How to create or justify a good Lich

[Teasing_Dale]

I'm planning on making one of the rulers in my setting be a benevolent Lich lord. How would you be able to justify a king becoming a Lich since becoming a Lich is one of the top evil things you can do? What is the exact "normal" process for becoming a Lich in the first place?

[Blackdrop]

Well, in the Forgotten Realms there's a type of creature called a baelnorn lich, which is basically a non-evil, elven lich. That may be a good place to start skimming for ideas.

If my memory is correct, there's a similar character in the Morrowind expansion, Bloodmoon. He turned himself into a draugr to ensure that the magic that sealed a powerful monster never failed.

I suppose it depends on why the ruler felt it was necessary to turn himself into a lich, what was he hoping to avoid if he was no longer on the throne?

[LudicSavant]

I'm planning on making one of the rulers in my setting be a benevolent Lich lord. How would you be able to justify a king becoming a Lich since becoming a Lich is one of the top evil things you can do? What is the exact "normal" process for becoming a Lich in the first place?

The "normal" process for becoming a lich is, for the most part, left open to the imagination.

All we get from the (3.5e) MM is "the process of becoming a lich is unspeakably evil." Now, I've come to consider D&D canon to be an unreliable narrator when it comes to moral judgments (and that's putting it lightly), and when I have seen descriptions offered of the kinds of things you have to do to become a lich they seem relatively tame (at least on the scale of "things monarchs do"). But let's take them at their word and pretend that at some point in the process you have to do something actually horrible to do it.

The thing is, no matter how evil the process of becoming a lich is, it doesn't stop the Lich from being able to act benevolently. Doing something bad does not prevent you from doing good things in the future. It's entirely possible to, for instance, have a king who slaughtered relatives in cold blood to get his job implement policies that make life better for all the commoners in the land. There's no contradiction to be resolved there.

[Honest Tiefling]

He could be reformed. I mean, do the peasants know that the process of becoming a lich requires unspeakably evil acts? Or do they know about the stability and quality of life Sir Wrinkly the Undying is giving him?

I also think just hand waving it and say he found a different ritual that didn't involve kicking kittens is fine and dandy. Then again, I'm a fan of good aligned undead.

[Gwaednerth]

I've always liked the idea of someone so wholly benevolent that instead of sacrificing their life for the good of others, they sacrificed their immortal soul. They commit the heinously evil act of becoming a lich, knowing that it will enable them to do many lifetimes' worth of good. Generally, because of my bent for somewhat cynical worlds, this character becomes the Knight Templar but there's no reason they couldn't just be a do-gooder.

[ThePurple]

He could be reformed.

Personally, I've always liked Keith Baker (and other)'s interpretation that turning into one of the undead basically freezes your personality at the point of your undead-ification. Any changes from that point are basically the person going insane.

Probably one of the more important things is that evil is as much about motivation as it is means. If the lich lord is acting in a benevolent manner for all of the wrong reasons (protecting itself from adventurers; cover while it does other evil stuff; gathering a bunch of mortals around it that it can use as pawns/sacrifices for some greater plan), he can still be evil.

A great example of this would be in Eberron: King Kaius is evil/lawful evil but was the monarch that championed and did the most to end the Last War; Queen Aurala, on the other hand, is good/neutral good but also happens to be a warmonger with plans to conquer all of Khorvaire.

Another example would be a thread I made a few months back where I discussed a world where undead have entered into a symbiotic relationship with the mortals that they feed upon. They still probably very evil, but they act in a generally benevolent manner.

As for a lich, remember that they are supposed to be chessmasters and masterminds with an *extremely* long view of things. They are immortal and the most powerful of them have been immortal for centuries or millennia (and they're capable of living even longer), which gives them a perspective that renders their plans almost impossible for mere mortals (even long lived mortals, like elves) to comprehend.

This all assumes that you want lichdom to be a de facto evil state. You could easily just reinterpret it to be akin to any other major transformative process that an individual can be put through. I believe that, in the Dark Sun setting, there's nothing stopping a good character from becoming a dragon; the reason that there are no good dragons or sorcerer-kings is because the only people that acquire enough power to begin/complete the transformation are evil (and their willingness to do anything to acquire/maintain their power is one of the reasons that they *have* that much power).

