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MonkeySage
2017-03-27, 10:32 PM
If a lich is the legitimate ruler of a kingdom, has not violated the laws of the kingdom, and treats their people fairly enough (for an evil creature)... What is a paladin to do in this situation if:
They live in this kingdom?
They visit this kingdom?
The lich visits their country?

In neither country is being a lich necessarily illegal.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-03-27, 10:57 PM
Righteous lich smiting is always a strong option.

It is also permissible to go "this isn't a high enough priority for me to deal with right now".

bigstipidfighte
2017-03-27, 11:00 PM
fairly enough (for an evil creature)- That's a concerning clause you just added there, but if the Lich isn't a horrid ruler in the Paladin's estimation, I see no reason to do anything about it, except keep an ear out for trouble.

Most campaign worlds have enough problems without the PCs initiating a coup against a legitimate, fair government.

Tiktakkat
2017-03-27, 11:15 PM
It doesn't matter if the lich is the legitimate ruler of a kingdom. As a lich, nothing it does can be legitimate, including ruling.
As for laws not prohibiting being an undead monster, again by definition those cannot be legitimate lawful and good laws, so the paladin is not obligated to acknowledge them.
And note, you said "fairly enough (for an evil creature)", so . . . still enslaving them, torturing them, executing them, stealing their souls, and all that stuff, just for "actual" reasons and not just for "teh evulz". Which means, yeah, still evil.

Now, does that mean the paladin must go Lawful Stupid Murder Hobo "just because"?
Not even close. Perhaps if he belongs to some order dedicated to destroying the undead, but even then there are other considerations that will make a mad suicide rush less than paladin-y.
If he lives there, he is likely to start a "liberation" movement.
If he visits, he will like agitate against submitting to the rule of an inhuman monster.
If the lich visits, he will have to consider just why he is working with a kingdom that works with such unholy abominations, and like have to move on or contemplate a local regime change. (If he isn't already because the kingdom hasn't outlawed being an evil undead beast.)

What he cannot do is just shrug it off as if it has no meaning at all.
He is a paladin, and cannot work with or for an evil creature. So no working from within to change things or anything like that, or looking the other way until the rest of the party gets suckered into a mission and he just has to help them on their quest for the lich.

NichG
2017-03-27, 11:26 PM
Not all interactions need to involve sticking a sword into things. If the lich is undertaking an evil but legal agenda, the paladin can and should consider opposing them through similar legal methods as well. That might mean lending financial aid or investigative work or garnering support among judges and nobility for the victims of whatever dastardly plan is in the working, for example.

If the lich isn't particularly doing anything but is just hanging out, and is legally permitted to do so, the paladin needs to consider the greater social context that has come into existence that legalizes things like necromancy as a more important consideration than the existence of an individual lich. Randomly attacking an entity that has protections under the society hosting the paladin does more to harm the cause of good than to help - following an event like that a society may well consider prohibiting paladins in general from operating within it's borders.

kopout
2017-03-27, 11:39 PM
I'd like to know what fairly enough means.

MonkeySage
2017-03-27, 11:44 PM
For example; the lich isn't wantonly abducting civilians to sacrifice them to his vile god. He enforces the law, more or less with an even hand, he just punishes law breakers harshly.

He isn't taking action without what, in the eyes of the law, constitutes a "good reason".

bigstipidfighte
2017-03-27, 11:48 PM
The issue here isn't the eyes of the law, it's the eyes of the Paladin. If the laws themselves are immoral following them does not make the lich morally acceptable.

If the Paladin thinks the lich and his laws are mostly ok, paladin should be free to lance down invading giants or whatever else is harming the people.

Vitruviansquid
2017-03-27, 11:49 PM
The situation should be impossible to begin with.

Evil is not the result of actions, the actions are the result of evil. A Lich is by definition evil and unnatural. Therefore, the Lich's kingdom should not fairly ruled. Positing that a Lich could rule a kingdom in a way that "treats people fairly enough" is the same as positing a river that flows upstream.

But let's say that this *is* a river that flows upstream. Just for the sake of your premise.

The paladin would then have to fall.

A paladin must be both good and lawful. Being good, the paladin cannot tolerate the evil Lich doing what he wants if the paladin could combat him. Being lawful, the paladin must respect the Lich's legitimacy as ruler. Therefore, the paladin falls whether or not he attempts to remove the Lich from power.

This doesn't make too much sense, but of course, it doesn't make too much sense before the Lich fairly ruling a kingdom didn't make sense to begin with.

awa
2017-03-27, 11:50 PM
frankly that just sounds lawful neutral.
Personally our hero should find worse evil and deal with that, theirs bound to be some bandits around somewhere.

Even if he is the type that can never let evil go without trying to smite it, well theirs bound to be worse evils out their he can deal with first that has the plus of being less complicated.

edit
i disagree with almost every thing the previous poster just said
A paladin need not uphold unjust laws so no auto fail for being lawful, and a paladin can tolerate an evil being to exist particularly if their are other worse evil beings he can fight instead. (otherwise every paladin fails instantly for not agroing all evil beings simultaneously)
a individual can be kind and loving to their family/ city/nation and still be evil just by directing it towards outsiders. So an evil ruler could rule fairly.

kopout
2017-03-28, 12:16 AM
For example; the lich isn't wantonly abducting civilians to sacrifice them to his vile god. He enforces the law, more or less with an even hand, he just punishes law breakers harshly.

He isn't taking action without what, in the eyes of the law, constitutes a "good reason".

Are the laws particularly draconian?
Are the people significantly worse off than they were before the lich came to power?
Is the lich tempting/forcing people into evil?

If the answer to all of these question is no then you probably shouldn't do anything, taking him out would likely do more harm than good. Heck, with the exception of the last one I'd probably recommend working within the system to make things better.

Milo v3
2017-03-28, 12:49 AM
If a lich is the legitimate ruler of a kingdom, has not violated the laws of the kingdom, and treats their people fairly enough (for an evil creature)... What is a paladin to do in this situation if:
They live in this kingdom?
They visit this kingdom?
The lich visits their country?

In neither country is being a lich necessarily illegal.

This is really dependant on setting. In this hypothetical, is undeath automatically evil? Does alignment manipulate a persons actions or is alignment determined by ones actions?

Beneath
2017-03-28, 12:51 AM
This depends on what lichdom is, and also what paladinhood is.

If lichdom is just, like, you turn into an immortal skeleton thingy with cool powers and you have to wear an "evil" flag that people with the right magic can see, no more no less, then the paladin probably shouldn't do anything, unless the dictates of the paladin's order/deity/source are that they're at war with anything flying an evil flag, in which case the paladin is obligated to make war on that country according to the tenets of their order and their own ability (a 1st-level paladin won't be obligated to take on the king's army on his own, though he might be expected to rouse a peasant revolt or to spur the lich's neighbors to invade) until such time as the lich is overthrown.

Note that there are kingdoms in published D&D settings ruled similarly, though usually they remove the requirement that liches be evil. Forgotten Realms has Baelnorns, for instance, and Eberron has the Undying Court. Notably, though, these liches don't ping on Detect Evil, probably to avoid this situation.

If lichdom necessitates acts of brutal evil; if you need to bathe in the blood of innocents to become a lich, if you need to kill people and consume their souls to remain one, then the Paladin is more likely to be moved to act. Even if kingdom's legal system only feeds the souls of people duly convicted of crimes that the Paladin recognizes the right of a legal system to make capital crimes to the lich, diverting a creature's soul from its appointed afterlife may be a crime against the gods for which the paladin may be called to act, or may be seen by a mortal-viewpoint paladin order as excessive punishment for any crime.

(also, like, "paladins are always at war with all evil alignments" doesn't justify detect-and-smite; being at war isn't sufficient to justify attacking noncombatants unprovoked, nor breaking the peace when both are guests of a third party. so a paladin who is a guest of a king who is receiving the lich diplomatically may well be required to either recuse herself or engage diplomatically, even if, by virtue of being a paladin and a lich, they are at war)

So basically depending on what the requirements are to be a lich, what exactly the lich is doing that's evil, and what being a paladin means, anything from "the paladin is obligated to treat the lich as a legitimate ruler" to "the paladin is obligated to act as though at war with the lich at all times".

icefractal
2017-03-28, 01:47 AM
Positing that a Lich could rule a kingdom in a way that "treats people fairly enough" is the same as positing a river that flows upstream.Wat?

Evil creatures can do non-evil things just fine. They can even be totally nice and altruistic ... to some people. For example, if a giant acts in a LG-like manner toward other giants, but considers "small folk" to not matter at all and kills them for entertainment, you'd still call that character evil.

So there are a lot of ways that an evil Lich could be ruling a kingdom in a non-evil way. Just for example:
* It's the kingdom where he grew up, he actually likes the people there. The rest of the world ... eh, that can all burn if it benefits him to do so.
* He's taking a century or two off to do magical research - this kingdom has an excellent set of libraries. He figures that he's less likely to have interruptions from rebellions if he rules fairly.
* It's a scheme to become thought of as a respectable monarch, so he can get private audiences with other monarchs and mind control them.

And that's even ignoring reasons that might eventually cause the Lich to drift to neutral, but haven't yet. Like legitimately just wanting to do a good job running a kingdom, as like, a hobby.

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 07:39 AM
You have to define in which game and which setting this is happening.

CharonsHelper
2017-03-28, 07:46 AM
Assuming that the lich isn't doing actively horrid things and their laws aren't too terrible, I'd consider them still to be on a paladin's list of 'things to do', but they'd be pretty far down.

So - a paladin I was playing would keep the lich's existence in mind and know that he should do something about it... after all of the other more pressing things which he'll probably never get through.

Segev
2017-03-28, 08:07 AM
By the rules we have from the lich entry in the MM, becoming one requires an act of "unspeakable evil." Though this act is unspecified, something about making the phylactery and becoming a lich, something in the process somewhere, is an act so horrifically evil that anybody who knows of it is (at least metaphorically) unable to speak of it for how monstrous it is. It is something that willfully doing it is unquestionably evil by nearly any standard, and thus no matter how good you are otherwise, your willingness to engage in this is soul-staining.

Imagine the most saintly person you can think of. Somebody whom the world would be better off if (s)he were in it for all eternity. Now think of an act so terrible that, if you learned this person had performed it, you'd not just think less of them, but revile them for their depravity. Even if they only did it once, and only for the "good of the world" in keeping them active in it.

Perhaps it requires rape and murder of many innocents. Perhaps it requires breaking a soul's will to exist. Perhaps it requires wearing white after Labor Day.

Regardless, anybody who has undertaken the process of becoming a lich is a monstrous being, willing to do something horrific just to preserve their own existence. No matter what else, they chose that.

However, after that, they are not required to do anything evil ever again. It is conceivable to have a lich who suffered a change of heart and spends eternity trying to atone for his wrongs. (Any lich who went into it with this plan has a hard road ahead, as planning to "make up" for a wicked deed before you undertake it makes it all the harder to atone for the wickedness.)



Now, we also are told that, after some unspecified amount of time, liches wither away to demiliches. Demiliches require souls to keep functioning. So eventually, liches become soul-destroying monsters by necessity. But while in lich stage, they are not.

hifidelity2
2017-03-28, 08:14 AM
The situation should be impossible to begin with.

Evil is not the result of actions, the actions are the result of evil. A Lich is by definition evil and unnatural. Therefore, the Lich's kingdom should not fairly ruled. Positing that a Lich could rule a kingdom in a way that "treats people fairly enough" is the same as positing a river that flows upstream.


I totally disagree
An Evil person CAN rule somewhere fairly - after all as stated by icefractal he may love his country / subjects just hates everyone else

I have a PC (that is more of an NPC now as semi retired) who was NE and is now LE. He rules his holdings. He is a lovely person to his family and his workers think he is affair employee. However the rest of the world can "go and hang" as far as he is concerned and if any one tried to attack what he considers to be under his protection he will very happily wipe them out to a man including their families, friends and allies. (He is also good friends with a Paladin but then the Paladins god owes him a favour which he has never collected)

CharonsHelper
2017-03-28, 08:24 AM
Now, we also are told that, after some unspecified amount of time, liches wither away to demiliches. Demiliches require souls to keep functioning. So eventually, liches become soul-destroying monsters by necessity. But while in lich stage, they are not.

Which does seem to imply that eating souls was required in becoming a lich in the first place and they just eventually have to refuel.

Segev
2017-03-28, 08:30 AM
Which does seem to imply that eating souls was required in becoming a lich in the first place and they just eventually have to refuel.

Potentially. It's noteworthy, if so, that demiliches seem to need to feed much more regularly than they did as liches.

It's also suggested that demilichdom is a condition that occurs due to failure to care for the body, so perhaps the extra soul-consumption is either a requirement of the higher magical power output of a demilich, or a requirement because they've failed to maintain their connection to life and so they need to supplement whatever held them here before with fresh energy.

mikeejimbo
2017-03-28, 08:47 AM
One of the Tenets of Good is Redemption. Perhaps it is rare, but if Good stopped trying because of that they might as well give up entirely. A Paladin is... perhaps not the best agent to attempt to redeem a Lich, but he should at least consider the possibility.

Beleriphon
2017-03-28, 09:10 AM
If a lich is the legitimate ruler of a kingdom, has not violated the laws of the kingdom, and treats their people fairly enough (for an evil creature)... What is a paladin to do in this situation if:
They live in this kingdom?
They visit this kingdom?
The lich visits their country?

In neither country is being a lich necessarily illegal.

What you're describing is Thay in the Forgotten Realms. It is still an evil empire ruled by a mad lich king that is opposed by every other country that would be considered even remotely good.

Alcore
2017-03-28, 09:29 AM
If a lich is the legitimate ruler of a kingdom, has not violated the laws of the kingdom, and treats their people fairly enough (for an evil creature)... What is a paladin to do in this situation if:
They live in this kingdom?
They visit this kingdom?
The lich visits their country?

In neither country is being a lich necessarily illegal.

Not much. If he has nothing else to do? (Unlikley) he must oppose him. Needing to respect 'proper authority' he would have to do it in such a way as to not break his oath. So he will (most likely) be a vary public problem for the lich.

Often the paladin will be left being unable to do anything directly (which is not a fall). Say the lich is invited by the ruler for diplomatic reasons. The paladin can't simply attack (1. It disgraces his own Lord, (2. it means breaking laws left and right and (3. is a form of assassination. I could go on but those are all falls, not because he's a lich but how he went about it.

The paladin can inspire by example but it might take some time before taking the fight to the Lich.

Segev
2017-03-28, 09:43 AM
It's also worth noting that this whole "by the laws of the kingdom" thing is presuming an awful lot of law BINDING the lich-king. Kings being bound by law in ways other than pertaining to how they deal with succession and granting of land was actually fairly rare. The Magna Carta was a big deal because it bound the English King by a lot more law than he'd ever been held to before.

The Paladin is not bound by the laws of a kingdom to which he owes no fealty. He won't care if the lich-king is "abiding by the law," though he might be positively influenced if said lich-king applies all laws fairly and doesn't exempt himself from them.

But remember that Paladins are not bound to obey unjust laws; they would never subscribe to such. They're bound by the rules to which they subscribe. They treat these rules as ironclad and foundational. They are not mere "guidelines." But they're not every system he stumbles across; they're one particular credo to which the Paladin adheres.

Keltest
2017-03-28, 09:54 AM
What you're describing is Thay in the Forgotten Realms. It is still an evil empire ruled by a mad lich king that is opposed by every other country that would be considered even remotely good.

Thay also practices slavery and generally antagonizes its neighbors though. Mages are a class to themselves, and their leadership a class above that. It is by no definition a Lawful Good or even Neutral society that happens to have a Lich ruler.

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 10:00 AM
If this was in 5e, it'd be impossible, because of how Liches are in that edition. In the sense that even if they somehow ruled fairly, the Lich would do too much evil otherwise to be tolerated.

GPS
2017-03-28, 10:16 AM
Come on. Liches are inherently evil, and kind of have to consume souls. A paladin going after one is always ok

Segev
2017-03-28, 11:07 AM
Come on. Liches are inherently evil, and kind of have to consume souls. A paladin going after one is always ok

They do not, per the rules, have to consume souls. In fact, liches are the ultimate in self-sufficient, leave-me-alone-I'm-studying undead, if they want to be. They really can lock themselves away in a tower or dungeon miles from anyone and not come out for decades while they spend every moment researching and experimenting with their magical powers.

Keltest
2017-03-28, 11:43 AM
They do not, per the rules, have to consume souls. In fact, liches are the ultimate in self-sufficient, leave-me-alone-I'm-studying undead, if they want to be. They really can lock themselves away in a tower or dungeon miles from anyone and not come out for decades while they spend every moment researching and experimenting with their magical powers.

in 5e I think they do need to consume souls periodically.

AuraTwilight
2017-03-28, 11:55 AM
Plot twist, it turns out the ruler is a good-aligned archlich.

GPS
2017-03-28, 12:14 PM
in 5e I think they do need to consume souls periodically.
Yeah, sorry about that. I'm a 5e guy, and I often forget I'm not on the 5e exclusive channel.

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 12:21 PM
They do not, per the rules, have to consume souls. In fact, liches are the ultimate in self-sufficient, leave-me-alone-I'm-studying undead, if they want to be. They really can lock themselves away in a tower or dungeon miles from anyone and not come out for decades while they spend every moment researching and experimenting with their magical powers.

In 3.X, yes.

JNAProductions
2017-03-28, 12:25 PM
Anyone here read Dresden Files?

Gentleman Johnny Marcone.

Enixon
2017-03-28, 12:50 PM
I kinda imagine the scenario would play out a bit like the ongoing conflicts between Superman and Lex Luthor. Superman can't just go in and clobber the CEO of a major corporation even though he knows Lex is an evil psychopath nor can he go and smash up everything with a Lexcorp logo plastered on it since that would end up causing more hardship for all the innocent people that would be affected. That said what he CAN do, is find out about whatever particularly evil plots Lex is doing in addition to running his corporation and put a stop to /those/.




Now the more jaded part of me can't help but assume that the whole point of even having the Lich ruling legitimately and not being a cliche "evil overlord" type is so the DM can go "gotcha!" and make the paladin fall whether he tries to destroy the lich* or lets it continue on existing**


*GOTCHA! You just threw a peaceful nation into a chaos you now Chaotic Evil religious bigot! :smallbiggrin:


**GOTCHA! You're allowing a soulless monstrosity to continue his evil ways because of legal loopholes you now Lawful Neutral bureaucratic drone! :smallbiggrin:

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-28, 12:51 PM
By the rules we have from the lich entry in the MM, becoming one requires an act of "unspeakable evil." Though this act is unspecified, something about making the phylactery and becoming a lich, something in the process somewhere, is an act so horrifically evil that anybody who knows of it is (at least metaphorically) unable to speak of it for how monstrous it is. It is something that willfully doing it is unquestionably evil by nearly any standard, and thus no matter how good you are otherwise, your willingness to engage in this is soul-staining.


Rowling goes down the same road with "wicked immortality" and "an unspeakably evil act", and it gets tedious.

Somehow, I'm not impressed by being told that an act is so evil that you can't tell us what it is. Between reality and imagination, the whole notion rings hollow.

Beleriphon
2017-03-28, 12:55 PM
Anyone here read Dresden Files?

Gentleman Johnny Marcone.

He's not an undead abomination of nature though, in fact he's not even that bad from a D&D perspective. He's ruthless and amoral, but he's not evil in the D&D sense of things. What's being asked is more akin of what the a country would be like if ruled by Kessler, or a Denarian.

JNAProductions
2017-03-28, 01:00 PM
The only difference presented here is that Marcone is alive and the lich is undead. I'm of the camp that being undead =/= being evil, necessarily.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-03-28, 01:01 PM
Rowling goes down the same road with "wicked immortality" and "an unspeakably evil act", and it gets tedious.

Somehow, I'm not impressed by being told that an act is so evil that you can't tell us what it is. Between reality and imagination, the whole notion rings hollow.

All it says is "The process of becoming a lich is unspeakably evil and can be undertaken only by a willing character."

I don't see what filling in the blanks there would add. What that does is leave it up to the individual game world just what that unspeakably evil act is.

Segev
2017-03-28, 01:03 PM
Rowling goes down the same road with "wicked immortality" and "an unspeakably evil act", and it gets tedious.

Somehow, I'm not impressed by being told that an act is so evil that you can't tell us what it is. Between reality and imagination, the whole notion rings hollow.

I'm actually okay with it. Particularly in D&D, where it's left unnamed specifically so that the players and DMs of a particular game can make it up if they want, without having a "canon" one that somehow offends or underwhelms somebody one way or another.

"What? That's not evil; that just shows how bigoted the writers are that they think so!"
"AAAAAH! What sicko THINKs of this stuff?! How can they print that in a book without huge warning labels!? D&D is for kids too, you know!"
"...okay, yeah, that's...certainly evil, but it's hardly unforgivable. I could probably orchestrate a way to make that non-evil and still get a lich out of it."
"Oh, great, more 'informed evil.' Like animating the dead."

If, at your table, an act of incestuous rape and murder is what is required, and you all agree that that is sufficiently evil and not doable without being evil, that works for your table. If your table thinks that's some relatively mundane evil, there, then you can come up with something else. If your table doesn't want to contemplate such things, you can come up with something else.

Same goes for if it takes the betrayal of a close friend, murder and soul-trapping of a random schmoe, murdering your adulterous wife and her lover instead of finishing your quest for redemption, exterminating an endangered species, or putting chili on a hot dog (you monster).

