Post/Author/DateTime	Post
JulesCARV 03-03-06, 12:47 AM	One question that often comes up around here is, "why are liches so evil?" Those who oppose alignment say this just shows how stupid it is. Those who endorse it fabricate nonsense about negative energy or blindly refer to the RAW. I'm caught between these positions -- I think that liches really should be evil, but as written, there's no reason they have to be besides ex cathedra assertion. My thought is that liches could be evil because their indefinitely long unlife is powered by the death of others. Basically, for the cosmic forces to allow liches to stick around, they have to be "fooled" into thinking that he "really" dies when he "should." So if you destroy a lich's body, the magic keeping the lich from dying permanently seeks someone else out and kills that person, and then regenerates the lich's body. However, because actually sending them through the astral plane to the gods would somehow set off an "alarm" that the wrong soul was sent, thus telling the Maruts to get busy and attack the lich, the souls that die in the lich's stead are instead trapped in his phylactery, where they wait as shadows or ghosts. So, the price for a lich's eternal life is killing others and trapping their souls, which is a pretty good reason for being evil. The idea comes from playing Planescape: Torment: like liches, the Nameless One sought immortality. He got it roughly to the same degree that a lich did: immunity to aging, and bodily regeneration after violent death. I thought, "so what if the Nameless One is really a sort of very special kind of lich?" Obviously, he doesn't look (much) like a lich, but that could be explained by the processes Ravel used in the "transformation:" perhaps she used some magic that granted him troll-like regeneration (as if he were wearing a ring of regeneration), and did some other sort of magic that made his life processes continue in spite of being "undead" (i.e., his heart keeps beating, he keeps breathing, etc). After all, Ravel had her own reasons for wanting him to be more "well preserved" than the typical skeletal lich. His phylactery would thus be the Transcendent One's green, branching armor, or possibly the Fortress of Regrets itself (it's not the Transcendent One, because that *is* his soul, not the container for his soul). The shadows get taken to the Fortress of Regrets. Why doesn't he regenerate in the Fortress when he dies then? I think the best explanation for that is that there's a planar connection between the Fortress and the Nameless One, wherever he is, connected by the power of regret, which thus allows the Nameless One's body to regenerate where it last fell. Thus, the "why can't there be good liches" threads and the mystery of exactly what the state of the Nameless One was, in D&D rule terms, is resolved in one stroke! Okay, probably not.
JulesCARV 03-03-06, 06:04 PM	Anyone have any different ideas one why liches are evil? My idea does fit into the larger pattern of vampires, ghouls, shadows, and other undead who more blatantly and obviously feed on others to preserve their own lives.
Raymond_Luxury_Yacht 03-03-06, 08:23 PM	It's the ritual that makes them evil. The ingredients of the mixture that causes the transformation require killing multiple people with digestive venom.
JulesCARV 03-04-06, 12:17 PM	Is this official material, or is it just your alternative hypothesis about why liches are evil?
Raymond_Luxury_Yacht 03-04-06, 02:39 PM	Is this official material, or is it just your alternative hypothesis about why liches are evil? 2e described part of the process for becoming a lich. What was described about of the standard process was monstrous, and it was implied that there were far worse parts to it.
Shemeska the Marauder 03-04-06, 11:18 PM	2e described part of the process for becoming a lich. What was described about of the standard process was monstrous, and it was implied that there were far worse parts to it. At least the standard process was pretty abhorrant to any good individual, but there's plenty of examples of neutral or good liches (though not as many as evil liches for various reasons). The 3.5 'all liches must be evil' wonkiness doesn't have much of a leg to stand on considering precident in prior editions, and even current edition precident.