#his particular brand of evil is entertaining to me

[sad-endings-suck]

“But he’s done evil things!”

Yes, that’s why he’s so dear to me.

[apollowhoo]

hello!! I love your Alastor x Child Reader stuff you wrote. So can you please write an one shot of Alastor with a child reader who's the oppisite of him? What i mean is, Alastor is lowkey nonchalant but the reader is actually insaine. I hope i explained enough.

soo... you didn't say anything for a plot so i just made them meet, i hope that's alright with you<33

ALASTOR X INSAINE CHILD!READER

Hell was always the same with the chatter of sinners and the painfull screams all around. Alastor, strolled through the streets, his cane tapping rhythmically against the ground. His wide grin never faltered, though his sharp red eyes darted around, observing everything.

Then he heard it—the most evil laugh, high-pitched and absolutely unhinged. Alastor stopped, tilting his head, the sound was coming from an alleyway just ahead. He adjusted his tie and strolled over to the alleyway.

What he found was... surprising.

A small child, no older than ten, stood over what used to be a rather unfortunate demon. The remains were scattered about in a chaotic mess of black goo . The child, held a jagged piece of metal in one hand, the other smeared with the remnants of the "fun." They're wide eyes shimmered with manicness.

"My, my, what a display!" Alastor exclaimed. "I must say, it’s rare to find someone so creative with their time."

The child turns to him, eyes glowing. “Did you see? Did you see what I did?! He said I couldn’t take his hat—so I took everything else!” They gesture dramatically at the mess behind them.

Alastor chuckled, twirling his cane. “Quite the overachiever, aren’t we? But tell me, dear child, what drives you to such... theatrical carnage?”

They tilt their head, clearly unbothered by his casual tone. “Why not? It’s fun! It’s exciting! Don’t you think so?”

Alastor’s smile twitched. “Ah, yes, but there’s an art to it, my dear. A balance. Chaos is like a radio frequency—too much static, and the signal is lost.”

The child seemed unimpressed. “Static is fun. It’s loud, and no one can ignore it.” They grin wider, holding up the bloodied piece of metal like a trophy. “Want me to make some for you?”

Alastor’s chuckle turned into a full-blown cackle. “Tempting! But I think I’ll pass. Watching you is entertainment enough.” He leaned in closer, his grin sharp. “But do be careful, little one. Hell is like an ocean full of fish, and not all of them appreciate someone making such a mess.”

They automatically lean in just as close, their smile never faltering. “Let them come. I’ll make it fun for them, too.”

Alastor pulled back, his laughter echoing down the alleyway. “Oh, I do believe I’ll enjoy keeping an eye on you. You, my dear, are a star in the making.”

And with that, he tipped his hat and strolled away, his cane tapping the same rhythm. The child curiously follows him.

After all, it wasn’t every day they found someone who appreciated their particular brand of madness.

[qm-vox]

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.

[scintillyyy]

Hi. I love every second of your blog going "Fuck Chuck Dixon. All my homies hate Chuck Dixon." concurrent with "Dixon could often be remarkably competent as a writer with legit interesting ideas." Please never stop writing metas.

listennnnnn i hate dixon he's awful. he's also written stuff i really enjoy despite the many glaring faults.

the thing with dixon that i'm always trying to suss out tho. like, i think because current day dixon has been radicalized in a truly awful and horrendous way, there's a lot of desire to place his current day radical beliefs onto every aspect of his past works and blame everything on him and him alone as this one terrible writer who ruined all characters for ever and ever just because he's a conservative. but like. i think that because he's an awful person it's easy to place blame on him retroactively for some things that weren't necessarily solely a product of his conservatism or his fault alone.

and mmm. i never ever deny the conservatism present in his works. it's present in his robin book with tim, it's present in his nightwing book with dick, and it's present in his batman books with bruce. but people sometimes act as if he was working in a batoffice that had the current day issues it does where writers are given a carte blance to do whatever they want with all characters with little regards to continuity or character growth. that did not happen during his tim under denny in the 90s--denny o'neil was known for running a fairly tight ship (i can't find the interview but there's an interesting retrospective interview he does wrt jason where he talks about his failures as an editor and how he was too hands off and not firm enough allowing writers to do what they pleased which led him to become a much stricter and firm editor following jason's death because he learned from the experience). dixon in that interview i posted made it clear that o'neil wouldn't even let dixon touch the joker until dixon had demonstrated to o'neil he had a grasp on the character that o'neil approved of. dixon would not have been allowed to do whatever he wanted with characters like robin/tim. without o'neil putting a stop to it if he had gone too far. and for the record, o'neil was a big old bleeding heart liberal that, at the time at least, dixon is noted to have gotten along with very well despite their political opinion differences even at that time. dixon says he was an avid read of grant's work on batman. he's awful now, but at one point he was probably younger and a bit more willing to entertain ideas that weren't his own too.

so when i look back on his work as a historical work, i'm always trying to tease out the following - is this representive of dixon's brand of conservative views in particular or is it representative of a different, overall more conservative time era. and there's a lot of things that fall under the second umbrella that get attributed to the first tbh. listen i love no man's land and understand that despite my love it is full of copaganda and downright conservative ideals by today's standards. but NML wasn't written solely by dixon to push a uniquely conservative pro-cop view--o'neil approved of the story and was the editor of the office at the time. rucka was a huge player in helping tell this super pro-cop story (he even wrote the novelization!!) and nobody ever really puts blame on him for these things the way they do dixon afaik. NML being written in a 'democrats trying to be tough on crime' era absolutely means it's not solely the fault of dixon and his evil conservatism, but he often gets the flack as if it were despite the fact that he was getting these stories okayed by people on different ends of the political spectrum than him + these stories were not his evil conservative brainchild alone.

so these are the things i'm thinking when i read through his works. and maybe that gives me a rosier view than it should, but a lot of my thoughts come from "what can reasonably actually be attributed to showcasing what dixon's views actually are" vs "what might actually not be his fault and his fault alone".

and when i say that tim generally isn't the one who showcases his personal views, i'm not trying to minimize the fact that there is inherent conservatism baked in to his character along with everyone else written by dixon, i'm saying that we need to be realistic and realize that dixon did not have as much freedom to do with tim what he had freedom to do with tim's side characters. tim, after all, had to ultimately fit in o'neil's batbible framework of what he was supposed to be because tim was ultimately an IP character who was part of a batman and robin mythos that o'neil was very, very protective of in the 90s given his previous failures to maintain control of the ship. so when you consider dixon's particular conservatism in tim's books you need to consider that the vast majority of it came from the characters surrounding tim (such as his dad, dana, steph, etc) because dixon had more freedom with those sorts of characters, rather than tim himself who often doesn't have any particular opionion of his own--he's just reacting to all the different opinions being presented to him. and that's not to say that those character should be evil conservatives forever and ever--in fact, i personally think they shouldn't. but take the racist and classist inner city kids are bringing guns to school storyline in robin #25-26. as a whole it's a conservative story. o'neil allowed dixon to do the story in the first place when he could have said no. in the story tim wanders around not knowing what to do about karl bringing a gun to school--which is why he has to go to his dad and dana, who represent "go to the cops/don't be a narc options"--his dad is the one who tries to talk to karl's dad--karl is the conservative one who thinks that they need to protect themselves from inner city kids compared to tim who thinks that guns shouldn't be in school. but tim also thinks that they shouldn't go to the cops and wants his dad to handle it by himself, but eventually comes to the realization that he should have gone to school administration to begin with. in these issues, steph is also the one who dixon uses to link karl's shooting to the inner city kids who are getting bused in to the suburban schools--we talk about that panel of steph declaring herself the protector of the suburbs, but also that panel in context is within the confines of the story--steph is essentially saying "maybe the suburbs need a spoiler (to protect themselves from the inner city people coming to bring crime out to them)" which absolutely is a conservative dixonism that you can pinpoint to his particular kind politics in comparison to the milquetoast of tim's "i don't know what to do/talk to a trusted adult to get help before tragedy happens PSA/overall conservativeness" that happens. that the story itself that exists in tim's book is conservative, yes, and i won't deny that tim also has a few conservative dialogue here but to me the difference is that o'neil would not let dixon use tim drake to go on any overtly political rants or represent any specific ideology *himself* that could make him controversial with readers of the time given how protective o'neil was of not repeating his previous mistakes. you're generally going to find the more egregious dixonisms outside of tim. like "robin 1993 is a conservative book that has a pro-life storyline" (true) =/= "tim goes on an anti-abortion rant" (not true, literally never happened). tim shares blame because ultimately it is his book that presents a conservative worldview but tim as a character tends to exist as a more moderate (not completely, but more) character to have other characters present options and opinions to him rather than he himself saying he has those opinions. robin cannot take sides like that. o'neil wouldn't have let that happen.

and like. when discussing dixon my goal is never to completely absolve tim of dixon's writing. i just don't often see a need to completely rehash the tim-conservatism points because it's been discussed already over and over again to the point there's a pretty widespread misconception that tim is the ultimate dixon conservative mouthpiece who is solely at fault for all of robin 93's conservatism when actually there's a lot of other interesting places dixon's conservatism presents that are almost never discussed in comparison. my goal is not to be "tim's not at fault" or anything but it is to seriously consider and think about where i see dixon's personal opinions shining through more overtly based on what i know of the conservative mindset (as much as i don't agree with it). dissecting dixon and how he writes in consideration of his beliefs is fascinating and fun to me.

anyways he's awful.

[blue-grama]

A little Film/Jam requeim

Upon the news that these two are not planning any projects together in the future, I was pondering Thai actor pairings and why I liked this particular one. First let me say I'm very in favor of actors not getting joined at the hip forever -- I doubt that's why anyone gets into acting, and while I get the financial reasons this happens in Thai entertainment, I'm generally in agreement that it tends to limit creativity, since the brand often has to come before the story. My only gripe is that now they're off doing lakorns that will never get subbed in English and it's not fair and look, I need to see The Empress of Ayodhaya ok?? I don't think it's a bad thing to have actors with great chemistry appear together in multiple shows, however, and I wanna say that I think these two used that opportunity right. Look, we have Tian:

Utter cinammon roll, too pure for this world, total sweetheart. He's a little scared and a lot beaten down, but he still has a burning spark of respect for himself that he doesn't let extinguish. He spends 73% of this show in the throes of a mental breakdown but still manages to take control of his narrative in the end. It's actively insane that the murder glitter show has such fantastic characters.

And then you have Charn, who is...

... also beaten down by this world, but evil about it. It's all manipulation, manwhoring, and complicated smiles belaying his real feelings with this guy. Refreshingly, he only has to reform himself a little bit to get his happy ending.

Meanwhile, Jiu. Assassin, kind of a tsundere. Marshmallow center, obviously. I'll never be over how after he and Tian first had sex (under the influence of a beetle fungus, OBVIOUSLY), he got deeply hurt that Tian said it was a mistake and accused Tian of doing this to all the boys. Possibly my favorite Jiu moment. ANYWAY.

There isn't as much distance between Jiu and Tinn as there is between Tian and Charn (from what I've seen, Jam maybe doesn't have quite as much range as Film, or at least hasn't been asked to demonstrate it). But Tinn is a more open and straightforward character, the moral center of Laws of Attraction versus a guy who assassinates several people with scissors without remorse in Khun Chai.

Point is, we don't always get this with repeated actor pairings. A lot of the time, you have an underlying dynamic that comes through in all the pair's shows, and it can't wander too far from its origins - I was thinking about this specifically with regards to Only Friends after listening to this excellent debut of the Part 5 (of 4) podcast, which talks about the way Force's Top turned into a completely flat character, possibly because "interesting" would conflict with the whole True Love ForceBook dynamic that GMMTV needs to sell. An appealing dynamic can be great -- hey, I read fanfic, I get the joy of putting the same guy in situations -- but I really liked how Film and Jam went with/were given quite different characters in their two projects together. This could be a lakorn vs. BL thing, but it'd be cool to see more paired actors take on more disparate roles together!

My disappointment over no more shows from these two comes down to wishing I could see what else they might pull off. Jam as the rich jerk instead of Film? Both of them playing morally grey? It could have been fun.

Oh well; I'll just be over here lighting candles for English subs from One31, because at least this hot murderous royalty nonsense looks exquisite.