It is unfortunate for those who can't come up with something they deem "sufficiently evil," though.



I've heard that J.K. Rowling actually did write out, in detail, the procedure for creating a horcrux. Her editors were so horrified that they forbade her to publish it. Whether this is apocryphal, or her editors had a weak stomach compared to her fans, or she really did come up with something That Awful, is unknown to me. I like the notion that it's the last, though, so I choose to believe it until I get evidence to the contrary.

As it is, at the least, we know that each horcrux requires the murder of another human being.

Frozen_Feet
2017-03-28, 01:09 PM
Rowling goes down the same road with "wicked immortality" and "an unspeakably evil act", and it gets tedious.

Somehow, I'm not impressed by being told that an act is so evil that you can't tell us what it is. Between reality and imagination, the whole notion rings hollow.

Uh, with Rowling, we know exactly what the required evil act is: murder. In the Potter setting, killing another human in cold blood is so traumatizing it literally splinters your soul.

You then place that splinter of your soul inside some object. The exact spell or ritual is unknown (because those in the know didn't want to give people funny ideas), but those details are not necessary for understanding what is wickes about it.

(A variant form of "wicked immortality", or rather, "wicked emotional invulnerability" is seen in Warlock's Hairy Heart in Tales of Beedle the Bard. Hint: removing your heart so that you can avert love and other such "foolishness" may not be the best way to achieve respect and a fulfilling life.)

icefractal
2017-03-28, 01:15 PM
in 5e I think they do need to consume souls periodically.Needing a steady diet of souls means the Lich is almost certainly evil, but it could still be ruling the kingdom in a non-evil way. There’s the entire rest of the world out there, and many Liches can teleport - no need to harvest souls from one’s own kingdom.

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 01:20 PM
5e goes more detailed about what's so evil about being a Lich.


Needing a steady diet of souls means the Lich is almost certainly evil, but it could still be ruling the kingdom in a non-evil way. There’s the entire rest of the world out there, and many Liches can teleport - no need to harvest souls from one’s own kingdom.

And? An evil ruler is still something that Paladins would be against, even if they're evil outside of their borders.

Hell, it makes it MORE likely for the Paladins to want to intervene.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-28, 01:57 PM
Uh, with Rowling, we know exactly what the required evil act is: murder. In the Potter setting, killing another human in cold blood is so traumatizing it literally splinters your soul.

You then place that splinter of your soul inside some object. The exact spell or ritual is unknown (because those in the know didn't want to give people funny ideas), but those details are not necessary for understanding what is wickes about it.

(A variant form of "wicked immortality", or rather, "wicked emotional invulnerability" is seen in Warlock's Hairy Heart in Tales of Beedle the Bard. Hint: removing your heart so that you can avert love and other such "foolishness" may not be the best way to achieve respect and a fulfilling life.)


From the Wikia:

J. K. Rowling (http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/J._K._Rowling) knows exactly what the process for the creation of a Horcrux is, but is not telling — yet. All she will say is that a spell is involved, and a horrific act is performed.[2] (http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Horcrux#cite_note-Pottercast-1) The information was initially planned to be revealed in the Harry Potter Encyclopedia (http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_Potterworld). However, since the encyclopaedia may have been cancelled, the information may eventually be revealed on Pottermore (http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Pottermore).


From the footnoted source:


JKR: I see it as a series of things you would have to do. So you would have to perform a spell. But you would also-- I don't even know if I want to say it out loud, I know that sounds funny. But I did really think it through. There are two things that I think are too horrible, actually, to go into detail about. One of them is how Pettigrew brought Voldemort back into a rudimentary body. 'Cause I told my editor what I thought happened there, and she looked as though she was gonna vomit. And then-- and the other thing is, how you make a Horcrux. And I don't even like-- I don't know. Will it be in the Encyclopedia? I don't know if I can bring myself to, ummm... I don't know.




So... no, we don't know, and just "cold blooded murder" appear to very much not be enough.

(The part about "cold blooded murder" "splintering the soul" strikes me as very much the sort of thing that adults told Harry when they were telling him a sanitized, simplified version of the truth.)

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 02:03 PM
So... no, we don't know, and just "cold blooded murder" appear to very much not be enough.

(The part about "cold blooded murder" "splintering the soul" strikes me as very much the sort of thing that adults told Harry when they were telling him a sanitized, simplified version of the truth.)

No, it was Slughorn telling this to Tom Riddle.

The shattering of the soul when you kill is literal. It's just that it is not enough to imprison the soul fragment in an item.

What you have to do starts with murder, and then there is a whole process to capture your fractured soul

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-28, 02:06 PM
No, it was Slughorn telling this to Tom Riddle.

The shattering of the soul when you kill is literal. It's just that it is not enough to imprison the soul fragment in an item.

What you have to do starts with murder, and then there is a whole process to capture your fractured soul


Given JKR's own words... no.

Keltest
2017-03-28, 02:10 PM
Given JKR's own words... no.

No... what? murder doesn't shatter your soul? I see nothing in there to contradict the idea.

hamishspence
2017-03-28, 02:18 PM
It may be more "murder cracks the soul, but doesn't break a bit off it - the Horcrux-making spell breaks a bit of the soul off along the crack"

http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Horcrux


To create a Horcrux, a wizard first had to deliberately commit murder. This act, said to be one of supreme evil, would result in the murderer metaphysically damaging their own soul. A wizard who wished to create a Horcrux would then use that damage to their advantage by casting a spell which would rip the damaged portion of the soul off of the whole and encase it in an object.


That's why an ordinary murderer, no matter how many murders they've committed, still has a complete soul - and looks normal.

Whereas Voldemort, having broken bits off his soul many times, looks less and less human with every Horcrux he makes, until he's downright snakelike in facial appearance.


It would also fit with the notion that Voldemort can make the Horcrux quite some time after the relevant murder was committed - for both the Diary and the Ring:

http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Tom_Riddle%27s_Diary


When Tom Marvolo Riddle was in his fifth year at Hogwarts, he achieved his goal of locating Salazar Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets and used his ability to speak Parseltongue to open it. He further used this language ability to order the Chamber's Basilisk to terrorise the school and hunt down the Muggle-born students. Eventually one, a Ravenclaw girl named Myrtle Warren, was killed. Riddle would later use this murder to infuse the journal with a piece of his soul, and transformed it into his first Horcrux.

http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Marvolo_Gaunt's_Ring


Upon learning of his father's abandonment (and thus feeling that he had caused Merope's death), Riddle stunned Morfin and took his wand. He then proceeded to the Riddle House to confront his father. Frank Bryce, the Riddle's gardener, remarked later that he had seen Riddle ascending the hill toward the house. Riddle used a common spell to unlock the door and entered the house. Once inside, Riddle found his father, as well as his grandparents, Thomas Riddle and Mary Riddle, in the drawing room. Riddle then used the Killing Curse on his father and Muggle grandparents.

It is unknown if there were any words exchanged between them before the actual murders took place, but what is certain is that the Riddles were found dead in their drawing room, with looks of extreme fear on their faces. Riddle returned to the Gaunt shack and modified Morfin's memory to make him believe that he had killed the Riddles himself. Riddle replaced Morfin's wand on his person but absconded with the ring. When Morfin was arrested by the Ministry and found guilty of the Riddle murders, he was carted off to Azkaban for good this time. As he was being taken away, he continuously remarked that his father would kill him for losing the ring.

Riddle openly wore the ring at Hogwarts after these events, as seen on his hand in a memory provided by Potions Master Horace Slughorn. Riddle then questioned Slughorn about Horcruxes, particularly what would happen to the wizard that created more than one. By this point, Riddle had already created his first Horcrux, his childhood diary, with the murder of a fellow student named Myrtle. At some point shortly before or after his graduation from Hogwarts, Riddle used the murder of his father, Tom Riddle Snr to turn the ring into a Horcrux.

GPS
2017-03-28, 02:23 PM
The only difference presented here is that Marcone is alive and the lich is undead. I'm of the camp that being undead =/= being evil, necessarily.
Does undead not mean inherently evil in 3.X? 90% of undead in 5e are inherently evil just by MM

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-28, 02:26 PM
No... what? murder doesn't shatter your soul? I see nothing in there to contradict the idea.


JKR makes an emphatic point of how it's too terrible to detail even outside the books, and comparable to something that made her editor almost vomit just from the description. It starts with a spell, but both the spell details and the rest of the process, she's unwilling to describe.

An estimated 1200 people are murdered every day worldwide... somehow I doubt that "just" murder is a key part of a process that JKR can't even hint at and revolting on the level that mere description could threaten to make someone vomit. If it's simple murdering someone and casting the right spell, what is so disgusting and what is she so reluctant to even hint at?

Rather, the assertion that "murder" "splinters the soul" appears to be Slughorn not knowing the details and throwing in a bit of poetic puffery.


As this relates to the process by which one attains and maintains lichdom... what exactly is so evil that it cannot be spoken of? While the rules of the forum prevent it here, there's very little evil that can't at least be spoken of, even if the repulsive details would best be left unsaid.

JNAProductions
2017-03-28, 02:30 PM
Does undead not mean inherently evil in 3.X? 90% of undead in 5e are inherently evil just by MM


Undead are once-living creatures animated by spiritual or supernatural forces.

Features
An undead creature has the following features.

12-sided Hit Dice.
Base attack bonus equal to ½ total Hit Dice (as wizard).
Good Will saves.
Skill points equal to (4 + Int modifier, minimum 1) per Hit Die, with quadruple skill points for the first Hit Die, if the undead creature has an Intelligence score. However, many undead are mindless and gain no skill points or feats.
Traits
An undead creature possesses the following traits (unless otherwise noted in a creature’s entry).

No Constitution score.
Darkvision out to 60 feet.
Immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, phantasms, patterns, and morale effects).
Immunity to poison, sleep effects, paralysis, stunning, disease, and death effects.
Not subject to critical hits, nonlethal damage, ability drain, or energy drain. Immune to damage to its physical ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution), as well as to fatigue and exhaustion effects.
Cannot heal damage on its own if it has no Intelligence score, although it can be healed. Negative energy (such as an inflict spell) can heal undead creatures. The fast healing special quality works regardless of the creature’s Intelligence score.
Immunity to any effect that requires a Fortitude save (unless the effect also works on objects or is harmless).
Uses its Charisma modifier for Concentration checks.
Not at risk of death from massive damage, but when reduced to 0 hit points or less, it is immediately destroyed.
Not affected by raise dead and reincarnate spells or abilities. Resurrection and true resurrection can affect undead creatures. These spells turn undead creatures back into the living creatures they were before becoming undead.
Proficient with its natural weapons, all simple weapons, and any weapons mentioned in its entry.
Proficient with whatever type of armor (light, medium, or heavy) it is described as wearing, as well as all lighter types. Undead not indicated as wearing armor are not proficient with armor. Undead are proficient with shields if they are proficient with any form of armor.
Undead do not breathe, eat, or sleep.

Those are the undead traits from the SRD. Nothing in there screams "Evil" to me.

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 02:32 PM
3.X allows non-evil Undead. 5e changed that.

Vitruviansquid
2017-03-28, 02:38 PM
Wat?

Evil creatures can do non-evil things just fine. They can even be totally nice and altruistic ... to some people. For example, if a giant acts in a LG-like manner toward other giants, but considers "small folk" to not matter at all and kills them for entertainment, you'd still call that character evil.

So there are a lot of ways that an evil Lich could be ruling a kingdom in a non-evil way. Just for example:
* It's the kingdom where he grew up, he actually likes the people there. The rest of the world ... eh, that can all burn if it benefits him to do so.
* He's taking a century or two off to do magical research - this kingdom has an excellent set of libraries. He figures that he's less likely to have interruptions from rebellions if he rules fairly.
* It's a scheme to become thought of as a respectable monarch, so he can get private audiences with other monarchs and mind control them.

And that's even ignoring reasons that might eventually cause the Lich to drift to neutral, but haven't yet. Like legitimately just wanting to do a good job running a kingdom, as like, a hobby.

I'm going to quote this to address all posts of the stripe.

I think the alignment system is best used as a portayal of the black and white morality that fits into the genre of D&D, which we can say imitates the nature of morality in Lord of the Rings, or a fairy tale, or a (stereotypical) medieval worldview. In Lord of the Rings, we don't question whether the balrog does anything good. He's evil. We don't question whether extermination of all orcs is good. We are told they are evil and that's enough. Similarly, we don't really question whether Cinderella's evil stepmother really deserved what came her way because maybe she was just mean to Cinderella and nice to everyone else. The way that these genre conceive morality permits no other way to look at it.

You run into problems applying modern morality to a system that was designed, intentionally or not, to force you into a different view of morality. The idea that people are not inherently good or evil, but that the sum of their deeds, which can be a bit of both, add up to our ability to broadly categorize someone as one or the other while knowingly understanding it is shorthand to do so is unsupported in this system. An analogy is imagine if you tried to play the White Wolf monster games with someone who so firmly believed in mind over matter that they didn't believe in things like mental illness and addiction. Their understanding of behavior would be incompatible wih the game's prescriptions for how to behave.

hamishspence
2017-03-28, 02:39 PM
3.X allows non-evil Undead. 5e changed that.

5e Ghosts can still be of any alignment:

http://5e.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/ghost.htm

Regarding individual alignment entries - isn't it merely the default alignment? Creatures like deep gnomes, centaurs, etc are listed as Neutral Good - but, not being Outsiders, they are capable of changing alignment.

The same may apply to those intelligent undead listed as Evil.

Keltest
2017-03-28, 02:40 PM
JKR makes an emphatic point of how it's too terrible to detail even outside the books, and comparable to something that made her editor almost vomit just from the description. It starts with a spell, but both the spell details and the rest of the process, she's unwilling to describe.

An estimated 1200 people are murdered every day worldwide... somehow I doubt that "just" murder is a key part of a process that JKR can't even hint at and revolting on the level that mere description could threaten to make someone vomit. If it's simple murdering someone and casting the right spell, what is so disgusting and what is she so reluctant to even hint at?

Rather, the assertion that "murder" "splinters the soul" appears to be Slughorn not knowing the details and throwing in a bit of poetic puffery.


As this relates to the process by which one attains and maintains lichdom... what exactly is so evil that it cannot be spoken of? While the rules of the forum prevent it here, there's very little evil that can't at least be spoken of, even if the repulsive details would best be left unsaid.

Its the first step. A murder will fragment your soul, and a followup process that ultimately was not deemed fit for description is used to remove that part of your soul and stash it in an object.

Anyway, I hope you don't want a literal answer to the question "what is so evil you cant speak of it" because the answer, by definition, cant be communicated.

hamishspence
2017-03-28, 02:42 PM
Its the first step. A murder will fragment your soul, and a followup process that ultimately was not deemed fit for description is used to remove that part of your soul and stash it in an object.


I prefer "crack" to fragment - because a fragmented object is generally not together any more, but in separate bits - whereas a cracked object can still be all one piece.



I think the alignment system is best used as a portayal of the black and white morality that fits into the genre of D&D, which we can say imitates the nature of morality in Lord of the Rings, or a fairy tale, or a (stereotypical) medieval worldview.


The Giant on this subject (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?232652-Redcloak-s-failed-characterization-and-what-it-means-for-the-comic-as-a-whole/page4&p=12718471#post12718471)


Another Poster:
D&D is a world of black and white morality, in most cases. Even the concept of shades of grey was codified in neutrality, really an idea that's just as simple and straightforward (albeit annoyingly hard to actually implement) as good and evil. Trying to apply your real world morals to it (often resulting i the self-inflicted discomfort you're feeling) is like trying to determine the morality of a lion eating a gazelle; they're just not compatible.

The Giant's response:
The primary purpose of Redcloak's characterization is to specifically prove that this point is completely and utterly wrong. That D&D cannot and should not begin and end at black-and-white, and indeed already doesn't, if everyone would just learn to look at things a little more complexly.

CharonsHelper
2017-03-28, 02:48 PM
You guys do realize that you're arguing about specifics in a fantasy world which has all sorts of gaping holes and failures of internal consistency.

Harry Potter is a lot of fun and JKR is a master of pacing and fun ideas - but a great world-builder she is NOT.

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 02:57 PM
I'm going to quote this to address all posts of the stripe.

I think the alignment system is best used as a portayal of the black and white morality that fits into the genre of D&D, which we can say imitates the nature of morality in Lord of the Rings, or a fairy tale, or a (stereotypical) medieval worldview. In Lord of the Rings, we don't question whether the balrog does anything good. He's evil. We don't question whether extermination of all orcs is good. We are told they are evil and that's enough. Similarly, we don't really question whether Cinderella's evil stepmother really deserved what came her way because maybe she was just mean to Cinderella and nice to everyone else. The way that these genre conceive morality permits no other way to look at it.

You run into problems applying modern morality to a system that was designed, intentionally or not, to force you into a different view of morality. The idea that people are not inherently good or evil, but that the sum of their deeds, which can be a bit of both, add up to our ability to broadly categorize someone as one or the other while knowingly understanding it is shorthand to do so is unsupported in this system. An analogy is imagine if you tried to play the White Wolf monster games with someone who so firmly believed in mind over matter that they didn't believe in things like mental illness and addiction. Their understanding of behavior would be incompatible wih the game's prescriptions for how to behave.


The alignment system describes *tendencies*. A Chaotic Evil person is a person who, most of the time, will choose to do Chaotic and Evil things.


Problem is, 3.X's writers really, really messed up how alignments were handled, especially in the books that were supposed to talk about alignments.



5e Ghosts can still be of any alignment:

http://5e.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/ghost.htm

True, thank you, I've forgotten that.



Regarding individual alignment entries - isn't it merely the default alignment? Creatures like deep gnomes, centaurs, etc are listed as Neutral Good - but, not being Outsiders, they are capable of changing alignment.

The same may apply to those intelligent undead listed as Evil.

Nah, in 5e, the evil Undead are either evil spirits that desires to kill everything that is alive, or evil people who died and came back in a more powerful form.

You can't be a Lich without being evil, for exemple, because if you decided to stop being evil you'd end your horrible existence.


In 3.X, the intelligent Undead are basically just people animated by negative energy, and with a few particular needs.

Beleriphon
2017-03-28, 03:03 PM
As this relates to the process by which one attains and maintains lichdom... what exactly is so evil that it cannot be spoken of? While the rules of the forum prevent it here, there's very little evil that can't at least be spoken of, even if the repulsive details would best be left unsaid.

I can think of several horrifying things that might qualify. I mean humans are pretty terrible to each other in general so its not like something horrific hasn't actually happened to a person before and details of it are available.

If you want to come up with something I suggest it starts with mass murder on a pretty grand scale. Like killing three or four villages of people all at the same time scale and just gets worse from there.

veti
2017-03-28, 03:07 PM
This is why paladins are affiliated to orders, churches and the like. A decision like this should not be taken - cannot be taken - by any one person in isolation. At least, not if that person describes themself as any flavour of "lawful".

The paladin will follow the policy of their order towards the lich-king. If that policy is "work for good within the framework, don't make any overt moves against the regime", then that's what they'll do. If it's "seek out potential dissidents within the government to organise a coup and end the lich", then that's what they'll do. If it's "open warfare against the whole kingdom until the lich flees or dies", then... well, you get the picture.

If a paladin is trying to make that kind of call without referring to their superiors, who can be expected to know way more about the big socio-political picture than they do - then they may or may not be Good, but they're big-time failing Lawful.

hamishspence
2017-03-28, 03:07 PM
Nah, in 5e, the evil Undead are either evil spirits that desires to kill everything that is alive, or evil people who died and came back in a more powerful form.


Does 5e not have room for the traditional "vampire antihero" then - who got free of the Vampire that spawned them - and sought to exist in a way that's somewhat less evil - using their bite only in combat against villains?

CharonsHelper
2017-03-28, 03:10 PM
Does 5e not have room for the traditional "vampire antihero" then - who got free of the Vampire that spawned them - and sought to exist in a way that's somewhat less evil - using their bite only in combat against villains?

Would said antihero sparkle? :smallbiggrin:

Segev
2017-03-28, 03:16 PM
As this relates to the process by which one attains and maintains lichdom... what exactly is so evil that it cannot be spoken of? While the rules of the forum prevent it here, there's very little evil that can't at least be spoken of, even if the repulsive details would best be left unsaid.

I assume that "unspeakable" is being poetic and means more literally "extremely, to the point that it's hard to even talk about for most morally-minded people."

As for what...well, I know what I'd use, but it would offend a great many people that I would deem it "evil" or even that I would claim it involves murder, so in light of ToU for the forum, I won't go into detail. It does get spoken of rather vehemently, though, IRL.

I can think of a few other ideas, too; the runner-up would involve earning the love and trust of an individual who you render dependent upon you, and then betraying them in a horrific way such that they die only half-way to realizing what you've done. Use their soul, confused from death and still trusting you but barely starting to suffer the mental strain from the realization they were about to have, to get them to die for you, causing their death to be on your behalf so that you, yourself, can never properly die. They go to your deserved afterlife, letting you store your life force in your phylactery made, in some fashion, from parts of their body (metal cooled in their blood, their bones making part of its structure, polymorphed eyes serving as gems...something like that).

hamishspence
2017-03-28, 03:20 PM
Would said antihero sparkle? :smallbiggrin:

There's lots of pre-Twilight vampire antiheroes. Some even in D&D (Jander Sunstar from Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft springs to mind).

