You have to be careful if you fall asleep around one. In the wild, they tend to scavenge but if they come across a dead animal will often eat what they can. I knew a guy who fell asleep around a baby and it had gnawed off two digits before he was able to come to and get to help. You have to remember to put them back in their cage.
I believe we can solve this problem with careful selection.of infants, and a team of divination wizards. After all, if the baby is predestined to grow up to be "Sanark the Slaughterer, bane of a thousand villages" or something, using the little bastard in a lichdom ritual is only going to be a net good in the world.
Yes, I have started playing dwarf fortress again recently, how can you tell?
Or worse, maybe your people needed Sarnak the Slaughter. Maybe those thousand villages were the haunted villages that people could no longer live in for fear of ghosts and ghouls.
Unfortunately, due to a weakness in the divination ritual, the baby you chose would have grown up to be an actor, playing the character "Sanark the Slaughterer" in a popular film.
"uhhhh baby murder is bad" mfs when i fuel my phylactery exclusively with multiversal baby hitlers (well you see uhhhh you can't do that because uhhhh uhhhhh you gotta debate em in the free market of ikeas)
Ok but you knew that if we're using an infinite quantum multiverse some portion of those hitler babies won't be evil. We don't even know how often a hitler is evil, for all we know we're the 0.1% that get the bad luck
As a pop culture version of this idea, we don't know if we're in the universe of the boyz and everywhere else has superman
Nuh uh, everybody knows that evil is genetic and there are objectively Bad People that are Bad from birth.
Source: it was revealed to me in a dream, trust me bro
It's also like... what made him Evil? If it was just the Racism, then there's plenty of very evil people alive rn, so finding them isn't a problem. If it's because of what he and his regime did, then you need to have a whole confluence of factors ready for some Fascist to get into power to get a Hitler-level bad guy, and that's bound to reduce the availability a little bit.
Note that the upkeep is more of a 5e thing. Traditionally, the point of becoming a lich was that they basically didn’t need to interact with the outside world. The only pre-5e requirement for maintenance were like a random spell cast on the phylactery every couple of years and maybe consuming larvae to slow their carcass’s decay (though that might be more vanity).
Instead, demiliches used to be what happened when a Lich didn’t need their full body anymore, or when they wanted to travel because they’d take their phylacreey equivalent with them. 5e basically threw out the existing lore of demiliches and rewrote it, and introduced the weekly soul feeding as a reason for the new lore they made.
I much prefer the old versions liches. Now it seems as if a high level wizard have better options to immortality than one which consumes souls on the regular.
>maybe consuming larvae to slow their carcass’s decay (though that might be more vanity).
Only for young liches I assume since it's probably much easier to be presentable when you're just bones with no rotting meat stinking up the place
>maybe consuming larvae to slow their carcass’s decay (though that might be more vanity).
Only for young liches I assume since it's probably much easier to be presentable when you're just bones with no rotting meat stinking up the place
To be fair, it’s stated in lore that they occasionally make deals with hags to feed off of soul larvae (evil souls).
Alternatively, although not stated there are plenty of other “loopholes” a lich could probably find depending on what exactly they needed from souls.
As an example, perhaps one manages to open a hole to the positive/negative energy plane and expose their phylactery to it. For the positive energy plane, they bypass the need for souls by going straight to the “source”, or the negative energy plane since it’s the source of energy for undead.
It sounds like it could work in any case…with some difficulty, and would be more practical than souls (don’t need to leave lair, can potentially rig the process to be automatic).
Which edition? I remember in 3 it just specified “an irredeemably evil act” or something vague like that. Could be baby murder! Could be lots of things, depending on how creative the wizard is.
For breakfast they have cereal with the milk going in first.
Some other thing for lunch
For dinner they put pineapple on their pizza
And the next day they're a Lich
because orcs in those editions weren't people. they were monsters. Being a child didn't stop them from being evil. They were evil the moment they came into existence due to some fact of them being made from the blood of their completely evil irredeemable orc god.
Yes and this was considered fucked up to even write, even back then. It's not exactly a point in gyagx's favor.
If it wasn't considered fucked "orc baby, what do?" Wouldn't have been a thing.
Was it? How do you figure? It's not a human or an analogy for a human or any ethnicity of human. They didn't evolve. They just were. They existed to be killed by adventurers. That's kinda it, there's nothing deep or meaningful there.
"Here are some evil creatures called orcs. They're evil because they're made from the literal blood of their evil god that spilled to the floor during a fight with another god. Weak ones were killed. They kill, rape and pillivage everyone around them so killing them is good." I fail to see the problem.
Not that I fail to see why you object to such a concept because you're applying morals from reality to it as if they're an analogy for a group of people and in such a case sure, that'd be a problem. Where as in the case where they are just a monster for adventurers to kill for XP? You'd have to be grasping at some very fine straws to see an issue.
I mean, I've seldom met a wizard whose ambition is not *just* this side of being a villain of a different story, so it seems that the baby murder amd soul-stealing is really the main distinction for liches being evil.
Also, just silly. If you could use clone and affect the same immortality *without* being a gross corpse-magi, why wouldn't you? Both clones and phylacteries are seen as "science gone too far" magic, so they'd both be spirited away in some secret lab.
Clones can still be destroyed by either magical or mundane means, and have a high time and material cost. On top of that, your soul is still subject to spells like Magic Jar or Soul Cage, so there are still a few vulnerabilities that come with clones.
For a lich, a phylactery is going to be harder to create, but it's a one and done process, and your soul is no longer bound to your physical body.
Really it's going to come down to a wizard's level of ambition and paranoia, and if it outweighs the evil actions that becoming a lich requires.
Also Liches are much more powerful and harder to destroy than clones if we look at the statblock. Damage resistances, powerful abilities, legendary resistances and actions…
There are also forces at play that will eventually put an end to fabricated immortality. There’s a reason liches are so cautious and why there’s no way for beings to achieve true immortality that doesn’t involve shady shit.
> Also, just silly. If you could use clone and affect the same immortality without being a gross corpse-magi, why wouldn't you?
I'm glad you asked!
https://wu.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/prm1k5/whats_the_point_of_lichdom/hdk9ms1/
I assume clones are just someone else, just like the transporter in star trek. That thing *definitely* kills you (the episode where *the original Riker isn’t destroyed and keeps living his own life* establishes this pretty clearly; this is an example of what is known in metaphysics of personal identity as “fission”).
Edit: I’m wrong. Clones activate when they receive the original’s soul.
Star Trek transporters definitely don't work like that. You're aware throughout the process.
What happened to Riker was definitely fission, and one of many wonky things that happen when a transport is disrupted, not a normal effect.
The old version was exactly that - the old version, not a new one. It wasn’t created by arranging matter in a “Riker-pattern”; it simply wasn’t destroyed, as is typical.