[LudicSavant]

Keith Baker's interpretation

Got a source for that?

[Mechalich]

If you want to have a good lich, just revise the rules of lichdom, that's simple - it's all D&D metaphysics anyway - just beware the consequences. Having a path to immortality available to powerful 'good' characters that allows them to watch over the people, rule, and enact their ideals leads to utopianism. Since the good guys nominally get along about most things, you're setting your world up to be ruled forever by immortal lich lords who run everything and can never die. This is the problem FR has with the Chosen of Mystra only more blatant.

That being said, if you really want the 'good lich' character you probably need to make it very clear that this is a unique circumstance for whatever reason.

[ThePurple]

Got a source for that?

I spent about 30 minutes looking for it, but there's a metric crapton that Keith Baker has said about Eberron and gaming in general so I wasn't about to find it. Of course, it's entirely possible that I read it somewhere else entirely and just attribute it to Keith Baker because it just seems like something he'd do in his game.

I believe the comment was specifically referring to Erandis Vol compared to other equally old individuals, like the Deathless of the Undying Court or the uber-dragons in Argonessen. The point was that, although she's quite possibly several millennia older than most of them, she still has the mind of a teenager because that's when she was turned into a lich. Being turned into any sentient undead creates a "snapshot" of your personality at the moment of undeath. Much like the ghost of a little girl isn't going to act like an old crone after haunting that house for 100 years, a lich is going to keep the same frame of mind, personality, and level of maturity that they had when they became that undead. Erandis Vol might be 3500 years old and one of the mightiest arcanists in Eberron, but she's still a teenager, at heart.

The core of the argument comes from the idea that the living are fundamentally different than the undead. Only living creatures can change themselves: outsiders are physical embodiments of concepts (e.g. you can't have a good rakshasa because a good rakshasa isn't a rakshasa any more) and the undead are developmentally frozen (they can learn new things and get better/stronger/etc, but that doesn't mean they can actually change aspects of who they are).

[Corneel]

This all assumes that you want lichdom to be a de facto evil state. You could easily just reinterpret it to be akin to any other major transformative process that an individual can be put through. I believe that, in the Dark Sun setting, there's nothing stopping a good character from becoming a dragon; the reason that there are no good dragons or sorcerer-kings is because the only people that acquire enough power to begin/complete the transformation are evil (and their willingness to do anything to acquire/maintain their power is one of the reasons that they *have* that much power).

IIRC, no in Dark Sun (at least 2nd edition) it's quite difficult to become a dragon and remain good-aligned since it requires the use of massive amounts of defiling magic (the standard arcane magic, which in Dark Sun uses up life force from the environs).
There was a counterpart to the dragons (don't remember the name, but they were somewhat phoenixlike) for those who used preserving magic (more complicated to cast, but doesn't use up life force).

[ThePurple]

IIRC, no in Dark Sun (at least 2nd edition) it's quite difficult to become a dragon and remain good-aligned since it requires the use of massive amounts of defiling magic (the standard arcane magic, which in Dark Sun uses up life force from the environs).

Difficult but not actually required. It's possible to play a good-aligned defiler; you just have to be the kind of good that doesn't care at all about the environment, which is kind of like a good aligned lich: the kind of good that doesn't really care about necromancy/undeath/soul-screwery.

There was a counterpart to the dragons (don't remember the name, but they were somewhat phoenixlike) for those who used preserving magic (more complicated to cast, but doesn't use up life force).

Avangion.

Neither of these transformations specifically *required* given alignments. It's just that the given paths to get to them (defiling for Dragon, preserver for Avangion) have pretty strong connection with a specific alignment.

[TheFamilarRaven]

He/she could still be an evil lich... No one said that being evil means you automatically grow a mustache to twirl.