Necroticplague
2017-03-28, 03:35 PM
At least in the version of DnD I play, it's explicitly noted that simply being Evil isn't worthy of death. So, even if the lich is Evil, and pings as such to Detect Evil, the paladin isn't required to care unless they know the lich is actually doing something wrong. It's also emphasized that Good, when possible, prefers to atone and let people redeem themselves (the line specifically comes up: "there is no sin so great that it cannot be forgiven"), than to just kill who's strayed. So, given the limited information given, a paladin's response should be to simply ignore them. If they find evidence of some actual wrongdoing, then they can get more involved. But, by and by large, paladins have bigger fish to fry than someone who's just decided they want a couple thousand more years on this of the afterlife.

Also of interesting note, is that undead always ping as Evil, regardless of actual alignment, so even if simply killing everything that pinged Evil was justified (it isn't), the paladin wouldn't be able to tell if the lich was.

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 03:41 PM
Does 5e not have room for the traditional "vampire antihero" then - who got free of the Vampire that spawned them - and sought to exist in a way that's somewhat less evil - using their bite only in combat against villains?

Nope. Vampires are evil shadows of their former selves. The greatest love turns into mere obsessive desire to control and own, that kind of things.

Beneath
2017-03-28, 03:47 PM
Does 5e not have room for the traditional "vampire antihero" then - who got free of the Vampire that spawned them - and sought to exist in a way that's somewhat less evil - using their bite only in combat against villains?

5e vampires exist only as a CR 13 legendary monster and a CR 5 spawn; there's not a 3e-style vampire template (there are some variants on the legendary monster and some rules for a PC becoming a vampire, including "alignment changes to lawful evil and the DM may take control of the character"). Even 3e as written doesn't let vampires do the antihero thing; the expected thing for a PC who becomes a vampire is to be replaced with a chaotic evil NPC (this was more explicit in 2e that a PC who becomes a vampire always, rules as written, becomes an NPC). A heroic vampire is an exception to the rules not as in "vampires are usually evil" but an actual exception to the description in the rulebook of what the process of vampirization entails.

D&D vampires are very different from modern vampire story vampires anyway. Every D&D vampire has a lot of Dracula's distinct powers (summoning bats and wolves, shapeshifting, gaseous form, charm gaze); if you want vampires to not have any/as many special powers baseline, or for the process of becoming one to not dramatically change your motives, you'd need to rewrite them.

Also I think the traditional way for a vampire to be heroic despite drinking blood is either willing volunteers or animals, not declaring themself protector and judge of humans deciding who is to be protected and who is food.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-28, 03:57 PM
Nope. Vampires are evil shadows of their former selves. The greatest love turns into mere obsessive desire to control and own, that kind of things.

Depends on the fiction or setting in question. Sounds like 5e is "backlashing" against something...

halfeye
2017-03-28, 03:59 PM
Janus Hassildor

Beleriphon
2017-03-28, 04:00 PM
Does 5e not have room for the traditional "vampire antihero" then - who got free of the Vampire that spawned them - and sought to exist in a way that's somewhat less evil - using their bite only in combat against villains?

It does, but generally speaking the D&D vampire falls into the Dracula mold of the remorseless monster, hunting people like people hunt rabbits. They're usually depicted as a corpse powered by something dark and sinister masquerading as the person the corpse used to be. Its not like the virus in some depictions, or the Anne Rice woe-is-me (unless your Lestat) vampire.

As a bit of an aside the Anne Rice vampire is probably a better mold of the anti-hero where their very nature makes them monsters. Some of the revel in that (Lestat) and some ultimately come to hate what happened to them (Louis), but they can never hide from the fact they are monsters.

Unoriginal
2017-03-28, 04:28 PM
Depends on the fiction or setting in question. Sounds like 5e is "backlashing" against something...

I was talking about how the 5e MM described them.

And it's not a backlash, it's a return to the roots.

Probably was influenced by Ravenloft, too.

GPS
2017-03-28, 04:34 PM
This is why paladins are affiliated to orders, churches and the like. A decision like this should not be taken - cannot be taken - by any one person in isolation. At least, not if that person describes themself as any flavour of "lawful".

The paladin will follow the policy of their order towards the lich-king. If that policy is "work for good within the framework, don't make any overt moves against the regime", then that's what they'll do. If it's "seek out potential dissidents within the government to organise a coup and end the lich", then that's what they'll do. If it's "open warfare against the whole kingdom until the lich flees or dies", then... well, you get the picture.

If a paladin is trying to make that kind of call without referring to their superiors, who can be expected to know way more about the big socio-political picture than they do - then they may or may not be Good, but they're big-time failing Lawful.

Well, that depends on the oath

Edit: Right, forgot, 3.X paladin's had alignment restrictions, sorry

Vitruviansquid
2017-03-28, 07:07 PM
I prefer "crack" to fragment - because a fragmented object is generally not together any more, but in separate bits - whereas a cracked object can still be all one piece.




The Giant on this subject (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?232652-Redcloak-s-failed-characterization-and-what-it-means-for-the-comic-as-a-whole/page4&p=12718471#post12718471)

Mr. Burlew seems to be defending his characterization of Redcloak in this post. Sure, I don't see anything wrong with Redcloak. He works well in the story Rich Burlew is trying to tell.

But Rich Burlew doesn't justify why a more complex morality is better than a less complex one. He just assumes that a morality with black and white is less interesting, but I would say it is more interesting as well as being more natural for a game with D&D's alignment system.

It is more interesting because we already live in a world with complex morality. But role-playing is about casting off what you are familiar with and putting yourself in the role of something alien. A world of black and white morality is different from how I am used to thinking, but is also a concept I am familiar with from literature I like, and can be a *cooler* kind of world than the real world.

It is comparable to the setting of Warhammer. In the real world, we understand that witch hunts were a terrible thing, where innocent women (and some men) were persecuted, tortured, and killed. But Warhammer changes our morality by placing us in a world with different premises (that witchcraft is real and dangerous), and that is a good and fun thing because it allows us to roleplay something different than we're used to.

Calthropstu
2017-03-28, 08:07 PM
This is an actual thing in Golarion. There is a kingdom of Undead called Geb. The living are seperated into 2 groups: thralls/slaves, and normal people. Normal people have rights equivalent to those of most countries. Thralls and slaves have no rights and serve as food and animation fodder.
The aristocracy is led by powerful living and undead necromancers.

Visiting paladins are treated with great suspicion as they frequently attempt to free the thralls or incite slave uprisings.

NichG
2017-03-28, 08:41 PM
I'm actually okay with it. Particularly in D&D, where it's left unnamed specifically so that the players and DMs of a particular game can make it up if they want, without having a "canon" one that somehow offends or underwhelms somebody one way or another.

"What? That's not evil; that just shows how bigoted the writers are that they think so!"
"AAAAAH! What sicko THINKs of this stuff?! How can they print that in a book without huge warning labels!? D&D is for kids too, you know!"
"...okay, yeah, that's...certainly evil, but it's hardly unforgivable. I could probably orchestrate a way to make that non-evil and still get a lich out of it."
"Oh, great, more 'informed evil.' Like animating the dead."

...

It is unfortunate for those who can't come up with something they deem "sufficiently evil," though.


Yeah, I think I'd be in that last group. The only things I can imagine that would be unforgivable are things which are actively, willfully ongoing. It's too easy for me to imagine someone doing something, however horrible, then having their mind be effectively completely rewritten (instantly, through 1000 years of atonement, whatever), and then being asked to believe that even despite that, I should hold that previous act undertaken by a radically different persona against the new persona - just because it happens to be inhabiting the same flesh/mind/soul/whatever as the old one.

On the other hand, if you change the persona like that, and the new one refuses to stop doing the continuing horrible thing, that takes it into a realm where I can start to imagine 'unforgivable' . And even then, for me it'd need to be something purely willful, where the person could actually do differently without any real consequence but still chooses to do the horrible thing. OOC at least (I'm not a paladin after all) I'm willing to at least entertain the argument that there are situations in which something horrible happens to a few people but a much larger number of people are prevented from coming to harm by it.

So what I'm looking for if I'm going to judge someone 'unforgivable' is a willful, continuing set of acts of horribleness that could be avoided but where the person is choosing to do so anyhow.

BarbieTheRPG
2017-03-28, 08:55 PM
Liches, by definition, are terribly evil creatures. What you're suggesting is a "Good Lich" - something that exists outside of the normal interpretation. Liches are evil and thus cannot run a "fair and balanced" government because evil doesn't do that. Research the word "evil". Should help.

Milo v3
2017-03-28, 10:05 PM
Liches are evil and thus cannot run a "fair and balanced" government because evil doesn't do that. Research the word "evil". Should help.
You realise you can be evil without being evil 100% of the time. Being evil doesn't mean your a Saturday morning cartoon villain who kicks puppies.

I have an evil king who is runs a completely fair and balanced government, doesn't change the fact that he's evil because he does horrific experiments, makes pacts with fiends, and enslaves angels in his spare time.

GPS
2017-03-28, 10:35 PM
You realise you can be evil without being evil 100% of the time. Being evil doesn't mean your a Saturday morning cartoon villain who kicks puppies.

I have an evil king who is runs a completely fair and balanced government, doesn't change the fact that he's evil because he does horrific experiments, makes pacts with fiends, and enslaves angels in his spare time.
I agree fully with this. While I do believe a lich is inherently evil, there is nothing that prevents a lich from setting up a fully functional and fair government. I don't really believe the PC's would be at fault offing such a lich, but it still has the capability to do just fine. You don't have to be good to be fair and balanced, LN exists for a reason. Fair isn't good exclusive.

NichG
2017-03-29, 12:03 AM
I agree fully with this. While I do believe a lich is inherently evil, there is nothing that prevents a lich from setting up a fully functional and fair government. I don't really believe the PC's would be at fault offing such a lich, but it still has the capability to do just fine. You don't have to be good to be fair and balanced, LN exists for a reason. Fair isn't good exclusive.

I'd definitely consider the PCs to be at fault if they offed such a lich and then the lich's government fell into anarchy, the populace was hit by a famine, the next guy was even worse, etc. That's really the primary issue that a paladin in this situation faces, rather than whether or not the lich is a valid kill target. The paladin may not be permitted to compromise with evil, but that comes with a lot of sacrifices they willingly take upon themselves. However, that paladin lives in a world where most people - even good people - do have to compromise with evil in order to survive. When the paladin slays the lich and damn the consequences, they're making a choice on behalf of all of those people to make those sacrifices as well.

It's not whether the paladin is in the right to slay the lich. It's whether the paladin is in the right to slay the farmers and soldiers and so on who will die in the ensuing conflicts and chaos as a result of their choice. It's more abstract than that, but in a sense this shares a lot in common with a hostage situation.

Frozen_Feet
2017-03-29, 01:08 AM
You guys do realize that you're arguing about specifics in a fantasy world which has all sorts of gaping holes and failures of internal consistency.

Harry Potter is a lot of fun and JKR is a master of pacing and fun ideas - but a great world-builder she is NOT.

But there is no failure of consistency in this specific case. Murder splinters your soul, and that is the first step to creating a horcrux. This is made explicit in the books. It is true we do not know what the exact ritual to then make the actual object is, but those details are not needed to understand what's wicked about it.

Focusing on the additional horrifying elements of the Horcrux spell is besides the point. You do not need to know how to make a Horcrux to understand why or how a Horcrux-using Wizard is evil in the Potter setting . This is in contrast to many versions of D&D, where the process of making a Lich's Phylactery is so obscure, it's hard to see how the act is evil.

Bohandas
2017-03-29, 01:47 AM
For example; the lich isn't wantonly abducting civilians to sacrifice them to his vile god. He enforces the law, more or less with an even hand, he just punishes law breakers harshly.

This might work better with a vampire. This spunds a lot like the guy Dracula was based on (Vladimir III "The Impaler" Dracul); he was able to more or less entirely eliminate crime in the area he ruled through an aggressive campaign of public executions and the permanent gibbeting of all executed criminals

Delusion
2017-03-29, 06:20 AM
I can think of a few other ideas, too; the runner-up would involve earning the love and trust of an individual who you render dependent upon you, and then betraying them in a horrific way such that they die only half-way to realizing what you've done. Use their soul, confused from death and still trusting you but barely starting to suffer the mental strain from the realization they were about to have, to get them to die for you, causing their death to be on your behalf so that you, yourself, can never properly die. They go to your deserved afterlife, letting you store your life force in your phylactery made, in some fashion, from parts of their body (metal cooled in their blood, their bones making part of its structure, polymorphed eyes serving as gems...something like that).

I like this idea a lot. Provides some nice plot hooks for example a pc might be related to someone a Lich used as a stepping stone to become a lich.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-29, 07:07 AM
But there is no failure of consistency in this specific case. Murder splinters your soul, and that is the first step to creating a horcrux. This is made explicit in the books. It is true we do not know what the exact ritual to then make the actual object is, but those details are not needed to understand what's wicked about it.


How do we "know this"? Because a confused and repeatedly mind-magiced old man says so?

~1200 murders every day in the real world, and we know from the books the process requires a killing for every Horocrux... but that's somehow the detail that JKR is so reluctant to explain, and comparable to something that almost made her editor vomit? Really?




Focusing on the additional horrifying elements of the Horcrux spell is besides the point. You do not need to know how to make a Horcrux to understand why or how a Horcrux-using Wizard is evil in the Potter setting .


It's made out to be far more evil and repulsive than just the act of murder...




This is in contrast to many versions of D&D, where the process of making a Lich's Phylactery is so obscure, it's hard to see how the act is evil.


In both cases, it's made out to be a remarkably evil act, and treated as "unspeakable". In both cases, the "mystery" doesn't make the act seem more evil, it's just eye-rollingly cliched.

In both cases, if it were just killing someone as part of the ritual, then that could be said, but it's clearly not just killing someone.

GloatingSwine
2017-03-29, 07:18 AM
If a lich is the legitimate ruler of a kingdom, has not violated the laws of the kingdom, and treats their people fairly enough (for an evil creature)...

How is the lich the legitimate ruler? A significant step in the process of becoming undead is becoming dead, and that would mean that the kingship would pass to the king's successor, and the lich would be a usurper.

Also, why are they a lich? What cause made them so determined to overcome death that they went to the relatively extreme step of becoming a lich, and if they are the ruler of a nation why are the resources of the nation not bent to that cause?

NichG
2017-03-29, 07:25 AM
How is the lich the legitimate ruler? A significant step in the process of becoming undead is becoming dead, and that would mean that the kingship would pass to the king's successor, and the lich would be a usurper.

Also, why are they a lich? What cause made them so determined to overcome death that they went to the relatively extreme step of becoming a lich, and if they are the ruler of a nation why are the resources of the nation not bent to that cause?

This is why you always make sure to pass the council resolution to change inheritance laws to necrogeniture before doing the lich thing. Or would that be Necrotic Primogeniture? First heir to become undead gets the primary title, ...

GloatingSwine
2017-03-29, 07:35 AM
Thinking about it, you could do a cool "Lich ruling a country" adventure where the conflict doesn't hinge on the Lich being an undead abomination per se.

Say the Lich became a Lich because they genuinely believed in the well being of the country and they have ruled for a thousand years, but now the country is in many ways horribly backwards and its neighbours are outcompeting it, are nibbling away at its territory, and would possibly even have conquered it if not for the power of the Lich themself. Being dead and being obsessed enough to have become a Lich in the first place he's set in his ways and can't adapt to things that don't fit his perfect image of the country he rules.

Keltest
2017-03-29, 07:47 AM
How do we "know this"? Because a confused and repeatedly mind-magiced old man says so?

~1200 murders every day in the real world, and we know from the books the process requires a killing for every Horocrux... but that's somehow the detail that JKR is so reluctant to explain, and comparable to something that almost made her editor vomit? Really?




It's made out to be far more evil and repulsive than just the act of murder...


Because its not "just" the act of murder, something you are yourself making disturbingly light of. Murder is the first part, but then theres some other non-specified part that that does the actual transferring of your soul to the object, and THAT is the part that is nausea-inducing.

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 07:56 AM
It is comparable to the setting of Warhammer. In the real world, we understand that witch hunts were a terrible thing, where innocent women (and some men) were persecuted, tortured, and killed. But Warhammer changes our morality by placing us in a world with different premises (that witchcraft is real and dangerous), and that is a good and fun thing because it allows us to roleplay something different than we're used to.

Err, while I agree that there is a place for black-and-white morality in fiction, you choose a pretty terrible exemple.

Warhammer is NOT a black-and-white morality setting. Some witch hunters are actually protecting the situations from threats, others are pretty much horrible people who commit horrific acts out of fanaticism or sadism.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-29, 08:45 AM
Because its not "just" the act of murder, something you are yourself making disturbingly light of. Murder is the first part, but then theres some other non-specified part that that does the actual transferring of your soul to the object, and THAT is the part that is nausea-inducing.

First, please check the context of my comments. Wondering how murder would qualify as "unspeakable" when fiction -- including the fiction in question -- if rife with people killing each other, and when there are over 1000 murders every day in real life, is not "making light of murder". Understanding that murder is, when it comes to fiction, fairly mundane, is not "making light of murder".

Second, again, note that JKR doesn't say "kill someone, then do something unspeakable", she says (paraphrasing) "there's a spell involved, but the rest I can't really talk about"... whatever is going on with the actual killing is included in the "unspeakable" part, which strongly indicates that there's something special, gruesome, and vile required in the specifics of the killing act itself.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-29, 08:46 AM
Err, while I agree that there is a place for black-and-white morality in fiction, you choose a pretty terrible exemple.

Warhammer is NOT a black-and-white morality setting. Some witch hunters are actually protecting the situations from threats, others are pretty much horrible people who commit horrific acts out of fanaticism or sadism.

Warhammer -- the fantasy setting or 40k -- is pretty much the "picture in the encyclopedia" for "black and less-black" morality.

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 08:47 AM
Second, again, note that JKR doesn't say "kill someone, then do something unspeakable", she says (paraphrasing) "there's a spell involved, but the rest I can't really talk about"... whatever is going on with the actual killing is included in the "unspeakable" part, which strongly indicates that there's something special, gruesome, and vile required in the specifics of the killing act itself.

Nah, it's pretty clear in the books that a Killing Curse works for it.

Segev
2017-03-29, 08:49 AM
Yeah, I think I'd be in that last group. The only things I can imagine that would be unforgivable are things which are actively, willfully ongoing. It's too easy for me to imagine someone doing something, however horrible, then having their mind be effectively completely rewritten (instantly, through 1000 years of atonement, whatever), and then being asked to believe that even despite that, I should hold that previous act undertaken by a radically different persona against the new persona - just because it happens to be inhabiting the same flesh/mind/soul/whatever as the old one.

On the other hand, if you change the persona like that, and the new one refuses to stop doing the continuing horrible thing, that takes it into a realm where I can start to imagine 'unforgivable' . And even then, for me it'd need to be something purely willful, where the person could actually do differently without any real consequence but still chooses to do the horrible thing. OOC at least (I'm not a paladin after all) I'm willing to at least entertain the argument that there are situations in which something horrible happens to a few people but a much larger number of people are prevented from coming to harm by it.

So what I'm looking for if I'm going to judge someone 'unforgivable' is a willful, continuing set of acts of horribleness that could be avoided but where the person is choosing to do so anyhow.

If you're "completely rewriting" the person, then perhaps yes,they could be forgiven. But that's introducing a new scenario, not proving the existing one "bad." Besides, a lich who was willing to go to such lengths to preserve his own existence would consider such a death of personality at least as unacceptable as actual final death.

The idea behind the utterly reprehensible act which must be committed to become a lich is that you can't do it and be a good person. You can't even be neutral and engage in such willful evil, even once.

Sure, you can construct odd corner cases around this, but they generally are going to involve incredible ignorance or effectively destroying the lich who did it. Want your excuse for a "good lich" who was born as one because the old one's mind was completely replaced by this new, genuinely nice and kind person? Okay, go for it.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-29, 09:50 AM
If you're "completely rewriting" the person, then perhaps yes,they could be forgiven. But that's introducing a new scenario, not proving the existing one "bad." Besides, a lich who was willing to go to such lengths to preserve his own existence would consider such a death of personality at least as unacceptable as actual final death.

The idea behind the utterly reprehensible act which must be committed to become a lich is that you can't do it and be a good person. You can't even be neutral and engage in such willful evil, even once.

Sure, you can construct odd corner cases around this, but they generally are going to involve incredible ignorance or effectively destroying the lich who did it. Want your excuse for a "good lich" who was born as one because the old one's mind was completely replaced by this new, genuinely nice and kind person? Okay, go for it.


For some reason, certain worldbuilders (authors or game setting creators or whoever) who are willing to introduce all sorts of elements that would -- if actually followed through to their logical conclusion -- utterly change the setting into something unlike the real world and unlike what the worldbuilder ends up presenting to us, and who are so often willing to ignore in part or in total the implications of those elements...

...are absolutely against including any form of immortality or agelessness that isn't totally and irredeemable evil. As if protagonists and allies not eventually dying of old age would uniquely shatter the setting or make it completely untenable.

"Here's a form of magic that would triple the yield of crops and can be cast without drawbacks by 1/5th of the population... but I'm still going to present a society of landbound serfs under yearly threat of starvation, with 95% of the population involved in farming. Wait, you think I should include possible agelessness for people who aren't evil? That would make the setting totally illogical and destroy the moral fabric of the tale!"

