Quote Originally Posted by Pokonic View Post
A question: is it not within means to have a soul-jar thingi (seen more than a few varients to make the word "phylactery" useless as a base term , and I know that the traditinal little bauble is kind of out of style. Weapons and books are all the rage now a days.) to make there suits there storing-place? If thats so, is it not within means for a wearer of such a suit to enchant the living crap out of it to be almost impossible to damage, let alown truly destroy? After all, the soul-holder jar in most situations can have magical effects "hanged" on it, so who knows what a powerful lich can come up with?
Spoiled for long and not-very-pony...
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Phylactery-bound Liches, by their very nature, don't get nearly so many abilities, nor spirit-vessel will reinforcement, because their soul is ultimately bound in a thingy, and not basically haunting their body, which they are at best "projecting" into. Spirit-binding is just overall better, with phylactery-bindings only advantages are that you can suffer destruction of your puppet-body and survive - but the trade off it that you're completely vulnerable while you regenerate a new body - and that it is something that you can do to yourself.

Spirit-binding is not something you can cast on yourself, unless you can actually cast spells while dead (and I mean "dead" not Undead, it's as hard as casting Resurrection on yourself.) However, it's faster, infinitely cheaper, and gives you a lot better chance out of the gate of not having your body destroyed in the first place.



Also, what magic is proof against destruction in a low-tech fantasy environment rapidly becomes not so when you reach our level of technology. And magic has levels of advancement as well, and a low-magic-advancement anti-scrying spell might stop most magic detection - but it won't stop sensors, or someone whose effectively using WW2 radar jamming against your 21st century top-of-the-line radar systems, as it were. Because high-"tech"-magic will naturally include the counters to lower stuff, for example, imagine an illusion spell that would fool True Seeing, because they were designed to specifically spoof True Seeing , like Shield foils Magic Missile as part of it's spell description. (Though like high-tech, you have to understand the science of magic in ways you just can't do with low tech, in the same way you can't understand micro-biology (properly) without a microcsrope, and you can't do finite element analysis without a computer.)

And more to the point, the baleful level of energies most vehicular weapons - let alone fighter or starship weapons - put out match and exceed what, not only most mortal magic, but a fair chunk immortal magic can tolerate.



Long story short, Xykon can Epic-protect his phylactery up the wazoo, but if, due to the thaumaic technology disparity, he's essentially painting it really convincing horizon pink camoflage and I'm looking for it with millimetric radar, it's not going to help. And I doubt even the One Ring could withstand the full force of a capital starship energy beam.

(Remember, a 20th century nuke is hotter than the sun. A typical-yield starship missiles are much often better than that - and a capital energy beam will have a power output greater than several of them combined.)

I use a Rocket Launcher because the amount of damage it's capable of dealing is far more efficient than what I can output with magic. I mean, I can do some fairly awesome crap, but even I can't take on a whole platoon of Cybertanks (at once) single-handedly. Because hammering away at their shields takes some effort - and they pretty much only have to hit me once, even if fully buffed up with defences. (And, outside of D&D, the whole save-or-die thing tends to only be as effective as blasting is in D&D; i.e. viable, but often not as efficient as the alternative.)