And if you've read this far, please feel free to drop me recs in the tags or comments of other pairs that have played really different roles or dynamics with each other. I love seeing actors show their range!

[adobsoncomics]

COMICS THAT I NEVER MADE AN "EVIL TOM PRESTON" COMIC VERSION OF: Maybe I'll consider making this into a comic to celebrate the tenth anniversary of "Evil Tom Preston". However, what bothers me about this comic in particular is the idea that "[pissing] tons of people off" with a "controversial view" ultimately means you're either in the wrong place to share it, or the view isn't significant enough to genuinely upset people.

If I were to share controversial views in the wrong context, like being a flat earther or—even worse—a Trump supporter in San Francisco... it could easily and rightfully provoke anger. But for me to then strawman those who would be rightfully upset, it brings up questions of what it says about me as the creator for depicting them as such.

Alternatively, if I express safe """controversial views""", like say "Super Mario 64 isn't that good of a game", the lack of a legitmately strong backlash renders the comic pointless. And if anyone does get overly upset about a harmless position, their disproportionate anger suggests deeper issues. In both cases, "owning" them is a waste of my time.

Ultimately, I found it futile to turn this into an "Evil Tom Preston" comic. I just couldn't find a way to remake the original comic in my brand of anti-humor, and any attempt to make it entertaining would undermining the essence of Regular Tom Preston's message (however shallow it was). ... That said, if I could take a stab at it today... GUY 1: People really got mad at you for this comic? EVIL TOM: ...yeah... I piss tons of people off because of my very controversial views! GUY 1: Such as? EVIL TOM: Oh, stupid things... Like how I don't think Super Mario 64 is the greatest Mario game ever made... GUY 2: WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU? MARIO 64 IS THE--- EVIL TOM: Hey hey, no need to shout. I know I'm in the minority here, although honestly it's not that big of a deal. But that's just how I feel. Let's just agree to disagree. GUY 2: ...Oh, ok, sorry for yelling. EVIL TOM: No worries! Enjoy the rest of the con! I mean... maybe that could work? But that would still require me to imply that Evil Tom had """controversial views""" that had incited serious anger from people, and that just doesn't make any sense to me. It's even harder to make it today because I'd like to think that Regular Tom Preston has since realized that strawmanning his opponents is a stupid trope and not worthy of a cartoonist like him. Afterall, his original comics were made well over 10 years ago, people can change... right??

[incorrect-koh-posts]

If you search Krol Tredowaty in Polish you mighy find images of Baldwin IV. An early take. Very cool.

Oh, thank you for pointing that out to me! 💛

Have some lovely Baldwin IV cover illustrations for Zofia Kossak's 1937 novel The Leper King (Król Trędowaty):

I'm particularly fond of these two - I think the minimalist art style suits both the subject and our leprous boy quite well, and I like the design the artists chose for his cloak and veil.

I also came across a rather pretty Polish cover for the Bernard Hamilton book:

My version of the Kossak novel (published in Germany in 1964), sadly, looks quite boring in comparison:

And while we're on the subject: I have to admit I rather enjoyed Kossak's take on the events in the Holy Land between roughly 1176 and 1187. Of course, it is very old-fashioned in terms of its writing style, and far from historically accurate - but considering that it was published in 1937, long before most of the decisive academic works we know had been written, I think Kossak nonetheless did an admirable job with presenting the historical events in a way that is both comprehensible and somewhat entertaining. Being nitpicky about the details while having access to almost a hundred years' worth of further research would be a little unfair, in my opinion.

That said, I'm not sure this is the right novel for you to read if you are simply looking for some good sauce about Baldwin, since Kossak's portrayal of him is a bit of a mixed bag. In some instances, her Baldwin resembled the wise, gentle king we know from KoH very closely, but in others, he came across as whiny and wallowing in self-pity, acting much more childish than he should. (Remember: In that time and place, men were considered legal adults at the age of fifteen.) So, what I missed in Kossak's Baldwin sometimes was the inner strength that - according to the chroniclers - he must have possessed in spades. His mother Agnes of Courtenay, by the way, receives a similar treatment and is presented as an overweight clucking old hag, which is, unfortunately, the default characterisation she is given in older historical fiction.

Apart from that, though, The Leper King was a hoot. This may be just my particular brand of weirdness talking - I'm currently writing my thesis about medieval German literature, so go figure - but I unapologetically love those early literary takes on Baldwin & Co. Their differing characterisations of the various historical figures are always fun to compare, sometimes I merely get a good laugh out of them while other times I end up being surprised or even genuinely impressed. This novel, somehow, managed to pair the WTF-factor with moments that I found genuinely heart-warming and dialogue that was by turns either well-written or absolutely laughable.

To be fair, some of this can probably be chalked up to the translation because - let's face it - many things that sound fine in any other language become very odd, all of a sudden, when translated into German. Towards the end of the book, for example, Kossak covers the Hattin episode and thus briefly tells how Eschiva and her sons retreated into the citadel at Lake Tiberias when Salah ad-Din laid siege to the city. Upon hearing this news, Kossak's Raymond exclaims affectionately "Meine tapfere Alte!", which is best translated as "My valiant old lady!", and if that isn't the funniest shit ever, then I don't know.

What I also found particularly wholesome - though of course not historically viable - was the way Kossak depicted the relationship between Baldwin and Raymond. For some reason, she seems to think Raymond was Baldwin's uncle (when in reality he was his first cousin once removed), but the "favourite uncle & favourite nephew" dynamic she builds between them really works for this novel. As a Raymond fangirl, it was also quite refreshing to read something that showed him as both sympathetic AND ambitious and, for once, didn't make him do the whole "cackling evil relative who is after the crown" act.

In the German translation, Raymond repeatedly calls Baldwin fondly "Mein Junge" und "Mein Kleiner", which literally means "my boy" and "my little one". I'm not crying, you're crying. Baldwin, in turn, refers to Raymond as "Oheim", which is an old German term for "uncle" (specifically: the brother of the mother - imagine that: Raymond as Agnes of Courtenay's brother! 😂). Hence, while it is simply a genealogical mistake and historically speaking, of course, a cartload of bollocks, it nonetheless warms my heart that this novel chose to present us with the one and only depiction of a literal "Uncle Tibs".

So, yeah - this was a fun read.

[herstarburststories]

He didn’t make it to 42

Pairing: Dean Winchester x reader

Summary: it’s Dean’s birthday, you go to visit him with some news and things that need to be said.

A/N: Happy bday, De.

Warnings: so much angst, mentions of sex, hopeful/happy ending (?)

Dean’s dead. It’s Dean’s birthday and he’s dead. You can’t argue much.

Sam denied the demon blood inside him, and that didn’t stop its evil nature from growing and gasping for his fresh air to the point he was almost shocked alive. Dean denied his dad’s destructive methods’ results for the longest time, and that didn’t stop the cicatrixes in every emotion he had ever shown. You denied the absence of Dean and that didn’t stop the bricks cracking in your soul. There’s only so far you can go with your eyes closed.

So here you are. Standing in front of an empty grave. You are bigger than the dull tombstone, yet you can’t help but not to feel tall, at all. How can you even start to talk? Talking to Dean used to be easy even when it got hard and now you’re feeling like a lost kid in a supermarket. Your snide thinking spells out his name with venom, saying it isn’t easy for you to open your barmy mouth and spill out contrarian shit because this isn’t Dean, just another meaningless symbolism that Sam promises that will help. The real Dean died almost a year ago, he was burned in a hunter’s funeral, the flames dancing over his body as the smell of burnt meat invaded your nostrils. Whenever you try to remember his fragrance, that manly aroma which you loved to scent each morning, all your brain can come up with is the odor of his skin and guts burning. The smell lingers like bad perfume, it doesn’t matter how many times you wash yourself with his soap-- that only broke your heart worse.

But today is Dean’s birthday. He deserves a visit, even if it’s not him. Then you go and attempt to deal with the desolation, push it away just a little, and pick up something from the enormous pile of things you wish to tell Dean. You glance at the cold tombstone: Dean Winchester. 1979 - 2020. Beloved son, big brother, and husband. Hunter. A hero. Simple definitions that can never make it up for who he was and what he meant. You purse your lips and cough a little, a gentle wind touches your cheek so tenderly. If you were still a believer, you’d think this is some sort of sign, Dean’s presence or some other pious hoax. All you do now is to remain in quietude, a deep breath. Ultimately, your voice comes:

‘’You didn’t make it to forty two, huh?’’ You scoff humorless, reminiscing to the multiple days that Dean said he wouldn’t go past 35. He did live each year like it was the last--- you aren’t sure if it's such a good thing. If you carry on like your days are outnumbered, you are silently entertaining yourself until death's knock on your door. ‘’I always hated when you were right. Let’s be honest, you had the words of a pessimist and the wants of an optimist. Still, if you were to be right about something, it would be about a bad situation. A nest with too many vampires, how crappy the motel’s bedroom would be, or how that third glass of wine would make me tipsy. So yeah, I always hated when you were right. And look at you now! You aren’t right, you aren’t wrong. You are dead! And I’m the crazy girl screaming at an empty tombstone.’’

You let out a laugh empty of joy. That’s how a hunter’s life is: you die and people stop talking about you because it’s too sad or too long gone to hold any pity, meanwhile the ones who recall about you go loud with all the spirits in their heads. You put your hand in the pockets of the heavy leather jacket that once belonged to a green eyed man who would be turning 42 today, some strange force causing you to speak again.

‘’Wow.’’ You shake your head to the blue way you paint the scene until you notice that you never greeted him. ‘’Hey.’’ The simple word adds a comical insult to injury. ‘’Guess the dead don’t care about manners, huh?’’ You arch your eyebrows with a grin that demonstrates anything but happiness. ‘’Miracle died. Sam digged a hole next to the bunker and buried him there. He isn’t the same since you died, you know? Not the deceased dog-- Well, he wasn’t the same either. Always whining and scratching your door like a fucking cat, and sniffing your old boots. He made me company in your bed and I whined as much as he did when you didn’t come back home that day. He stood by the door most days, waiting for you to appear. I can’t judge him, I did the same.’’ You shrug, not caring about how risible that confession may look. It's true. You became as irrational as a loyal dog at some point in this sorrow. ‘’And Sam, your baby brother… I think he died with you right there, Dean. He didn’t try to bring you back as he promised, but I shouted and screamed so much. I said I would burn the bunker and throw Baby over a cliff if he didn’t-- if he didn’t let me try. I lived up to the mad woman title.’’

You are crestfallen, pacing on top of where the eldest Winchester - Sam’s brand new nomination -  supposedly was buried. You know your boots barely touch an infected land, there's no deceased man under your steps. The dead thing is in you.

‘’I spent days dragging your body everywhere and nowhere, anywhere I could catch a crumb of relief in hope to bring you back. But I couldn’t. Jack could, but that ungrateful idiot doesn’t wanna follow his grandpa steps and get too attached to mere humans, the creation or whatever. As if we are just some skin and bone to him, as if you are just another human.’’

You sit down on the tombstone, some tender solace in being close to a thing that's supposed to represent him, like sleeping hugged to a pillow or waking up to a photograph of his. Your nails sink against the gelid concrete at the thought of screaming into the sky for the new God that seemed as deaf as the last one. His calm answer to your burning pain. How he dared to tell you he knew what he was doing— as if he was the original lord and not a three years old. You can't make him do it, so you hold on the fury of some overthrown nation.

‘’Anyway, I couldn’t bring you back. Your body, well, you know how human anatomy works. Your body started to smell like death. We tried to stop with human and magic ways, and it wouldn’t work because you were dead. You should’ve seen the doctor’s face when we got you in that fancy hospital tha night. I think we traumatized the doctor with so much violence and trauma. She didn’t even give us a false hope or anything, you know? She just asked about organ donation of what was left. She just wanted to take every little thing out of you, as if you were just another accident on a Tuesday night.’’ Your shake your head as the memories and your points start to mix, it's hard to discern things and keep a straight line when you have an open wound in your insides. ‘’Well, they couldn’t bring you back to life, and neither could Rowena or whatever I looked for. Don’t be mad because I tried, Winchester. You know I’m too stubborn for my own good. I had to try.’’ you refuse to apologize, yet adds the playful words in his eulogy. ‘’But then your body started to stink and God, how could I continue to be so violent to your corpse? That was when I decided to listen to you for the first time and to Sam, so I let you go. I hate you for asking that.’’ What an ambiguous, contradictory truth to bare. You are glimpses of a person for months because of Dean Winchester, still have the energy to argue his selfless logic, just to love him even more. He's got your devotion, but man you can hate him sometimes. ‘’I hate you for going on that stupid hunt. I hate you for being dead, you giant idiot that I love so much.’’ You can't bring your mouth to say loved. "I was always telling you to let the past go and now I’m in love with a dead thing. What a comic way to end our history. I told you that Miracle died, right? I don’t know if dogs go to heaven, but I hope he’s in there with you. I wonder what your heaven is like. I bet it has Whiskey.''