:smallmad:

Beleriphon
2017-03-29, 10:24 AM
"Here's a form of magic that would triple the yield of crops and can be cast without drawbacks by 1/5th of the population... but I'm still going to present a society of landbound serfs under yearly threat of starvation, with 95% of the population involved in farming. Wait, you think I should include possible agelessness for people who aren't evil? That would make the setting totally illogical and destroy the moral fabric of the tale!"

:smallmad:

In fairness immortality can be done in a few ways in fiction. You can go the undead monster with liches, vampires, and other assorted gribblies. All of them are monsters of one sort or another. One of other methods is being sufficiently awesome like the Eight Immortals from Taoist beliefs, who are immortal by virtue of being awesome Taoists. Eberron takes a third route with the Undying Court of Aerenal. They aren't undead perse and are created via some kind of religious devotion on the part of the elves where the court as a whole is effectively treated as a deity for the purposes of the game. Eberron also doesn't tend towards alignment absolutes for creatures (good red dragon, evil gold dragons for example) even if it uses the alignment system in descriptive rather than prescriptive way.

In comparison the lich is basically side stepping the whole learn how to do stuff and be meditative and calm to achieve a higher state of being, and just decide they'll do something horrific to gain immortality and damn the consequences.

I kind of like the idea that at least part of the ritual for lichdom involves tricking another person to willing take the lich's place in the after life.

Vitruviansquid
2017-03-29, 10:50 AM
Err, while I agree that there is a place for black-and-white morality in fiction, you choose a pretty terrible exemple.

Warhammer is NOT a black-and-white morality setting. Some witch hunters are actually protecting the situations from threats, others are pretty much horrible people who commit horrific acts out of fanaticism or sadism.

That is because I did not use Warhammer as an example of black and white morality, but rather as an example of a setting that forces us to suspend our real world morality.

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 11:24 AM
That is because I did not use Warhammer as an example of black and white morality, but rather as an example of a setting that forces us to suspend our real world morality.

...but it doesn't? Not really, at least. It's a grim world full of jerks and monsters, but they're judged by our standards as much as by the in-setting ones.


For some reason, certain worldbuilders (authors or game setting creators or whoever) who are willing to introduce all sorts of elements that would -- if actually followed through to their logical conclusion -- utterly change the setting into something unlike the real world and unlike what the worldbuilder ends up presenting to us, and who are so often willing to ignore in part or in total the implications of those elements...

...are absolutely against including any form of immortality or agelessness that isn't totally and irredeemable evil. As if protagonists and allies not eventually dying of old age would uniquely shatter the setting or make it completely untenable.

"Here's a form of magic that would triple the yield of crops and can be cast without drawbacks by 1/5th of the population... but I'm still going to present a society of landbound serfs under yearly threat of starvation, with 95% of the population involved in farming. Wait, you think I should include possible agelessness for people who aren't evil? That would make the setting totally illogical and destroy the moral fabric of the tale!"

:smallmad:

For what it's worth, DnD 3.X, 4e and 5e all includes options for immortality that are *not* totally and irredeemably evil.

LughSpear
2017-03-29, 11:41 AM
Don't Lichs have to to like commit mass murder to become a lich or something? Like the ritual to split the soul is evil isn't it?

Segev
2017-03-29, 11:48 AM
Part of the reason why immortality requires "irredeemable evil" from a narrative standpoint is simply the question of why anybody would bother with the "evil version" if a non-evil version (which wouldn't get do-gooders trying to thwart your attempt, nor get people seeking revenge on you for doing it) existed.

This can be answered a few ways, but the essence of them all will come down to the evil version being easier or costing the user less. But, for that to work, the requisite "evil cost" must be something that isn't too onerous to pay in terms of things the evil jerk who uses it would care about. Every day, he has to cast a spell that kills a random person in the world, but he doesn't have to know nor care who it is nor have them in his power? Sure, why not? It requires you find a new body, belonging to somebody young and with physical features you like, every few decades? That probably is okay, too. Every day, he has to consume the life force of a helpless person of his race? That's a bit more iffy, because it means an exotic food supply that tends to make others mad and get you on hit lists. Not to mention the sheer expense of keeping it going.

It requires a singularly evil act, once? Okay, that might we worth doing, since it is a one-and-done deal. As long as the non-evil immortality solutions don't cost even less.

Elans are a non-evil solution for immortality, but the cost to the character is high if not insurmountable. If non-human, the would-be elan is just plain out of luck. If human, the would-be elan - even if the costs to pay for the ritual are negligible for some reason - has to give up all the power and skill he's accumulated throughout his life and start over. He may or may not lose enough memories for those who believe memories make the man to declare him a different person. But he's giving up a LOT and essentially starting over.

Lich-based immortality has an additional attractive edge: you come back from anything that tries to kill you, even if it succeeds in destroying your body entirely. So unique features like that could make "evil" immortality more attractive than non-evil.


If immortality has a non-evil solution which is cost effective compared to evil versions, then it makes little sense for people to use evil versions. As "the quest for immortality" is a prime villain motivation, it behooves writers to keep it as something that there's a reason to oppose causing to happen.

Jan Mattys
2017-03-29, 11:49 AM
Rowling goes down the same road with "wicked immortality" and "an unspeakably evil act", and it gets tedious.

Somehow, I'm not impressed by being told that an act is so evil that you can't tell us what it is. Between reality and imagination, the whole notion rings hollow.

You wouldn't like Planescape Torment then lol

I find this very similar to the question "What would a paladin do if he met the Nameless One?". Imagine a saintly Nameless One. A sincerely, deeply caring individual. Who just happens to be damned for all time no matter what he does. Someone who did something in the past so evil and wrong that no matter how much time he spends trying to behave he won't ever make a dent.
The evil mark on him would be unbearable for a Paladin to sense, and yet the Paladin (who is - largely speaking - a human being) would probably also realise that the guy standing in front of him lives in total, complete remorse and that it's been millennia since he last did anything remotely evil.

Honestly it wouldn't be wrong to call a Paladin sticking his flaming sword into such a creature's chest "murderer".

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 12:05 PM
Don't Lichs have to to like commit mass murder to become a lich or something?

In 5e, you have to commit mass murder to *keep* being a Lich, as you need to eat souls regularly. The process of transforming into a Lich involves charming little things like bargaining with evil entities to even learn how to do the ritual, which most likely will leave the caster heavily indebted to them, and then you have to kill yourself by ingesting a mix of poison and the blood of a sapient creature whose soul you're destroying.

NichG
2017-03-29, 12:39 PM
If you're "completely rewriting" the person, then perhaps yes,they could be forgiven. But that's introducing a new scenario, not proving the existing one "bad." Besides, a lich who was willing to go to such lengths to preserve his own existence would consider such a death of personality at least as unacceptable as actual final death.

The instant complete rewrite is primarily a thought experiment for me to determine whether I could imagine forgiveness as possible or not. If I accept that people change, I have to accept that its at least conceivably possible for people to change by an arbitrary amount. Furthermore, it makes clear that the 'unforgivableness' is more tied to the presence or absence of significant change in the actor than anything to do with the historical fact that a particular action was taken at some point in the past.

That is to say, what is the mental process I go through when I decide that I do not forgive someone? It's because I feel as though a person's past actions predict their future behavior, and so learning or experiencing something negative about them at one point means that I protect myself by thinking of them as someone who would do that particular thing again. So then forgiveness means reaching a point where I am willing to believe that the person is not particularly likely to do that kind of horrible thing again.

People change significantly on decadal timescales just as a byproduct of living their life - after a hundred of those intervals, I'd gues most personae will have quietly 'died' while the person wasn't looking if you start talking about lifespans in the millennia. If I found out that someone committed mass murder when they were 15, got locked away in jail, found they were immortal somewhere along the way, then spent the next, say, thousand years being an upstanding citizen and helping people without any particular spots on their record or indications of backsliding, yeah, I'd probably be prepared to forgive them the mass murder. The observations of a thousand years of consistent behavior would be a stronger indication to me of their character than the one historical event. I'd want to know 'hey, what was up with that?', but if I got responses that indicated a believable trajectory of personal change, sure, no reason to treat them like the person they used to be.

But if they said 'no reason, just haven't felt like it recently' then maybe not so much forgiveness there. There's a wide gulf between 'forgiveness is possible' and 'I choose to forgive', and part of bridging that is giving me what I need to adapt my beliefs about the person.



The idea behind the utterly reprehensible act which must be committed to become a lich is that you can't do it and be a good person. You can't even be neutral and engage in such willful evil, even once.

Sure, you can construct odd corner cases around this, but they generally are going to involve incredible ignorance or effectively destroying the lich who did it. Want your excuse for a "good lich" who was born as one b Aecause the old one's mind was completely replaced by this new, genuinely nice and kind person? Okay, go for it.

When we get to cosmic alignment as opposed to forgiveness, there's something dissociated involved. If you want to say 'anyone who does this act has their soul irreversibly tainted by evil, so no matter what they do they will go to the lower planes when they are destroyed, will always ping as evil, etc' then sure, I can buy that. The same way that getting a big radiation dose and then spending the rest of my life being really cautious about radiation safety won't remove the genetic damage. But then the result is a setup where I'm more inclined to treat cosmic alignments of all sorts as unfortunate afflictions and not indications of how I should regard that individual in my interactions with them. But that opens the can of worms that in such a world, picking a side between Good and Evil and making decisions based on that would potentially be a pretty willfully evil thing to do (in the ethical or moral sense). In such a world, I could imagine that I could forgive the lich their single act of unspeakable evil, but the paladin might be the one who is beyond forgiveness (in the sense that they've actively committed to a continuing pattern of behavior that I would expect to bring them into moral conflict with me at some future point).

halfeye
2017-03-29, 12:53 PM
Because its not "just" the act of murder, something you are yourself making disturbingly light of. Murder is the first part, but then theres some other non-specified part that that does the actual transferring of your soul to the object, and THAT is the part that is nausea-inducing.

Gas chambers aren't unspeakable. I really, really have an intellectual problem with the idea of an unspeakable crime or process when the holocaust isn't unspeakable.

Rowling telling her editor and the editor going "no, you can't put that in print" I can well believe, some of her pen-name books are pretty sadistic.

Segev
2017-03-29, 01:26 PM
Forgiveness is an interesting concept, that probably goes beyond the scope of this forum to discuss. You can forgive somebody for anything. Whether they are truly able to atone for it, however, is another matter. Can they make it up?

In a sense, murder is almost irredeemable in that regard: you cannot bring the slain back to life. Torture is also pretty tricky: you cannot undo the torment they endured. And trying might be, in a way, worse, since memory modification is pretty scary stuff and of questionable acceptability.


In some faiths, actually being relieved of the burden of one's sins is beyond the power of mortal men to achieve on their own; it requires a divine gift.

The question over whether that gift alone is enough, or an actual demonstration of effort to make up for it as far as the sinner is able is required, is a dividing line amongst a few denominations of those faiths.


D&D 3e (and earlier editions) has the atonement spell, which can restore alignment after the target has done something to undergo a change of heart. Perhaps, then, the lich who has truly changed from the being who was willing to engage in that vile act and has done all he could to make up for ever having done it would be able to achieve a Good alignment if he received atonement from a Good cleric.

The point I keep trying to make, and am not sure I'm making clearly enough, is that the lich, having been willing to engage in the "unspeakably evil" act, is evil. His willingness to do it and his willful execution of it damns him. Changing later is hard, if possible at all. But there's no "well, I'll do it, then I'll repent for it and be Good again" plan that works the way it's planned. It's harder to have a real change of heart when you went into something knowing you would need to have one after you'd done it.

Bohandas
2017-03-29, 01:32 PM
In a sense, murder is almost irredeemable in that regard: you cannot bring the slain back to life.

Yeah, but that doesn't really apply to D&D

Bohandas
2017-03-29, 01:35 PM
In 5e, you have to commit mass murder to *keep* being a Lich, as you need to eat souls regularly. The process of transforming into a Lich involves charming little things like bargaining with evil entities to even learn how to do the ritual, which most likely will leave the caster heavily indebted to them, and then you have to kill yourself by ingesting a mix of poison and the blood of a sapient creature whose soul you're destroying.

So basically a knockoff of the Emperor from WH40k?

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 02:00 PM
So basically a knockoff of the Emperor from WH40k?

Not really, no.

Segev
2017-03-29, 02:23 PM
In 5e, liches trade being ugly and having a more severe hunger (they MUST kill their victims) for being able to go out in the sunlight, compared to vampires. I'm not sure that's worth it.

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 02:30 PM
In 5e, liches trade being ugly and having a more severe hunger (they MUST kill their victims) for being able to go out in the sunlight, compared to vampires. I'm not sure that's worth it.

They also got to stay themselves.

Their horrible, evil selves.

Beleriphon
2017-03-29, 02:41 PM
So basically a knockoff of the Emperor from WH40k?

At a certain point the Emperor of Mankind isn't actually being given a choice in his current state. By all accounts he knew Horus would kill him and then he'd be reborn as something more necessary to guide mankind than a warrior king.

NichG
2017-03-29, 02:41 PM
Forgiveness is an interesting concept, that probably goes beyond the scope of this forum to discuss. You can forgive somebody for anything. Whether they are truly able to atone for it, however, is another matter. Can they make it up?

In a sense, murder is almost irredeemable in that regard: you cannot bring the slain back to life. Torture is also pretty tricky: you cannot undo the torment they endured. And trying might be, in a way, worse, since memory modification is pretty scary stuff and of questionable acceptability.


In some faiths, actually being relieved of the burden of one's sins is beyond the power of mortal men to achieve on their own; it requires a divine gift.

The question over whether that gift alone is enough, or an actual demonstration of effort to make up for it as far as the sinner is able is required, is a dividing line amongst a few denominations of those faiths.


D&D 3e (and earlier editions) has the atonement spell, which can restore alignment after the target has done something to undergo a change of heart. Perhaps, then, the lich who has truly changed from the being who was willing to engage in that vile act and has done all he could to make up for ever having done it would be able to achieve a Good alignment if he received atonement from a Good cleric.

The point I keep trying to make, and am not sure I'm making clearly enough, is that the lich, having been willing to engage in the "unspeakably evil" act, is evil. His willingness to do it and his willful execution of it damns him. Changing later is hard, if possible at all. But there's no "well, I'll do it, then I'll repent for it and be Good again" plan that works the way it's planned. It's harder to have a real change of heart when you went into something knowing you would need to have one after you'd done it.

This gets into that dissociation between cosmic alignment and on-the-ground ethics of people. If Evil is thrown around by cosmic forces in too definitional a way, it risks losing meaning as actually being 'bad'.

In a fantasy setting there can certainly be an objectively verifiable god handing down judgements which anyone can go and look up with the right spell. But if those judgements don't actually correlate with how the judged behave, they don't really mean much. In that sense, someone could be Evil but still be the kind of person you want in your community, looking after your kids, etc; while someone Good could end up being a monster as long as they took pains to do so in a cosmically-approved way.

An interesting variant would be if alignment is explicitly infallibly prescient - someone who will murder but hasn't is exactly as Evil as someone who murdered before. That'd present a bit of complexity to the 'ongoing' thing - I don't have a good answer to how I'd reason about forgiveness in such a world.

Segev
2017-03-29, 02:53 PM
The idea is less that the atonement (spell or otherwise) is necessary to satisfy some arbitrary cosmic "because I said so" alignment, and more that it's the final "cleanser" to wipe away whatever metaphysical stains of the alignment(s) you're swearing off might still have on your soul based on your past actions.

So, for example, if a free spirit with a kindly heart broke laws for the good of those he could see based on his own judgment because he found rules to be getting in the way of what was right were to undergo a slow change of heart - perhaps because he saw one too many times how his failure to adhere to the rules led to circumstances he couldn't foresee, but which the rules were put in place to handle - and he also started to realize that his kindness was being exploited by those who may not deserve it, and was unintentionally harming people who he felt "deserved it" when, again, he really didn't know...

...if this free spirit slowly started to believe that the rules are there for a reason, and that fair application of them to all regardless of how a kind and generous heart would like to handle it is the only way to prevent greater misery and unhappiness brought about by disorder, I'd argue that he's sliding from CG to LN. Definitely a well-meaning LN, but LN nonetheless.

If he were a well-meaning LN who found himself working with the LE church of Hextor, and wanted to join their clergy, he probably would need an Atonement, despite being LN now, for his past Chaotic and Good deeds before he could really take on the mantle of Hextor's power. Again, this isn't an arbitrary "Hextor says so" thing, but a statement about the condition of his soul: it is still stained by the Chaos and Good he once performed with great zeal. He lacks the power to release them. The atonement spell, therefore, wipes away those actions' metaphysical connection to him. Yes, he still did them, but they no longer have power over him.

Like a Paladin who cannot have his powers while a Chaotic deed rests upon his soul, this now-LN would-be cleric of Hextor couldn't become a cleric of Hextor with the Chaotic and Good deeds in his soul. Hextor's pure LE power couldn't flow through him with those obstructive stains there.

It doesn't matter how long you stay out of the mud if you never bathe after having been wallowing in it, after all: you're still dirty.

icefractal
2017-03-29, 02:56 PM
In 5e, liches trade being ugly and having a more severe hunger (they MUST kill their victims) for being able to go out in the sunlight, compared to vampires. I'm not sure that's worth it.Especially not if Reincarnate is still on the table (Is it? I'm not familiar with 5E Reincarnate). That's the funny thing about all the extreme immortality methods in 3.5 / PF - you can just reincarnate your way back to adult age periodically and live forever. Sure, Druids might not be on board if they knew your plan, but that's what scrolls (or deception, mind control, etc) are for.

But even in that context, Lich made sense for a certain type of person, because it was the ultimate in self-sufficiency. You don't have to mess around with other people, or remembering to do anything, the rest of the world could be destroyed and you'd still last forever. And you come back from destruction without any allies helping you, which is handy.

If you're that highly reliant on victims, it pretty much negates that. Maybe if it was easy to do - something a Wizard who wasn't powerful enough to stockpile Reincarnations could still manage - then it would serve that purpose. Not sure I like Liches being the chump option though.

ShaneMRoth
2017-03-29, 03:07 PM
If a lich is the legitimate ruler of a kingdom, has not violated the laws of the kingdom, and treats their people fairly enough (for an evil creature)... What is a paladin to do in this situation if:
They live in this kingdom?
They visit this kingdom?
The lich visits their country?

In neither country is being a lich necessarily illegal.

In the World of Greyhawk an evil physical god ruled as a sovereign in the Empire of Iuz, so this scenario has a solid pedigree in D&D. Ravenloft is based on the assumption that a vampire was competently governing his homeland. I'm not sure about Forgotten Realms or Eberron, but I am hopeful that another denizen of the Playground will provide an example for those settings.

I am assuming that the Lich-King is legally recognized as a bonefide ruler (a formal title and is treated as a sovereign... however reluctantly... by other heads of state in the setting and the like) I am assuming further that the Lich-King is ruling over a functioning state (businesses run, crops are harvested, a stable standing army, treaties and trade agreements are enforced, a functioning court system, and the like.) The state would likely be oppressive and likely conform to the Crapsack World trope from TV Tropes, but I also assume it is a functioning society.

I am also assuming a state of relative peace, because if the paladin were from a nation that had declared war on the lich's state, or if the paladin were part of a faction of a declared civil war, the paladin would be free to kill the lich on sight.

I'll leave the matter of the lich's phylactery aside for the moment and assume that killing him (however temporarily) and taking over his administration would effectively depose him. While the lich was reforming his body, there would be plenty of time to coronate a different head of state.

In my setting, a paladin would be expected to treat a sovereign who is a lich the same way as any other problematic sovereign. The paladin would seek to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Part of the paladin's code is to Respect Legitimate Authority. Therefore, assassination would be off the table for a paladin. And by that, I mean I would make it clear to the paladin's player that even an attempt at killing or deposing the lich-king would provoke a fall from grace. (Remember, if the paladin were at war with the lich, then the rules of engagement would be kill on sight.) Respect Legitimate Authority severely restricts a paladin's combat options against heads of state during peacetime.

Deposing a sovereign... even a lich... would cause enough civil unrest to pose an immediate risk of killing thousands of citizens. A wave of people would likely be killed in the chaos that followed the loss of the sovereign... and the inability of the government to function would kill off thousands more in the interval between the destabilization of the lich government and the establishment of whatever government formed in the power vacuum left behind. And the power vacuum left behind would likely be a variation on the previous government.

The scenario from the OP didn't provide for a True and Just King to step in and rule the land, so I'm not assuming that the oppressive lich-run government would be replaced with an Arthurian Fisher King constitutional monarchy. My assumption is that it would be the same Crap, put in a slightly different Sack.

Having said all that, the paladin's right to self-defense would remain undiminished in the eyes of his divine higher power. If the Lich-King sent some mooks to kill the paladin, then the paladin could slay those mooks without fear of a fall from grace. In fact, the paladin would be within his rights to have the mooks' corpses delivered to the Lich-King so that they might be buried with full military honors.

Resident Paladins would be expected to serve as loyal opposition to the Lich-King by day and to function as The Resistance in the shadows. These paladins would be expected to speak truth to power and call out the Lich-King every time he overstepped his authority. Player-character paladins would be allowed to ham this up and enjoy it. Local paladins would petition the Lich-King to use his power for the maximum social good, and to make sure he knew that there were judgmental eyes on him at all times.

