, information networks, and more) and mechanical benefits (item crafting, increased profit-making, access to poisons, generating Charms, and more), and in this way it is a much more elegant and refined variation on its predecessors. A Bastion binds the player characters to the game world before the Bastion itself is ever finished, and indeed it will only be finished at level 17 or so; for an adventurer's entire career, their Bastion - shared or solo - will be continually changing, continually being upgraded, continually altering in response to the events of the campaign, the desires of the character, and the interests of the player.

This is in sharp contrast to a lich's lair.

A lich's lair may have started much like a Bastion; indeed, a young lich's lair may well just be their Bastion, until or unless they relocate. But the pressures and incentives of lichdom will either force changes or relocation or both eventually. Some obvious things come to mind, chief among them being that unless the lich has made the extremely unusual choice to have living creatures in their lair (to get in-house access to spell components, say), it's not a place where people live. A lich's lair does not have bathrooms, kitchens, or food; with nothing alive in it, the lair might even lack dust. The altar to the lich's god may be quite "lacking" in offerings (temples in D&D don't like, heap gold that their gods eat - they're using the money they charge for their services to perform sacred works, lobby politically, and buy spell components, all things the lich likely isn't doing or may even travel to another temple in disguise to donate towards). Depending on the attitude of the lich, considerations like stairs and corridors might not be installed; while a lich has no need to display their magical prowess or install a teleportation circle (any visitor is already a failure of the lair), they may well consider temporary expenditure of their spell slots to be a good price to pay for the extra security turning their lair into disconnected rooms, being flight-accessible only, or even requiring incorporeality represents to be quite worth it. Indeed, even if the lich bothers installing stairs and corridors - perhaps to save those spell slots on the rare days they go outside - they may well keep their personal rooms behind permanent illusions and emerge into the "false" lair only to attack intruders or deal with projects that are less security-sensitive. "Hey Vox that sounds like Dark Souls," I have exciting news for you about where Miyazaki got it.

What this means for you the DM is that a lich's lair is a wonderful opportunity to contrast with your player characters and their dreams, ambitions, and changing lives. It's said that the best villains mirror the heroes in some ways, and honestly here's your chance. A PC wizard's arcane laboratory is full of plans and moving parts, pieces, components, forever being reshelved and moved around and in the glorious disarray of life; when she steps into the lich's ancient forge for magical items, which burns pure gold for a fire hot enough to fold magic to steel, is she unsettled by her own thoughts of magical convenience mirrored in this master of undeath? A cleric of Lathander entering the temple of a divine lich must grapple with the knowledge that this, too, is a holy place - a testament to the glory of the living world built by something profane. A bard runs her hand along the spines of books written in languages nothing living speaks and wonders: was this person like me, once? And the worst part is, yeah, the lich probably was. This ancient evil was just like you, once, and in some ways they still are.

You May Do It Once - So there's a concept that's crossed my dash a couple times here, and by God I wish I could find it and just link it; if y'all do, let me know and I'll edit the proper credit in here. The post in question proposes having liches cast spells from older editions, to represent their ancient sorceries and disconnection from the living world. This is absolutely hilarious and the worst possible idea and I love it. The downsides are obvious - there's a lot of work to be done in how the PCs interact with such magic (how does a dispel magic work in this context, especially with editions that use a separately tracked 'caster level'? How about counterspell? If you drag in, say, a darkness effect from an older edition, how would newer light effects interact with it? If you're using 2e style countermagic where specific spells can counter and dispel other ones, can the modern equivalents still do that, or newer spells like the older ones? Can the lich do that to the modern magic?), the game balance changes drastically, and not to put too fine a point on this one, spells older than 5e don't use Concentration, leading to buff stacking to an unholy and terrifying degree. You should absolutely not do this.

However, it is very funny and I encourage you to do it once. You get one shot per play group, and I might suggest in this context that it's done best in the specific form of an early encounter with the lich to demonstrate the problem, followed by a subplot about researching these ancient forms of magic and then the quest to confront the sorcerer and resolve that person somehow. Before you pull this ripcord, though, keep in mind that your players are gonna want to use this magic, and any excuses you have for why they can't are gonna scan like bullshit. Additionally, many settings - notably here to include Forgotten Realms - make changes to spellcasting diegetic, which is to say, these ancient sorcerers are swept up in actual alterations to the laws of magic themselves, and pulling this little trick may be in conflict with the lore of the setting. That isn't to say that you can't do it, but you either need to be prepared to say that this lich is an unusual exception or perhaps has an item that shields them from the changes (the latter is a great way to let your players have access to these spells) or to say that here at your table the lore will be different.