Evil is, if nothing else, pragmatic, and if this lich doesn't want pesky good-aligned adventurers cramping his/her style, then it makes total sense that this ruler doesn't treat their subjects like disposable objects. After all, a lich is undead, so most worldly pleasures (eating, drinking, comfy chairs) are a non-issue, so why would a lich (evil or not) spend government resources on extravagant luxuries for themselves? Like-wise, if their living lieutenants (military officials, other politicians) are corrupt, then the lich's government is NOT running at the highest level efficiency. And being a lich (and thus a presumably a high level caster), could take care of these fools lickety-split. Don't get me wrong, the ruler would be completely ruthless, cold and calculative, but all of their judgement are made with the benefit of their realm (and their subjects) as the highest priority. Not every citizen is happy, but order is still maintained without needing oppressive laws.

Or something else you should consider, if the lich happens to be good aligned (all you need to do is say so...), what happens when the ruler makes vastly unpopular decisions? The lich is immortal, and therefore has the ability to think ahead decades or maybe even centuries ahead and craft ordinances based on their great foresight. But the benefit of such rulings may not be readily apparent to their mortal subjects. And since the lich is good aligned, I don't think they would be into stamping out free speech. So what I'm getting at is, how do you keep order in a population that can openly speak out against the government, but ultimately has no say in the policies of said government? Sounds like a frustrating place to live. Would they just emigrate? Is their a land nearby they could even migrate to?

I suppose people could simply say "welp, 'es never let us down before", but I find that only happens when peoples' way of life is not completely changed by the policies of the government.

[Excession]

Forgotten Realms also has the Archlich as a type of non-evil lich.

In 4th edition, this was provided as an epic destiny for player characters.

[Jallorn]

Personally, I'm rather in favor of leaving him as Evil, but still having his goal be to make the world better. He might not be doing it for the right reasons entirely, being honored and hailed as the greatest king of men might be his goal, or he might be doing it for the right reasons, genuinely caring that the average person's life be better, but he becomes the knight templar, willing to pay any price to get the job done; after all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

Or better yet, a mix of the two. A genuine desire for most people to be happy, an ambition to be the greatest man in history, and a willingness to do anything to anyone to make those things come true, even to set aside his compassion, to do short term harm for long term good, to set aside his very humanity. The best part is that he genuinely believes that if he could achieve his aims for good at the cost of his life, he would do so, it's just that he could never have enough certainty, and so must see things out for himself.

[Everyl]

Difficult but not actually required. It's possible to play a good-aligned defiler; you just have to be the kind of good that doesn't care at all about the environment, which is kind of like a good aligned lich: the kind of good that doesn't really care about necromancy/undeath/soul-screwery.

Avangion.

Neither of these transformations specifically *required* given alignments. It's just that the given paths to get to them (defiling for Dragon, preserver for Avangion) have pretty strong connection with a specific alignment.

It's hard to imagine a non-evil Dark Sun dragon, given that each stage of the dragon metamorphosis process requires an larger sacrifice of sentient beings than the one before. The Dragon Kings in that city protect and rule over their cities not just out of greed and ambition, but to cultivate a herd of unwitting sacrifices to fuel their own future ascension.

Frankly, the fact that D&D liches are always evil but *lack* any sort of inherent aspect of their nature that forces them to perform evil acts kind of bothers me. Vampires, wights, and most other sentient undead have to feed on mortals in some way; liches are completely divorced from any need other than a secure place for their phylactery. If anything, an already-created lich can exist in a *less* evil manner than mortals, since they have no need to compete for scarce food, water, or other vital resources. So whatever ineffable acts of evil a spellcaster has to perform to become a lich must be pretty amazingly evil, to taint their souls for all eternity.

Maybe liches are sort of like Dark Sun dragons, where merely being one doesn't require ongoing acts of evil, but growing in power as one does. Undead are notoriously static - perhaps, in order to gain a level, a lich needs to do something evil. Dark Sun dragons are actually a pretty good model for this - sacrificing thousands of unwilling mortals and wrecking the ecosystem for miles would qualify as evil, even if it is only done once every several centuries as the lich plots their gradual ascension to ever-greater power.

Which could potentially leave room for a "good" lich - one who has, for whatever reason, decided to no longer pursue more power, but instead use what they have achieved to genuinely protect others. From the outside, of course, their behavior would look like that of any other lich planning their next great harvest, but that only helps you keep the players on their toes - do they really trust the thousand-year-old lich-monarch when he or she claims to be different from all the other undead overlords in the history books?