Visiting Paladins would serve as either official or unofficial diplomats from their homelands, they would also apply pressure to the Lich-King and his administration to rule wisely and would work tirelessly to prevent and avert a war. And unofficially, the visiting paladins would also help whatever Resistance was in place, including but in no way limited to facilitating the freeing of slaves and the expatriation of the oppressed. Visiting paladins would also publicly embarrass the Lich-King, within the limits of social decorum, by example. Kittens would be rescued from trees. Maidens would be escorted safely through streets. And bards would be deployed to sing of these good deeds. These Paladins would go full Boy Scout in public and dare anyone-- including the Lich-King-- to criticize them for it.

When the Lich-King visited a paladin's homeland, the paladins might be tasked with assisting the Lich's guard to protect the Lich-King from assassination attempts. These paladins would press their home court advantage fully, also setting examples of conduct that made the Lich-King look like a schmuck by comparison. An assassination attempt would be out of the question, but angry villagers armed with rotten fruit would show up to pelt the Lich-King with eerie frequency and rotted fruit would be peculiarly handy. The Lich-King's guard would be prevented from retaliating against such villagers.

Segev
2017-03-29, 03:11 PM
As a 4th level Druid spell, reincarnate can be mimicked by limited wish, too, so even if you can't talk druids into helping with serial reincarnation schema, a wizard or sorcerer of higher level can arrange for it for his friends and business partners. More expensive (costs XP, or gp in PF, after all) but quite workable.

Heck, a 20th level wizard in PF is able to sacrifice his 20th level feat for immortality. He stops aging and has no maximum age.

Admittedly, lichdom kicks in as low as 11th level. Which is before even limited wish becomes available. Though a one-shot reincarnation chamber - perhaps some sort of sarcophagus - activated by a creature dying inside of it, would be 4*7*50+1000 = 1800 gp market price, and anybody with Craft Wondrous Item could theoretically make it, assuming they could make a DC 12 (if they have reincarnation) or 17 (if they don't) Spellcraft check.

Arrange the least unpleasant way possible (without spending still more gp) to die inside the sarcophagus, and you have 1-off "return to young adulthood" as an item! Species may vary.

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 03:27 PM
Reincarnation doesn't help you live longer than your natural lifespan, aside from giving you your new form's lifespan.

Segev
2017-03-29, 03:39 PM
I see nothing that says reincarnated creatures still die "when their time is up" or any other language implying a finite life span shorter than what an adult would expect to be left in his life at the apparent age of the new body.

Heck, PF's version, at least, explicitly states it can bring back creatures that have died of old age.

Bohandas
2017-03-29, 03:49 PM
Even the 5e lich could potentially still swing goodness or at least neutrality if they were a demon hunter or somethig

Keltest
2017-03-29, 03:51 PM
I see nothing that says reincarnated creatures still die "when their time is up" or any other language implying a finite life span shorter than what an adult would expect to be left in his life at the apparent age of the new body.

Heck, PF's version, at least, explicitly states it can bring back creatures that have died of old age.

In 3.5, it explicitly cannot reverse death from old age. However given that the body is explicitly that of a "young adult" one could probably get around this by killing the intended target before they die of old age and then reincarnating them, rather than waiting for after the fact.

awa
2017-03-29, 03:52 PM
huh you come back as a young adult, i was thinking how weird it would be as a child to skip puberty and go straight to adulthood. Of course realistically a Troglodytes body is probably very different than a haflings possible more disconcerting than the difference between child an adult (mammal to reptile and all). Course d&d basically treats every species as an American in a funny hat so whatever.

Frozen_Feet
2017-03-29, 03:57 PM
How do we "know this"? Because a confused and repeatedly mind-magiced old man says so?

Based on the rest of the narrative, he has to have been right, so this point is moot. Nothing in the books nor Rowling's own words actually contradict nor falsify this.


~1200 murders every day in the real world, and we know from the books the process requires a killing for every Horocrux... but that's somehow the detail that JKR is so reluctant to explain, and comparable to something that almost made her editor vomit? Really?

No.

What I've said several times is that the details you're referring to are not necessary for understanding why creating Horcrux is evil. The number of murders or speakability there of is irrelevant to what I'm saying.


It's made out to be far more evil and repulsive than just the act of murder...

Maybe, maybe not. Does not make it relevant, does not mean murder is not a vital component.


In both cases, it's made out to be a remarkably evil act, and treated as "unspeakable". In both cases, the "mystery" doesn't make the act seem more evil, it's just eye-rollingly cliched.

In both cases, if it were just killing someone as part of the ritual, then that could be said, but it's clearly not just killing someone.

Yes, but in one case we know murder is vital component of the procedure, and that it leads to lasting metaphysical damage to one's soul, and that the only way to fix this damage is regret, so a Horcrux-using wizard by definition has to be an unrepentant murderer.

Where as many versions of the Lich's phylactery don't include such details, which makes their evilness a much more mystifying quality.

In short, based on known qualities of a Horcrux, there is no mystery to why a wizard using such is vile. The unknown traits of the ritual may make it more vile, they may not, but there's no room for arguing that creating Horcrux is totes okay, guys.

Where as with a Lich's phylactery, there are no equivalent known traits.

Do you actually disagree with this, or do you just want to complain about Rowling's squeamishness?

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 04:12 PM
Even the 5e lich could potentially still swing goodness or at least neutrality if they were a demon hunter or somethig

No they couldn't.

You have to do a lot of evil things to be a Lich, and keep doing them over and over.

Kane0
2017-03-29, 04:17 PM
Is it better for the plot and more fun for the table to have it be a legitimate conundrum to be explored or a clear cut problem that needs resolving?

Answering that should do it

Tiktakkat
2017-03-29, 04:49 PM
In the World of Greyhawk an evil physical god ruled as a sovereign in the Empire of Iuz, so this scenario has a solid pedigree in D&D.

Iuz is Chaotic Evil, and ruled in a gratuitously callous and evil manner. The only reason he didn't kick puppies during his morning constitutional is because he had them all turned into wargs long ago. Likewise kittens were off the menu due to extinction from overeating.
Nothing about Iuz qualifies as "treat(s) their people fairly enough (for an evil creature)".


Ravenloft is based on the assumption that a vampire was competently governing his homeland.

Strahd is a Darklord, cursed beyond cursing, damned beyond damning, Mary Sued beyond Mary Suing. The reason he doesn't kick puppies and eat kittens is because he can close off the mists and seal hapless puppy-like adventurers in his realm of horror, tormenting them until he gets bored enough to consume their kittenish souls, turning their corpses into upgraded eponymous zombies and skeletons to torment the next batch of PCs foolish enough to let their DM get his hands on the setting books.
He goes out of his way to treat the people unfairly enough for an evil creature that they went and gave him other evil creatures as neighbors just to taunt him over not being able to inflict teh evulz on everyone.


I'm not sure about Forgotten Realms or Eberron, but I am hopeful that another denizen of the Playground will provide an example for those settings.

FR has lichs hither and yon, powered up beyond any limits so that only Elminister can possibly affect them. This naturally caused such an imbalance that they had to create a Good lich monster just so players could meet one without having to cast summon deus ex machine in order to survive.

Eberron has Lady Vol, who converted an entire kingdom to wallowing in necromancy as part of her quest for vengeance, then went so far that her pawn rebelled and gave her the boot for being too over the top. And he's a crazed blood-drinking vampire who has feasted on his own descendants!
Of course Eberron also features a specific subtype of non-evil undead so it can avert and play other games with standard tropes.


So no, this really doesn't have a solid pedigree in D&D settings.
You have to some significant digging to find non-gratuitously evil lichs running around, and those tend to be minor asides or footnotes rather than significantly developed NPCs.

Unoriginal
2017-03-29, 05:05 PM
Strahd doesn't even rule competently by evil standards. It's all the "tragedy" of the character: he's talented, smart, powerful, cunning... yet he keeps failing and failing, because he's trapped in a situation in which his flaws will constantly doom him.

Bohandas
2017-03-29, 05:17 PM
I think lyzandred the mad was neutral. Or near to it. Of course that's because he had himself sealed off in a difficult to access demiplane when he realized he was starting to go off the deep end

FabulousFizban
2017-03-29, 05:36 PM
See Geb from pathfinder

Mordar
2017-03-29, 06:36 PM
For some reason, certain worldbuilders (authors or game setting creators or whoever) who are willing to introduce all sorts of elements that would -- if actually followed through to their logical conclusion -- utterly change the setting into something unlike the real world and unlike what the worldbuilder ends up presenting to us, and who are so often willing to ignore in part or in total the implications of those elements...

...are absolutely against including any form of immortality or agelessness that isn't totally and irredeemable evil. As if protagonists and allies not eventually dying of old age would uniquely shatter the setting or make it completely untenable.

"Here's a form of magic that would triple the yield of crops and can be cast without drawbacks by 1/5th of the population... but I'm still going to present a society of landbound serfs under yearly threat of starvation, with 95% of the population involved in farming. Wait, you think I should include possible agelessness for people who aren't evil? That would make the setting totally illogical and destroy the moral fabric of the tale!"

:smallmad:


.For what it's worth, DnD 3.X, 4e and 5e all includes options for immortality that are *not* totally and irredeemably evil.

Additionally, the author being discussed earlier (JKR) described a character with functional immortality who not only wasn't irredeemably evil, but was actually willing to give up that immortality to keep other people safe from the possibility of it (the method for immortality) being misused by bad people.

I guess that's probably another eye-rolling cliche, though, right? Like actually reading material before making negative criticisms about the content of the material.


Gas chambers aren't unspeakable. I really, really have an intellectual problem with the idea of an unspeakable crime or process when the holocaust isn't unspeakable.

Rowling telling her editor and the editor going "no, you can't put that in print" I can well believe, some of her pen-name books are pretty sadistic.

Plus, "unspeakable" really does have some other connotations beyond the clear denotation...it just boils down to "really really bad". Are there better words? Yeah, probably.

I don't know that I buy the idea of JKR having such a horrible idea that it made the editor literally sick...perhaps that was artistic license. Maybe "I described it and it was soundly and emotionally rejected by my editor as a sickening thing to put in a book with a primary/significant readership of school-aged children" would have been more believable (and possibly more accurate).

Maintain some topic relevance:

I think it is a potentially interesting topic to explore as long as it is done from a fair perspective and not, as mentioned earlier, as a paladin trap.

Assuming the lich has to be, by nature of its formation and existence, an Evil creature, does the Good group have to immediately and violently oppose it? Well...that depends on how the characters have been played to that point in the story. Have they just discovered the nature of the king? Are they by their nature hunters of the undead? What are the dictates of the Paladin's divinity/code? All of that plays into the response...as does (I think) the potency of the Paladin.

I think a solid case can be made for an array of responses from monitoring the lich to opposing non-violently to open hostility. All of them are reasonable. I do say this as a fan of the "reasonable paladin interaction" school of thought though. "Paladin" no more dictates specific actions than "Elf" or "Rogue". Don't punish someone for playing a "good guy"...but by the same token, make them responsible for their actions.

I think the "weakest" case is for the Paladin to visit the kingdom, knowing the identity of the ruler, and initiate hostilities without a darn good reason (and more than "my Paladin 101 training says so!"). Leroy Jenkins actions should be met with disdain and violently put down...and if there is already an in-game reason for the lich kingdom to suffer greater badness if the lich is removed, then by all means have those consequences occur. But I don't think you should artificially create that situation to punish the player(s).

At the end of the day, if you want there to be open hostility (or if the players demand it), allow it and reasonably consider the consequences. If you want the paladin to have a crisis on conscience about it, craft it and support it without it being an auto-fall situation.

I know I'd like both sides of the situation (player or DM) as long as it was even handed.

- M

Psikerlord
2017-03-29, 06:48 PM
I think this is a very interesting question, and also a good example of why alignment should be removed from D&D. Makes things much more interesting.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-29, 06:53 PM
Based on the rest of the narrative, he has to have been right, so this point is moot. Nothing in the books nor Rowling's own words actually contradict nor falsify this.


No, we know from the rest of the narrative that Voldomort's soul is splintered... we don't know for fact that it's "just" murdering people that did it.




No.

What I've said several times is that the details you're referring to are not necessary for understanding why creating Horcrux is evil. The number of murders or speakability there of is irrelevant to what I'm saying.


The issue isn't whether it's evil (and repeatedly trying to go back to that is a blatant red herring). The issue is (and has been since the comparison was first made, by me) this notion of something "unspeakably evil" being involved -- and compared to some real-world examples of humans inflicting horror on humans, "unspeakable evil" is a trite notion that's almost always an attempt to put the burden of invoking emotional response on the reader's imagination.




Maybe, maybe not. Does not make it relevant, does not mean murder is not a vital component.


It's absolutely made out to be more than just a normal act of murder, I provided the JKR's statements that make that clear.




Yes, but in one case we know murder is vital component of the procedure, and that it leads to lasting metaphysical damage to one's soul, and that the only way to fix this damage is regret, so a Horcrux-using wizard by definition has to be an unrepentant murderer.


So what separates "the most evil dark wizard ever" from countless "muggle" killers? What separates making a Horocrux from "mundane" murder, such that wizards who've engaged in such are not viewed with the horror and revulsion that those who realize what Voldy has done view him with for doing it?




Where as many versions of the Lich's phylactery don't include such details, which makes their evilness a much more mystifying quality.


Both supposedly involve "unspeakable acts" in the pursuit of immortality, acts that go beyond "just" murder. Neither is any more or less "mysterious".




In short, based on known qualities of a Horcrux, there is no mystery to why a wizard using such is vile.


As noted above, if one insists that it's "just" the murder that makes it vile, then there's plenty of mystery as to what makes a wizard using such more vile than thousands of "muggle" murderers.




The unknown traits of the ritual may make it more vile, they may not,


Unless making a Horocrux is no more vile than the 1000+ "mundane" murders committed by "ordinary" murderers every day, then the difference MUST lie in the "unknown traits".




but there's no room for arguing that creating Horcrux is totes okay, guys.


That would appear to be an argument against an assertion that no one has made.




Where as with a Lich's phylactery, there are no equivalent known traits.


In neither case do the known facts illuminate what makes the act -- creating a Horocrux or becoming a lich -- extraordinarily or "unspeakably" vile.




Do you actually disagree with this, or do you just want to complain about Rowling's squeamishness?


Obviously I disagree with your mistaken interpretation. Leave the strawmen in the fields where they belong.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-29, 06:55 PM
Gas chambers aren't unspeakable. I really, really have an intellectual problem with the idea of an unspeakable crime or process when the holocaust isn't unspeakable.



Precisely.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-29, 06:56 PM
Additionally, the author being discussed earlier (JKR) described a character with functional immortality who not only wasn't irredeemably evil, but was actually willing to give up that immortality to keep other people safe from the possibility of it (the method for immortality) being misused by bad people.

I guess that's probably another eye-rolling cliche, though, right? Like actually reading material before making negative criticisms about the content of the material.


I wasn't referring to JKR in the above statement -- why would you think I was?

Koo Rehtorb
2017-03-29, 07:37 PM
People are getting weirdly hung up on the word "unspeakable".

All it is is a synonym for "really bad". You could absolutely describe the Holocaust as unspeakable, while not literally meaning you are unable to speak about it.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-29, 07:51 PM
People are getting weirdly hung up on the word "unspeakable".

All it is is a synonym for "really bad". You could absolutely describe the Holocaust as unspeakable, while not literally meaning you are unable to speak about it.


In both cases, the sources literally refuse to speak of what's involved.

Tiktakkat
2017-03-29, 08:24 PM
I think lyzandred the mad was neutral. Or near to it. Of course that's because he had himself sealed off in a difficult to access demiplane when he realized he was starting to go off the deep end

Lyzandred gets away with being LN.
And is otherwise exceptionally minor, being a vague adventure seed with 3 modules eventually built around him, then completely forgotten.
So, "minor aside or footnote rather than significantly developed NPC."

Compare Lyzandred to Vecna or Acererak. Those are big name, "standard evil", lichs.

NichG
2017-03-29, 08:55 PM
It doesn't matter how long you stay out of the mud if you never bathe after having been wallowing in it, after all: you're still dirty.

This helps narrow down the dissonance. It's the idea of having different ethics apply to people depending on what amounts to 'being covered in mud'. The severity of that gap corresponds to the degree to which alignment appears dissociated from practical ethical and moral considerations to me (and correspondingly the less seriously I'll be inclined to take alignment considerations in that setting)

Again, I could see a difference if there was some metaphysical mind control going on - a character with the tinge of evil being irresistably compelled to do more evil - or it supernaturally predicted future behavior, or things like that. But if it's just 'mud', let the gods worry about their rugs but it seems pointless to factor it into the decisions of mortals.

Segev
2017-03-29, 08:59 PM
It's the difference between "likelyhood to do it again" and "having received absolution for having done it."

To some degree, absolution is more for the sinner's sake.

That's from the "good redeeming evil" perspective, obviously. From the "have become evil after a lifetime of good" perspective, it's more like, "You've embraced the ways of strength. You've given up your weaknesses. But you still are plagued by them. Let us cleanse you of the past, that you may go forward pure in your focus and will."

NichG
2017-03-29, 09:55 PM
It's the difference between "likelyhood to do it again" and "having received absolution for having done it."

To some degree, absolution is more for the sinner's sake.

That's from the "good redeeming evil" perspective, obviously. From the "have become evil after a lifetime of good" perspective, it's more like, "You've embraced the ways of strength. You've given up your weaknesses. But you still are plagued by them. Let us cleanse you of the past, that you may go forward pure in your focus and will."

I guess the assumed need for absolution is what is bugging me. I can only really see it if there's a supernatural reason backing it up - absolution removes the radiation damage, that kind of thing. Otherwise it basically seems sort of political to me - the same way that being legally exonerated for a crime is just a different type of thing than being innocent of that crime.

Frozen_Feet
2017-03-30, 05:01 AM
So what separates "the most evil dark wizard ever" from countless "muggle" killers? What separates making a Horocrux from "mundane" murder, such that wizards who've engaged in such are not viewed with the horror and revulsion that those who realize what Voldy has done view him with for doing it?

1) the act of placing a splinter of your soul to an external object and the lasting metaphysical damage it does to you. I already noted this, and it is a known function of having a Horcrux. Questioning the source material continues to be moot when it is not contradicted.

2) As already noted, a wizard having a Horcrux is always, at minimum, an unrepentant murderer. As such, it's always justified to treat them as at least that bad. Whether they're "just" that bad, or more bad, still isn't required knowledge to conclude that they're bad. You don't need to know the extraordinarily vile details of the Horcrux ritual to know they're vile.

((EDIT: and in Voldemort's specific case, he murdered at least seven people, and attempted to murder an 8th, for the express purpose of cheating death. That's pretty extraordinary in both quantity and motive when compared to your average killer. The details of the Horcrux ritual are not needed to distinquish him, and indeed, in the series they are not known to people! He's the "most evil dark wizard ever" for being an unashamed terrorist, pureblood supremacist, serial killer, user of all three Unforgivables, and plenty of other bad things. The details of the Horcrux ritual really are just details in his portofolio of wickedness.))

Again, this is in contrast to Lich's phylactery, where often even the ordinarily vile aspects are left up to guessing.

Your intellectual problems with the concept of "unspeakable evil" have been apparent from the start. They're also irrelevant to the point that you can see 1) what make a Wizard with a Horcrux bad and 2) what sets them apart from ordinary murderers from the known traits of having a Horcrux.

Jan Mattys
2017-03-30, 05:52 AM
Wait a second, all you "unspeakable is bad" warriors.

I hope the forum rules allow me to go this far, but:

Let's talk for a second about the fantasy settings. It might well be that you *know* there are gods, you *know* souls exist, you *know* there's an afterlife (or quite a few of them) and so you *know* that "life" is probably not the alpha and the omega of one's existence (at least not in the same sense an atheist would think about our real world).

As such, there might acts of irredeemable evil way worse than one you could conceive in our real world.

Just to name a staple of magical fantasy, let's fantasize about the concept of "destroying a soul.
The *soul*, however you intend it, is the very essence of a being, its foundation and purpose, way beyond its physical body. It is what allows it to enjoy (or suffer) an afterlife, what constitutes what *it is*. Destroying a soul, devouring a soul, or otherwise twist a soul in a fantasy setting would rate much higher than multiple homicide, or genocide, or whatever. It would be something ultimate, and would probably mean the culprit has absolutely no respect whatsoever for the very essence of what keeps the multiverse together. It is the ultimate, selfish act. It is way beyond any redemption because it cuts off not only life, but all other possibilities as well. Even in a multiverse with multiple revolving doors about life and death.
Or, for example, imagine a universe where all life happens, dies and goes back to the "ONE" to be recycled into new life. Destroying a soul means cutting off forever a potential part of the universe. It means you are diminishing *everything* by a little bit, forever. If you kept doing so, one day the whole universe would be a void husk.

I'm just playing with fantasy tropes here, but my point is: if you take a fantasy setting, you can definitely imagine "acts of unspeakable evil" entirely worth of the horror the term implies.

Dappershire
2017-03-30, 06:08 AM
What you're describing is Thay in the Forgotten Realms. It is still an evil empire ruled by a mad lich king that is opposed by every other country that would be considered even remotely good.

I saw the thread derail and hop back on the rail a little bit, so I just skipped ahead to posting about the OP.