Your dry chuckle makes your notice the tears in your eyes, glistening your orbs as they go like a waterfall to be absorbed by the thirsty land after leaving your cheeks.

"Sam and I-- We tried to make some sense out of this cruelty, but we can’t. You are dead and I can’t seem to put it past me. I still sleep in your bed, and I can still taste your body burning on the roof of my mouth in the quiet nights. I cried this morning because someone asked for a burger, can you believe that? It was so stupid since I used to shake my head and argue with you about cholesterol. Suddenly I was crying at lunch in a restaurant because some stupid kid asked for a burger with extra bacon. They sang Happy birthday to this dumbass child, and I interrupted with my awful crying, and wished that you were celebrating your birthday and not that kid. I guess you could say I wish death upon an innocent child with a problematic eating routine.’’ That was a whole new level of low, as if you are the one wrapped with the sentiment of laying six feet under.

‘’Everyone tells you about how grief is singular and particular with similar emotions that bring people who went through this together. They even have that crap stages thing and all that. You know what they don’t tell you?’’ Your mouth shuts for a moment, like you are waiting some response. You nod as if whatever you were expecting is handed to you. ‘’Grief can be fucking ridiculous. Who cries because of a burger full of oil and cardiac diseases? Who cries because they found a grocery store recipe under her dead boyfriend’s bed? Who falls on the ground screaming in the middle of the mall because they saw a flannel? Who? Those things are so stupid.’’ You smile like there's no tomorrow and the laugh leaving your lips is a treacherous tone. Perhaps you just aren't build up to express joy anymore. ‘’You see it in the movies and in the books and you think, you know, you think to yourself that grieving is being sad on special dates and randomly remembering the loved ones because of some screaming memory, like a flannel or their perfume. Thing is, it’s not just that. All your body seems so small, so tight for all the ache and agony inside it. Your senses go wild, you are not just one person in one place. You’re just the pain everywhere, like being pulled apart and you beg to jump in the fucking grave with them. At least you would be together, at least you would feel like one person and not suffering edges of a broken earthy thing. And--And you start remembering things you didn’t even know you had mesmerized. I look at the ceiling and remember you saying you’d paint it someday. I look at the kitchen and remember me screaming at you for giving Miracle the rest of the food. I smell Sam’s clothes and started crying because hey, they don’t smell like alcohol. You don’t iron them while drinking anymore, so of course they don’t smell like cheap beer.’’ You are chuckling through the tears and it only makes it more monstrous. ‘’Everything is you now that you are gone. Every man has something similar to you, every garden is green as your eyes, and each step sounds like you are coming home. They didn’t prepare me, not for this.’’ You said breathless. A soft single follows. The knife cuts both ways; the empty breeze and the words hurt. Where's the middle term? Where's the limbo? Where's the only safe place for you to rest your weary head?

Out of nowhere, you blurt out, ‘’I can’t masturbate,’’ I know it’s something stupid and even selfish to say, but I think you’d like to know. I can’t masturbate. That’s a part of the whole losing someone process that people are too ashamed to discuss, or maybe they don’t have the urge to be touched anymore because after someone you love dies, after someone-- the hands who touched are dead and cold, you become a haunted object. That’s how I feel most days, like I’m a haunted house because you touched me and now you’re dead and some days I believe I am too.’’ You look around the places. It's beautiful. It's lonely. It has trees and flowers and green. Not as green as Dean's eyes, but it doesn't matter anymore. He doesn't even have eyes at this point. ‘’Well, I can’t masturbate. I can’t touch myself. And I can’t ask someone else either. I tried and ended up punching the guy, Dean. I swear. I panicked when he was between my legs and just punched his nose. You’d have liked it, you were always the jealous kind. I won’t admit that, but I thought it was kinda hot. Especially when you got possessive in sex.’’ A dirty grin appeared on your lips, the echoes of luxury lasting in your eyes for a brief moment. ‘’I don’t think I can be cared for anymore, honestly. Sam tried to hug me when Miracle died and I… It was like I wasn't there. I got frozen in time, and I live in my sleep. In my nightmares you are alive. I  dream about the day you died every week and I used to wake up screaming, but now those nightmares are the only proof you were alive now that you’re as dead as the police report says this time. It was the most painful, calamitous moment for you and I swear it was a nightmare for me, but then I realized that at least I had you there, egoistical or not, I made my nightmare into a dream.’’ You aren't sure which opinion Dean would have on that. Would he understand? Would he shake his head? You wish you can ask him just this one more thing, just beg him to write it down for you on how to be without him here.

You raise on your feet, glaring at the name craved in the concrete. The tears go by still, although they're as usual as the blood in glir veins at this point. ‘’Death is so silly. What it takes, anyway?" Each word conquers more inches of pure wrath. ''People die because they stumbled on their own feet and hit their head somewhere, or they drove their car too close and too fast to the cliff, or because they were giving birth, or because they dated the wrong person, or because they were hunting a fucking vampire and got impaled. What are the chances? How stupid, and idiotic is death? Always creeping and waiting to bite and chew a piece of you-- Taking every scrap of you from me like that’s its right.’’ You are screaming, starting to kick and punch the tombstone with any piece of straight you have. Your limbs hurt and the blood is visible, but you keep going. ‘’YOUR STUPID DOG DIED, DEAN! AND YOU DIED! AND I DIED! SAMMY DIED! YEAH, IS SAID SAMMY! GO AHEAD, TELL ME ONLY YOU CAN CALL HIM THAT.’’ Another punch, your knuckles are ripped. Another kick, your boot as a hole. ‘’DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.’’ Kick. ‘’SAMMY, SAMMY, SAMMY!’’ A punch to each name. Anything to get a reaction, to get comfort. Anything. ‘’YOU CAN’T BECAUSE YOU ARE DEAD.’’ Gasping for something you don't need anymore, sweet oxygen, your eyes are on the tombstone again. And the definitions. And the trees. Your body is sore and aching. It is the kind and coercion no person wants which you needed; the freedom of feeling outside the exact pain that was inside. ‘’You can’t because you are dead. I’ve been playing some sick games in my mind, you know? Sam stopped hunting and had his closure. He was always better at letting go than you and I, but he’s still hurting. I never saw him hurting so much. I think he knows you won’t come back this time, how could you make us promise something like that?  Well, my twisted game is a bunch of misleading what ifs. What if you hadn’t gone after John? What if you hadn’t gone on that last hunt? What if you had stayed with Lisa? At first I didn’t like her much. Jealous, I admit that. But she grew on me. She gave you something I couldn’t back then and I’ll always be thankful for that. And even though it would rip me apart, I’d rather you to die at sixth after living your suburban dream with her. Have another kid besides Ben, maybe a girl this time, and just have that apple pie life. You and Sam would live close and your kids would always play. They’d be as close as brothers. Maybe I’d get a guy and bring my own kids and we could’ve a barbecue and everyone would be happy. But we don’t get soft epilogues here. It ends how it starts, right? Bloody and desperate. I thought maybe, maybe Lisa could understand what’s going through my head now. I drove to her new address and parked close to her house. I must have spent hours there, thinking if I should come in or not, If she somehow remembered after Castiel died or if I could make her brain work again if I told her the truth. But then I just drove back home and fell asleep wrapped in that stupid lumberjack flannel of yours. The one I always mocked, yeah? She may understand me, but I know you wouldn’t want that. You want her, you want me and Sam to be happy. I don’t know if I can do that, Dean. It’s like myt brittle soul shrewd and my body is just waiting to collapse.’’ You signed, overwhelmed by the battle without an anthem. The victory with no triumph. Is it still a win when you don't have someone to come home too? ‘’Your dog died, it’s the first birthday you didn’t live to see, and I bought all the things you told Mrs Butters you wanted for your birthday because it’s your birthday. I just don’t know how to celebrate it with you dead. People stop counting after they die, right? They just say he’d have been 42 or he died at 41. They give melancholy smiles when they wake up and check the day on their phones and a woe atmosphere swallows them for the rest of the day. Then they get better the next day. I think everyday is your birthday.’’ You attempt to wipe away your tears, which only causes your pulsating hand to stain your face red. ‘’Dean, for the first time, what died stayed dead! Congrats.’’ Once again, a hysterical laugh. ‘’I wish but no. What died didn’t stay dead, you are alive, so alive in my head. I swear you are there some days. I wake and watch the door, so sure you’ll come back. Sam says I’m living in delusion and I have to wake up and keep going since that's what you would want. That's enough to make him keep going, but it only makes me angry. Everyone we know and some strangers looks at me like I'm a house on fire and no longer a warm home, like I'm a car accident. They think I don't notice but I do.’’ You look at your boots, the whole is rolling out blood like your hands. You feel closer to Dean. How sick.

‘’Help, I’m still right where you left me." You plea, his love lingering like a bruise. ''I think gravity is overwhelming and it keeps me here. Sometimes it’s like I’m one of those dusted books Sam used to read. Or those Bukowski ones that you hid, so we wouldn’t see how smart you’re. You tried so hard to hide your intelligence because you didn’t think you were entitled to it. You saw yourself as the protector and never the valuable one for protection. You, the man who made an EMF out of an old radio, who rebuilt the Impala from the ground multiple times, and who knew patterns better than any detective. The man who showed me I could rely on someone other than myself. The dude with a lopsided grin, tough hands and a heart of gold. I miss you so much. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were singing all those classic rock songs and Taylor Swift pop hits, while I drove here. I would think you were home, smelling like guts because you wanted to eat before taking a shower after a hunt. I would think that you are in the Deancave, waiting for me to curl up on your lap to watch Scooby Doo or Doctor Sexy MD until we aren’t watching anymore. If I didn’t know better I would think no death could take you from me. There would be no tear us apart in our vows.’’ The only thing that keeps your organism working is that Dean died knowing how much you loved him. You never let this talk for later or never. No tomorrow is promised. That's a nice comfort, maybe that's what will help you to let go in the future. ‘’But yesterday your stupid, skink dog died and I lost the last living thing that I had from you. You know what’s more angerting? I cried and Sam cried and I noticed we were the living things you left behind and all we have is each other. All your closets of backlogged dreams were left for us-- so yeah. Sam is done hunting and he’s met a lovely girl, and they are moving in like in your domestic dreams. I’m taking care of the family business like your other contradictory dream and making sure Sam is safe enough to be normal. Because I have to, we have too. Stupidly enough, I still wait for the day you’ll burst out the door and tell us to hit the road again. I still watch every episode of your dumb tv shows to make sure I’ll know everything that happened when you ask. I still drive around in your car and close my eyes when the street is calm, only picturing you driving as Baby’s engineers go wild but those are my hands on the steering wheel. If I didn't know better, I’d think you are still around. But I know better. I still feel you all around. I love you.’’

Your monologuing ends as astutely as it stated. You get up, press a kiss to your ruined for the next weeks hands and place it on the rock with writings. You turn around and walk back to the car that you parked near, only in case of Dean wanting to see Baby. How knows? You and your clandestine faith. You lick your lip and get in the car.

You swear you the AC/DC cassette wasn't there before, but when you turn on the car and the radio it starts playing. It's the first true smile that comes to your mouth, it's bloodstained and you look like a shameless woman. With that you can deal.

It hurts a bearable hurt for now. You didn't think it was possible. Maybe someday.

The end.

(she takes a little longer to arive in heaven than sammy. his baby brother says that women are most likely to live around six years more than men. it doesn't ease him up, though. dean waited sam for too long, his platonic soulmate. and now he has to wait his romantic one too? the eldest Winchester considers it the best earthly present when the he sense you around, that smell of orange and apples. it's you, he knows before even turning around. he can't wait to love you again. your name rolls off your tongue so naturally, as if you had seen each other just yesterday: ‘’hey, y/n.’’)