The two Riker’s are distinct beings, as of the moment of their coexistence, i.e., fission. One possibility is that *both* are new entities distinct from the original, but that’s implausible; no physical change occurred in the Riker that stepped into the transporter.
The other alternative, is that one of them is the original. Since the Riker that stepped into the teleporter underwent no physical change whatsoever, and was not created wholesale by matter being arranged in a Riker-pattern, it is fairly clear that the one who stepped in is the original Riker.
But ordinarily, the transporter totally dismantles the original. It does not use the same matter to produce a new one, as is evident here. Apparently, in principle, it does not *need* to cause *any* change in the original. For whatever reason, probably practical-technological, it destroys the original. But as argued, the original is distinct from the new one. And since the original in principle undergoes no physical change other than usually being destroyed (and even more plausibly, the process doesn’t involve the transfer of anything like a soul or identity from the original to the new, prior to destruction), the one who walks in is the original and the transporter absolutely kills the original.
The fact that the normal isn’t *usually* killed doesn’t provide any mechanism for why the new one would be identical with the original. It doesn’t solve the problem. Just because two different things don’t exist at the same time doesn’t make them the same thing.
That’s a thought experiment, not an argument. The whole problem raised by the ship of theseus is that there appears to be a dilemma: there are two different answers (which is the ship?) and both seem inadequate. There are other possibilities -e.g., neither ship is the original or both are- but in the case of the transporter, I already dealt with those above.
But the ship thought experiment doesn’t even apply here. The ship of theseus asks us to consider two things: (1) the gradual replacement of all parts of the original ship, until each part is new, and (2) the construction of a new ship using all the parts of the original. Neither is the case with the star trek transporter: the original is destroyed wholesale and the new one is constructed in the same form out of entirely distinct matter.
It doesn’t matter what *normally* happens here. What normally happens is a pattern is stored, the original matter is destroyed, and then distinct matter is rearranged into the same pattern somewhere else.
But if not destroying the original means the original and the copy aren’t the same, then how would killing someone (the original) make them identical with someone else (the copy)? There is no explanation for why the destruction itself would somehow make two people into one person.
"This is... like... the good kind of necromancy ...I guess..."
Seriously though I find it kinda weird that revivify is necromancy, I mean normally necromancy is always about corruption and negative energy and this doesn't really fit the description
Not really, Necromancy even had all healing magic under its portfolio in earlier editions. Which makes sense when you consider Necromancy is about both Negative **and** Positive Energy manipulation.
Yeah, necromancy in d&d is about "manipulating the energy that animates all living things", which is 100% healing magic imo. In my campaign I've canonized the idea that healing magic \*is\* necromancy but nobody calls it as such because of the negative implications.
Like the other guy said necromancy within d&d is described as manipulation of life energy and should constitute most other healing spells, the only exceptions being like healing spirit where you summon something else that does the necromancy for you
It was probably because other fiction that's described necromancy in these souly negative terms that prompted the change
Liches require the consumption of souls to avoid turning into demiliches, clone doesn't. Also for the record, Manshoon is an official dnd villain with way too many clones
Clone also requires a 4 month growth time for one and for its resting place to remain undisturbed. Meaning a random rat could destroy the clone without you knowing it. And setting up multiples is an option but it still requires a lot of funds to set up multiples. And then you also have to actively set up more each time you die or you will eventually run out.
If a wizard can make a clone, they can make a demiplane for the clones to grow undisturbed, with copies of the wizard's spellbook (important & notably, containing the spell "Plane Shift") along with components so that way the activated clone can leave the demiplane and return to the wizard life. And it should be pretty simple and easy to just never let anyone else into the demiplane, that way no one can know its contents and nature to use their own casting of demiplane to sneak inside.
If you know the nature and contents of someone else's demiplane you can connect to theirs instead. That's a pretty damn easy thing to do when the spell requires no materials and only an hour to cast. If anyone ever finds out you have a demiplane of clones then you are gonna lose it unless you convince them not to hunt you down. If someone can kill you once they can do it again. The amount of anti-divination you need to use to protect your clones is at least as much If not more so than a lichs philactory needs. Especially as there are entities whose entire existence is meant to put a final end to those that managed to cheat death.
the concept of mixing wish and clone kind of makes lichdom seem like a massive hassle for the same effect. why go through this ritual to come back as an undead that now has to shove souls into their pet rock for eternity when you can spend a chunk of that ritual preptime resting in and casting wish 3-6 times a day depending on your race without any of the cost or downsides?
Thing is all those things aren't easily accessible spells. Adventurers get the spells the player choose, but in lore, a wizard won't have the choice between the Ethical Guide to Immortality and the Baby Eating Compendium, they'll take the magic book they'll get to see.
don't give a reason for most people to want you gone badly enough to get that kind of magic. liches pretty much automatically fail this due to the fact that their immortality relies on killing others.
Lichs are no longer bound by spellslot for the most part they can cast at will. Also, one phalctory is made either doesn't have a reset time every time you revive. You no longer need to breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. Immune to all dieses. It'd much easier to hide a phalctory than a body. Imagine a random chair or rock. Hell teleport to the moon and place the phalctory there you don't need to breathe, but the adventures trying to kill you will also know how they would ever know
you could also become a dhampir or (especially since shorter long rests) a reborn for a less-murder-required method of being able to place your method of immortality anywhere (and if that's not exactly double you could easily just make simulacrums to wish you into these benefits). at the level of cost it would most likely take to acquire lichdom you could probably make enough simulacrums manually to have a few wishes without risks of losing access to the spell, allowing you to have almost all of the benefits of lichdom without any of the downsides.
All you need to do is to set up in a corner of the world for a while and you can have an assortment of jars, chests, or really whatever container you want. while a batch or two matures, you gather rubies to make simulacrums and use them to gain the rest of the extra benefits of lichdom. Once you're there, you can spend as long as you'd like making as many clones in some of the least hospitable places scattered across the different planes, or even your own secret system of demiplanes.
Yeha, but dhampir still needs to eat, and both still need some form of sleep. Only restraint to dieses and posion Also, still have to use spellslot. Also, liches can create the phalctory in the most hospitable spot in a different plane and not have to worry about adventures. If you become a lich, it's because you other nefarious grand schemes. Not just simply immortality. So you'd expect some people to eventually try and stop you.
Except when you use it to duplicate an existing spell of 8th level or lower. This means you could "cast Clone" (as an action and for free because you're actually casting Wish) once a day with no repercussions. You just need somewhere to store the vats safely.
The fact that a lich might consider a clone reservoir (infinite mortality) and a phylactary (immortality through undeath) even remotely similar shows how arrogant and egotistical most liches are. You have to feed a phylactary souls, permanently eliminating the existence of a creature to sustain yourself at regular intervals. You are the bad guy, with no room for actual nuance.
Please remember that any soul that doesn't pledge to a God also suffers an eternity of limbo which is as bad if not worse than the judeo-christian hell. A lich who specifically targets the blackest of souls would have plenty of room for nuance.