I agree that a Lich, even if evil, could rule fairly. Even benignly. Undead to police the streets, doing menial jobs. Perhaps demanding the body of any naturally deceased from the family as a form of taxation (exempting them from that years taxes?).
However, I can not imagine a Lich ruling legitimately. Even in Thay, one of roleplaying's more notorious countries, The Lich is not ruling legitimately. He pulled off a civil war/coup, assassinations and all. The true Government, evil and all, are living in exile.
A kingdom wouldn't allow for a legal Lich ruler. Even if said Lich was the previous King, the crown would go to the Prince, or Regent. Even if those mysteriously didn't exist at the time, the nobility would be up in arms about a royal rule that was unending, with no royal line to marry into.
Theoretically, a Democratic nation could vote a Lich in, but even if he won, it wouldn't be for long.

Therefore, a Paladin would be directed towards ending the Lich, on both Good, and Lawful grounds.

My theory does bring into question though, how Elves deal politically with their royal line? Being immortal and all. Even assuming benevolence, why do Elves need a Royal line? How did they ever get one in the first place?

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-30, 06:57 AM
1) the act of placing a splinter of your soul to an external object and the lasting metaphysical damage it does to you. I already noted this, and it is a known function of having a Horcrux. Questioning the source material continues to be moot when it is not contradicted.


So now it's reached the point where you're taking your own interpretation as gospel truth, and accusing those who disagree with your interpretation of "questioning the source material". Nice.

I'm not questioning the source material, I'm questioning the ongoing effort to totally ignore the author's own statements regarding the material, and avoid of the inherent contradiction between "it's just the murder that makes it bad" and assertion (made at the in-fiction level, the author-statement level, and the fan-belief level) that it's somehow different from the 1000 "ordinary" murders every day in the real world, somehow "extra bad".

As for "the metaphysical damage", who gives a damn? It's his soul, he can do whatever he wants with it. If it weren't for required murders and whatever "unspeakably evil" and "sickening" details that are being obscured, it wouldn't matter a bit. That has nothing to do with what makes it vile or immoral. If he could "splinter his soul" by drinking herbal tea and reciting a poem... then there'd be no issue.

So, again, we have no idea what supposedly makes the Horocrux-maker inherently more vile than some "mundane" serial / mass / repeat murderer. Voldomort in particular was shown to be exceedingly immoral long before he created his first Horocrux, so it's not like making the damn things was some leap of evilness for him. Making the things didn't cause him to be "more evil" than he was before, it revealed how evil he already was.


Likewise, we have no idea makes liches so "extraordinarily" evil, other than having to kill people, or what makes his acts supposedly "unspeakable" such that the details are left entirely out. Cause, you know, no ordinary mundane human ever committed wholesale murder for warped reasons.



Wait a second, all you "unspeakable is bad" warriors.

I hope the forum rules allow me to go this far, but:

Let's talk for a second about the fantasy settings. It might well be that you *know* there are gods, you *know* souls exist, you *know* there's an afterlife (or quite a few of them) and so you *know* that "life" is probably not the alpha and the omega of one's existence (at least not in the same sense an atheist would think about our real world).

As such, there might acts of irredeemable evil way worse than one you could conceive in our real world.

Just to name a staple of magical fantasy, let's fantasize about the concept of "destroying a soul.
The *soul*, however you intend it, is the very essence of a being, its foundation and purpose, way beyond its physical body. It is what allows it to enjoy (or suffer) an afterlife, what constitutes what *it is*. Destroying a soul, devouring a soul, or otherwise twist a soul in a fantasy setting would rate much higher than multiple homicide, or genocide, or whatever. It would be something ultimate, and would probably mean the culprit has absolutely no respect whatsoever for the very essence of what keeps the multiverse together. It is the ultimate, selfish act. It is way beyond any redemption because it cuts off not only life, but all other possibilities as well. Even in a multiverse with multiple revolving doors about life and death.
Or, for example, imagine a universe where all life happens, dies and goes back to the "ONE" to be recycled into new life. Destroying a soul means cutting off forever a potential part of the universe. It means you are diminishing *everything* by a little bit, forever. If you kept doing so, one day the whole universe would be a void husk.

I'm just playing with fantasy tropes here, but my point is: if you take a fantasy setting, you can definitely imagine "acts of unspeakable evil" entirely worth of the horror the term implies.


OK.

There's nothing "unspeakable" about that.

eru001
2017-03-30, 07:37 AM
Does the Lich have to be evil? In straight vanilla DnD Yes, but given that GM's have the leeway to sick whatever alignment they want on whatever creature they want the answer in your campaign could very easily be no.

Suppose the Lich had a Neutral alignment, or even a good one. A kingdom ruled fairly and competantly by an immortal magical being, is probably not the worst thing in your setting. There is other evil to smite first. (Perhaps the Lich uses an undead workforce to cheaply maintain roads and infrastructure, improving the quality of life for the populace. Perhaps it uses the near unlimited free time it has, due to not sleeping and not aging, to study in detail every aspect of governance and become a hypercompetant ruler. Sky's the limit, you are the GM after all and are entitled to build your world as you see fit.)

But, what if, the Lich was Evil as per standard rules?

There are many things which qualify as Evil in DnD.
A violent monster which murders everything is Evil.
A selfish hedonist which serves only their self interest is also Evil.

Suppose the Lich were Evil. The kind of self absorbed evil where he needs to hear himself being praised all the time to stroke his ego. He wants to watch grand plays about how great he is, and for his populace to constantly be cheering his name in front of epic military parades.

Let's tell the story of this lich. We shall call him the Dark Lord Bob.

Bob was a powerful necromantic Lich. A thousand years ago he raised an undead army and conquered the Kingdom of Placeland, renaming it Lich-estine. The first few decades, he terrorized the populace, forcing them to cheer him on, or be killed, as he did nothing but celebrate how great he was. Then the problems began for Bob. You see, constant parades and parties upon penalty of death meant that the fields weren't producing enough food. The populace of Lich-Estine was shinking and the parades just weren't as epic any more. The crowds couldn't cheer as loud. He could raise the dead peasents as undead minions, but those aren't really all that good at cheering and performing, and generally stroking the ego of a megalomaniac, he wants a live audiance. "ugghhh, fine" he groans, ordering a portion of his undead horde to go and build a major irrigation system. It doesn't go very well. The Bob continues to be bored. A decade later he decides to figure out what went wrong, opens up a book on civil engineering. "Hey this stuff is pretty interesting!" he exclaims to the guard skeletons "FETCH ME MOAR BOOKS!" five years of non-stop reading later, he designs a properly effective irrigation system and sends the skeletons out to build it. It works, well, very well, the population soars, the cheering crowd grows. "Ahh, now that's more like it." Bob thinks. Another couple of decades pass. The parades are kind of dull. The crowd is big, but rather ugly, covered in filth, and smelly too. They really don't seem all that impressive, certainly not impressing the rulers of nearby kingdoms. Those kings have much nicer looking peasents. "THIS JUST WON'T DO!" Exclaims the Dark Lord Bob, "My kingdom must have better peasents in the world, those other kings should be jealous of ME! Not me of them! SKELETON BUILDERS! MAKE AQUEDUCTS AND BATHHOUSES! INSTRUCT THE PEASENTS TO BATHE AND BE LESS SMELLY!" A year or so later, the aqueducts and bathhouses are build, the peasents look more impressive, smell nicer, and suddenly are less sick. The neighboring kings are jealous. "As they should be" smirks Bob. A few decades pass. Word comes in that a red dragon is terrorizing north Lich-estine. "How convenient" Bob thinks "A red dragon hide cape would look really impressive, I would look so awesome with a cape like that. UNDEAD ARMY KILL THAT DRAGON AND BRING ME IT'S SKIN!". The dragon get's slain, Bob now has a truly impressive cape, worthy of an evil overlord such as himself, "wait, what's this? The peasents are cheering louder? They are excited that the dragon is gone? Wow, authentic cheering is much more fun than forced cheering at the parades. Dead monsters means more cheering? Who would have guessed. SKELETON ARMY! GO KILL MORE MONSTERS! I WANT MORE CHEERING!". Lich-Estine becomes one of the safest kingdoms in the world, with undead hordes purging the land of monsters which threaten the common folk. A century later, polishing his 98th consecutive Safest Kingdom on the Continent award, Bob thinks to himself, "you know what this calls for? A BIGGER BETTER PARADE, WITH PRETTY LIGHTS! SKELETONS FETCH ME AN ALCHEMIST! WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE DON'T HAVE ANY? ALL WE'VE GOT ARE PEASANTS? THAT WON'T DO!" Bob draws up plans to build a college of alchemy, where else is he going to get properly trained pyrotechnic's experts, after all, he is going to need lots of fireworks in his future parades. Also, while he's at it, those plays being performed to show how great he is, kind of lackluster really. The Actors aren't very good, perhaps the kingdom also needs a college of performing arts, the better to perform plays about how great the Dark Lord Bob is, and also to one up those neighboring kings again. "I mean, seriously. HOW DARE THEY HAVE NICER PERFORMANCES THAN ME!" Bob shouts to no one in particular. A few years later Bob thinks to himself, "You know what I need? A GIANT STATUE!" then he pauses for a moment, "Skeletons are a bit clumsy for builders, fine for functional stuff, but for a truly fancy statue, worthy of someone as awesome as ME, i'm going to need some master sculpters and architects. Time to build a college of architecture I suppose, only way to get a statue epic enough. Also, if i'm going to build this statue, i'm going to need good roads to bring in all the black marble i'm going to need."

A few years later, Steve the Paladin visit's Lich-estine. He sees a very safe, well fed populace, with access to public bath houses, well maintained roads, and a number of institutions of higher learning. All of these things exist to feed the ego of the Lich that rules the land, not for the benefit of the citizens, but that doesn't change the fact that the citizens benefit. Steve decides that while the Dark Lord Bob is probably evil (given that every single action he has taken has been motivated entirely by self interest and egomania), he's not a priorty to slay at the moment, as his actions have had positive side effects despite being of evil motive. The opressive sadistic tyrant in the kingdom next door who hosts weekly puppy punting competitions, much more urgent.

CharonsHelper
2017-03-30, 07:56 AM
The opressive sadistic tyrant in the kingdom next door who hosts weekly puppy punting competitions, much more urgent.

Assuming that it is the puppies who are being punted rather than the puppies doing the punting.

The former would be very mean.

The latter would be very cute.

Socksy
2017-03-30, 08:12 AM
Anyone here read Dresden Files?

Gentleman Johnny Marcone.

I'd happily live in a kingdom ruled over by Gentle-Lich Johnny Marcone.


(Amazing story about Bob the Lich)

I approve strongly of this, and wish to steal it for my current campaign.

Jan Mattys
2017-03-30, 08:19 AM
OK.

There's nothing "unspeakable" about that.

I think you are being too literal for your own good. Seriously.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-30, 08:22 AM
I think you are being too literal for your own good. Seriously.

Not really.

1) both examples under discussion go on to literally not speak of it, "because it's too horrible to speak of".
2) the world is full of examples of horrible things that we know the details of... what's so extra-horrible about these things that the details need be obscured?

Jan Mattys
2017-03-30, 08:48 AM
Not really.

1) both examples under discussion go on to literally not speak of it, "because it's too horrible to speak of".
2) the world is full of examples of horrible things that we know the details of... what's so extra-horrible about these things that the details need be obscured?

Not wanting to drag on the debate about this, really, but if you are asking yourself such a question you are clearly missing one of the best aspects of imagination, which (in my opinion) is filling the missing parts with whatever you fancy.
There is nothing extra-horrible about these things. It's just that stating them makes them mundane, which is exactly the opposite of the writer's intent. The sense of wonder about the unknown is powerful. More powerful than words, no matter how articulated. Saying that becoming an undead abomination and achieving functional immortality through evil means requires unspeakable evil deeds may be lazy wrinting, but I prefer to see it as a canvas. You can fill it with whatever you fancy.

Lovecraft (the author who probably trademarked the concept of "unspeakable", :D) works not because the things he writes about are literally unspeakable (even though they are, mostly), but because of the sense of mystery and dread the concept evokes.

But I guess you know these things too. It is not something that meets your likings? That's ok. But that's also a pity, imho.

I strongly prefer "The process to lichdom requires unspeakably evil acts" to the "These are the steps to lichdom: cut a heart of a child, boil it, drink it during a full moon, add three tears of a freshly widowed girl, force her to watch all she loves burned, then sacrifice her at the altar of Bhaal while singing songs about Hell in rhyme. Oh, and remember to wash your hands in desecrated water first!" variety.

Keltest
2017-03-30, 08:52 AM
Not really.

1) both examples under discussion go on to literally not speak of it, "because it's too horrible to speak of".
2) the world is full of examples of horrible things that we know the details of... what's so extra-horrible about these things that the details need be obscured?

If we could tell you, it wouldn't be unspeakable :smalltongue:

More to the point, theyre both fictional. In the real world, "unspeakable" events get spoken about, even (and perhaps especially) against the inclinations of the speaker, so we understand exactly the depths that we can fall to and are on guard to make sure it doesn't happen again. People don't write books about these things because they like the fame and publicity, they do it because they think people need to know what happened. That isn't the case in fiction. Theres no benefit in describing some gratuitously horrific act besides potentially upsetting your audience. the horxrux example wasn't elaborated on because nobody actually needs to know the process that went on there, its already understood that Voldemort is an awful, awful person who has no depths too low. The lich example meanwhile is left deliberately vague so people can fill in the blank with whatever act or acts they deem to be appropriately horrific. Maybe it involves making a giant golem out of dead puppies you killed yourself, or maybe it involves spilling mustard on peoples shirts. Its as bad (or not bad) as the setting and GM wants it to be.

eru001
2017-03-30, 09:07 AM
I approve strongly of this, and wish to steal it for my current campaign.


Go for it. All yours

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-30, 09:18 AM
Not wanting to drag on the debate about this, really, but if you are asking yourself such a question you are clearly missing one of the best aspects of imagination, which (in my opinion) is filling the missing parts with whatever you fancy.
There is nothing extra-horrible about these things. It's just that stating them makes them mundane, which is exactly the opposite of the writer's intent. The sense of wonder about the unknown is powerful. More powerful than words, no matter how articulated. Saying that becoming an undead abomination and achieving functional immortality through evil means requires unspeakable evil deeds may be lazy wrinting, but I prefer to see it as a canvas. You can fill it with whatever you fancy.

Lovecraft (the author who probably trademarked the concept of "unspeakable", :D) works not because the things he writes about are literally unspeakable (even though they are, mostly), but because of the sense of mystery and dread the concept evokes.

But I guess you know these things too. It is not something that meets your likings? That's ok. But that's also a pity, imho.

It strikes me as the author not being able present in words things that are as frightening or horrible or alien or whatever as they want them to be, so they fall back on the crutch of "unspeakable".

And either the author doesn't actually know themselves, they're just literally throwing in "unspeakable" as a way to shove the burden off on the reader... or they do know, and the whole thing is almost always a big old "sad trombone noise" when it's finally revealed.

halfeye
2017-03-30, 10:24 AM
Wait a second, all you "unspeakable is bad" warriors.

I hope the forum rules allow me to go this far, but:

Let's talk for a second about the fantasy settings. It might well be that you *know* there are gods, you *know* souls exist, you *know* there's an afterlife (or quite a few of them) and so you *know* that "life" is probably not the alpha and the omega of one's existence (at least not in the same sense an atheist would think about our real world).

As such, there might acts of irredeemable evil way worse than one you could conceive in our real world.

Just to name a staple of magical fantasy, let's fantasize about the concept of "destroying a soul.
The *soul*, however you intend it, is the very essence of a being, its foundation and purpose, way beyond its physical body. It is what allows it to enjoy (or suffer) an afterlife, what constitutes what *it is*. Destroying a soul, devouring a soul, or otherwise twist a soul in a fantasy setting would rate much higher than multiple homicide, or genocide, or whatever. It would be something ultimate, and would probably mean the culprit has absolutely no respect whatsoever for the very essence of what keeps the multiverse together. It is the ultimate, selfish act. It is way beyond any redemption because it cuts off not only life, but all other possibilities as well. Even in a multiverse with multiple revolving doors about life and death.
Or, for example, imagine a universe where all life happens, dies and goes back to the "ONE" to be recycled into new life. Destroying a soul means cutting off forever a potential part of the universe. It means you are diminishing *everything* by a little bit, forever. If you kept doing so, one day the whole universe would be a void husk.

I'm just playing with fantasy tropes here, but my point is: if you take a fantasy setting, you can definitely imagine "acts of unspeakable evil" entirely worth of the horror the term implies.

You just spoke/wrote those. That's the problem with "unspeakable acts", they are either not literally unspeakable (in which case using the phrase is a mistake), or they are much worse than anything that can be spoken, and you just wrote a few of those. The word "unspeakable" is basically a cop-out, it means the author wants that their villains can be killed without moral consequence, without going into details of their crimes (it seems to have come to the fore with the Victorians, the ones who put skirts on table legs so they wouldn't be too sexy).

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-30, 10:39 AM
A selfish hedonist which serves only their self interest is also Evil.


Is a selfish hedonist who doesn't cause any harm to others, actually evil?

CharonsHelper
2017-03-30, 10:54 AM
Is a selfish hedonist who doesn't cause any harm to others, actually evil?

Bob the Lich DID cause harm to others. Lots of it when he took over the kingdom and plenty more early in his reign.

He just isn't right now because it serves his goals.

Keltest
2017-03-30, 10:56 AM
Is a selfish hedonist who doesn't cause any harm to others, actually evil?

Depends on why they aren't causing harm. If its just plain luck that nobody was caught up in their hedonism, then yes, theyre evil. if its because they specifically try to avoid hurting people with their hedonism, they could reasonably be called neutral. The line blurs when theyre OK with hurting people but don't want to deal with the fallout, though I would generally call those people Evil because they would do it if they could get away with it.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-30, 11:18 AM
Bob the Lich DID cause harm to others. Lots of it when he took over the kingdom and plenty more early in his reign.

He just isn't right now because it serves his goals.

I wasn't specifically asking about Bob -- Bob clearly goes beyond selfish hedonism, given his war of conquest using an undead army.

NecroDancer
2017-03-30, 11:26 AM
If you want a good/neutral Lich (or a Lich that doesn't need souls) than go right ahead, your the DM, you make the lore

Example: A Lich from "the adventure zone" universe sustains itself off its own emotions. They are totally different from other types of liches but Griffon (the DM) wanted to change the lore so he did.

Bohandas
2017-03-30, 12:01 PM
You just spoke/wrote those. That's the problem with "unspeakable acts", they are either not literally unspeakable (in which case using the phrase is a mistake), or they are much worse than anything that can be spoken, and you just wrote a few of those. The word "unspeakable" is basically a cop-out, it means the author wants that their villains can be killed without moral consequence, without going into details of their crimes (it seems to have come to the fore with the Victorians, the ones who put skirts on table legs so they wouldn't be too sexy).

Some of the time though (though not most) it could be code for "unpublishable". Too violent of racy or controversial for whatever medium thay're in

For example on the old children's cartoon show Pinky and the Brain for example there was a musical number entitled "Meticulous Analysis of History (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9aYrURLHh0)" where they memtion that Caligula "did things that we can't even talk about". Which is 100% true. They can't talk about him performing human sacrifices or turning the imperial palace into a whorehouse on a kids show. The craziest thing he did that they are allowed to talk about in that format is making his horse a consul.

Similarly, I've thought of a lot of suggestions for possible lich rituals that I'm literally not allowed to talk about on this forum due to the code of conduct. Many of them cobbled together from scenes in the Marquis de Sades L'ecole du Libertinage, a book which would probably violate the tos to even link to

NecroDancer
2017-03-30, 12:19 PM
Some of the time though (though not most) it could be code for "unpublishable". Too violent of racy or controversial for whatever medium thay're in

For example on the old children's cartoon show Pinky and the Brain for example there was a musical number entitled "Meticulous Analysis of History (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9aYrURLHh0)" where they memtion that Caligula "did things that we can't even talk about". Which is 100% true. They can't talk about him performing human sacrifices or turning the imperial palace into a whorehouse on a kids show. The craziest thing he did that they are allowed to talk about in that format is making his horse a consul.

Similarly, I've thought of a lot of suggestions for possible lich rituals that I'm literally not allowed to talk about on this forum due to the code of conduct. Many of them cobbled together from scenes in the Marquis de Sades L'ecole du Libertinage, a book which would probably violate the tos to even link to

What about his war against the sea?

Knaight
2017-03-30, 12:38 PM
You just spoke/wrote those. That's the problem with "unspeakable acts", they are either not literally unspeakable (in which case using the phrase is a mistake), or they are much worse than anything that can be spoken, and you just wrote a few of those. The word "unspeakable" is basically a cop-out, it means the author wants that their villains can be killed without moral consequence, without going into details of their crimes (it seems to have come to the fore with the Victorians, the ones who put skirts on table legs so they wouldn't be too sexy).

Two things:
1) The phrase has a metaphorical meaning as a phrase that contradicts the literal sequence of words in it. That's not uncommon - when it's "raining cats and dogs", it's raining heavily. An "elephant in the room" need not involve either an actual elephant or an actual room. Neither cats nor dogs are assumed to actually be falling from the sky. "Cold as heck" and "hot as heck" are both statements using heck as a euphemism for an intensifier, where a literal reading is going to make at least one of them wrong. Criticizing a vaccuum cleaner/chamber/other-vaccuum-production-object by saying "this thing sucks" is likely a criticism based on how the thing fails to produce enough suction. Languages have idioms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_idioms), and "unspeakably evil" is one of them.
2) That whole skirts on table legs so they wouldn't be too sexy thing is a myth.