But then again, nothing ever really ends, does it?

REBLOG AND COMMENT. Feedback is magic and helps me!

Starburst's footnote: It just didn't feel right to make an author's note on the top. I wanted it all only to be an arrow to the story. So, this is my side note: it's six am and I'm up writing this after inspiration kissed me with a bruise in the middle of the night. Or more like grabbed my throat. Anyway, I had to write and finish this one to post today, even pushing sleep aside. Hey, we are writers, that's what we do! I've been watching the show since I was eleven and I cried like a baby with the finale. This series was just so important and crucial to molde aspects of relationships for me. The song marjorie by Taylor Swift was used here, and so was the line "you got my devotion/ but man, I can hate you sometimes" by Harry Styles. I told you guys I would use it somewhere! A special thanks to @msmarvelouswinchester​ who helped me with her encouraging and opinon. You are the best! And with all of this I wanna say: Happy bday, Dean Winchester!

REBLOG AND COMMENT! Feedback is magic! Especially about this fic, I’d like to know your opinion. Tags in the reblog! Send an ask or dm to get in the taglist.

[sonofjeddah]

Why Superheroes still matter in Arabia

The pop-culture segment in general and superhero segment in particular is the least considered in Saudi Business community (local and international players included). Toy companies, Entertainment houses, Media production companies and even FMCG companies still consider kids (esp. tweens) as primary audience of these properties that have inspired, excited and entertained old and young for more than eight decades

While the society has shown tremendous interest in activities organized by General Entertainment Authority since 2017, the consensus within the business community is antithetical to the wishes of this niche segment of 5 million plus. Shocking as it may seem, the level of interest, fan following isn't restricted to cosmopolitan centers (Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam/Khobar); in fact, regions such as Hail, Qassim and Al Jouf are among the top 5 out of top 10 regions with most search queries in the country concerning these subject(s)

The Quest for Superhero Content: Saudi Arabia vs The World

Saudi Arabia:

Worldwide:

Search Queries: Marvel Cinematic Universe (Blue), Marvel Comics (Red), Shang Chi and the Legend of The Ten Rings (Yellow)

While for me this information isn't new as I've been mining data on Google and Facebook since 2013, I chose today to talk about it in the form of an article. I did so because at this moment in time, the biggest happening in the world of heroes is not being led by DC Comics flagship characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman or Justice League; nor it's being led by Marvel's flagship characters like Spider-Man, The Avengers or X-Men; nor by Star Wars, Transformers or Game of Thrones for that matter. Instead, it's being led by a highly underrated superhero of Marvel who was created in the 70s thanks to the Kung Fu craze (mainly because of Bruce Lee) during that time. His name: Shang Chi, the first Asian/East Asian Superhero

Both graphs show us that audiences in Saudi Arabia show a higher level of interest than the rest of the world combined. Both MCU and Marvel Comics related queries/searches are half as much popular or more (vs Worldwide audience), the underrated superhero Shang Chi is reaching the same mark. Of course, one can't ignore the superior marketing tactics deployed by Marvel Entertainment and Disney plus the character's movie has been released yesterday. The million dollar questions here are:

Why would audiences in the Kingdom show incremental interest in a character whose animated series never existed nor broadcasted on Saudi Channel 1 or 2 in the 70s, 80s or even 90s? (Reminder: Bruce Lee VHS were available for rent and David Carridine's Kung Fu series was on air throughout the 80s on Saudi Channel 2)

Why would audiences here be interested in a character whose Arabized comics never were part of Amlaq Digests or reprinted editions of Marvel that were available in neighborhood mini-markets or imported comic books at Star Markets, Sarawat Supermarkets or Tihama Bookstores (distributed by Al Khazindar)?

Before attempting to answer my own questions, we need to understand that Shang Chi is one of those characters who may not have long-running series in the comic book world that span decades but because of their appeal and strong following, have been part of some of the best stories ever written but with the age of diversity, inclusion and online media, he is important for winning over new audiences of East Asian origin around the world, not just China!  

If this is the impact of an underrated character, imagine what happens when Spider-Man: No Way Home is released in December 

Superhero Content & the Arab

Before Content Strategy & Marketing were a thing, comic book publishers were doing it even before World War 2. Over the decades, what was being published was resonating with audiences not just in White America but across the world. In the Middle East, the 70s was the starting point for countries such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt but the trend made inroads into the Gulf region, especially in Saudi Arabia in the late 70s

The values shared in American superhero comics resonated with Arabs because of their own history of rich story telling as well as adaptations. Just like the Arab folklore, real historical figures of the region were presented as heroes; in fact superheroes in some cases. Another reason for this is that most of the characters produced in the Golden as well as Silver Ages of comics were created mainly by individuals who came from Abrahamic households. Their story telling borrowed heavily from the Biblical accounts of Prophets and other noblemen (who are also mentioned in Quran) regarding Good vs Evil, Light vs Darkness, the virtue of Doing the Right Thing. It was inevitable that such Western creations would resonate with Arabs

The seeds were planted and once an idea or interest takes root in the hearts and minds, it's hard to let it go

And now, the Superhero Content is being published in over-drive mode. Just check Youtube, Facebook, Instagram for starters and you'll see that the Arab content is there; driven primarily by creators in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain; ranging from comics to collectibles and even cosplays. This...is the Aladdin Effect

Aladdin was actually Chinese. Thanks to Abbasid Ruler Haroon Al Rasheed, he became an innate part of Arab Literature

Businesses in Saudi Arabia are losing out

Like the community of Anime fans, the superhero community has been there for decades. It came out with full force during Comic Cons that happened in Jeddah and Riyadh between 2017-2019. The first Saudi Comic Con saw a whopping attendance of 20,000 geeks during 3 days of festivity. It wasn't surprising to see a father attending Stan Lee Super Con Riyadh (2019) with his daughter and son waiting anxiously to meet Lou Ferrigno (the star of 1970s Incredible Hulk series). A Saudi Gen-X Father with his millennial daughter and his Gen-Z son (all fans of the Hulk) or Expatriates travelling to Riyadh to attend the festivity and participate in artist alleys and cosplay comeptitions. No wonder this community was referred to as 'Buried Talent' by Arab News

As they say: Data is the new Oil. Unfortunately, international brands and local businesses in Saudi Arabia haven't taken this segment seriously. The collection that's available at an international 'Megastore' in Saudi Arabia pales in comparison to its sister outlets in Dubai. Toy stores, international or locally owned, are still adamant to sell toys to kids instead of focusing on key collectible properties which are being ordered from US market by Geeks in Saudi Arabia thanks to Amazon. Gaming console companies organize impressive launches of their Superhero game in neighboring Gulf countries but nothing as such takes place here. Dairy brands are still using Superheroes for their "Got Milk" approach. What's needed is to take a look at Data that's available on Google and Facebook's Business Suites, for the very least

While young entrepreneurs with limited resources have opened up shops (online and offline) in major Saudi cities (Examples include: Jeddah's Konami licensed Gaming Lounge, a proper Comic Book Cafe in Dammam) and Riyadh having hosted the world's major Toy Fair as well as Stan Lee Super Con and Saudi Anime Expo BUT more needs to be done. The data is there. Action is needed from the Private Sector

The starting point would be with seed investors and venture capitalists who are currently obsessed with re-inventing the wheel by investing in ride hailing apps, food delivery apps, online baqalas, fintechs while a niche segment's wants mostly remain unaddressed  

[thedinanshiral]

Magic, mages and more

If you’ve played the Dragon Age series you’ve probably noticed some differences here and there. Origins was heavy on tactics, something Inquisition lacks considerably, and Dragon Age 2 allowed for blood magic, which Origins had little of and Inquisition barely mentions. All lore aside, we can experience magic in Thedas more closely through our mage companions in each game ( or your character if you chose the mage class).

First, i’ll discuss briefly how magic spells have changed throughout the games, then i’ll analyse a mage pattern and how it broke. And finally i’ll entertain some future over the top possibilities.  

Origins and DA2 were designed primarily to be played on PC, and we see this more clearly on Origins through its tactics-heavy gameplay. Spells in Origins are more suitable to a carefully planned combat strategy, with passive and status-inducing spells presented in a variety that didn’t survive into the following games. DA2 also allows for tactics but the combat system is more dynamic, it’s not necessary to pause/unpause 5 times per second, one can do battles in real time and as a result spells were considerably reduced, prioritizing active/offensive spells, and almost entirely eliminating status-inducing and supportive spells.

Unlike its predecessors, Inquisition was way more console-friendly and all but eliminated the tactics system from Origins; now combat was fast, direct, with a tactical screen capable of basic commands and overall limited, and spell trees were reduced to the bare minimum, with elemental attacks, and very few defensive spells, having completely eliminated healing.

So, in short, summonings disappeared after Origins, as did most of the Creation, Spirit and Entropy trees. By Inquisition, none of the glyphs or hexes survived. Some spells icons from DA2 reappear in Inquisition, but most from Origins never made it past it, and some spells changed name or spell tree between games. There’s a gradual simplification of spell trees from one game to the next, adjusting combat to a more straightforward style, with less support or status-inducing spells and an increasing concentration of active spells with enhancing passive ones. On the other hand, Healing all but disappeared from Inquisition spells, “spirit healer” not even surviving as a specialization, with the only healing spell available being Revival which as the name implies you can only use on an already fallen party member. Surprisingly, Dispel made it through all three games staying in the same spell tree, Spirit, and elemental spells remained the same across all games, with minor changes.

Now let’s take a look at all our main mage companions.

In Origins we have Morrigan (apostate, shapeshifter), and Wynne (circle mage, spirit healer, vessel for spirit of Faith). In DA2 we have Merrill (dalish, blood mage), and Anders (former circle mage turned apostate, healer, vessel for spirit of Justice/Vengeance). In inquisition however we get three mages: Dorian (Tevinter pariah, pyromancer, necromancer), Vivienne (circle loyalist, icemancer, knight-enchanter) and Solas (apostate, electromancer,rift mage).

Just in case the pattern isn’t clear enough..In both games we get an apostate and formally educated and trained mage, a mage who lived in the wild and a mage who lived in cities, a mage who dwells in obscure or forbidden magic used for offense and a mage dedicated primarily to healing and support, a mage who deals in dangerous magic but remains their own and a mage who despite dealing in safer magic harbours a spirit within (by Chantry dogma, an abomination).

This pattern is broken in Inquisition; while we still get an apostate and a circle mage, we also get a mage that while not from the circle still isn’s technically an apostate (Dorian), we also get no healer but we do get a mage that specializes in obscure magic (necromancy), and we don’t really get a mage that has lived in the wild but one who’s lived outside of Thedosian society (Solas, being who he is and having recently woken up from the longest nap ever). And instead of getting a mage sharing their body with a spirit of the Fade, we get an ancient elf who secretely is an elvhen god and the creator of the Veil. Solas breaks the pattern (as well as everything else, apparently).  

I’ll focus on Inquisition from now on and leave Solas for last. 

Auto-level evidences the default element of choice of each mage. Solas is an electromancer, Dorian is a pyromancer, and Vivienne is an icemancer. Dorian preferring fire makes sense as a Tevinter who constantly complains the South is cold, implying his homeland has a warmer weather he sorely misses. Vivienne choosing cold spells goes perfectly with her personality, presenting herself as an ice queen.

Here is where it begins to get a bit tricky: Specializations.

Dorian’s is Necromancy, which would make a lot of sense...if he was Nevarran. Being a Tevinter it’d make more sense for him to be a Blood Mage. But Origins and particularly DA2 already exposed blood magic, painted it in all its evil colours, made it pretty clear it’s the wrong kind of magic to use for all the dangers it entails. By the time we get Inquisition, we face an actual Magister Siderial and Tevinter is painted as this degenerate empire full of evil blood mages, so getting a blood mage specialization was out of the table. Therefore our Tevinter ally got the next most questionable line of magic, necromancy. Because nothing says “almost evil” as raising up the death to fight for you and draining lifeforce from your enemies.