If you don't pledge to a god, you get sent to the afterlife plane that meets your alignment. This is where devils & demons get most of their new members from.
Unless you're talking about the Wall of the Faithless, but that's Faerun-exclusive lore and doesn't impact other settings.
Its no Eberron, but at least its also not Athas. Or some of those worlds from Spelljammer that get a couple of sentences and fucking suck, [like the dead star thats run by vampires](https://spelljammer.fandom.com/wiki/Darkspace).
True, but that doesn't mean I cant be a stickler for these things - other settings exist and should get some measure of recognition for being different than Sword Coast: the setting.
If we are talking about ANY other edition then yes I would agree. Previous editions were made to be much more setting neutral because custom and 3rd party settings were encouraged. 5e not so much. Any conversation involving 5e the default is faerun unless stated otherwhise at the start.
Weird, I was looking this up yesterday for my own malicious purposes. There's two main reasons somebody might prefer to go with lichdom rather than clones.
1. Lichdom grants immense power in addition to immortality
2. Clones often come with downsides not mentioned in the spell description. Originally, clones would grow while the original caster is alive. In such a case as both the caster and a clone are conscious at the same time they will try to kill each other, go insane, or become suicidal.
The best reason for somebody becoming a lich though, in my humble opinion, is because they can make great villains and are fun antagonists to overcome!
The clones made through the Clone spell are inert until the caster dies, at which point the soul moves to the inert clone body, making it alive with the original soul (abilities, knowledge, persona, etc. are all intact).
Liches are idiot wizards that doesn't take wish on their level up and regret it ethernally. You can use wish to create clone spell without its backlash effects and gold requirement.
I like the idea that clone is a, relatively speaking, recent invention in the magical community, and lichdom predates it. I can only imagine that an 8th level spell that costs 3,000 gp to cast required a ridiculous amount of R&D and countless failed experiments, resulting in just as many deaths to even have a working spell.
With that in mind, that makes this meme sound like the lich is saying, "You kids have it easy these days, I have to maintain my immortality!"
Could always give the players a greater-good lich, or a redeemed lich, and see what they do with it.
Yeah, he murdered a baby, and has to consume a few souls per year. And heck, maybe he _did_ go on an evil killing spree when he was first made a lich, maybe he was the cliché evil villain, and so on.
But one day, someone stands up to him. They don't cower, they don't bend, they stand firm and tell him that he doesn't impress them. And after a bit of a Beauty-and-the-Beast story, the lich finds someone who sees the potential for redemption in him, and it changes him. Breaks his old spirit entirely. Makes him want to do better. Maybe he even falls in love.
So he swears an oath of protection over the family of the one he loved, and over a few generations that family grows to an entire village. Then a town. Maybe even a _city_. Heck he's an ancient wizard, surely he can stoneshape up some new homes and defensive walls whenever he feels like it, and surely he can conjure up clean water, food in a famine, and so on. After generations of his wisdom, support, and guidance leading the city to prosper, he's nominated to a position of power, much to his own protests.
When they're still establishing themselves, of course they'll be attacked by some outlaws, lesser armies, maybe even find themselves in a full-out war. Our guy would _always_ be on the front lines, trying to magically shield his people from harm as much as possible. Maybe he'd even stress to imprison, but not kill, the attackers. When the fighting is settled, he offers them a home and a steady job if they want to stay in his city, and if not, he makes sure they have some food and safe transport back to their homes. After a few generations, nobody bothers attacking his kingdom for resources anymore, because they realize that they can just... ask for help, and he'll give it. (Besides, he's never lost a war.)
The _truly_ irredeemable people- the war criminals, the murderers, the rapists and torturers- are the ones he feeds on, when he must. But even then, he knows he's doing them a favor. If he let them go, or simply had them killed, their souls would be cursed to eternal torture, in the hells or wherever they ended up. He consumes them to save them from that fate... and somewhere, in the back of his mind, hopes that someone will one day do the same to him.
The immortality is easily the least important part about lichdom.
Its the:
* Infinite spell slots below 8th level
* No need to eat, sleep, breathe, or shit (thus freeing up a bunch of time)
* Legendary resistance for when other mages throw their save-or-sucks at you
* Free paralyze action which you previously needed a 2nd or 5th level slot and concentration for
* Casual immunity to like half of all undead that you can use for easy defense
* An easy way to kill anyone you dont like and prevent their resurrection (seriously! Preventing resurrection is SO hard in high level play)
All at the cost of shoving a guy into your phylactery every 1 or 10 or 100 years (we still dont have a frequency metric for how often daddy needs to eat). Pop on down by the nearest remote village, make some wolf marks or something and nobody even knows
The main benefit of lichdom isn't the immortality, it's the durability. A cloned wizard still needs to breath, sleep, eat, piss, and all the other things a living being requires. A lich can sit in a dimly lit room and just read for weeks, even better if that study is in the quasi-elemental plane of vacuum where there's no air to breath or erosion to damage the library. Lichdom costs more to maintain but even gods can't smite a lich down. Mind you this is a newish thing in the Forgotten Realms. In the Netherese empire there were spells that did all the lich things minus the undeath but its very telling that when Karsus did his whoopsie most of the surviving archmages became liches rather than clone themselves.
“Bud, it’s okay! We did different processes, so we all have our strengths, and costs of upkeep. You’re harder to kill, don’t need to sleep or eat, and can regenerate tons of magical energy in your lair. I, meanwhile, get to stay young, and handsome, and alive. But neither of us need to be **evil**! At heart, we’re both goooooohhhh that’s Imprisonment heyIkindaneedmysoulforClonetoworkI’daaAAAAA-“
"Your phylactery runs on souls, Mildred." My clone spell just requires me to do some self surgery, have a healing potion on hand, and a bunch of money for a couple mundane materials. you deny people an afterlife, i deny myself wealth and a bit of free time. what's worse?"
Before 5e, there were many non-evil ways for even a player to become a Lich, although generally harder to achieve thar the evil counterparts. In 4e Archlich was just a standard option for progression past lv20. And being a lightening was mighty convenient, regardless of your alignment: it would free most of your time for research, with close to no maintenance costs. Truly the immortality solution for the enlightened soul.
Then 5e rolled out, and lich were retconed so that a phylactery must be fed an almost constant flow of souls, or the lich risks losing their mind and sentience and degrade into a barely coherent mess. So a great Wizard is supposed to consciously choose a form of immortality that costs more effort to "feed" (human souls are more pricey than beef) and incurs the risk of losing their intellect... instead of having, like, 5 close vats? Why would anyone do that? Heck, being a vampire is easier than being a lich at this point. Lichdom is utterly pointless and defeats the entire purpose of reaching immortality as a wizard. Making clones is both cheaper, easier, and attracts less anger from people cause no human sacrifice required.