Bohandas
2017-03-30, 12:47 PM
What about his war against the sea?

I suppose they could have talked about that too. And his desire to be worshipped as a god.

Though the War on the Sea is almost mundane though these days; we've got at least two crazy non-war wars like that going on in the US (though one of them postdates Pinky and the Brain IIRC)

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-30, 01:01 PM
Two things:
1) The phrase has a metaphorical meaning as a phrase that contradicts the literal sequence of words in it. That's not uncommon - when it's "raining cats and dogs", it's raining heavily. An "elephant in the room" need not involve either an actual elephant or an actual room. Neither cats nor dogs are assumed to actually be falling from the sky. "Cold as heck" and "hot as heck" are both statements using heck as a euphemism for an intensifier, where a literal reading is going to make at least one of them wrong. Criticizing a vaccuum cleaner/chamber/other-vaccuum-production-object by saying "this thing sucks" is likely a criticism based on how the thing fails to produce enough suction. Languages have idioms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_idioms), and "unspeakably evil" is one of them.
2) That whole skirts on table legs so they wouldn't be too sexy thing is a myth.

We're not talking about "unspeakably evil" as a turn of phrase.

We're talking about "unspeakable acts" that the author has chosen to not detail but instead has just told us are "unspeakable", usually because they think the mystery and the reader's imagination is more potent a source of emotion than anything they (the author) can actually come up with.

It's like the onerous "noodle incident (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoodleIncident)" trope, in which some past event is referred to but never explained.

lord_khaine
2017-03-30, 01:15 PM
Suppose the Lich were Evil. The kind of self absorbed evil where he needs to hear himself being praised all the time to stroke his ego. He wants to watch grand plays about how great he is, and for his populace to constantly be cheering his name in front of epic military parades.

Let's tell the story of this lich. We shall call him the Dark Lord Bob.

It is hilarious to read about a Lich playing live civilisation :P


If you want a good/neutral Lich (or a Lich that doesn't need souls) than go right ahead, your the DM, you make the lore

Or you can just play 3.5 and pull out an archlich :smalltongue:

Keltest
2017-03-30, 01:17 PM
We're not talking about "unspeakably evil" as a turn of phrase.

We're talking about "unspeakable acts" that the author has chosen to not detail but instead has just told us are "unspeakable", usually because they think the mystery and the reader's imagination is more potent a source of emotion than anything they (the author) can actually come up with.

It's like the onerous "noodle incident (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoodleIncident)" trope, in which some past event is referred to but never explained.

Then what are you even arguing about? Multiple people have said that the Lich example is deliberate so each DM can fill in the blank with something specific to their group, and Rowling explicitly did come up with a full procedure, she just didn't publish it.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-30, 01:31 PM
Then what are you even arguing about?

Really?

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?519650-If-a-kingdom-is-ruled-legitimately-and-fairly-(enough)-by-a-lich&p=21858223#post21858223
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?519650-If-a-kingdom-is-ruled-legitimately-and-fairly-(enough)-by-a-lich&p=21858451#post21858451
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?519650-If-a-kingdom-is-ruled-legitimately-and-fairly-(enough)-by-a-lich&p=21858485#post21858485
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oudeis
2017-03-30, 02:20 PM
Can we give this a rest, already? Rowling used a euphemism or weasel word some of you find lazy, sloppy and irritating. GET OVER IT.

And for what it's worth, in Deathly Hallows Rowling gives some indication of how she intends the word to be taken:


“You were the seventh Horcrux, Harry, the Horcrux he never meant to make. He had rendered his soul so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child. "

All of this is is needlessly distractive from the point of this thread.

Enixon
2017-03-30, 02:25 PM
Can we give this a rest, already? Rowling used a euphemism or weasel word some of you find lazy, sloppy and irritating. GET OVER IT.

And for what it's worth, in Deathly Hallows Rowling gives some indication of how she intends the word to be taken:

for real, this thread has got to be the first time I've seen people so adamant that something described as "unspeakable evil" must LITERALLY be "so evil that we are physically unable to speak of it" as opposed to "it's something I really do not want to talk about"

Calthropstu
2017-03-30, 02:33 PM
You just spoke/wrote those. That's the problem with "unspeakable acts", they are either not literally unspeakable (in which case using the phrase is a mistake), or they are much worse than anything that can be spoken, and you just wrote a few of those. The word "unspeakable" is basically a cop-out, it means the author wants that their villains can be killed without moral consequence, without going into details of their crimes (it seems to have come to the fore with the Victorians, the ones who put skirts on table legs so they wouldn't be too sexy).

In this context, unspeakable actually means "things that should not be mentioned in polite company." More precisely, it is termed to "things that should not be spoken of in the presence of a lady."
Unspeakable acts could refer to unusual sexual behaviors, grotesque violence or even mere improper behavior of nobility.
It is not literally "unspeakable." You are essentially using a pun.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-30, 02:54 PM
Can we give this a rest, already? Rowling used a euphemism or weasel word some of you find lazy, sloppy and irritating. GET OVER IT.

And for what it's worth, in Deathly Hallows Rowling gives some indication of how she intends the word to be taken:



All of this is is needlessly distractive from the point of this thread.


We're told that the lich must do "unspeakably evil" things to become and/or remain a lich, and the text avoids telling us what those things are, either because the writers think the "mystery" is more "impactful" or because they want to leave it open-ended...

The point of the thread deals at least in part with the "moral balance" between the "good" the hypothetical lich is doing and whatever "evil" is required of the lich by the very fact that it's a lich.

We should not be willing to simply accept on the face of it that the lich's actions are evil, or how evil they are, without being told what those actions are.

And without knowing what those actions are, we're unable to compare them to the other side of the scales (the good of the kingdom).


The example of a lich-like entity in a particular fiction that we're also told must do terrible things to achieve his immortality is absolutely germane. Again, we're told he must do "unspeakable", "horrific", "terrible" things of "exceptional" evil -- but other than murder the details are left entirely obscure. Murder is evil, but sadly it's also common and mundane and for the most part not fitting the grandiose and horrible implications of the author's own words. So as with the lich, we're left without the key facts.


Of course there's always the classic example of this question of the "good land" and the price that "must" be paid to maintain it. (http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.pdf)

But even there, it's asserted but never explained how the price enables the rest of it... it is a "just so" tale.




In this context, unspeakable actually means "things that should not be mentioned in polite company." More precisely, it is termed to "things that should not be spoken of in the presence of a lady."

Unspeakable acts could refer to unusual sexual behaviors, grotesque violence or even mere improper behavior of nobility.

It is not literally "unspeakable." You are essentially using a pun.


If that's all it is, then... none of us are "Victorian ladies". And we need the details to make the judgement.

Enixon
2017-03-30, 03:15 PM
What the lich has to do is [Whatever the DM/Group thinks is appropriately heinous for their individual game] :smallbiggrin:

and that's kinda the point I figure, what you think is unforgivably evil is most likely going to be different than what I think is unforgivably evil or what the book's writer thinks is unforgivably evil.

The Monster Manuel entry is just a default starting point for if the DM doesn't want to write out his own lore for every beastie the Party encounters, if you're just doing a hack and slash dungeon crawl then some vague evil is probably enough, if you're doing a more detailed storyline then you flesh it out according to your own personal tastes, or heck throw it out and start from scratch if you don't actually want the undead to always be evil in your game.

Unoriginal
2017-03-30, 03:32 PM
It should be noted that a Lawful person, even a Paladin, would not hesitate to destroy a legitimate ruler who treat their kingdom fairly, provided they do enough awful things to other places.

If King Gosh the Reasonably Irritated decides to throw a plague at his neighbor nation, you can be sure a Paladin will want to stop him.

Now, a Paladin would know that removing the evil ruler is only the first step of the process. They'd have to make other efforts to fill the power vacuum and make sure the land is not left worse than it was.



A kingdom wouldn't allow for a legal Lich ruler. Even if said Lich was the previous King, the crown would go to the Prince, or Regent. Even if those mysteriously didn't exist at the time, the nobility would be up in arms about a royal rule that was unending, with no royal line to marry into.
Theoretically, a Democratic nation could vote a Lich in, but even if he won, it wouldn't be for long.

Errr, you're seriously misunderstanding those form of governments. You can be democraticly elected for centuries, if it's how the system works, and you can be an immortal king too.




My theory does bring into question though, how Elves deal politically with their royal line? Being immortal and all. Even assuming benevolence, why do Elves need a Royal line? How did they ever get one in the first place?

DnD Elves are not immortal, only kinda long lived. They have kids and heirs like anyone else.


If you're talking about Tolkien's Elves, it's because certain Elves are of higher status and power, generally due to birth, so they sometime go and create realms.

Calthropstu
2017-03-30, 03:40 PM
If that's all it is, then... none of us are "Victorian ladies". And we need the details to make the judgement.

Hey, you never know. It IS the internet...
Though, to be fair, the internet has never really cared. I've seen a 7 year old run off of a place because jerks wanted to make her cry.
Regardless, unspeakable was coined for the use I ascribed. Its use in literature is almost universally as that.

There is a point in writing where you just have to stop catering to the wishes of people like those saying "unspeakable" is lazy here. As a writer, I do not want to think up a horrible thing just to satisfy the morbidly curious.

I would much rather write "He performed unspeakable evil acts in a ritual to his dark gods, appeasing their dark appetites and attaining a portion of their favor and power" than "He placed a woman and her baby onto his alter..." and go on to describe a horrific mutilation that will disgust and horrify my readers. The Harry Potter books were meant to be marketed to teenagers after all. Can I think of some horrific evils? Sure. Should I write them into my book? No.

Bohandas
2017-03-30, 05:24 PM
for real, this thread has got to be the first time I've seen people so adamant that something described as "unspeakable evil" must LITERALLY be "so evil that we are physically unable to speak of it" as opposed to "it's something I really do not want to talk about"

Same here. Though I've seen things in between. Like "things so evil we're afraid to speak of them although we physically can". Lord Voldemort falls i to this category, as does Hastur the Unspeakable from the cthulhu mythos.

(Actually, now that I think of it, I have seen "literally unable to speak it" used once. The Dark Speech from BOVD is described as being able to kill anyone who tries to speak it without special training.

Oh, and also arguably in the cthulhu mythos again where there are several creatures that are metaphorically unspeakable who also, for unrelated reasons, have inpronouncable names

And come to think of it, didn't the Dark Speech's inspiration, the Black Tongue of Mordor, also cause physical pain to good creatures to speak or hear or so ething like that)

oudeis
2017-03-30, 05:36 PM
Here's the relevant part from FoTR:


"Upon this very ring which you have here seen held aloft, round and unadorned, the letters that Isildur reported may still be read, if one has the strength of will to set the golden thing in the fire a while. That I have done, and this I have read:

Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg
thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul."

The change in the wizard’s voice was astounding. Suddenly it became menacing, powerful, harsh as stone. A shadow seemed to pass over the high sun, and the porch for a moment grew dark. All trembled, and the Elves stopped their ears.

"Never before has any voice dared to utter words of that tongue in Imladris, Gandalf the Grey" said Elrond, as the shadow passed and the company breathed once more

Segev
2017-03-30, 11:55 PM
I guess the assumed need for absolution is what is bugging me. I can only really see it if there's a supernatural reason backing it up - absolution removes the radiation damage, that kind of thing. Otherwise it basically seems sort of political to me - the same way that being legally exonerated for a crime is just a different type of thing than being innocent of that crime.

If atonement is not just a weird thing meant only for paladins to work-around mind control induced falling, then it must be that you can't really change alignments - not fully, in a sense of being "pure" - without it to cleanse the past deeds. Perhaps you can be whatever alignment you "earn" through your actions for most purposes, even up to the use of alignment-specific items, but you aren't "forgiven" of acts that would (or did) push you to other alignments without the atonement spell.

Perhaps, in a sense, atonement is actually changing you. Whatever lingering tendency, whatever temptations of conscience, pleasure, or habit might remain, it purges. Whatever guilt you might have, whatever feeling of shame for your past weakness or misdeed, whatever lingering rebelliousness or reaction to yield to authority...it roots out.

But it only works if you want it to, and only if you've gotten to a point where those things it is changing are things which are, at best, toe-holds for backsliding.

The lich who repents of his evil ways will always know he did this horribly evil thing to become a lich. As a good person, he'll be tormented by that guilt. And there will always be that lingering knowledge that he has it in him to go back. In fact, the temptation to "then let me be evil" will be there. Atonement cast by a Good cleric gives him not just hope, but confidence. It gives him absolution. The magic doesn't undo the harm he's done, but it metaphysically separates him from it.

But it won't work on somebody who just says "yeah, give me an atonement for this week's bad behavior."

On the one hand, yes, it's "political." You're absolved.

On the other, it's personal. It makes you FEEL absolved and truly excises the part of you that would do it again if you let it loose.

Dappershire
2017-03-31, 01:48 AM
For those that wish to be literal about the phrase "unspeakable evil", you definitely can. Here's how!

Take when someone speaks about the "Unspeakable evil" that someone did, then goes into detail about the actions, IE "His actions of unspeakable evil, Harry; murdering your parents, molesting your dog. They stained his soul, bla bla exposition."
The actions themselves aren't unspeakable, else they couldn't be spoken of. But it's not the actions that are so evil. Anyone could do those things. I could do it. Would I be evil?
Lets say a stranger held my son's head under water, and wouldn't let him up til I snapped a couple necks, and tossed some chocolate at a puppy. Would I be evil then?
Everyone seems so focused on whether the actions are literally unspeakable. But it's never been the actions. It's the mindset behind them. Why is he committing atrocities?
They are unspeakably evil, because
A) they are evil. Evil isn't hard to calculate. When an action serves as more detriment to the universe at large, then it benefits you or anyone else, then I'd say you broke through the greyscale.
and B) They are unspeakable, because words can only describe the deed. Not the intent. A normal person can not describe the mind of a killer that feels no remorse. Because even the most battle hardened, be they sane, still feel for death. A man can describe rape. Perhaps even understand the desire for control that a rapist feels. But words can't easily convey why someone would rape a blind geriatric, that beat her to death with her own dentures, in front of her girl scout granddaughter. (Ok, and I thought giving a dog chocolate was dark. No more examples.)

In conclusion, Unspeakable Evil is describable, in its actions. But the intent, the mindset, of that evil doer; is not just abhorrant, but truly alien in scope. And if we can't understand something, we cant describe it. We can't speak it.


P.S. Can I get a Paladin to smite my post a little. I don't even want to re-read it for corrections.

Bohandas
2017-03-31, 01:58 AM
DnD Elves are not immortal, only kinda long lived. They have kids and heirs like anyone else.


If you're talking about Tolkien's Elves, it's because certain Elves are of higher status and power, generally due to birth, so they sometime go and create realms.

Also, Tolkiens elves, though ageless, can still be killed

Reboot
2017-03-31, 07:07 AM
Or you can just play 3.5 and pull out an archlich :smalltongue:

I've just looked up Monsters of Faerûn online. And the thing about the "LICH, GOOD" section (of which the archlich is a subsection)... is that it says absolutely nothing about the lichification process. The closest it comes is "...a very few liches sought undeath (or had it forced upon them) in order to serve a noble cause, protect a loved being or place, or achieve a lofty goal."

So we're left to assume they STILL did the "unspeakable evil" thang, yet are somehow still Good...

Milo v3
2017-03-31, 07:35 AM
So we're left to assume they STILL did the "unspeakable evil" thang, yet are somehow still Good...
Maybe they just cast enough Protection from Evil spells to improve their alignments.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-31, 08:04 AM
For those that wish to be literal about the phrase "unspeakable evil",

We don't wish to be literal about the phrase; and the problem is "unspeakable acts", not unspeakable evil.

The issue is that the phrase is being used a crutch or a fig leaf in the first place.

Simetra Irertne
2017-03-31, 08:05 AM
If the lich rules fairly and doesn't randomly go into the cold, murderous rage at the living that usually comes with being a lich, I see no problems. The problem is that this never happens. Generally the only spellcasters who choose lichdom are those who fear death and post-death judgment enough to choose a cursed existence as a lich. Those forced into lichdom tend to go mad or turn evil as well. The "unspeakable evil" thing has a prerequisite of the spellcaster being willing of doing evil, and at that point they will no longer rule fairly, given power. If by some miracle a good-aligned lich does rule a kingdom, a paladin should have no problems. It's the same problem as an evil king turning good. He just happens to be undead.

eru001
2017-03-31, 08:05 AM
So we're left to assume they STILL did the "unspeakable evil" thang, yet are somehow still Good...


Some Possiblities.

1.

Soldier The demon hordes are coming to despoil our land, and do awful things to our children, and kick our puppies, and talk at the theater. The army has been defeated in the field, we few survivors are not enough to defend the city, or even slow the horde long enough for the people to flee.

Wizard: What can be done, what can I do to save our people?

Scholar: Only someone of impossible arcane might can face the demon general and win, What's worse, all living things near him die immediately, and so that which kills him cannot be alive. There is a ritual, but it is...

Wizard: It is what?

Scholar: It is drastic, some would say wrong.

Wizard: It cannot be more wrong than allowing our children to fall into the clutches of the demon horde. Tell me, what must I do.

Scholar: We shall need... gods forgive us, we shall need a volunteer. She must be a virgin...




Situation 2

Evil Necromancer Lich: HA HA HA I SHALL KILL YOU AND REANIMATE YOU INTO A POWERFUL LICH LIKE MYSELF! THEN YOU SHALL BE EEEVIL LIKE ME AND WILLINGLY DESTROY ALL THAT WHICH YOU DEFEND! MUAH HA HA HA HA! I AM SO DELICIOUSLY EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL!

Hero: NOOOOO!

One Dark Ritual Later

Lichified Hero: So I'm a powerfull lich now?

Evil Necromancer Lich: Yes, now use your newfound dark powers to lay waste to that which you formerly loved!

Lichified Hero: As a counterproposal, Chop, punch, stab, maim, ignite, thump, kaboom, impale, zzzap, biff, pow, I'm still intelligent you know, I still have free will. Idiot. Hey, newfound dark powers are great for killing things. Many evil things need killing. I should continue killing evil things, only now be better at it.

Nightcanon
2017-03-31, 10:33 AM
How do we "know this"? Because a confused and repeatedly mind-magiced old man says so?

~1200 murders every day in the real world, and we know from the books the process requires a killing for every Horocrux... but that's somehow the detail that JKR is so reluctant to explain, and comparable to something that almost made her editor vomit? Really?




It's made out to be far more evil and repulsive than just the act of murder...




In both cases, it's made out to be a remarkably evil act, and treated as "unspeakable". In both cases, the "mystery" doesn't make the act seem more evil, it's just eye-rollingly cliched.

In both cases, if it were just killing someone as part of the ritual, then that could be said, but it's clearly not just killing someone.

Not sure if anyone has raised the point yet, but up to this point in the thread I don't believe anyone has. There is apparently at least one case in which the act of murder alone is sufficient in itself to create a Horcrux: when Voldemort kills Lily Potter a fragment of his soul lodges in Harry, creating a Horcrux that Voldemort never intended to make. It's possible that this is an effect only seen in souls that have already been multiply damaged by being split several times (it is implied that no previous wizard has attempted to make more than one Horcrux, and stated that only the most depraved would even consider making one), but that murder didn't result in the soul-fragment created by it latching on to any pre-prepared object that (as per Dumbledore's speculation) was intended to become the final Horcrux with Voldemort's planned murder of Harry.
As to whether 'any' murder is enough I would suggest no, but by definition, murder by a wizard powerful enough to make a Horcrux, for the purposes in making a Horcrux, is the premeditated and deliberate murder of a weaker individual motivated purely by personal gain.

Edit:
Having caught up with the rest of the thread, I'm not really sure what your problem with the concept of unspeakable acts is. Someone mentions that the Holocaust isn't unspeakable, and thus nothing else should be: well, yes and no. We speak of it because it was a historical event, and so that people do not forget about it, but prior to 1930 it would have been unspeakable to propose carrying it out; and even now as someone without direct involvement (ancestors of WW2 generation all British, none active combatants in European theatre at the end of the war) the monstrosity of it (as opposed to the numerical and logistical facts) is almost impossible to articulate. It is possible that at some future point, some crime worse than the Holocaust might be perpetrated, but it would be inappropriate for a number of reasons to speculate what form such a crime would take, and one of those reasons is that it would be sickening to me and to anyone reading if I were to try to do so. To change tack slightly, I have personally given medical evidence in court that led to a man's conviction for the murder of his girlfriend's 3-month-old baby, and in a separate case had cause to investigate whether a 6-week-old that was bleeding to death in front of me from a lacerated tonsil might have sustained that injury from the mother's boyfriend forcing something down its throat the first time she left the two of them alone. I'm not sure whether these are appropriate things to share on a message board about a humorous comic and a game; I am concerned that the mention of them might cause offense and, yes, damage to people that read about them; I'm certainly mildly worried about what effects seeing such things might have had on what I might refer to as my soul. Certainly I would not want to create them from my own imagination to satisfy someone's desire for me to 'think of something really evil'. I'm therefore puzzled by your apparent stance that use of the phrase 'unspeakably evil' in books aimed at the teenage market is in some way a cop-out. As to the detailed description that made JK Rowling's editor turn green, I doubt it was much more graphic than the ritual described at the end of Goblet of Fire, which is told from the point of view of Harry, who has his eyes closed and is sensibly trying not to pay any more attention than he can help. Clearly they decided, as the editors of D&D did, that 'unspeakable evil' suited their purposes better.