Next we have Vivienne who specialises as a Knight-Enchanter (KE). She’s a Circle mage, a Loyalist at that, and KE is a path reserved for Circle mages allowed to engage in combat when requested. But we learn from Solas that the powers used by Knight-Enchanters have their origin in the Arcane Warriors of the ancient elves. Vivienne has no known connection to anything elven, so her being able to become a KE is just another example of the cultural appropriation of elven elements and knowledge done by humans and the Chantry. 

None of the specializations are entirely new, as already stated KE takes from Arcane Warriors, much of the Necromancer tree comes from the previous games��� Entropy trees, and the Primal and Force trees lend some spells to the supposedly brand new Rift tree. 

Then there’s Solas, who is the default Rift Mage once specializations become available. The Rift spell tree is a post-Breach occurrence, as it was developed by mages studying the Breach and resulting rifts that appeared all over Thedas. It should have unique spells yet it recycles old ones: Stonefist no longer deals physical damage as it did in Origins and DA2 when it was in the Primal tree and meant hurling rocks at the enemy, but spirit damage as it now involves summoning a boulder directly from the Fade. Similarly, DA2’s Force spell Fist of the Maker and subsequent upgrades, Maker’s Hammer and Maker’s Fury, described as “slamming enemies into the ground” with some invisible force became Veilstrike in the Rift tree of Inquisition, there described as “smashing nearby foes to the ground” by “recreating your own fist from from the essence of the Fade”.

Knowing what we know about Solas, his specialization makes sense, he’s responsible for the Veil’s existence so of course he’d know how to manipulate its properties. He’s Fen’Harel, after all. 

Still with me? Good, because this ride is about to get bumpy.

As the default Rift mage he can use Veilstrike, recreating his “own fist from the essence of the Fade”,  but Veilstrike is actually a rename of Fist of the Maker…So what Solas is really doing whenever he casts Veilstrike is casting the Fist of the Maker. By recreating his own fist..It’s all in the name. Fist of the Maker pre-dates Rift magic, but its rebranding as Veilstrike is post-Breach and named after the Veil and not the Maker, possibly because the one who introduces us to this particular spell now is not Andrastian but the ancient elvhen god and creator of the Veil.  Technically speaking  we could say Solas, having created the Veil ages ago and therefore being the one responsible for the present reality of Thedas, is then, in a way, its maker. It’s a wild idea, I know, and there are some bits of lore scattered around that could support it, but i’m not jumping into that abyss yet-

In addition, let’s go back to his auto-leveled spells. At first sight there’s no basis for Solas being an electromancer. But like his Rift specialization, his magic preferences are lore/plot oriented. To consider:

Solas prefers the Storm tree. Skyhold is, by its very name, the place from where the Veil was installed. Some codices found at Skyhold mention electricity being used in unknown rituals at Skyhold’s location. Solas was responsible for creating the Veil.

With this in mind it can be concluded that Solas has always been an electromancer, and even used his electric powers in some way to help put up the Veil in the past.

tl;dr Solas was originally an electromancer and is a Rift Mage because he created the Veil and knows it better than anyone else. Also, he may be the Maker. (loljk or am i)

Now what would you say if I told you Solas possibly also does blood magic? Too much of a stretch? Maaaybe..Except maybe not. He’s not against it, thinks of it as simply a means to an end, and doesn’t disapprove of it unless it’s done in excess for all the wrong reasons (as they do in Tevinter) or is used to limit freedom like when used to bind unwilling spirits or control people’s minds. It’s just an idea, but there must be an explanation why blood magic and lyrium (titan blood, so, still blood magic) can be used to tear the Veil open. The Magisters did it before, and a second time when Corypheus sacrificed Divine Justinia in a ritual that also involved...Solas’ Foci. That is, Fen’ Harel’s Foci.

From Tevinter Nights we learn Solas is after the red lyrium idol (again, titan blood) which he claims belongs to him and is a necessary element for the ritual he must perform to take down the Veil. A ritual for which he’s willing to destroy Thedas as we know it, regrettably causing the dead of thousands. For all we know, those deaths are a necessary sacrifice because they are part of a massive blood magic ritual, Solas’ own death may also be part of it. If the blood of a Divine could be used to open the Breach, what could the blood of Fen’Harel be used for?? Solas’ new powers as Fen’Harel are, frankly, terrifying*, and he’s decided to do whatever it takes to see his mission through, sadly.

And all this leads me to future possibilities..we can imagine with Solas actively trying to take down the Veil there will be places where the Veil gets super thin or begins to disappear. Pockets of space where reality no longer respects natural laws of physics or logic. The Fade is fluid, ever changing, with the right power it can be reshaped at will and i imagine some of that may begin to leak into the physical world, so we may get mage (or spirit! )companions with skills capable of taking advantage of that. 

Lastly, i may add, right now and as far as we can see, Solas is OP as fuck*. He can kill you in your sleep from within your dreams. He can turn you into stone with just thinking of it, which means in a way he can bend the laws of nature of the physical world like he can do in the Fade, If in the future we get close to him,if we get our hands on artifacts or intel.. it won’t because we gathered the right people and resources, it won’t be because of clever tactics and espionage, it won’t be at all because we did anything right. It’ll be because he allows it, because he let us get that far. 

If we stop him at all it’ll be because he wants to be stopped.   

(Apologies in advance if some of this is poorly written, i revised it so many times words no longer look like words. Also half of this is just wild speculation on my part and nobody has to agree with me, after 5 years i may be connecting imaginary dots but hey, it’s fun! If you read this far...i am so sorry, thanks)

[burritodetodo]

Burrito’s Guide To Survive Coronavirus Quarantine

We got to keep social distance (1 or 2 meters each other) or stay home during coronavirus outbreak so I thought I can share with y’all some things I’m gonna watch or do doing quarantine (this is a very long post, REBLOGS ARE VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!).

BUT FIRST SOME RULES:

Wash your hands: do it for 20 seconds or a while, but ALWAYS do it. It prevents the virus from spreading. If you don’t have sanitizer, water and soap! The cheapest and best ally against the disease.

Buy everything you need: if you can, try to buy stuff so you can stay some days at home. If the place is crowded, go back home and come later when it’s more empty. Same as medicine.

You can go for a walk: stay at home all day can be overwhelming for your mental health, but unless the goverment puts a curfew or gets strict about it you can go walk outside for a while always respecting the 1 or 2 meters from other people and without making contact (chatting) with other people. This ain’t my rule, a CDC professional says. DON’T go visit your friends or to crowded places such as bars, restaurants, shoppings, etc. If you want to buy something, ask for delivery or take away.

If you have coronavirus sympthoms (high fever, diarrhea, cough, feeling tired, breath difficulties) DON’T GO TO THE HOSPITAL YET, CALL TO YOUR PUBLIC HEALTH ORGANISATION OR WHATEVER YOU GOT AND THEY’LL TREAT YOU.

(credits to whoever made this meme)

SO YOUR LIFE IS ON QUARANTINE

Let’s say your boss or your school told you can stay at home. Okay then, you gotta prepare for some days inside *Isolation by John Lennon plays in the distance*. The first thing you think is you have to prepare a batch of series and movies to watch in order to kill some time. I’m gonna recommend you some you can find on VOD or cable, if you don’t have it don’t worry because I got you covered!

Infinity Train: a yet two seasons saga about people who got to face their problems aboard an endless train. The protagonists are joined by creatures who have different nature and help them, or not, to acknowledge their issues and leave the train. It’s on CN, it will continue on HBO Max.

The Owl House: a teen girl who daydream a lot was going to be sent to a down-to-earth camp but then she crosses a portal to the Boiling Isles, a magical world where she is taken care by a powerful Owl witch/saleswoman and her adorable demon. Lots of fantasy, some action scenes and many many puns. It’s on Disney Channel, it’ll be on Disney+ in some weeks.

Primal: Genndy Tartakovsky delighted us with the alliance of a caveman and a dinosaur, two rivals in a wild world who ally after facing a devastating event. It IS brutal and beatiful, has no dialogue and keeps you watching closely. Five final episodes are set to premiere this year. It’s on Adult Swim, maybe on HBO Max.

Tuca and Bertie: for the critics, one of 2019 best shows. For Netflix, a show that had to be cut off because the studio unionized. Two friends in their late 20s face changes in their lives: from living with a boyfriend and plan a life to look a way to stay sober and get a job. Deals with trauma, ptsd, anxiety and more harsh moments very well. In fact, the creator is a vital part of Bojack Horseman! It’s on Netflix.

Aggretsuko: red pandas are cute eh? But what about a antopomorphic red panda who releases her anger and frustrations by singing at a karaoke? This awesome comedy by Sanrio & Netflix is one of anime’s big hits lately. Like T&B, has a good handle of adult problems but not going too deep just to not break the comedy. You can watch it on Netflix.

Regular Show: yeah-uuuuhhhh! Eight seasons, a movie, five Halloween specials and some others. The adventures of a racoon and a blue jay with their co-workers/friends that relies on psychadellia and 80s and 90s nostalgia. It begins good, gets better, then lowers the quality (they were producing the movie at the same time tho, give some credit) and with and after the movie ends awesome. It’s on CN web, dunno if on Hulu (US only) and proably on HBO Max.

Evangelion: it’s a classic at this point, but addictive to me because I end rewatching the series or the final movie many times. A post apocalyptic future where the world has to deal with strange creatures known as the Angels and a boy with lots of traumas has to get on a mecha to save the humankind. All the characters have traumas and issues, the interaction between them or the action makes it worth. The End of Evangelion is a movie that ends the unfinished series. Warning: at some point it becomes very twisted and there are scenes which are too much violent. Viewer disclosure etc. It’s on Netflix worldwide.

Steven Universe & SU Future: this is the tale of the gem boy who ends a galactical tyranny and brings democracy to the universe. A acclaimed show that broke through many topics like gender, identity, ptsd, relationships and many more. Besides it’s got the best scores of the Milky Way and beyond thanks to the talent of Rebecca Sugar, Aivi Tran and Surasshu. And the actors and acrtresses! I don’t forget the movie, a musical that is an introduction to the epilogue: Shippuden Future. The show is available on CN and will be on HBO Max. Worldwide? No news.

Adventure Time: something that began as an innocent boy and a magical dog having adventures in a post apocalyptic world turns into the journey of Finn Metens from childhood to almost adulthood. There is a lot of fantasy and comedy you enjoy, but there are dark moments and serious ones through S6 that find a balance with early seasons form S7 to the finale. It also has great music, memorable moments and colaborations. And guess what? There is going to be a special set to premiere on HBO Max in some weeks! You got plenty of time to catch up or rewatch before that on CN or only (!!) S5 on Netflix.

Final Space: a dude tries to save the universe with their friends, where we can find his love interest, a cat-man and his kitten son, a intersexual alien, an AI then robot that is the best of them, two particular siblings and an annoying bot that prevents insanity that makes you insane. Crazy adventures in space, lots of situations, sadness, an evil smol bean who is a space emperor, a dude who looks for revenge, space deities that can destroy the universe. Is this a lot or info? It is not, because there is more and you can watch it on TBS, Adult Swim and Netflix (the world except US).

Rick and Morty: the most powerful, smartest human in the universe has adventures with his grandson. It’s awesome, but has a very toxic fanbase. Anyway, you can enjoy it on Adult Swim or Netflix (which is up to date!) and the rest of S4 is set someday.

Bojack Horseman: a Hollywood satire about human relationships, fame, traumas with a pour of comedy. Alongside the previous series, the best adult animation of the decade. Sadly cut by Netflix because the studio unionized (see T&B), said by both the creator and Aaron Paul. You can watch the six amazing seasons on that platform.

I’m not an animated movies guy, but here are three I really like and you can watch:

Porco Rosso: a handsome Italian combat aviator turned magically to a pig has a face off with an American pilot hired by pirates to get rid of him before WWII in Fascist Italy. It’s entertaining and, like every Ghibli movie, nice to watch. It’s on Netflix and will be on HBO Max for US.

Lego Batman Movie: Batman is depressed and has to get over it. It’s wacky and has lots of comedy. Plus Will Arnett is top 3 Batman. On Netflix (Latinamerica).

Spiderverse: Oscar winner movie about your friendly neighbour Peter Parker Miles Morales. Miles sees Spiderman die and feels bad after being transfered to a private school. Then a radioactive spider from a Fisk compound bites Miles and he’s Spiderman... among other dimensions’ Spiderpeople: Gwen, Peni, Peter Parker, Noir and Peter Porker. It’s visually amazing. On US it’s on Netflix (I guess), on Latinamerica on HBO.