[ThePurple]

It's hard to imagine a non-evil Dark Sun dragon, given that each stage of the dragon metamorphosis process requires an larger sacrifice of sentient beings than the one before. The Dragon Kings in that city protect and rule over their cities not just out of greed and ambition, but to cultivate a herd of unwitting sacrifices to fuel their own future ascension.

I'm guessing it changes from edition to edition because I don't recall the dragon metamorphosis explicitly requiring the sacrifice of sentient beings (I mean, it definitely makes it *easier* since that's an easy way to acquire more power). In 4e, a player can start on the path to becoming a dragon via an epic destiny that simply requires they be a defiler.

Of course, 4e Dark Sun could just use the classic "the PCs are special and don't have to follow the normal rules of the universe" logic that 4e loves such that, unlike anyone else *ever* a PC can achieve draconic ascension more effectively and rapidly than mere NPCs (which, you know, I'm all for; I like it when the PCs are special, though I do draw lines on this, like not allowing inappropriate races from having a dragonmark in Eberron).

Frankly, the fact that D&D liches are always evil but *lack* any sort of inherent aspect of their nature that forces them to perform evil acts kind of bothers me.

It depends on the edition. In 4e, liches have an aura that deals necrotic (i.e. negative energy) damage to everything within 25' (this doesn't have to be on constantly and has been referred to as "removing their reactor shielding", which I love) because, unlike other undead that may require things to keep them going, liches basically leech energy from the Shadowfell (i.e. Negative Energy Plane) to keep themselves animate. The process of becoming a lich is as much focused on finding out how to draw on the energy of undeath on a permanent basis as it is on binding your soul to a phylactery.

In one of the campaign concepts I described, liches required the raw stuff of souls to keep themselves going and sane (the campaign concept was driven by undead having a symbiotic relationship with mortals because the undead required things from mortals to remain sane; vamps need blood, ghouls need flesh, ghosts need emotion, liches need souls). They only need to consume a soul every year or so (they burn souls very efficiently) and, because they're gotta be master arcanists to transform in the first place, generally known how to bind souls to objects for later consumption. Unlike the other 3 categories of undead, liches actually require the consumption of a living being (ghouls need flesh but are perfectly fine with dead flesh) though they don't require it as often so they generally set themselves up as the leader/elder of a city that enacts the death penalty (or, if necessary, conducts a lottery among the citizens) to get what they need in exchange for being a massive repository of knowledge, advice, and magical artillery.

I like the idea all of the sentient undead needing to feed off of mortals in some way and being able to find a way to coexist to some extent since undeath has always seemed to me to be a *really* useful state of being. I mean, they get massive bonuses to all kinds of stuff and don't have to actually *kill* creatures to sustain themselves... why wouldn't they just find a way to coexist rather than constantly being at odds with mortals (even if you're evil, you don't gotta be stupid evil; it makes way more sense to use mortals as happy herd animals that are willing to let you feed on them every once in a while)?

Which could potentially leave room for a "good" lich - one who has, for whatever reason, decided to no longer pursue more power, but instead use what they have achieved to genuinely protect others. From the outside, of course, their behavior would look like that of any other lich planning their next great harvest, but that only helps you keep the players on their toes - do they really trust the thousand-year-old lich-monarch when he or she claims to be different from all the other undead overlords in the history books?

This is actually a really cool campaign idea.

[IShouldntBehere]

I'll assume that since you want this to be an interesting point that simply making liches "Not Evil" or him as super-special "but not that kind of lich" Lich in the twilight-vampire vein are both off the table.

That means that he's a full on Lich. What makes the lich transformation evil varies, but I'm going to go with what I always thought was the best baseline version:

Spoiler

Show

That the universe abhors souls violating the bounds of morality and magic cannot keep the reaper at bay without a sufficient trade:
1) Becoming Lich requires sacrifice, namely human sacrifice (or other equivalent creatures with souls). For however many years your soul has roamed the earth, you must offer up 100. You're a 20 year old wizard looking to become a lich? You must ritualistically kill a number of people such that their combined remaining lifespans equal 2,000 years. For obvious reasons namely that they have they most years left to live children are efficient victims, and generally easier to kill. A single orphanage might enough to score you all of them honestly.

