Eaglejarl
2014-06-19, 12:25 PM
Hello forumites,
The Big Bad in my novel, The Two Year Emperor (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9669819/1/The-Two-Year-Emperor), is Afi the uber-lich. He's (tens? hundreds? of) thousands of years old, enormously powerful, and generally scary as hell. And now I need to model him. (urgh) I'd really appreciate some help on this, so I'm turning to the best. (i.e. all y'all.)
Also, if you're reading the novel and don't want spoilers, you might want to turn back now.
Here's the rules:
Absolutely no Epic, including anything in the Epic Handbook. Characters can advance beyond level 20 perfectly fine, they just don't get to do screw-the-world-completely epic magic and such. They do still get extra hit points, extra feats, etc.
No psionics that requires me to care about power points. If it's just another way to get some particular feat or body modification, fine, but nothing that can't be done with magic (etc) and nothing where I have to keep track of the numbers. Also, if you decide not to go psionics, I'm ok with using a homebrew version of illithids that retain the "eat your head and get your feats / abilities" ability but don't have psionics. This doesn't have to be used, I'm just listing it as an option.
No homebrew (aside from the above-mentioned illithid).
No personal demiplanes. Once you allow fast-time planes, everything become trivial and makes for a boring story.
Go easy on custom magic items and please don't make them story-breaking. You can assume an essentially unlimited number of XP, gold, etc for their creation.
Any official sourcebook is on the table.
Up to 100 character levels. Let's say 25 levels. I don't really care what the number is, so choose your own preferred.
In addition to a character build, what magic items / tactics / lair elements would you suggest?
Here is some highly spoilerific backstory about him:
The gods kicked off the Wighpocalypse (or, at least, they let it happen). It started off in the Underdark and depopulated a massive area, converting all inhabitants to undead or slaves. Then it went aboveground; a nation of a billion people was converted into shadows, wraiths, vampires, wights, zombies, etc. A tiny fraction escaped and formed Redoubts where they are hiding out and trying to fight back. There are several dozen liches (between 40 and 60) leading the undead side. Afi is by far the oldest and most powerful of them; he has at least 200 Legions of undead followers, averaging a million per Legion.
Afi is so old that he comes from an era when the world was substantially different -- for example, he's the only one in the novel who gets to make heavy use of feats, prestige classes, etc. He might quite believably have bloodlines, artifacts, lost knowledge, etc.
All suggestions welcome!
The Big Bad in my novel, The Two Year Emperor (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9669819/1/The-Two-Year-Emperor), is Afi the uber-lich. He's (tens? hundreds? of) thousands of years old, enormously powerful, and generally scary as hell. And now I need to model him. (urgh) I'd really appreciate some help on this, so I'm turning to the best. (i.e. all y'all.)
Also, if you're reading the novel and don't want spoilers, you might want to turn back now.
Here's the rules:
Absolutely no Epic, including anything in the Epic Handbook. Characters can advance beyond level 20 perfectly fine, they just don't get to do screw-the-world-completely epic magic and such. They do still get extra hit points, extra feats, etc.
No psionics that requires me to care about power points. If it's just another way to get some particular feat or body modification, fine, but nothing that can't be done with magic (etc) and nothing where I have to keep track of the numbers. Also, if you decide not to go psionics, I'm ok with using a homebrew version of illithids that retain the "eat your head and get your feats / abilities" ability but don't have psionics. This doesn't have to be used, I'm just listing it as an option.
No homebrew (aside from the above-mentioned illithid).
No personal demiplanes. Once you allow fast-time planes, everything become trivial and makes for a boring story.
Go easy on custom magic items and please don't make them story-breaking. You can assume an essentially unlimited number of XP, gold, etc for their creation.
Any official sourcebook is on the table.
Up to 100 character levels. Let's say 25 levels. I don't really care what the number is, so choose your own preferred.
In addition to a character build, what magic items / tactics / lair elements would you suggest?
Here is some highly spoilerific backstory about him:
The gods kicked off the Wighpocalypse (or, at least, they let it happen). It started off in the Underdark and depopulated a massive area, converting all inhabitants to undead or slaves. Then it went aboveground; a nation of a billion people was converted into shadows, wraiths, vampires, wights, zombies, etc. A tiny fraction escaped and formed Redoubts where they are hiding out and trying to fight back. There are several dozen liches (between 40 and 60) leading the undead side. Afi is by far the oldest and most powerful of them; he has at least 200 Legions of undead followers, averaging a million per Legion.
Afi is so old that he comes from an era when the world was substantially different -- for example, he's the only one in the novel who gets to make heavy use of feats, prestige classes, etc. He might quite believably have bloodlines, artifacts, lost knowledge, etc.
All suggestions welcome!