Some interesting live actions I watched lately

Atlanta: Donald Glover is Earn, a dude who struggles to find a job for her baby girld and sees an opportunity when his cousin, Paper Boi, has a hit and uses him to make his cos famous. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a social satire with touches of drama. And all protagonists are now big shots, like Zazie Beetz, Brian Tyree Henry or Lakeith Stanfield. There are two seasons and two seasons set for 2021 (2022 possible beacuse of coronavirus). It’s on FX, Hulu (US) and Netflix (world)

Avenue 5: this is brand new. On 2060 space cruises are a thing, and one cruise (the Avenue 5) has an accident that leaves the crew and passangers stranded for years. The captain (Hugh Laurie) has to solve this shit with a bunch of incompetent crew, bosses like Judd (Josh Gad), except one female engeneer who is very smart. Lots of crazy things happen in this series from the creator behind Veep. It’s on HBO (it’s free in the US!).

Peaky Blinders: it has some years but damn it’s epic. A gang from Birmingham makes their way to the top during the late 1910s after the Great War and extends through the 1920s. S5 is right in the ascension of fascism in Britain. ALL THE CAST acts spectacular, names like Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Anna Taylor-Joy and a long etc. But my fave is Paul Anderson, that ultra violent junkie Arthur Shelby is splendid, then is Tommy and aunt Pol, the baddest badass woman in Britain. Blinders is going to have seven seasons, there are two left. You can watch it on BBC or Netflix.

Sex Education: speaking of Britain, excellent teen comedy. Horny, doubtful teenagers going through those hard years. Stories of sex (duh!), abuse situations, abortion, there are gay relationships either, Gillian Anderson! It’s on Netflix, go go go!

Watchmen: despite not having Alan Moore on board, Damien Lindeloff did a tremendous job with the comic. Way better and less misleading than Zack Snyder’s 2009 film, Watchmen is again at the gates of the world’s end (like today) and handles the problem of racism and white supremacy quite well. Just 9 episodes, but worth to watch. On HBO.

CAOS: Sabrina the Teenage Witch is over. Warner and Netflix made a revival of the Archie Comics character and brought her to XXI Century. But gorier, hornier, dark and magical than the nice 90s sitcom. Sabrina Spellman goes from a doubtful teen who has to decide if she has to be a witch or a powerless woman to rule Hell. How she does it? Find out on Netflix! Note: S1 and 2 take some episodes to start properly. Don’t get bored too easy.

There are A LOT MORE to recommend and I make a list: Harley Quinn (DC Universe), OK KO (Hulu -US only-), House MD, Young Justice (DC Universe/Netflix), Ken Burns’ documentaries (Netflix), Titans (DCU), Over The Garden Wall (CN), Seis Manos (Netflix), Thundercats Roar (CN), Easy (Netflix), GLOW (Netflix), Star Trek Discovery (CBS, Netflix) and Picard (CBS, Amazon Prime), etc.

- You named cool shows, but I’m not from the United States or I don’t have a subscription to (insert VOD here) because I can’t afford it

- Glad you asked, I have the answer here

Introducing Stremio. It’s an open source platform where you can watch shows, movies or even live TV on Windows, Linux, Apple or Android. You create an account, install some addons and start looking for what you want to watch.

Stremio is based on torrents, you should install addons from many known torrent sites. So maybe you find an old show, but there aren’t many seeds to watch. And it could be frustraiting, so make sure there are people sharing so you can watch it.

You can download Stremio here and check the FAQs which is very clear.

NOTE: Stremio is note quite “clean” way to watch, but if you do please support the shows you watch by posting, commenting about them, making memes, thanking the creators and crew for their work, buying merchandise if you can. They put a lot to make the shows we love, let’s give ‘em back that love and effort.

You’re tired of the same music, the same movies or need to leave something to make company? There is Vaughn Live, a streaming page where are lots of channels with movies and series on strem (not VOD). For example, there is a channel that streams Adventure Time, other Regular Show, other Sci-Fi shows, another with DBZ and so on. Take in count that if the channel has +70 viewers, the free access is cut and if you want to watch it you have to pay.

En Vaughn también hay canales en español, como Simpsonmanía, Dragon Ball, Futurama, dibujos viejos y muchísimo más. Anyway, go to https://vaughn.live/ and enjoy yourselves!

Y hablando de canales en español, pueden ir a SeriesLan donde está el mayor reservorio conocido de series animadas de entre 1960 a 2010 en español latino. Pueden encontrar tesoros desde Don Gato, los Halcones Galácticos o Street Sharks a Flapjack y Mechas XLR. Otra alternativa para que pasen el rato.

Some interesting facts:

Epic Games releases a free game per week in their store. This week will be two games. You can check in https://www.epicgames.com

Steam has good prices on games and some free ones. There even is the latest Football Manager for free until March 25th. Check on https://store.steampowered.com/

If you’re interested,

I got this playlist I made on Spotify

with songs I liked in more than one year. More than 1200 songs.

And that’s pretty much it! You got resources for a lot of days, 14 initially since that’s the quarantine time in my country. Remember: obey the indications of the Health authorities, this is no time to play the “fuck the goverment” game. We will overcome this pandemy together, helping and caring for each other. That’s why I did this guide, to keep your minds busy in these tough times! Wash your hands, keep social distance, stay at home, go outside if necessary and have some patience please. This has been a PSA.

Stay strong!

Burrito

[nightingaleandtheredredrose]

Ozmafia!! Character Profiles

The quarantine boredom finally got to me

Aaa, no, but really, back in one of my previous posts I mentioned that there were character profiles in this Ozmafia!! Vivace booklet. I didn’t have the time or energy to attempt to translate the full profiles back then, but due to recent circumstances (´;ω;) I decided to finally give it a shot. 

The character profiles can be found under the “Read More”!!

*Note:  Most of what I had to translate was easy enough considering I was working with just words and not full on sentences. There were some parts that tripped me up (of which I included the original Japanese characters along w/ a tentative definition in this post; if anyone can help me with these parts, please DM me). Otherwise, I did the best I could with what I previously know about the language, a Japanese dictionary, and Google Translate. If anyone wants to see the original character profiles to check for any errors in translation, don’t hesitate to reach out to me through this account!*

*Note: Things in parentheses are actually a part of the original profile information. Things in the brackets are my own commentary/info.*

“The Courageous Lion”

Caramia

CV: Shingaki Tarusuke

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html [Basically what is translated here]

Birthday: August 16

Height: 177cm

Hobby: Reading

Special Skill: Song/Firearm Repair

Favorite Things: Water/Meat

Weapon of Choice: Automatic Pistol

What is a lover: Someone to protect

Place of branding: Left of Chest

“The Sly Scarecrow”

Kyrie

CV: Okitsu Kazuyuki 

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html 

Birthday: February 8

Height: 175cm

Hobby: Gambling

Special Skill: Cheating in gambling (イカサマ)/ Evil Doings (悪だくみ)

Favorite Things: Tea/Anything that’s delicious

Weapon of Choice: Assault Rifle (But, usually, he doesn’t like getting his hands dirty)

What is a lover: An entertaining presence

Place of Branding: Nape [of the neck]

“The Taciturn Tin Woodsman”

Axel

CV: Kakehashi Atsushi

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html 

Birthday: March 23

Height: 185cm

Hobby: Nothing in particular [ぼ一っとする事]

Special Skill: Strength/Can sleep anywhere

Favorite Things: Coffee/Sweets

Weapon of Choice: Shotgun/Hachet

What is a lover: Someone who can’t be taken away from you

Place of branding: Upper right of waist 

“The Big Bad Wolf”

Caesar

CV: Kirimoto Takuya

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html 

Birthday: November 5

Height: 180cm

Hobby: Training

Special Skill: Making accessories

Favorite Things: Carbonated Water/ Meat

Weapon of Choice: 2 Long Swords

What is a lover: Someone obedient [Someone who acts according to his will]

Place of branding: Right Shoulder

“The Pure-Hearted Pacifist”

Soh

CV: Iguchi Yuuichi

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html 

Birthday: April 1

Height: 167cm

Hobby: Cuisine

Special Skill: Cooking

Favorite Things: Corn Soup/Potato Dish

Weapon of Choice: Fork/Knife

What is a lover: Someone you can share happiness with

Place of branding: Left shoulder

“Little Red Sniper-Hood”

Scarlet

CV: Ichiki Mitsuhiro

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html 

Birthday: October 14

Height: 159cm

Hobby: Walking

Special Skill: Searching for enemies/Erasing presence

Favorite Things: Wine/Croissant [I honestly have no idea why his favorite drink is wine despite the fact that he says he’s not allowed to drink alcohol in the game?? But the katakana is literally just ワイン (wainu), so that’s what I’m going with]

Weapon of Choice: Sniper Rifle/Magnum Revolver

What is a lover: Someone who he can be together and at ease with

Place of branding: Left clavicle

“The One-Eyed Pied Piper”

Hamelin

CV: Ono Yuuki

Short Description: https://ozmafia.fandom.com/wiki/Hamelin 

Birthday: January 27

Height: 179 cm

Hobby: Napping/Making Donuts

Special Skill: Playing his flute so as to control children and animals

Favorite Things: Donuts/Hot buttered lamb

Weapon of Choice: Nothing

What is a lover: Someone he can say “Goodnight” to at the end of the day [Hamelinnnn ( ；∀；)]

Place of Branding: Left of chest

“The Strict Cat with Long Boots”

Pashet

CV: Fujii Kyoko 

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: July 3

Height: 165 cm

Hobby: Training her subordinates

Special Skill: Acute Hearing/High Jumping Power

Favorite Things: Apple Juice/Biscuit

Weapon of Choice: Long Sword

What is a lover: Someone sincere

Place of Branding: Right Wrist

“The Black-Cloaked Town Doctor”

Robin Hood

CV: Fujinami Satoru

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: December 10

Height: 176 cm 

Hobby: Practicing suturing 

Special Skill: Treament/Healing (It is said that there is no ailment the doctor cannot cure)

Favorite Things: Absinthe [a distilled highly alcoholic drink] (Just a bit. He doesn’t drink much. Also likes pretzels.)

Weapon of Choice: Doesn’t participate in conflicts, but all medical supplies can be used as weapons, such as scalpels and drugs.

What is a lover: Someone who surprises you

Place of Branding: None

“The Devoted Swallow”

Manboy

CV: Takatsugu Awazu

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: June 26

Height: 182 cm

Hobby: Keeping a diary/Knitting/Polishing silverware

Special Skill: His dexterity 

Favorite Things: Beer/Rye Bread

Weapon of Choice: Any of the weapons displayed in the mansion

What is a lover: Romance is fleeting

Place of Branding: Near his tailbone

“The Hedonistic Manager”

Dorian Gray

CV: Honda Hiroyuki

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: June 25

Hobby: Collecting beautiful things/Spending time in bed

Special Skill: Manipulating others/Wine Tasting

Favorite Things: Rum/Navarin [French ragoût [stew] of lamb or mutton]

Weapon of Choice: Training School [???仕込校]

What is a lover: A way to kill time

Place of branding: Left Shoulder

“The Blissful Masochist Prince” 

Alfani

CV: Yamaguchi Kazuya

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: June 27

Height: 163 cm

Hobby: Flights of fancy/Fulfilling the wishes of others

Special Skill: Rope Tying/Unraveling Rope

Favorite Things: Cocktails/Root Vegetables (Especially carrots)

Weapon of Choice: Weak combat ability. Uses his body as a shield.