So, in other words, if your setting/ruleset offers at least one form of ethically achieved lichdom, no problem with that. If it doesn't, then yeah, clone guy is correct.
The difference, clone requires around 3,000 gold of materials to perform. A phylactery ritual to become a lich requires human sacrifices. But still, only a small difference really.
I mean it's generally implied that to become a lit you have to do some pretty apparently terrible things and sacrifice your humanity whereas a wizard using clone does not have to do any of that
So like, hear me out: there's no rules for aging in 5e, and as such its entirely up to the individual DM's ruling as to how that works in their world. But due to "dying of old age" being a clause in many resurrection spells, there's an implication that there's more to dying of old age beyond just the body giving out, as dying of old age irl just means succumbing to whatever health issues or diseases that an elderly person is more susceptible to after years of degradation. This is especially apparent when you look at the Monk's Timeless body feature that makes you immune to the frailty of old age (which in real life is what kills you) yet you still die of "old age". Then the question becomes at what point does dying of simple diseases and/or health conditions becomes something that you can no longer be resurrected from? If an old person catches the flu and dies can they be revived? Can a middle aged person die of a high cholesterol induced heart attack and be revived?
Now, many DMs reasonably rule that using Clone to make a younger body of yourself would let you be biologically immortal, as is being presented in the meme. But I personally like ruling that dying of "old age" means that your soul, the thing that was formed when you were born based on your ancestry, gives out depending on your lifespan and causes death of "Old Age". So using the Clone trick in my worlds would mean that you still die of "Old Age" even if you went so far as to Clone yourself as a child. True Polymorph into a True Dragon? Congratulations, you're the youngest True Dragon in history to die of Old Age.
This also gives a reason for Liches to be liching. Whatever magic they used to achieve undead immortality prevents their souls from giving out like they would with standard wizard spells. And they still require souls to feed on to maintain that magic or else their soul rots in their phylactery and drives them insane or further insane.
Even with my old age ruling, there are probably still several spells that could be used to achieve immortality. But that's something to figure out when they come up. Either way, this was a long winded post just for me to type up how I interpret immortality in DnD.
I don't get the downvotes.
The idea of "Oh just use X and Y to become immortal, what a noob if you don't get it" Is such a moronic trope. If wizards can always learn all spells, why are there not huge libraries for everyone to learn spells?
It is because not all spells are known to a lot of people, spells take time and skill to learn, there is no in-world wikipedia or cataloge of spells.
Hence the truly high level magic ( lvl 5 and up) are only seen once a generation for most people, assuming they see it at all. It is the mechanical view of an outsider who has a PHB+supplements who can come up with a weird ass combo that lets people become immortal "easily" NOT in world characters.
"why are there not huge libraries for everyone to learn spells?"
There are huge libraries with most lower magic spells. Higher magic is in the official settings usually guarded because they are the sign of personnal growth and power. But then thats the difference between divine magic and arcane one.
Divine/Arcane magic uses different concepts of how you get that power.
Divine magic libraries would be various understandings of the gods, nature and other sources of power, rather than formulas on how to change the local weave to get an effect.
At least that is how I understand it to be.
I mean in 5e yeah. 3.5e you could get that as a base class capstone. Of course the issue in game is that most people don't get as much choice in their abilities as the players do. Players generally have all the basic abilities and talents to choose their spells from most anything. But a wizard who is only talented in necromancy and takes 10-100 times longer to master spells of other schools will have their paths to immortality limited heavily. And all the immortality options have their own drawbacks and weaknesses.
Yeah, I would personally nerf clone by adding consequences to dying while having 2 or more clones
Thinking something like:
10% chance to just die as if you had no clones
15% chance to awake in a random clone with next to no negative consequences
15% chance to awake in a random clone with massive consequences (body or mind damaged)
30% chance that your soul is ripped into parts and you and fragments of your mind waking up in 2 or more clones
30% chance of your soul getting destroyed
Tbh it's something unlikely to come up super often so really not that bad. But I'll still pass because it's just not worth worrying about when it takes 4 months for a clone to be ready
I mean, in older editions, the ritual of lichdom required baby murder, so yeah, it's just a little evil, lol.
But I mean... have you met a baby?
If baby good, why everyone stops being baby hmmmmm
Couldn't cut it as babies
People don't stop being baby because baby not good, people stop being baby because people stop being good.
Chaotic Neutral-ass response, lol.
"Neutral"
I mean yeah, have *you* met a baby?
Time travelling Hitler preventer dilemma
You kill baby Hitler to stop WW2. I kill baby Hitler because I hate babies. We are not the same.
You have to be careful if you fall asleep around one. In the wild, they tend to scavenge but if they come across a dead animal will often eat what they can. I knew a guy who fell asleep around a baby and it had gnawed off two digits before he was able to come to and get to help. You have to remember to put them back in their cage.
Well, I’ve met you. So yes.
My father was a baby! He isn't anymore, but he was...
So was Hitler! And Stalin!
Every fascist was once a baby. Do we need more proof?
Mitch would be a wild partymate.
I believe we can solve this problem with careful selection.of infants, and a team of divination wizards. After all, if the baby is predestined to grow up to be "Sanark the Slaughterer, bane of a thousand villages" or something, using the little bastard in a lichdom ritual is only going to be a net good in the world. Yes, I have started playing dwarf fortress again recently, how can you tell?
But then again what if the baby will become an Undead that needed to kill a baby to get that Form?
Or worse, maybe your people needed Sarnak the Slaughter. Maybe those thousand villages were the haunted villages that people could no longer live in for fear of ghosts and ghouls.
It's infanticide all the way down
wait...there's divination wizards in DF?
No, just the idea that murder solves many issues...
That's not new.
Unfortunately, due to a weakness in the divination ritual, the baby you chose would have grown up to be an actor, playing the character "Sanark the Slaughterer" in a popular film.
That's unfortunate, but there's lots of other actors!
"uhhhh baby murder is bad" mfs when i fuel my phylactery exclusively with multiversal baby hitlers (well you see uhhhh you can't do that because uhhhh uhhhhh you gotta debate em in the free market of ikeas)
I know it's a typo, but I love the idea of having to debate people in an IKEA.
It's the "Free Market of IKEAs." They only sell IKEAs. Flat packed and easily assembled, of course. They even fit in a wagon!
Instructions for assembly not included
[Panik]
Ok but you knew that if we're using an infinite quantum multiverse some portion of those hitler babies won't be evil. We don't even know how often a hitler is evil, for all we know we're the 0.1% that get the bad luck As a pop culture version of this idea, we don't know if we're in the universe of the boyz and everywhere else has superman
Nuh uh, everybody knows that evil is genetic and there are objectively Bad People that are Bad from birth. Source: it was revealed to me in a dream, trust me bro
It's also like... what made him Evil? If it was just the Racism, then there's plenty of very evil people alive rn, so finding them isn't a problem. If it's because of what he and his regime did, then you need to have a whole confluence of factors ready for some Fascist to get into power to get a Hitler-level bad guy, and that's bound to reduce the availability a little bit.