If your setting as an afterlife, souls consumed do not go there. They are utterly destroyed the victims are consigned to true oblivion from which even the gods could not return them.

2) Remaining a Lich requires continued sacrifice, albeit at slower rate. The magic that sustains you must be refueled from time to time, consuming souls in the same fashion as being born into a lich. Albeit at a better conversion rate, say you get 1 year for every 10 your sacrifice.

Perhaps he spent a great many years as Lich and has consumed so many souls that even he cannot comprehend the time left until his demise. In this state his previous ambitious have somehow faded from view. Scheming and gaining power now seem as petty as any other thing. With all things now equally petty he simply does what provides him with the most immediate satisfaction. This is with so many people however dark & evil, is just enjoying a few laughs and good cheer with everyone around him. The idea he might ever harm anyone at this point is incomprehensible, it's just such a bother for so much nothing. Likely he cannot even recall at what time he came to be an ageless bag of bones. Certainly no living soul for 10 generations has ever met someone touched by his previous deeds.

Perhaps he came to realize what a monster he really was. While beyond any true redemption, self-loathing, suicide or seclusion would do nothing to restore what he has destroyed. With what finite albeit great time he has remaining, he wishes to spend doing what good he can. As a powerful, charismatic and knowledgeable super-mage it turns out that is actually a great deal of good. If by chance doing so requires some measure of deception to hide the nature of his previous crimes, it is a sin to small to register against his guilt nor what good that deception allows him to do.

Perhaps his frame of mind never changed. Like rogue AI that has decided the best way to protect humanity was to destroy it, he saw his slaughter as helping the world. He only fed on criminals, and only burned unjust nations. In time though he saw some flaw in whatever twisted logic informed his decisions. "Oh wait? People don't like being set on fire.. even when they're bad. Better stop doing that". For him there is no real remorse, perhaps a twinge of regret at being so mistaken for so long. However now is not the time to dwell on regrets. Since he can't eat souls anymore hes only got a few hundered years left and so many things to do (but, um correctly this time).

There are lots of other things you could do. The scope of both a liches lifespan and their magic power allows you to take some pretty roundabout routes out of cackling villian territory into "Good King" territory.

[Everyl]

I'm guessing it changes from edition to edition because I don't recall the dragon metamorphosis explicitly requiring the sacrifice of sentient beings (I mean, it definitely makes it *easier* since that's an easy way to acquire more power). In 4e, a player can start on the path to becoming a dragon via an epic destiny that simply requires they be a defiler.

Absolutely all of my knowledge of Dark Sun comes from 2e sourcebooks. I'd actually forgotten that it was also published in 4e - I kind of missed out on 4e due to living in a place with an extreme shortage of tabletop gamers while it was current.

[Aka-chan]

I'm actually planning something like this for a homebrew setting I'm working on. In this case, the "secret ingredient" for the lichdom ritual is "the tears of a child orphaned by your own hand." ("Hand" can be metaphorical: the wannabe-lich can use a sword, a Finger of Death spell, etc.)

The lich-king-to-be was getting old and had no legitimate heirs. Being a decent sort of king, he was afraid that the realm would collapse into civil war upon his death. So he started researching lichdom and figured out a loophole that would allow him to complete it without doing anything Evil. Because the ritual doesn't specify that the aspirant has to kill innocent or helpless or Good-aligned people--it just requires him to kill someone who is the only living parent of a child. And, well, every country has its share of assassins, evil cultists, and so on, and some of them happen to have kids. So he finds someone who has committed a capital crime and whose death would leave their child an orphan, and carries out the lawful execution of said person himself.

(The game is intended to be set when the lich-king has been ruling for a couple hundred years. He's a generally decent ruler, but tensions are rising between his kingdom and a neighboring country whose Good-aligned theocracy takes a very dim view of undead. And there's a shadowy organization trying to bring him down that may or may not be led by descendants of the long-ago orphan...)