What is a lover: A toy box [おもちゃ箱]

Place of branding: Right ankle

“The Positive Older Brother”

Hansel

CV: Enoki Junya

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: September 12

Height: 165 cm

Hobby: Making sweets

Special Skill: Surprise Attacks/His optimism

Favorite Things: Carbonated water/Gummies

Weapon of Choice: Dynamite

Place of Branding: Left Wrist

“The Negative Younger Sister”

Gretel

CV: Nozuki Masami

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: September 12

Height: 161 cm

Hobby: Eating sweets

Special Skill: Assisting in surprise attacks/Smelling gunpowder

Favorite Things: Fancy carbonated water/Pretzels

Weapon of Choice: Grenades

Place of Branding: Right Wrist

“The Young Girl Who Does High-Pressure Sales of Matches”

Ande

CV: Uchiyama Yuki

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: January 1

Height: 152 cm

Hobby: Selling matches

Special Skill: Peeling red apples

Favorite things: Red drink/Red food

Weapon of Choice: Crossbow (that shoots flaming arrows)

Place of branding: Right of chest

“The Big Sister Heidi”

Heidi

CV: Takahashi Hidenori

Short Description: https://ice-archeress.livejournal.com/8971.html

Birthday: May 19

Height: 172 cm

Hobby: Searching for good men [scoping out the hot dudes]/Making cheese

Special Skill: Finger whistle 

Favorite things: Goat’s milk/Cheese

Weapon of choice: Peter

Place of branding: Right arm

[flimflamfranky]

i’ve read the two latest chapters and there were so many cool things and fun details that i’ve decided to make my own post on my Reactions™️ , so strap in everybody

they are literally SO CUTE IM GONNA CRY LOOK AT THESE TEENY BABIES!! ahhhh i just wanna hug them and protect them from all the evils of the world

everyone who meets oden: i will love and follow you forever! oden: please don’t

there are so many panels of the oden gang being cute and adorable. im not gonna put them all here cuz that’d be too much but know that i love and appreciate every single of those panels bc i am a huge sap

(but shout out to these two panels in particular)

they kept the two pigs as pets!! that’s cute!! and i love the dad’s battle scar, that’s an impressive injury to bounce back from

i can’t believe kin’emon died his hair to be more distinguished....what a dork

orochi is poisoning the shogun, that BASTARD (we all knew but still)

waaa they all look so young and small (or, well, smaller). esp marco look at that little round face;;; this is why i love flashbacks, i love seeing how characters were before we met them

asdlkfadsj kin’emon and whitebeard fist-bumping over, essentially, grounding oden to land is fucking hilarious. 

and oden throwing a tantrum over the lack of respect...hilarious 

oden is so excited to leave and it’s, quite frankly, adorable, but izo looks about ready to murder. and things do not get better for the poor guy. 

entertaining as oden’s adventure, i do feel bad for the retainers left behind, esp kiku for losing her big bro. but kin freaking out in the background is hilarious

this is exactly my brand of humor and i am LIVING. that little ‘ah’ with that face nearly killed me. 

and the mini-montage of oden rushing headfirst into new exciting and dangerous things as the wb crew run after him is so funny. oden is such a fun character and i love him a lot

ASLDKFASDK BABIES!!! AHH THEYRE SO SMALL AND CUTE

ASKLDJFASDFL ROGER AHHHHHHHHHH

we might actually get a whole chapter, maybe even multiples, of the roger crew interacting together and with oden and i am so excited for that!!!!

[zukadiary]

Hoshigumi Small Theaters ~ Spring 2019

I am five entire shows behind on reviews and I hate it!!

But I finally make it to Kansai!! I conveniently managed to see these guys on back to back days upstairs and downstairs in the same building. If nothing else I think I am 500% more educated on Hoshigumi after this trip.

Man from Algiers / Estrellas 2.0

Man from Algiers ticks all the National Tour buttons—old, done many times, ambiguous time period (useful for traveling costume recycling, i.e. why not just use the rainbow sports jackets we need for Estrellas anyway!)—and while I’m not surprised that Coto can make just about anything good, I was a bit surprised at how much I enjoyed the show itself (this was the first time I’d seen it at all, which was a blessing as the surprise ending was my favorite part). 

I can definitely envision it in all its original 70s glory, and it made me wonder if they really just wanted to exploit a West Side Story aesthetic’s swoon-inducing abilities and came up with the plot later; the opening looks and choreography were awfully familiar. Am I saying it didn’t work?

No I am not saying that.

(And the resulting prologue number was really cool).

The story, while dated, was simple and easy to follow, and does a great job of making sure you understand each character’s motivation with minimal info (difficult AND clutch for one-acts). There’s a good summary on the wiki, I’m including spoilers not mentioned there.

Team National Tour is definitely the lighter side of the troupe split, especially with regard to upperclassmen, but I thought Algiers was a good fit for this particular arrangement of members, and everyone really nailed their characters. Most notable: 

Julien is a despicable person, and it’s a testament to Coto’s pure heart and brimming talent that she made him a totally valid protagonist, complete with moments that made my heart lurch a little (when his old friends are bullying him in his cute little chauffeur outfit; how quickly he abandons everything to stand by Sabine when everything goes to hell at the end). 

It was very weird first not to see Aichan in Ocean’s and then to see her hanging out with a percentage of Hoshigumi, but this cast needed her. Her Jacques (albeit very reminiscent of her Bernardo) was a good balance for Coto; they both played unsavory people, but Aichan playing bad has kind of a darker streak that suits the more evil friend well, whereas Coto playing bad still has an undercurrent of goodness that gets you fully on board with his journey to reform.

Otoha Minori as Sabine was a good choice not only for her abs in the gold night club bikini dress, but for her maturity, which lended sincerity to Sabine’s fantasy-level selflessness in her concern for Julien and her desire to watch over him. When she shoots Jacques in her dressing room to get him out of the way so he can’t interfere with Julien’s new life, I was so impressed that it read as an act of sacrifice (however excessive and stupid) purely out of love and desire to see Julien continue to grow and succeed, instead of “look at what I did for you, come back to me!”

Asamizu Ryou played Bollinger, the dude who takes Julien in and grooms him for upper-crust success, opposite not just Coto (her senpai) but Shirotae Natsu (her mega-senpai), and she did it with a surprising amount of gravitas. She’s got that face which definitely helps, but she was a little scary and exuded a lot of authority. Shirotae Natsu was hilarious as the extraordinarily airheaded wife, and her interjections may have even been singlehandedly responsible for keeping the pacing of the show brisk and entertaining. 

Sakuraba Mai played the Bollingers’ daughter Elizabeth. She was detestable, but in the way that indicates a great acting job. She’s at that awkward spot where it looks like she’s getting almost heroine weight roles in small theaters and disappearing in grand theaters. I hope they keep pushing her because she’s very strong.

Number one heartbreaker Kozakura Honoka (voice of an angel!) played blind Annabel, daughter of Kumichou/a very influential duchess. She mostly stays inside alone, and then Julien woos her with the intention of climbing the social/political ladder (while developing feelings for Elizabeth and also really never getting over Sabine). Annabel overhears Julien confessing his feelings to Elizabeth and asks her attendant Andre (Kiwami Shin, in love with Annabel) to let her kill herself. Honoka apparently put an immense amount of time and research into acting blind and it showed. 

Fellow American Sayaka Rin had probably the most lines she’s had yet, in a role formerly held by both Takashio Tomoe and Hyuuga Kaoru <3 

My personal MVPs of this show were Shidou Ryuu and Kiwami Shin, Shidou not even for doing anything particularly spectacular, but just just for having grown so much since I first became aware of her existence via the Koumori shinko 3+ years ago. She’s always going to be on the cute side rather than the devastating side IMO, but she’s developed enough confidence and control in her acting that she’s become a really lovable best friend/brother type; her character’s relationship with Julien and secret-but-obvious admiration of his far superior coolness was really adorable. Andre (Shin) isn’t a super juicy role until the very end, but the way Shin did Andre’s quiet breakdown when Annabel was explaining she didn’t want to live anymore, and then her poise when Andre came out of nowhere and shot Julien just as he and Sabine were trying to run away from shooting Jacques (?!??!) was like, my jaw actually dropped. Granted she’s still super young, but Shin isn’t someone who has thus far impressed me proportionately to the amount they’re pushing her, so this mini breakout was nice to see. 

Estrellas (a revue that I loved!), like all tour revues with less than half the cast and no staircase, felt quite small, at least from the B-seki side box. But in the smallness, normally unseen people get to shine, and there were moments that had me bouncing in my chair. Amato Kanon is going to grow up dangerous (if Tennis Daughter doesn’t just consume all the otokoyaku below 98th); in the opening with everyone else beaming she was smoldering. Aichan and Anru took Kai’s medley (with different songs) and made it a very cute douki thing. Sazanami Reira needs to dance closer to the front more often. Ruri Hanaka (who, bless her heart, cannot sing, at least not like a musumeyaku) somehow snagged Airi’s part in Tonight is What it Means to be Young, and despite the singing, absolutely killed it; that girl can DANCE and she’s got sass and arm muscles for days and a look in her eye like she’ll superglue you to your makeup table if you cross her. 

And boy, Coto looks good in that top position. The talent is really stupid, but on top of that she has such warmth. I’m really excited for her Hoshigumi.

Kamatari

Kamatari accomplished a feat, because admittedly I went in having already biased myself against it; I thought Beni and Airi getting a weird nihonmono for their last small theater was dumb and just about as NOT THEM as you can get.

But I take it back! It was lovely!

For starters it was visually stunning, which feels like the thing you say when you’re trying to convince yourself that you liked a nihonmono you didn’t actually understand a word of... but in this case, it really was just a bonus. The story (summary here) is not actually all that complicated, and the dialogue was even on the friendly side for nihonmono—no weird dialects (beyond what it always takes to decipher Beni), no 12th level keigo. 

Act 1 introduces Kamatari (Beni) and Soga no Iruka (Hanagata Hikaru) meeting as youths in school and developing a friendship, and then takes us, as far as I can tell, fairly historically accurately through the events leading up to and including the Isshi Incident. Act 2 was a little harder for me to follow; but it seems to be just a progression of Kamatari’s struggles living under the new post-incident emperor Naka no Oe (Seocchi), with whom he’d conspired to eliminate Soga no Iruka, and the former empress/Naka no Oe’s mother (Kuracchi), who wants to see Kamatari suffer, because she both loved Iruka and couldn’t side against her son. 

Most of the roles were pretty small so there are fewer standouts, but here they are:

This was the third in a progression of Hoshi shows I saw live (the other two being Another World and Elbe) that really helped cement my respect for Beni and Airi’s brand of chemistry. At the beginning of her top run, I was skeptical about Beni’s ability to generate romantic chemistry with anyone at all (Scarlet Pimpernel didn’t really help me with that, and I haven’t seen anything between that and Another World). They definitely don’t have sizzling hot chemistry, and they don’t have that cute newlywed chemistry either, but I noticed watching Kamatari that in the last few Hoshi things I’ve seen, I’ve found it very easy to believe how deeply Beni loves Airi in whatever world they’re portraying. They have like, comfortable old married couple chemistry (yes, even when they’re playing love at first sight). Their moments in Kamatari were very tender, but in a wholesome “aw, she cooked for him” kind of way. Yoshiko (Airi) also had a lovely part at the end, where the two of them are old, and Kamatari’s health is failing, and they go back to the spot where they met, and she says their life wasn’t always easy, and they suffered, and they struggled, but in the end she can honestly say she had fun, and she’s truly happy. I teared up! It was sweet and meta! That alone convinced me it wasn’t a bad last small theater for them.

Hanagata Hikaru was SO much the star of Act 1 that it had me wondering if this was gonna turn out to be HER taidan present (but then she died and didn’t appear in Act 2 at all). I can’t complain because she kicked ass. I feel like I said this exact thing re: Another World, but Mitsuru is normally about as vanilla as it gets for me, but she blew me away. The pompous genius school kid to the idealistic young man to the uncertainty that comes with the reality of seizing power to the change to tyranny mixed with love for the empress and complicated feelings for his childhood friend all flowed seamlessly.

Not that I’ve watched a ton of Hoshi recently, but this was the best role Tenju Mitsuki has gotten in GOD I can’t even remember how long. Esaka is in service of the (state? empire?) as a historical record keeper, and serves kind of as a narrator as well (along with Itsuki Chihiro). I don’t even know how to describe how she characterized him... he’s odd? Maybe a little off? Regardless, she was brilliant. Watch it.

Arisa Hitomi has that empress energy for sure. I read up on the history of the events afterwards, and the explanation of why she had to give up the throne after witnessing such violence (the idea back then that an empress couldn’t be sullied by such things), and that made the sensitivity with which Kuracchi portrayed her feel even more poignant the more I sat with it afterwards.