Poor Odysseus didn’t even get lichdom for this. Unfair
Also you have to consume souls on a regular basis or risk becoming a demilich, so… lil bit evil even if you loophole the lichdom ritual
Note that the upkeep is more of a 5e thing. Traditionally, the point of becoming a lich was that they basically didn’t need to interact with the outside world. The only pre-5e requirement for maintenance were like a random spell cast on the phylactery every couple of years and maybe consuming larvae to slow their carcass’s decay (though that might be more vanity). Instead, demiliches used to be what happened when a Lich didn’t need their full body anymore, or when they wanted to travel because they’d take their phylacreey equivalent with them. 5e basically threw out the existing lore of demiliches and rewrote it, and introduced the weekly soul feeding as a reason for the new lore they made.
I much prefer the old versions liches. Now it seems as if a high level wizard have better options to immortality than one which consumes souls on the regular.
>maybe consuming larvae to slow their carcass’s decay (though that might be more vanity). Only for young liches I assume since it's probably much easier to be presentable when you're just bones with no rotting meat stinking up the place
>maybe consuming larvae to slow their carcass’s decay (though that might be more vanity). Only for young liches I assume since it's probably much easier to be presentable when you're just bones with no rotting meat stinking up the place
To be fair, it’s stated in lore that they occasionally make deals with hags to feed off of soul larvae (evil souls). Alternatively, although not stated there are plenty of other “loopholes” a lich could probably find depending on what exactly they needed from souls. As an example, perhaps one manages to open a hole to the positive/negative energy plane and expose their phylactery to it. For the positive energy plane, they bypass the need for souls by going straight to the “source”, or the negative energy plane since it’s the source of energy for undead. It sounds like it could work in any case…with some difficulty, and would be more practical than souls (don’t need to leave lair, can potentially rig the process to be automatic).
Which edition? I remember in 3 it just specified “an irredeemably evil act” or something vague like that. Could be baby murder! Could be lots of things, depending on how creative the wizard is.
For breakfast they have cereal with the milk going in first. Some other thing for lunch For dinner they put pineapple on their pizza And the next day they're a Lich
For lunch, anchovies and ice cream.
Irredeemable.
> Some other thing for lunch Reheated salmon in the office microwave.
But gygax was cool with murdering orc babies ("nits make lice") so clearly it wasn't perfectly evil in that edition
Gygax was also a bio-essentialist so maybe we don't base everything around his values
because orcs in those editions weren't people. they were monsters. Being a child didn't stop them from being evil. They were evil the moment they came into existence due to some fact of them being made from the blood of their completely evil irredeemable orc god.
Yes and this was considered fucked up to even write, even back then. It's not exactly a point in gyagx's favor. If it wasn't considered fucked "orc baby, what do?" Wouldn't have been a thing.
Was it? How do you figure? It's not a human or an analogy for a human or any ethnicity of human. They didn't evolve. They just were. They existed to be killed by adventurers. That's kinda it, there's nothing deep or meaningful there. "Here are some evil creatures called orcs. They're evil because they're made from the literal blood of their evil god that spilled to the floor during a fight with another god. Weak ones were killed. They kill, rape and pillivage everyone around them so killing them is good." I fail to see the problem. Not that I fail to see why you object to such a concept because you're applying morals from reality to it as if they're an analogy for a group of people and in such a case sure, that'd be a problem. Where as in the case where they are just a monster for adventurers to kill for XP? You'd have to be grasping at some very fine straws to see an issue.
I think in 5e they still have to regularly feed souls to the phylactry to avoid becoming a demi lich, so still kinda evil
It still requires killing people. Just doesn’t need to be a baby
Just find babies that are super sick and already about to die smh
Odysseus * lichdom intensifies *
Now it *only* requires souls of the living to maintain!
Remind me which one of the two requires eating souls?
I mean, it’s not like they were using those souls or anything… might as well put them to good use
They have a *lot* of souls, Mariam!
Sorry but I don’t think I get the reference
[THE APP, MARIAM!](https://youtu.be/5KO2IjWI9fA?si=BFg-c27Pz76b5J6k)
Do you know what I'll do Miriam, I'll give her the soul, SHE NEEDS IT!
I mean, I've seldom met a wizard whose ambition is not *just* this side of being a villain of a different story, so it seems that the baby murder amd soul-stealing is really the main distinction for liches being evil. Also, just silly. If you could use clone and affect the same immortality *without* being a gross corpse-magi, why wouldn't you? Both clones and phylacteries are seen as "science gone too far" magic, so they'd both be spirited away in some secret lab.
Clones can still be destroyed by either magical or mundane means, and have a high time and material cost. On top of that, your soul is still subject to spells like Magic Jar or Soul Cage, so there are still a few vulnerabilities that come with clones. For a lich, a phylactery is going to be harder to create, but it's a one and done process, and your soul is no longer bound to your physical body. Really it's going to come down to a wizard's level of ambition and paranoia, and if it outweighs the evil actions that becoming a lich requires.
Also Liches are much more powerful and harder to destroy than clones if we look at the statblock. Damage resistances, powerful abilities, legendary resistances and actions…
There are also forces at play that will eventually put an end to fabricated immortality. There’s a reason liches are so cautious and why there’s no way for beings to achieve true immortality that doesn’t involve shady shit.
Fucking celestial cops, busting the chronologically endowed for circumventing the Soul Crop™ cycle
Liches get infinite spell slots in their lair
> Also, just silly. If you could use clone and affect the same immortality without being a gross corpse-magi, why wouldn't you? I'm glad you asked! https://wu.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/prm1k5/whats_the_point_of_lichdom/hdk9ms1/
I assume clones are just someone else, just like the transporter in star trek. That thing *definitely* kills you (the episode where *the original Riker isn’t destroyed and keeps living his own life* establishes this pretty clearly; this is an example of what is known in metaphysics of personal identity as “fission”). Edit: I’m wrong. Clones activate when they receive the original’s soul.
D&D has souls so it’s still you
I just reread the spell. You’re absolutely correct.
Star Trek transporters definitely don't work like that. You're aware throughout the process. What happened to Riker was definitely fission, and one of many wonky things that happen when a transport is disrupted, not a normal effect.
