Please steal this idea

[Gwaednerth]

I totally don't have the time to actually work this into a campaign, but I'm putting it out there because hopefully one of y'all will do something interesting with it.

An ancient lich, rather than binding his soul to a physical object, has bound it to a lineage. He cannot die until all the direct heirs of that bloodline are destroyed. Plot twist: the lich screwed up. He was betrayed by the ancient ancestor of the current family and swore he would not die until he saw the bloodline end in suffering and death, but through a cosmically horrible run of luck has failed in every attempt. He has succeeded in killing quite a few members of the family through the ages, but he's always come up short of wiping them out, and at this point, he's become sick of immortality and the eternal pursuit of revenge and just wants to get things over with. Meaning he either has to destroy them all in one fell swoop, or find some way to undo the ritual that originally turned him into a lich. Chaos ensues.

[Vaz]

Why would someone go to the effort of unspeakable evil with the intention of becoming immortal to tie it to the lineage of something that he then wants to kill?

[Nobot]

Why would someone go to the effort of unspeakable evil with the intention of becoming immortal to tie it to the lineage of something that he then wants to kill?

Because "[h]e was betrayed by the ancient ancestor of the current family and swore he would not die until he saw the bloodline end in suffering and death."

His intention is not to be immortal (in fact, he grows/has grown tired of it) but to eliminate this bloodline. He is not willing to let even death stand in his way.

I think it's a pretty cool idea: I like the whole idea of a reluctant lich, perhaps even a lich whose desire for vengeance is completely justifiable and not even necessarily evil (not sure if that would match d&d's rules on liches). I might use it! Thanks! :smallsmile:

[Gandariel]

Lich using a lineage as phylachery is a great idea.

Makes for some cool ethical choices in a Good campaign (I do have to kill those innocents in order to kill the evil lich)

Immortal Lich being betrayed by a mortal (how?) And then deciding to spend centuries killing his lineage (which would kill himself as well) ? Not so much.

Other idea, you could do something like an Evil Campaign:

You are subordinates of the Lich. You take orders and go on missions for him.
Slowly you learn of his trick and you start plotting to kill him, and you have to track and kill the lineage in order to kill him and rise to power.

Plot twist: you kill the Lich, but turns out the last member of the lineage is one of the party members!
Now you have to travel and discover a spell that separates you from your own lineage before the Lich respawns.

This can evolve in some ways.
The rest of the party wants to kill the guy, he escapes to find the spell himself.

The search takes a lot of time, the Lich respawns and must be killed over and over.

[John Longarrow]

This sounds like a fairly standard 'ghost' trope applied to a lich. Could be fun, but from the liches perspective being tied to a blood line is a really bad idea. What happens if someone else starts going after them? Disease? War? Sudden outbreak of safe sex? Too many ways to find yourself gone without you being able to protect yourself.

I've tried using a similar plot with the reverse. Ghost is sworn to protect the heirs to the kingdom. Kingdom falls. As time goes by he's stuck haunting all kinds of different people until his last charge dies, now he's stuck with someone the party is interacting with (or even a mid-high level PC). For my game it was a relatively low level fighter/rogue ghost protecting what should have been the love interest of one of the PCs. Up till the player decided his character was more interested in scoring with the noblewoman than staying loyal to his girlfriend....

[Red Fel]

So, kind of like the Reth Dekala, then?

For reference, the Reth Dekala (Tome of Battle) are a race of LE Outsider warriors who sold their souls for power and prowess in battle, and then rebelled against their master. Now, the only way they can end their eternal suffering (they're constantly on fire) is by locating and killing all of their descendants. Since they're Outsiders, killing them doesn't actually kill them - a lot like a Lich, actually.

[Triskavanski]

Oh I've got an idea with this..

Family comes in with a mage and they work together to create some sort of ritual. The ritual gives the family good luck, while they mage takes their bad luck.. The Mage becomes a lich who can't die unless he kills that family.

Part of the problem though is the family is like unreasonably fertile. I'm talking on the level of The Bard, a series of limit comic pictures of a bard who sleeps with every monster the party meets, creating off spring.

So things went okay for a decade or two, but after that the bad luck the Lich received starts really rolling in.

[dascarletm]

Could be fun, but from the liches perspective being tied to a blood line is a really bad idea.

This idea makes the most sense if the lich was not a lich when he/she enacted this "curse." Instead of making them a phylactary because they would successfully keep him/her alive, this ensured that they would live to see the end of the bloodline. In fact the only way for the lich to be permanently defeated in theory is if the lich succeeds. Heck, the lich probably never would have become a lich in the first place had it not been the perfect means for this end.

[Segev]

Reminds me of Rasputin from Anastasia.

For humor value, you could explain the lich's failure to kill off his phylactery to be in part due to the annoying habit of the descendents of that line to be bards. Of the Frederick T. Andersson persuasion. So not just scads and scads of offspring, but of so many races and half-races that it's like having tied yourself to Genghis Kahn's or James T. Kirk's bloodline.