This was the first show where to me Seocchi felt like she belonged up there with Beni and Mitsuru. She definitely put some weight behind Naka no Oe and was very princely. NOW I wanna see her tackle a more interesting/challenging (and tbh more Hoshigumi) role from up in this spot. 

All in all now I’m a little sad I won’t be around for God of Stars.

[solarprophecy]

my thoughts on Rise of Skywalker

spoilers ahead, obviously

I should probably say first that when it comes to Star Wars I’m a casual. That is, I’ve seen all the films at least once and enjoyed them, but I haven’t read any of the books (except the novelizations of Episodes IV–VI) or comics and it’s not a fandom I’m really in. Just FYI.

I went into it thinking—based on snippets of reviews I’d heard—the movie was going to suck big time. Perhaps because of my low expectations, however, I really enjoyed it. Of course it wasn’t the best film ever. Of course a lot of it didn’t make much sense (e.g. “these ships that are already in the air and not crashing into each other simply cannot do anything useful without a constant navigation signal from this one source” etc.). But the Force wasn’t any dumber or more self-contradictory than it always is, imho, and I was sufficiently entertained.

In no particular order, some aspects that struck me:

I think it sucks balls that Ben Solo died. He should have been given the opportunity to live a better life, on the side of the good guys. I suppose, though, if he’s a Force Ghost on Luke’s level—not just able to talk to and be seen by the living, but to actually be able to affect and manipulate real objects too—then that’s better than nothing. But yeah, he should have lived. And he and Rey should have had a chance to interact in real life without fighting.

At one point, someone says that the little wheel droid—K.O., B.O., whatever his name is lol—has some super important info about the First Order. What did that turn out to be? I don’t recall what came of that, if anything.

I LOVE the 3-way Finn/Poe/Rey hug at the end. I am so glad the filmmakers didn’t opt to arbitrarily lock down a pairing there. Now you can interpret things as Finn/Poe, Finn/Rey, Poe/Rey, or, best of all, OT3—’bout time that [something that could be interpreted as] a healthy poly relationship was shown in a big movie.

I have always thought Adam Driver was a good actor (and holy GOD is he a good actor), but I never had a thing for him. I can feel that changing. I am about to have a huge thing for Adam Driver

Chewie finally got a medal! I dunno if they gave him Luke or Han’s old medal or a brand new one, but who cares—he got a medal!!

Chewie’s grief over Leia’s death absolutely destroyed me. You never really think about them caring much about each other or interacting much—or at least I, a casual viewer, never did—so seeing him utterly devastated by her death was really moving.

I liked the ‘Good Rey fights imaginary(?) Evil Rey’ scene. It was just like when Luke tried to kill Vader under the spooky tree on Dagobah and ‘Vader’ turned out to have Luke’s own face.

I loved how they ask Hux why he’s helping them, and he’s all “I don’t give a fuck if you win, I just want Kylo Ren to lose.” That was honest and a good moral lesson, I think. Hux was the Snape of this movie, and like Snape he wasn’t actually a good person and did a lot of awful shit that he maybe can’t be forgiven for. But—again, like Snape—he also did a few things that were very right and helped the good guys win. If we’re supposed to learn that no one is 100% good or 100% bad and that it is people’s choices that define them, then I think Hux and Snape are good examples of some good choices that were made by shitty people, and which did not diminish their other dickish actions...but which deserve to be acknowledged as good choices nonetheless.

There’s really only one part that I hated, and that is that Leia’s body vanished at the same that Ben’s did. That makes me worry that what actually happened isn’t that Ben truly repented and came over to the light side, but that Leia was basically possessing him and controlling his actions through the whole ending. Cuz that would suck and completely remove his agency/redemption. ...Hopefully it just means that she waited for him so they could disappear together, and mother and son were reunited in death.

I can tell I’m gonna get all up in the reylo tag on AO3. I need another OTP like I need a hole in my head. Sigh. 

[omniversalobservations]

Fandom Mashups Are On The Rise

Fact: Two fandoms are better than one. When your favorite fictional worlds collide, it’s a mashup made in fandom heaven. Fandom mashups are becoming more popular, with crossovers popping up in TV shows and movies, fan art, original cosplays, and even new collectibles, making pop culture hybrids a top trend in the geek world.

Fandom mashups have such a powerful impact because they join together two groups of extremely passionate fans — or two halves of your own geeky heart. While products and entertainment moments that feature themes from two separate worlds may be a little more niche —  not every Dungeons & Dragons fan would get schwifty with Rick and Morty — they have the ability to draw fans from one property into another. And the most accessible way for companies to pull off this concept is with gotta-have-it merch — and lots of it. With the right properties and the right fan bases, the collaborations can be seamless and maintain the integrity of each brand.

Take FOCO’s line of Game of Thrones MLB Bobbleheads, for example. The cross-licensed series pairs Major League Baseball players and mascots with Game of Thrones characters and settings. The first series merges three distinct bobblehead styles — the Iron Throne, the Night King, and the Ice Dragon Viserion — with mascots and branding from all 30 MLB teams.

“We definitely think it’s an emerging category, this cross-licensed mashup that we’re going to explore,” says Matthew Katz, licensing manager at FOCO. “… We tried to make sure we had the right balance. You don’t want to go too far one way or the other because you want to capture the people who are superfans of either baseball or Game of Thrones, and then capture those people in the middle as well.”

The bobblehead collaboration started off as a partnership for MLB’s theme nights, during which every fan who walks through the stadium gates gets a promotional item, like a bobblehead. The promotion opened the door to a conversation on how to expand at retail, especially for people who couldn’t make it to the promo nights or desired a more high-end collectible than the ones handed out at the games.

A unique aspect of pop culture mashups is that it gives the creators a bit more freedom in playing around with storytelling. The Night King was an ominous Game of Thrones villain, but he’s a bit more lighthearted when he’s wearing team-themed armor and ditching his spear for a baseball bat made of ice with the team’s logo on it.

“Developing a non-traditional product line like this gives a fresh perspective and allows a fan who has love for both brands to get a refreshed look,” says Josephine Fusezi, MLB’s vice president of global consumer products. “Being able to play with key elements from both baseball and Game of Thrones gives the consumer something different and refreshing. It also gives us an opportunity to have a little fun with our fans.”

Response to the first bobblehead series was so positive that FOCO quickly developed a followup series in just six weeks, featuring characters such as the direwolf, the Kingsguard, and a White Walker, available now for preorder. New MLB theme nights began in June for a Netflix Stranger Things collaboration, too.

Fans will also know exactly who to call with Hasbro’s new Ecto-1 Ectotron figure. The Transformers universe already has heroic Autobots, evil Decepticons, and now ghosts! The iconic Ecto-1 Cadillac from the 1984 Ghostbusters movie is now a Transformers robot — a converting Paranormal Investigator called Ectotron. The figure comes with its own Proton Pack and Slimer accessory, and it converts between Ecto-1 and robot in 22 steps.

This year marks the 35th anniversaries of both Transformers and Ghostbusters, making it an ideal year to combine the best of both franchises. A five-part origin story from IDW Publishing will also be available this year, giving fans insight on Ectotron’s background.

“Brand anniversaries not only allow us to celebrate a franchise, but we can also tap into nostalgia around a brand,” says Tom Warner, senior vice president for the Transformers franchise at Hasbro. “The Transformers and Ghostbusters brands are filled with waves of millennial nostalgia as new parents share the toys and brands they loved as children with their own kids.”

Ectotron preorders sold out within 24 hours after the figure was revealed at Toy Fair New York in February, so additional preorders were made available. Fans should also be on the lookout for other potential Transformers and Ghostbusters collaborations soon, according to Warner.

“On the surface, the Transformers and Ghostbusters franchises may seem vastly different; however, they share more in common than one may expect,” Warner says. “Both have two passionate fandoms, sharing a mutual bond over out-of-this world storytelling rooted in science fiction. When combining both worlds, our goal was to create stories and a product that stays true to the origins of both brands.”

The Avengers movies are probably the most well-known, most popular crossovers, but they weren’t the first. Think of all the “most ambitious crossover event in history” memes that circulated around the time that Infinity War came out — and how we were reminded of Disney Channel’s That’s So Suite Life of Hannah Montana, which came out in 2006, or 2003’s The Rugrats Go Wild, in which the band of babies met Eliza and her family from The Wild Thornberries, on Nickelodeon.

Entertainment crossover content is so successful because fans of these franchises can see all of their favorite characters interacting in situations they normally wouldn’t, like when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles visited Gotham in Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019). In this movie, the heroes in a half-shell and the Dark Knight team up when Shredder joins forces with Ra’s al Ghul, and all of the heroes need to work together to defeat the combined might of the Foot Clan and League of Assassins.

These crossovers can also span multiple age groups, such as Sesame Street’s “Respect Brings Us Together” campaign. Two commercials launched in April featuring Elmo and Cookie Monster, one of which starred the notably at-odds Lannister siblings from Game of Thrones. And if anyone can convince Cersei and Tyrion Lannister to get along, it’s Elmo.

Fan demand for this type of content is loud and clear, as is the case with The CW’s DC Universe. The network has created crossover content yearly since 2014 through its DC TV shows, starting with Arrow and The Flash. At the time, in December 2014, the two-part Arrowverse crossover between the two shows was the most-watched December telecast in seven years for the network, and the most-watched episode for both shows since their respective series premieres.

In 2016, the network’s #DCWeek event delivered The CW’s most-watched week in six years, featuring a four-night DC crossover between Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. The CW’s fifth-annual Arrowverse crossover last year, Elseworlds, introduced Gotham City and Batwoman into the mix, and concluded with a tease of the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, set to air this fall.

The ratings for The CW’s crossover events clearly show that fans crave this content, and it’s safe to say we can expect more of it in the future.

Pop culture mashups also come from the most important community: the fans themselves.

While manufacturers and entertainment companies have the power to bring pop culture mashups to the masses, fans can express themselves through cosplay and fan art — without the shackles of licensing rights getting in the way. And here, creativity is key. Out-of-the-box fan mashups, including one-of-a-kind cosplays and stunning illustrations, all have one thing in common: They fuse two things that would likely never be together otherwise.

Eric Proctor is a digital artist at TsaoShin who draws vibrant fantasy pieces, with a heavy focus on pop culture artwork. His gallery features bright, fun, and whimsical pieces that incorporate characters, such as Stitch from Lilo & Stitch and Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon.

“For me, the crossovers are a Venn diagram where the two circles completely overlap of things that I absolutely love,” Proctor says. “So, any crossover that I’m currently doing is going to just be just that I love A and I love B, and I’d love to see A and B together.”

Proctor is currently working on an ongoing Grumpy Cat and Disney series, which had accidental roots. Proctor bought a new rig and tablet for his illustration setup and was practicing with his new equipment. He sketched out the iconic The Little Mermaid scene in which Ariel is singing on the rock with water splashing around her, and because he doesn’t like drawing people, he drew in Grumpy Cat as a last-minute decision. He showed it to his friends, expecting to delete it, but then people asked him what Disney scenario he was going to put Grumpy Cat into next — and the series was born.

“I say that I love both of those things, but one of the things I felt so guilty about making that particular series is that I really, really love Disney, but I’m putting Grumpy Cat in a scenario where it’s just ruining it,” Proctor says. “It’s this little bit of dark humor where you’re like, ‘I really love Disney, but honestly if Grumpy Cat was in it, this is probably what would happen.’ So it’s taking something that’s a little sacred and then ripping it to shreds a bit. I think the humor was one of those things I had to play around with.”

Proctor is currently working on his next Grumpy Cat Disney installment, a Cinderella-themed piece titled “Bippidi Boppidi No.” It will show the scene from the animated film in which the fairy godmother grants all of Cinderella’s wishes, but with everything completely ruined, such as a pumpkin dress, Lucifer the cat being the size of a horse, and other mishaps.

“It’s one of those situations where it’s so easy to imagine a lot of those crossovers together; they seem so real and fitting that it just feels like a marriage of two ideas that you’ve enjoyed both of those things so much,” Proctor says. “For me personally, when I look at a crossover that just succeeds so well, I just get so happy because someone else saw the thing that put those two things together and they made that real.”

With pop culture mashups, fans get to express themselves in a whole new way, and manufacturers and entertainment companies are taking note of the increasing fan demand and creative potential. The possibilities are limitless.

Source: The Pop Insider

(image via DeviantArt)