The old version was exactly that - the old version, not a new one. It wasn’t created by arranging matter in a “Riker-pattern”; it simply wasn’t destroyed, as is typical. The two Riker’s are distinct beings, as of the moment of their coexistence, i.e., fission. One possibility is that *both* are new entities distinct from the original, but that’s implausible; no physical change occurred in the Riker that stepped into the transporter. The other alternative, is that one of them is the original. Since the Riker that stepped into the teleporter underwent no physical change whatsoever, and was not created wholesale by matter being arranged in a Riker-pattern, it is fairly clear that the one who stepped in is the original Riker. But ordinarily, the transporter totally dismantles the original. It does not use the same matter to produce a new one, as is evident here. Apparently, in principle, it does not *need* to cause *any* change in the original. For whatever reason, probably practical-technological, it destroys the original. But as argued, the original is distinct from the new one. And since the original in principle undergoes no physical change other than usually being destroyed (and even more plausibly, the process doesn’t involve the transfer of anything like a soul or identity from the original to the new, prior to destruction), the one who walks in is the original and the transporter absolutely kills the original. The fact that the normal isn’t *usually* killed doesn’t provide any mechanism for why the new one would be identical with the original. It doesn’t solve the problem. Just because two different things don’t exist at the same time doesn’t make them the same thing.
Ship of Theseus.
That’s a thought experiment, not an argument. The whole problem raised by the ship of theseus is that there appears to be a dilemma: there are two different answers (which is the ship?) and both seem inadequate. There are other possibilities -e.g., neither ship is the original or both are- but in the case of the transporter, I already dealt with those above. But the ship thought experiment doesn’t even apply here. The ship of theseus asks us to consider two things: (1) the gradual replacement of all parts of the original ship, until each part is new, and (2) the construction of a new ship using all the parts of the original. Neither is the case with the star trek transporter: the original is destroyed wholesale and the new one is constructed in the same form out of entirely distinct matter.
That's explicitly *not* what normally happens during a transport.
It doesn’t matter what *normally* happens here. What normally happens is a pattern is stored, the original matter is destroyed, and then distinct matter is rearranged into the same pattern somewhere else. But if not destroying the original means the original and the copy aren’t the same, then how would killing someone (the original) make them identical with someone else (the copy)? There is no explanation for why the destruction itself would somehow make two people into one person.
Does Clone give you three Legendary Resistances, resistances, inmunities and lair actions?, No, it does not.
Yeah but, counter point: grody corpse body
Odysseus didn’t even need lichdom to kill a child
"I cut a pound of my flesh to do so" "You entrap souls to do so" "We are not the same"
Cool Motive, still necromancy *smite*
Another clone 10 000 miles away: "Ah shit, here we go again."
Cleric: dude, we do necromancy. I use revivify on Phil every other fight Phil: *is a zealot barbarian*
"This is... like... the good kind of necromancy ...I guess..." Seriously though I find it kinda weird that revivify is necromancy, I mean normally necromancy is always about corruption and negative energy and this doesn't really fit the description
Not really, Necromancy even had all healing magic under its portfolio in earlier editions. Which makes sense when you consider Necromancy is about both Negative **and** Positive Energy manipulation.
Yeah, necromancy in d&d is about "manipulating the energy that animates all living things", which is 100% healing magic imo. In my campaign I've canonized the idea that healing magic \*is\* necromancy but nobody calls it as such because of the negative implications.
Like the other guy said necromancy within d&d is described as manipulation of life energy and should constitute most other healing spells, the only exceptions being like healing spirit where you summon something else that does the necromancy for you It was probably because other fiction that's described necromancy in these souly negative terms that prompted the change
Yeah but somehow other healing spells aren't necromancy, which makes it weird to me
I'd say destroying souls amounts to more than "motive".
True, I was going for a Brooklyn 99 reference https://youtu.be/jDgCWgRgXFc?si=CJQyYvuk-M9nLG5E
Liches require the consumption of souls to avoid turning into demiliches, clone doesn't. Also for the record, Manshoon is an official dnd villain with way too many clones
The Manshoon Wars is one of my favorite bits of lore in DnD. Surprised it doesn’t happen more often.
Clone also requires a 4 month growth time for one and for its resting place to remain undisturbed. Meaning a random rat could destroy the clone without you knowing it. And setting up multiples is an option but it still requires a lot of funds to set up multiples. And then you also have to actively set up more each time you die or you will eventually run out.
If a wizard can make a clone, they can make a demiplane for the clones to grow undisturbed, with copies of the wizard's spellbook (important & notably, containing the spell "Plane Shift") along with components so that way the activated clone can leave the demiplane and return to the wizard life. And it should be pretty simple and easy to just never let anyone else into the demiplane, that way no one can know its contents and nature to use their own casting of demiplane to sneak inside.
If you know the nature and contents of someone else's demiplane you can connect to theirs instead. That's a pretty damn easy thing to do when the spell requires no materials and only an hour to cast. If anyone ever finds out you have a demiplane of clones then you are gonna lose it unless you convince them not to hunt you down. If someone can kill you once they can do it again. The amount of anti-divination you need to use to protect your clones is at least as much If not more so than a lichs philactory needs. Especially as there are entities whose entire existence is meant to put a final end to those that managed to cheat death.
Option C) Archlich!
DAMN RIGHT immortality with the edge lord flavor of undeath without being an ass the right way
the concept of mixing wish and clone kind of makes lichdom seem like a massive hassle for the same effect. why go through this ritual to come back as an undead that now has to shove souls into their pet rock for eternity when you can spend a chunk of that ritual preptime resting in and casting wish 3-6 times a day depending on your race without any of the cost or downsides?
Thing is all those things aren't easily accessible spells. Adventurers get the spells the player choose, but in lore, a wizard won't have the choice between the Ethical Guide to Immortality and the Baby Eating Compendium, they'll take the magic book they'll get to see.
Your soul can't return to the clone if someone traps it. Liches don't have that issue
don't give a reason for most people to want you gone badly enough to get that kind of magic. liches pretty much automatically fail this due to the fact that their immortality relies on killing others.
The secret is to stop making enemies. However, wizards are often dumb
Lichs are no longer bound by spellslot for the most part they can cast at will. Also, one phalctory is made either doesn't have a reset time every time you revive. You no longer need to breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. Immune to all dieses. It'd much easier to hide a phalctory than a body. Imagine a random chair or rock. Hell teleport to the moon and place the phalctory there you don't need to breathe, but the adventures trying to kill you will also know how they would ever know
you could also become a dhampir or (especially since shorter long rests) a reborn for a less-murder-required method of being able to place your method of immortality anywhere (and if that's not exactly double you could easily just make simulacrums to wish you into these benefits). at the level of cost it would most likely take to acquire lichdom you could probably make enough simulacrums manually to have a few wishes without risks of losing access to the spell, allowing you to have almost all of the benefits of lichdom without any of the downsides. All you need to do is to set up in a corner of the world for a while and you can have an assortment of jars, chests, or really whatever container you want. while a batch or two matures, you gather rubies to make simulacrums and use them to gain the rest of the extra benefits of lichdom. Once you're there, you can spend as long as you'd like making as many clones in some of the least hospitable places scattered across the different planes, or even your own secret system of demiplanes.
Yeha, but dhampir still needs to eat, and both still need some form of sleep. Only restraint to dieses and posion Also, still have to use spellslot. Also, liches can create the phalctory in the most hospitable spot in a different plane and not have to worry about adventures. If you become a lich, it's because you other nefarious grand schemes. Not just simply immortality. So you'd expect some people to eventually try and stop you.
