Everytime the same question
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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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You only live that long by making enemies. That's what gives the setting juice. A few dozen deified egos playing tug-of-war with the Prime Material Plane for an eternity.
I don't begrudge the core concept. Players need to understand there's always a bigger fish, especially in a game where you play fast and loose with the min-maxing. But if one wizard can do the math on this, you have to believe its not the only one. The whole perk of being an unkillable necromancer is that you can rub people the wrong way without ever suffering for your hubris.
Whether that's a direct affront - taking the eye-teeth of a seventh born son on his 13th name day, because its a valuable material component - or indirect - hanging out in a big tower doing strange magicks far longer than the local divine orthodoxy considers "inoffensive in the eyes of Heaven", you're going to have some people who revile you.
Setting up an Angelic/Demonic entity impatiently waiting to collect its soul or establishing some bitter rivalry with another arcanist adds more history and flavor to the character as a set piece, even if there's never a pay-off or a material change in the status quo.
I feel like a world where people stumble around every corner tapping surfaces with with 10 foot poles has sufficiently high fatality to make the Lich a rarity.
Let's say you start with 8 DEX, to reach 30 with 1 book would take 1100 years. With two books, 600 years. Run of the mill wizards can't do the build.
But yeah, it's just a concept, so you can give it whatever sort of character or background you like.
Seems like a world that deadly would have a surplus wizards investing in automatic instant resurrection.
Yeah, but it's a bit problematic because they call those "phylactery" and they consume flesh and souls very often to function. You could write a setting where NewYou Station magic exists but at that point it's not a medieval fantasy.
Why do you think every 10' of soil is a potential pit trap if not to catch the prerequisite number of people for soul harvesting?
Hell, getting a conga line of ambitious unwitting adventures to plow themselves through one of your local death mazes feels like a collections technique when you're farming sentient but uneducated mortal humanoids.