[teslas]

There's a lot of words in this thread, and I stopped reading halfway down, so I'll try to keep mine brief:


it is possible for an evil person to do things that benefit a large society of people. Maybe they just like building an empire/nation to enrich their own sense of glory or purpose, and it just so happens that treating their inhabitants non-****tily happened worked best for them. While they themselves might not blink at committing heinous acts, they would save their population from the same if they could, perhaps even committing serious evil in an effort to avoid minor evils upon their population (where the population may be nothing more than an analogue for their sociopathic pride).

A second one: maybe they are only benevolent for now, engendering the supreme trust of their people. And it's all a plan to eventually, 11 generations later, harvest all their millions of souls or whatever all at once to ascend to the rank of a minor deity or something.

Those are just two examples of maaaany. The sky's the limit man. Evil people can do objectively good things, for a very long time, and still be evil. Pretty basic ethics.


Don't do the "change of heart" bull**** for the lich. You know it's lame, your players will know it's lame, it's lame. Unless you're an above-average world-builder, and then even more challengingly, an above-average expositor, don't do this. Hell, even if you are above average, you should probably not do this.

Alternatively, the lich could have had his fate forced upon him/her.

Also, didn't the 3.5 Necromancer turn into a lich at 20th level, and they were not absolutely required to be evil. The only thing you'd have a hard time explaining there is how anyone took someone seriously when they took 20 levels of 3.5 Necromancer :p

[Rockphed]

Well, I imagine that a twisted wish for immortality might turn someone into a lich. After all, immortality is just living forever. It is the eternal youth that normally accompanies it that people really want. Actually, a straight up curse might do the job.

Or, maybe, he stopped a lich's transformation just a little too late. So he was where the lich-to-be had marked on the floor as the ritual coalesced the power. His soul got bumped into the little box, instead of the very-recently-dead sorcerer he just offed. If he had been a little quicker, or maybe just quicker on the uptake, he could have foiled the ritual. Instead, he is trapped in his slowly rotting body for the rest of eternity, or until he is destroyed. Depending on how long ago this happened, he might not even realize what happened. He might not even know where the phylactery is.

Alternatively, he is a rotten-to-the-bone, evil sorcerer, who nevertheless is very protective of his people. Think the Fun Heterodynes from Girl Genius. They may have been nasty and evil and megalomaniacal, but the people loved them.

[falcon1]

Perhaps he's not quite a lich, but has similar powers, and was transformed into a lich in an accident, or something similar.

[Afrodactyl]

I like the idea of a good lich as a king that does what is necessary for the good of his people and kingdom. Not necessarily what is best for everyone else, but great for his kingdom.

So everyone thinks he's evil, unless you're talking to his citizens, in which case he's a kind, selfless, devoted king. (I also like the idea of the Lich King leading his armies in person, using his undying form to build up a rep of being 'the greatest warrior-king to have ever lived')

[KarlMarx]

the Deathless in Eberron are pretty similar thematically to the "good undead" idea.

In particular, undying/ascendant councilors could be reworked to create a good lich.

Or you could use this positive animation idea to modify the base lich.

[Max_Killjoy]

If you want to have a good lich, just revise the rules of lichdom, that's simple - it's all D&D metaphysics anyway - just beware the consequences. Having a path to immortality available to powerful 'good' characters that allows them to watch over the people, rule, and enact their ideals leads to utopianism. Since the good guys nominally get along about most things, you're setting your world up to be ruled forever by immortal lich lords who run everything and can never die. This is the problem FR has with the Chosen of Mystra only more blatant.

That being said, if you really want the 'good lich' character you probably need to make it very clear that this is a unique circumstance for whatever reason.

Depending on religious / cultural beliefs, becoming a lich might be viewed as unspeakably evil, even if it requires nothing that most of us reading these forums today would consider even vaguely wrong.

For example, if reincarnation and a spiritual cycle features in the beliefs of a people, and they believe it is the duty of each person to repeatedly strive for ultimate understanding and perfection as they pass through their incarnations, as part of the great struggle against the forces of corruption and stagnation, then they might well view "freezing" yourself in a state outside the cycle as the failure of your ultimate moral duty, as an act of surrender to stagnation.