The esteemed Afroakuma on review of this section offered a pair of practical suggestions for giving players access to this older magic, should you choose to dance this dance. The first is that the remnants of these ancient sorceries require some manner of praxis that will die with the lich, the kind of thing so ingrained and obvious from the inside that the lich didn't bother writing it down. While this means the spells essentially die with the lich, magical items made by them - wands, staffs, scrolls, spell gems, and the like - still retain them, giving your PCs the ability to literally break the rules when it really matters to them without it becoming their number one option. The second suggestion is a more narrative problem; buried deep in the lore of the Planes is the Draeden Compact, an agreement between five unlikely signatories which, among other things, obligates them to cull the spread of magical knowledge from before the current iteration of the multiverse. The lich had some way to hide from the Compact, but your PCs may well only learn it exists when the Keepers (think the Men in Black) and/or the githzerai come after them and they realize they have a brand-new life problem that they could have a whole adventure about that lasts and lasts and lasts until the end of their careers.

The Skeleton War - Liches for PCs

Consider the following if you're looking to incorporate lichdom into your PC's backstory or character arc.

Peepaw's Off His Shit Again - Perhaps the easiest way to incorporate a lich into your player character's backstory and themes is to tie them to the ancient sorcerer directly. Back in the Paladin article I proposed the idea that a lich had sponsored a young paladin for mysterious reasons and I still stand by it, that shit fucks, but there are many more options. Perhaps your character's family is part of a business which unknowingly services a lich's research. A young bard finds an incomplete work whose creator mysteriously vanished, and it inspires her; later in her adventures, evidence of the work's author persisting emerges. A desperate peasant girl pacts with an ancient lich and becomes an Undead Patron Warlock, bound only partly willingly to a cult of Mellifleur, Lord of the Last Shroud. In his youth, a Cleric was brought back to life after a misadventure in the wilderness by a skeletal priest of his own god, and now seeks to understand what strange dogmas would drive one of the chosen many to seek immortality.

As a perpetual dungeon master myself, this sort of thing is pure gold to me, and working with your DM can get you a long-term character arc whose opposing figure can be dubious ally, villain, and mentor at turns. If your DM is less interested in that sort of thing, eat them while they yet live and get a better one. However, do keep in mind that the DM is gonna want to, y'know, add in their own plot twists, expand on the ideas you present, and generally have fun making the game world and story for you to confront and interact with. The ideal situation is a strong hook that can be fleshed out beyond your sight and brought back to you as something thrilling for you both.

Becoming A Lich - Don't.

Okay, that's not fair. The temptations of lichdom have a lot of dramatic potential going for them, and if you're playing in 4e or earlier the game bears it just fine with absolutely minimal problems on anyone's end. If this is a thing you want to explore in that context I don't even need to give more advice than you've already read to get this far in the article, so I won't.

The trouble is 5e and 5.5. These editions hard-code liches as enemies and give them access to Legendary abilities that are just not ready for PC use, to say nothing of trying to handle questions like their Immunities and Resistances. So the simple answer is: don't. Maybe you plan a story of temptation that will ultimately be refused, leaving the idea of becoming a lich on the table that will ultimately be declined, but like, what if you're playing an evil PC who doesn't give a shit about the moral cost of the forbidden lean? Perhaps new liches are not currently possible; the knowledge has been lost, fiends have moved away from this technology, the laws of magic have changed, the gods themselves are beating the ass of anyone who tries (if your character then proceeds to take on a god in single combat over their immortality and win...well, congratulations on becoming a god, that's a new set of problems and also handily blocks lichdom). This is by far the easier route as it avoids a great deal of mechanical problems and personal labor on the part of you and your DM and your group.

If everyone involved wants to do that work...well, I endorse the 3.5 model of lichdom in which you need to be at least level 12 to become a lich and that anyone who can cast spells could become a lich. The initial transformation should hand out the paralyzing touch, the lich's immunities and resistances, and the benefits of being undead; you already have the spells. As your character levels up, work with your group to figure out how the other abilities trickle in, and definitely save the Legendary abilities for later - level 15 at a minimum, maybe even level 17, trickling in over time as you develop off-turn actions. Keep in mind, though, that at that point you're kinda the main fuckin' character of every combat. Whose turn is it? It's your turn, every turn, and you're swinging the battlefield mightily. At that point your character arc is about your relationship to this heady rush of power and whether or not you understand and accept the dark bargain you have made for your sovereignty.

And that's our article folks! Usually this is where I toss in some homebrew or example characters and I might do so in a reblog later but the inspiration is not upon me at this time (new job got my ass in shambles). That said, if you found this helpful, entertaining, enlightening, or if you're simply burdened with wealth you can no longer abide, I did start a ko-fi recently and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Look forward to the next article on something at some future time.

#rpg #d&d #dnd monsters #lich #pathfinder #ttrpg #dnd 5e

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