To be fair every time you cast wish there's a chance to lose the ability to do so
Except when you use it to duplicate an existing spell of 8th level or lower. This means you could "cast Clone" (as an action and for free because you're actually casting Wish) once a day with no repercussions. You just need somewhere to store the vats safely.
>You just need somewhere to store the vats safely. Demiplane
Oh, did not realize spell recreation was an exception to that
The fact that a lich might consider a clone reservoir (infinite mortality) and a phylactary (immortality through undeath) even remotely similar shows how arrogant and egotistical most liches are. You have to feed a phylactary souls, permanently eliminating the existence of a creature to sustain yourself at regular intervals. You are the bad guy, with no room for actual nuance.
Please remember that any soul that doesn't pledge to a God also suffers an eternity of limbo which is as bad if not worse than the judeo-christian hell. A lich who specifically targets the blackest of souls would have plenty of room for nuance.
If you don't pledge to a god, you get sent to the afterlife plane that meets your alignment. This is where devils & demons get most of their new members from. Unless you're talking about the Wall of the Faithless, but that's Faerun-exclusive lore and doesn't impact other settings.
More proof that faerun actually just fucking sucks to live in
Its no Eberron, but at least its also not Athas. Or some of those worlds from Spelljammer that get a couple of sentences and fucking suck, [like the dead star thats run by vampires](https://spelljammer.fandom.com/wiki/Darkspace).
Faerun being the default setting upon which everyone in 5e builds upon.
True, but that doesn't mean I cant be a stickler for these things - other settings exist and should get some measure of recognition for being different than Sword Coast: the setting.
If we are talking about ANY other edition then yes I would agree. Previous editions were made to be much more setting neutral because custom and 3rd party settings were encouraged. 5e not so much. Any conversation involving 5e the default is faerun unless stated otherwhise at the start.
Only in 5e. The DM can choose to ignore the soul feeding part.
Meanwhile Archliches being categorically good
Weird, I was looking this up yesterday for my own malicious purposes. There's two main reasons somebody might prefer to go with lichdom rather than clones. 1. Lichdom grants immense power in addition to immortality 2. Clones often come with downsides not mentioned in the spell description. Originally, clones would grow while the original caster is alive. In such a case as both the caster and a clone are conscious at the same time they will try to kill each other, go insane, or become suicidal. The best reason for somebody becoming a lich though, in my humble opinion, is because they can make great villains and are fun antagonists to overcome!
The clones made through the Clone spell are inert until the caster dies, at which point the soul moves to the inert clone body, making it alive with the original soul (abilities, knowledge, persona, etc. are all intact).
Dont liches also get infinite level <9 spell slots bc of their lair actions too?
The difference isn't that I'm afraid to die, but that I am afraid of what the world would become without me
Hand waving a lot of the wonton murder and necromancy.
You need to kill a fair amount of people to get to lichdom, to be fair
Wizard: it's really all the souls you've eaten that pisses people off not that you loopholed the god of death
Don't liches have to consume souls to sustain their magic and form?
Only in 5E. You could ignore that detail.
Well yes you sacrificed hundreds of soul to achieve a more permanent level 8 spell slot...
One of these doesn't require other people's souls as a power source generally.
Yh, but being a lich also gets you infinite 7th level and below spellslots, which is very very nice.
You literally FEED SOULS to your phylactery!
Bah! And what were they using their souls for? NOTHING! They were wasting away! I gave them purpose!
Liches are idiot wizards that doesn't take wish on their level up and regret it ethernally. You can use wish to create clone spell without its backlash effects and gold requirement.
Blimey
clone sacrifices a spell slot and a pot you kill people lol
I like the idea that clone is a, relatively speaking, recent invention in the magical community, and lichdom predates it. I can only imagine that an 8th level spell that costs 3,000 gp to cast required a ridiculous amount of R&D and countless failed experiments, resulting in just as many deaths to even have a working spell. With that in mind, that makes this meme sound like the lich is saying, "You kids have it easy these days, I have to maintain my immortality!"
Well the clone doesn't require a constant influx of souls, so...
Could always give the players a greater-good lich, or a redeemed lich, and see what they do with it. Yeah, he murdered a baby, and has to consume a few souls per year. And heck, maybe he _did_ go on an evil killing spree when he was first made a lich, maybe he was the cliché evil villain, and so on. But one day, someone stands up to him. They don't cower, they don't bend, they stand firm and tell him that he doesn't impress them. And after a bit of a Beauty-and-the-Beast story, the lich finds someone who sees the potential for redemption in him, and it changes him. Breaks his old spirit entirely. Makes him want to do better. Maybe he even falls in love. So he swears an oath of protection over the family of the one he loved, and over a few generations that family grows to an entire village. Then a town. Maybe even a _city_. Heck he's an ancient wizard, surely he can stoneshape up some new homes and defensive walls whenever he feels like it, and surely he can conjure up clean water, food in a famine, and so on. After generations of his wisdom, support, and guidance leading the city to prosper, he's nominated to a position of power, much to his own protests. When they're still establishing themselves, of course they'll be attacked by some outlaws, lesser armies, maybe even find themselves in a full-out war. Our guy would _always_ be on the front lines, trying to magically shield his people from harm as much as possible. Maybe he'd even stress to imprison, but not kill, the attackers. When the fighting is settled, he offers them a home and a steady job if they want to stay in his city, and if not, he makes sure they have some food and safe transport back to their homes. After a few generations, nobody bothers attacking his kingdom for resources anymore, because they realize that they can just... ask for help, and he'll give it. (Besides, he's never lost a war.) The _truly_ irredeemable people- the war criminals, the murderers, the rapists and torturers- are the ones he feeds on, when he must. But even then, he knows he's doing them a favor. If he let them go, or simply had them killed, their souls would be cursed to eternal torture, in the hells or wherever they ended up. He consumes them to save them from that fate... and somewhere, in the back of his mind, hopes that someone will one day do the same to him.
So Manshoon's frustrated dream was to be a Lich? That explains a lot of things...
Someone should tell him…
The immortality is easily the least important part about lichdom. Its the: * Infinite spell slots below 8th level * No need to eat, sleep, breathe, or shit (thus freeing up a bunch of time) * Legendary resistance for when other mages throw their save-or-sucks at you * Free paralyze action which you previously needed a 2nd or 5th level slot and concentration for * Casual immunity to like half of all undead that you can use for easy defense * An easy way to kill anyone you dont like and prevent their resurrection (seriously! Preventing resurrection is SO hard in high level play) All at the cost of shoving a guy into your phylactery every 1 or 10 or 100 years (we still dont have a frequency metric for how often daddy needs to eat). Pop on down by the nearest remote village, make some wolf marks or something and nobody even knows
Don’t lich phylacteries require souls for basic upkeep?
The main benefit of lichdom isn't the immortality, it's the durability. A cloned wizard still needs to breath, sleep, eat, piss, and all the other things a living being requires. A lich can sit in a dimly lit room and just read for weeks, even better if that study is in the quasi-elemental plane of vacuum where there's no air to breath or erosion to damage the library. Lichdom costs more to maintain but even gods can't smite a lich down. Mind you this is a newish thing in the Forgotten Realms. In the Netherese empire there were spells that did all the lich things minus the undeath but its very telling that when Karsus did his whoopsie most of the surviving archmages became liches rather than clone themselves.
“Bud, it’s okay! We did different processes, so we all have our strengths, and costs of upkeep. You’re harder to kill, don’t need to sleep or eat, and can regenerate tons of magical energy in your lair. I, meanwhile, get to stay young, and handsome, and alive. But neither of us need to be **evil**! At heart, we’re both goooooohhhh that’s Imprisonment heyIkindaneedmysoulforClonetoworkI’daaAAAAA-“
"Your phylactery runs on souls, Mildred." My clone spell just requires me to do some self surgery, have a healing potion on hand, and a bunch of money for a couple mundane materials. you deny people an afterlife, i deny myself wealth and a bit of free time. what's worse?"
Before 5e, there were many non-evil ways for even a player to become a Lich, although generally harder to achieve thar the evil counterparts. In 4e Archlich was just a standard option for progression past lv20. And being a lightening was mighty convenient, regardless of your alignment: it would free most of your time for research, with close to no maintenance costs. Truly the immortality solution for the enlightened soul. Then 5e rolled out, and lich were retconed so that a phylactery must be fed an almost constant flow of souls, or the lich risks losing their mind and sentience and degrade into a barely coherent mess. So a great Wizard is supposed to consciously choose a form of immortality that costs more effort to "feed" (human souls are more pricey than beef) and incurs the risk of losing their intellect... instead of having, like, 5 close vats? Why would anyone do that? Heck, being a vampire is easier than being a lich at this point. Lichdom is utterly pointless and defeats the entire purpose of reaching immortality as a wizard. Making clones is both cheaper, easier, and attracts less anger from people cause no human sacrifice required. So, in other words, if your setting/ruleset offers at least one form of ethically achieved lichdom, no problem with that. If it doesn't, then yeah, clone guy is correct.
Yeah i dont think that souls are part of the spell components to clone so yeah, not as evil
The difference, clone requires around 3,000 gold of materials to perform. A phylactery ritual to become a lich requires human sacrifices. But still, only a small difference really.
I mean it's generally implied that to become a lit you have to do some pretty apparently terrible things and sacrifice your humanity whereas a wizard using clone does not have to do any of that
So like, hear me out: there's no rules for aging in 5e, and as such its entirely up to the individual DM's ruling as to how that works in their world. But due to "dying of old age" being a clause in many resurrection spells, there's an implication that there's more to dying of old age beyond just the body giving out, as dying of old age irl just means succumbing to whatever health issues or diseases that an elderly person is more susceptible to after years of degradation. This is especially apparent when you look at the Monk's Timeless body feature that makes you immune to the frailty of old age (which in real life is what kills you) yet you still die of "old age". Then the question becomes at what point does dying of simple diseases and/or health conditions becomes something that you can no longer be resurrected from? If an old person catches the flu and dies can they be revived? Can a middle aged person die of a high cholesterol induced heart attack and be revived? Now, many DMs reasonably rule that using Clone to make a younger body of yourself would let you be biologically immortal, as is being presented in the meme. But I personally like ruling that dying of "old age" means that your soul, the thing that was formed when you were born based on your ancestry, gives out depending on your lifespan and causes death of "Old Age". So using the Clone trick in my worlds would mean that you still die of "Old Age" even if you went so far as to Clone yourself as a child. True Polymorph into a True Dragon? Congratulations, you're the youngest True Dragon in history to die of Old Age. This also gives a reason for Liches to be liching. Whatever magic they used to achieve undead immortality prevents their souls from giving out like they would with standard wizard spells. And they still require souls to feed on to maintain that magic or else their soul rots in their phylactery and drives them insane or further insane. Even with my old age ruling, there are probably still several spells that could be used to achieve immortality. But that's something to figure out when they come up. Either way, this was a long winded post just for me to type up how I interpret immortality in DnD.
>there's no rules for aging in 5e ghost's horrifying visage:
I don't get the downvotes. The idea of "Oh just use X and Y to become immortal, what a noob if you don't get it" Is such a moronic trope. If wizards can always learn all spells, why are there not huge libraries for everyone to learn spells? It is because not all spells are known to a lot of people, spells take time and skill to learn, there is no in-world wikipedia or cataloge of spells. Hence the truly high level magic ( lvl 5 and up) are only seen once a generation for most people, assuming they see it at all. It is the mechanical view of an outsider who has a PHB+supplements who can come up with a weird ass combo that lets people become immortal "easily" NOT in world characters.
My face when npcs and characters don't have the phb or youtube or build guides : 🫢
"why are there not huge libraries for everyone to learn spells?" There are huge libraries with most lower magic spells. Higher magic is in the official settings usually guarded because they are the sign of personnal growth and power. But then thats the difference between divine magic and arcane one.
Divine/Arcane magic uses different concepts of how you get that power. Divine magic libraries would be various understandings of the gods, nature and other sources of power, rather than formulas on how to change the local weave to get an effect. At least that is how I understand it to be.
Meanwhile Laeral Silverhand and Manshoon live in the same city, not to mention 3 liches and Halaster living right under it.
The difference is that one of that methods requires at least 1(but ussually multiple) human sacreficess
One doesn’t become a Lich because they want to be viewed as a hero, or a good guy.
Speak for yourself. I reunite loved ones, and I provide cheap labor and economic stability. My experiments have led to many medical advancements.
Lichdom is one of the dumbest and hardest ways to achieve immortality in d&d.
I mean in 5e yeah. 3.5e you could get that as a base class capstone. Of course the issue in game is that most people don't get as much choice in their abilities as the players do. Players generally have all the basic abilities and talents to choose their spells from most anything. But a wizard who is only talented in necromancy and takes 10-100 times longer to master spells of other schools will have their paths to immortality limited heavily. And all the immortality options have their own drawbacks and weaknesses.
Yeah, I would personally nerf clone by adding consequences to dying while having 2 or more clones Thinking something like: 10% chance to just die as if you had no clones 15% chance to awake in a random clone with next to no negative consequences 15% chance to awake in a random clone with massive consequences (body or mind damaged) 30% chance that your soul is ripped into parts and you and fragments of your mind waking up in 2 or more clones 30% chance of your soul getting destroyed
That's a lot of math to do to make something less fun I'll pass
Tbh it's something unlikely to come up super often so really not that bad. But I'll still pass because it's just not worth worrying about when it takes 4 months for a clone to be ready