Keltest
2017-03-31, 10:37 AM
Not sure if anyone has raised the point yet, but up to this point in the thread I don't believe anyone has. There is apparently at least one case in which the act of murder alone is sufficient in itself to create a Horcrux: when Voldemort kills Lily Potter a fragment of his soul lodges in Harry, creating a Horcrux that Voldemort never intended to make. It's possible that this is an effect only seen in souls that have already been multiply damaged by being split several times (it is implied that no previous wizard has attempted to make more than one Horcrux, and stated that only the most depraved would even consider making one), but that murder didn't result in the soul-fragment created by it latching on to any pre-prepared object that (as per Dumbledore's speculation) was intended to become the final Horcrux with Voldemort's planned murder of Harry.
As to whether 'any' murder is enough I would suggest no, but by definition, murder by a wizard powerful enough to make a Horcrux, for the purposes in making a Horcrux, is the premeditated and deliberate murder of a weaker individual motivated purely by personal gain.

Its heavily implied that this is sufficiently unexplored magical territory that they don't know what actually happened. Keep in mind that not only was Voldemort's soul splintered and broken, but he also died.

Nightcanon
2017-03-31, 10:50 AM
Its heavily implied that this is sufficiently unexplored magical territory that they don't know what actually happened. Keep in mind that not only was Voldemort's soul splintered and broken, but he also died.

True enough.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-31, 10:53 AM
Its heavily implied that this is sufficiently unexplored magical territory that they don't know what actually happened. Keep in mind that not only was Voldemort's soul splintered and broken, but he also died.

And there's the aspect presented in-story of Lilly's selfless love for Harry and the inherent protective magic thereof.

If I had to speculate, I'd say that was more of a unique situation given all the elements that came together, and had more to do with Voldy's soul already being a mess at that point, rather than revealing anything useful about the Horocrux magic in general.

Simetra Irertne
2017-03-31, 11:54 AM
If I had to speculate, I'd say that was more of a unique situation given all the elements that came together, and had more to do with Voldy's soul already being a mess at that point, rather than revealing anything useful about the Horocrux magic in general.

I agree. There are too many variables for the murder to be the only factor. Potential other factors:
Voldemort's soul being messed up already
Lily's protection imbuing the rebounding curse with "love magic"
The target of the spell being powerful (or potentially powerful) already

halfeye
2017-03-31, 12:16 PM
Having caught up with the rest of the thread, I'm not really sure what your problem with the concept of unspeakable acts is. Someone mentions that the Holocaust isn't unspeakable, and thus nothing else should be: well, yes and no. We speak of it because it was a historical event, and so that people do not forget about it, but prior to 1930 it would have been unspeakable to propose carrying it out; and even now as someone without direct involvement (ancestors of WW2 generation all British, none active combatants in European theatre at the end of the war) the monstrosity of it (as opposed to the numerical and logistical facts) is almost impossible to articulate. It is possible that at some future point, some crime worse than the Holocaust might be perpetrated, but it would be inappropriate for a number of reasons to speculate what form such a crime would take, and one of those reasons is that it would be sickening to me and to anyone reading if I were to try to do so. To change tack slightly, I have personally given medical evidence in court that led to a man's conviction for the murder of his girlfriend's 3-month-old baby, and in a separate case had cause to investigate whether a 6-week-old that was bleeding to death in front of me from a lacerated tonsil might have sustained that injury from the mother's boyfriend forcing something down its throat the first time she left the two of them alone. I'm not sure whether these are appropriate things to share on a message board about a humorous comic and a game; I am concerned that the mention of them might cause offense and, yes, damage to people that read about them; I'm certainly mildly worried about what effects seeing such things might have had on what I might refer to as my soul. Certainly I would not want to create them from my own imagination to satisfy someone's desire for me to 'think of something really evil'. I'm therefore puzzled by your apparent stance that use of the phrase 'unspeakably evil' in books aimed at the teenage market is in some way a cop-out. As to the detailed description that made JK Rowling's editor turn green, I doubt it was much more graphic than the ritual described at the end of Goblet of Fire, which is told from the point of view of Harry, who has his eyes closed and is sensibly trying not to pay any more attention than he can help. Clearly they decided, as the editors of D&D did, that 'unspeakable evil' suited their purposes better.

Speaking for myself, I'm saying that copping out of describing bad things can be the correct choice. However, as a matter of philosophical truth, to claim that "unwise to speak of" is the same as "cannot be spoken of" is untrue.

Max_Killjoy
2017-03-31, 12:25 PM
Speaking for myself, I'm saying that copping out of describing bad things can be the correct choice. However, as a matter of philosophical truth, to claim that "unwise to speak of" is the same as "cannot be spoken of" is untrue.


I think part of my objection is that just saying "just trust us, it's bad, mkay?" makes discussions like the one intended in the OP of this thread very difficult to have.

Mordar
2017-03-31, 02:46 PM
I think part of my objection is that just saying "just trust us, it's bad, mkay?" is that it makes discussions like the one intended in the OP of this thread very difficult to have.

I think as far as the lich goes the idea is that the process of attaining "lichdom" involves something that ranks a 10 on everyone's "Bad-Deeds-O-Meter". The problem is that my campaign Bad-Deeds-O-Meter may be calibrated differently than your campaign Bad-Deeds-O-Meter (or even my Campaign #2 Bad-Deeds-O-Meter). So the "unspeakable" solution sidesteps the need for a placement on a sliding scale, the potential for such a huge spectrum of variability in different perspectives of how bad a given act is, or how a given person perceives evil/wants to be perceived.

It might well have been better to say that vs. "unspeakable evil" or similarly flowered prose, but the intent, I think, is good.

No matter how dark and gritty your campaign, campaign setting, players or characters, to become a lich requires acts so Evil it gives them all pause. I think that does give us the information we need from the OP on one part of the equation...by using the definitional lich descriptor, it includes the characteristic that the lich has done great evil by the standards of that campaign world.

So, I do think we need additional information, but it's on the other side of the equation - the Paladin. Details about the character, the order to which the paladin belongs, the divinity worshiped, how and why they are interacting with the lich/lich's country, et al.

And THEN come the moral conversations:

Redemption/absolution - can a lich, the very definitional existence of which required a 10 on the Bad-Deeds-O-Meter, ever wipe that stain from their ledger? If so, what would it take and who could do it?
The relative impact of regicide - if the Paladin and party destroy or otherwise remove the lich from power, do the outcomes and consequences of that action result in a greater net disruption/evil than leaving what appears to be a just (if not Good) ruler in place?
If the consequences are more grave/Evil, how much blame belongs to the Paladin and party?
...and so on.


I like the topic a lot, and think there are probably more interesting conversations and debates in the topic than in the actual playing out of the story...but the moral dilemma is, to me, a lot of fun to unravel.

- M

Beleriphon
2017-03-31, 04:46 PM
It might well have been better to say that vs. "unspeakable evil" or similarly flowered prose, but the intent, I think, is good.

No matter how dark and gritty your campaign, campaign setting, players or characters, to become a lich requires acts so Evil it gives them all pause. I think that does give us the information we need from the OP on one part of the equation...by using the definitional lich descriptor, it includes the characteristic that the lich has done great evil by the standards of that campaign world.

I think the defining factor that needs to address for the lich evilness aspect is what does a person have to do to separate their soul from their body in such a way as to make the destruction of their physical body a non-issue? That's moved beyond seeking immortality or eternal life. Not even vampires manage that level of separation.

Segev
2017-03-31, 06:20 PM
I see the "unspeakable evil" phrase as less a fig leaf, and more a tacit acknowledgement that it's going to have to be something you and your table find to fit the bill. That no amount of effort at being suitably depraved would be "enough" for every table, and would probably be "beyond okay" to even describe for others.

It tells us the essential part: whatever else is true about the lichification process, there is an act that is evil by whatever standard you care to apply which must be done as part of it.

Not as an excuse, but as simply saying, "come up with it yourself; it must be truly, horrifically evil." All it really does is guarantee that liches are nongood (and all but certainly evil). Because no good person would DO such a thing.

Velaryon
2017-03-31, 08:37 PM
If, at your table, an act of incestuous rape and murder is what is required, and you all agree that that is sufficiently evil and not doable without being evil, that works for your table. If your table thinks that's some relatively mundane evil, there, then you can come up with something else. If your table doesn't want to contemplate such things, you can come up with something else.

Same goes for if it takes the betrayal of a close friend, murder and soul-trapping of a random schmoe, murdering your adulterous wife and her lover instead of finishing your quest for redemption, exterminating an endangered species, or putting chili on a hot dog (you monster).

It is unfortunate for those who can't come up with something they deem "sufficiently evil," though.


Pretty sure that's how you become a death knight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Soth), not a lich. :smallbiggrin:

NichG
2017-03-31, 09:37 PM
I guess another way to spin it would be to ask, what kind of continuing evil would be so bad that it would be forgivable for even a paladin to sacrifice the populace of an entire kingdom against their will in order to prevent it?

For example, what if the lichification ritual involves binding a particular deed, behavior, or virtue that should normally be Good such that it instead automatically consigns anyone who exhibits it to go to the Lower Planes when they die. So every year the lich continues to exist, something like 0.5% of the Good population of the multiverse are consigned to be tortured eternally in the hells. Furthermore, the triggering virtue is becoming known as deities warn their followers about it, meaning that a particular component of Goodness itself is being eroded - charity, mercy, kindness, patience... one of them is now a cardinal sin.

Would that reach the 'forget about the details of our ethics and principles, we have to end this now!' threshold?

Nightcanon
2017-03-31, 10:16 PM
Speaking for myself, I'm saying that copping out of describing bad things can be the correct choice. However, as a matter of philosophical truth, to claim that "unwise to speak of" is the same as "cannot be spoken of" is untrue.
In D&D there exist mere words whose utterance is so evil that most normal people die on hearing them. It's not so much of a stretch to suggest that some acts might be even more dangerous to describe. In English law, at any rate, the concept of obscenity is based on the notion that the witnessing of obscene acts is harmful to the person witnessing them. I don't have much truck with censorship, but there are extremes at which I think that this can be true.
On another tack, I've been to places and seen sights that have inspired world-famous poets to write world-famous poems extolling their beauty, and concluded that the poetry is insufficient to describe them. I therefore do think that for practical purposes I have seen things that are indescribably beautiful. In a D&D world in which supernatural abilities and wish spells exist, someone could doubtless make a better job of describing such things than the greatest real-world poets (epic bard with 40 charisma + wish > greatest RL romantic poet), but as a concept 'indescribable beauty' I think is valid. Likewise 'unspeakable evil': we might be able to name the act (raping babies to death), but we aren't really communicating the evil that it involves, and indeed the sort of gross-out escalation that would occur in trying to name the 'most evil act imaginable' can only occur by creating that disconnect. It's hardly surprising, and by no means a cop out, that TSR/ WotC didn't sit their staff down for a brainstorming session to come up an act that was sufficiently evil (industrialised genocide of 6 million people- no sixty million, with added rape!). It's not like they could have published result, if details got out it would be a PR disaster worse than the 1980s devil-worship moral panic, and it would be impossible to do without a mental disconnect about what the acts named actually entailed, which in itself is a harmful thing to do.

Segev
2017-04-01, 12:37 AM
Part of the lich ritual involves starting an alignment discussion on the internet.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-04-01, 01:31 AM
I guess another way to spin it would be to ask, what kind of continuing evil would be so bad that it would be forgivable for even a paladin to sacrifice the populace of an entire kingdom against their will in order to prevent it?

I think this is the wrong way to think about paladins. I would suggest that if a paladin had a choice between killing a child and letting the universe be destroyed, killing the child would be the option that made the paladin fall. Which isn't to say that it would be the wrong choice to make, just that paladins do not function on consequentialist ethics.

Righteously smiting an evil lich is always permissible for a paladin, regardless of the fallout that may arise. How much priority any individual paladin may place on avoiding said fallout is a choice for the individual paladin.

Satinavian
2017-04-01, 01:39 AM
I always assumed that the act of unspeakable evil was informed evil. The same way as "Protection from good" is an Evil deed, only far more evil.
Not because anyone actually got harmed, but because the Cosmic Powers of Good and Evil say so.

And it is so incredible powerful evil because you mess with your own soul and it is a single act that will forever bar you from certain afterlifes. While things like mass murder can be forgiven and redemption is possible and you might still end up in some kind of heaven, separating your soul is evil and isolating it from the cosmos kinda prevents cleaning it from that particular evil.


In certain religions suicide was considered an unforgivable sin. Not because it was worse than anything else but because you are dead afterwards and can't atone for it anymore until you die. Becoming a Lich is probably similar and the reason why it is considered so evil.

ShaneMRoth
2017-04-01, 01:41 AM
Part of the lich ritual involves starting an alignment discussion on the internet.

This post is just one reason why I put down any beverage before reading threads.

#SpitTakeAverted

NichG
2017-04-01, 02:22 AM
I think this is the wrong way to think about paladins. I would suggest that if a paladin had a choice between killing a child and letting the universe be destroyed, killing the child would be the option that made the paladin fall. Which isn't to say that it would be the wrong choice to make, just that paladins do not function on consequentialist ethics.

Righteously smiting an evil lich is always permissible for a paladin, regardless of the fallout that may arise. How much priority any individual paladin may place on avoiding said fallout is a choice for the individual paladin.

That's kind of ironic because its a very consequentialist take on paladin behavior - that is to say, it's proposing that 'anything that doesn't cause a loss of powers is fair game' is a reasonable code for a paladin to follow. I think its possible to construct an absolutely monstrously evil (in the colloquial sense if not the cosmic sense) paladin by taking that to the limit - having a paladin who places themselves in, say, a country which is undergoing major social problems such as famine or revolution, and makes as many opportunities for themselves to have the choice to Smite or Not Smite on a daily basis as possible - and then specifically only chooses to Smite those whose deaths would have horrible downstream consequences, while specifically sparing those whose survival would similarly have horrible downstream consequences.

It kind of goes to Segev's point about Atonement - there's both a letter and a spirit that must be satisfied. Someone who seeks atonement specifically to exploit the system ends up not receiving it. Similarly, if a paladin is beholden to both law and good, a paladin who exploits the letter of their code while being willfully negligent of the spirit might not be mandated to fall by the letter of the code, but presumably they'd be failing at the spirit of it.

It's so frequently an issue because of the disconnect of the metagame. The player is empowered to write something down on the character sheet - to proclaim that the character is Good at heart, to choose a class of Paladin, to write the backstory that said 'such and such a god said I'm a good guy and gave me a chunk of power because of it'. But that also empowers the player to intentionally stress the consistency of those structures if they so choose - they can choose to play a Paladin of Pelor who actually is more or less fine with the undead, or other weird combinations. There's a metagame factor which prevents Pelor from just removing their support (it would be bad if the GM were constantly judging the player and pulled their powers whenever they got annoyed), but presumably if Pelor is an entity who is empowered to know the true heart and soul of his paladins, if he found something not to his liking he just wouldn't invest that person as a paladin in the first place. However, we are forced to consider the situation in which Pelor (or Cosmic Good, or whatever) is bound to be blind to the real intents of their mortal proxies and has to navigate ethics with and only with a specified code.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-04-01, 03:18 AM
That's kind of ironic because its a very consequentialist take on paladin behavior - that is to say, it's proposing that 'anything that doesn't cause a loss of powers is fair game' is a reasonable code for a paladin to follow.

No, I didn't say that. I specifically said that taking the option that didn't cause the paladin to fall would be the wrong choice, in this case. What I am proposing is that sometimes a paladin who also wants to be a good person might have to choose a path that would make him fall. I also think that in such cases it would be relatively easy for the paladin to get redeemed. I guess I am saying that D&D's alignment system is inherently broken and will occasionally promote actions that are clearly the wrong choice as being the right choice. And therefore, by extension, a paladin's code is not necessarily the same thing as always doing the right thing. D&D Good is not necessarily the same thing as actually doing right, in my opinion.


I think its possible to construct an absolutely monstrously evil (in the colloquial sense if not the cosmic sense) paladin by taking that to the limit - having a paladin who places themselves in, say, a country which is undergoing major social problems such as famine or revolution, and makes as many opportunities for themselves to have the choice to Smite or Not Smite on a daily basis as possible - and then specifically only chooses to Smite those whose deaths would have horrible downstream consequences, while specifically sparing those whose survival would similarly have horrible downstream consequences.

I think you could do it without violating certain paladin codes. I don't think you could do it without changing alignment, though. Someone who has a specific intent to cause harm is probably crossing an alignment line. I don't think specifically intending to throw a nation into chaos is the same as someone who either doesn't recognize the potential for that to happen, or someone who shrugs and says that the nation collapsing is not his responsibility and that lawful goodness will prevail there in the end.

I will say as someone who thinks D&D's alignment is broken, you have a few options to deal with it.

1) You can scrap alignment entirely. Probably the best choice. It causes way more trouble than it's worth.

2) You can embrace it. It can be fun to roleplay with a morality system that's different from what we're accustomed to. I've had a lot of fun playing Good aligned characters that were terrible people, and Evil characters that wanted all the best for everyone.

Chaotic Good serial killer. She was always completely diligent about doing all the legwork, making sure that this villainous person was truly irredeemable and their death would make the world a better place for all concerned. Would donate a sizable percentage of the loot she got from these killings to hungry orphans or whatever. Would even kill them quickly and painlessly. Was still doing it because she got a sick thrill out of killing that she never admitted to herself.

Lawful Evil nation builder. Strongly believed that the best (and only) way to turn his war torn nation into a peaceful and prosperous nation was to ruthlessly crush dissent beneath his iron boot. He might have been right. Believed that one day it might even be possible to dial it back and make the kingdom happy as well as peaceful and prosperous. Didn't enjoy the ruthless tactics at all.

3) Or you can try to shoehorn modern morality into a system that is, in my humble opinion, not at all built for it. I think things break when you try to do this.

NichG
2017-04-01, 04:13 AM
No, I didn't say that. I specifically said that taking the option that didn't cause the paladin to fall would be the wrong choice, in this case. What I am proposing is that sometimes a paladin who also wants to be a good person might have to choose a path that would make him fall. I also think that in such cases it would be relatively easy for the paladin to get redeemed.

Ah, okay. Yeah, I agree with this.



I guess I am saying that D&D's alignment system is inherently broken and will occasionally promote actions that are clearly the wrong choice as being the right choice. And therefore, by extension, a paladin's code is not necessarily the same thing as always doing the right thing. D&D Good is not necessarily the same thing as actually doing right, in my opinion.


This is also true, but I guess the thing I was getting at with previous posts is that there is a reason for D&D Good to try to be the same thing as actually doing right, inasmuch as possible (in this case, both from the in-universe point of view of cosmic forces arrayed behind the banner, and from the out-of-universe point of view of the GM and players trying to maintain verisimilitude). The reason being that if they're generally pretty correlated, people in a D&D universe have reason to allow themselves to be guided by cosmic alignment considerations when their own judgement might be lacking or their information incomplete. But if you move too many ticks in the direction of blue/orange morality, you're going to start to get people judging the cosmos and finding it wanting (both in-universe, and players at the table saying 'yeah, alignment is pretty random isn't it, lets just ignore that').

Not to say it can always be achieved (much like, sometimes the paladin should choose to fall). But failing too severely at it has consequences (for the game, for the story, for in-character entities). Generally speaking, the consequence is to make alignment less relevant.



1) You can scrap alignment entirely. Probably the best choice. It causes way more trouble than it's worth.


I tend towards this, if its not obvious :smallsmile:



2) You can embrace it. It can be fun to roleplay with a morality system that's different from what we're accustomed to. I've had a lot of fun playing Good aligned characters that were terrible people, and Evil characters that wanted all the best for everyone.

Chaotic Good serial killer. She was always completely diligent about doing all the legwork, making sure that this villainous person was truly irredeemable and their death would make the world a better place for all concerned. Would donate a sizable percentage of the loot she got from these killings to hungry orphans or whatever. Would even kill them quickly and painlessly. Was still doing it because she got a sick thrill out of killing that she never admitted to herself.

Lawful Evil nation builder. Strongly believed that the best (and only) way to turn his war torn nation into a peaceful and prosperous nation was to ruthlessly crush dissent beneath his iron boot. He might have been right. Believed that one day it might even be possible to dial it back and make the kingdom happy as well as peaceful and prosperous. Didn't enjoy the ruthless tactics at all.

3) Or you can try to shoehorn modern morality into a system that is, in my humble opinion, not at all built for it. I think things break when you try to do this.

Well I think the issue is, interactions between sentient entities aren't arbitrary. Consequences remain the same even if you change the underlying philosophy. So even if you try to embrace it, the fact of the matter is the guy who is nominally a paragon of blue!good may well be a jerk that ruins everything your blue!good character holds dear but does so according to the playbook of the alternate moral system. You're supposed to be on the same side, but the consequence of that pattern of behavior is still real and so either you tend to bias the playable archetypes more towards madmen and extremists of various stripes, excluding the middle ground of people with generally reasonable and stable behavior. Even if the paladin is blue!good and the peasants of the lich king is blue!good and the lich king is orange!evil (but is doing a good job), those peasants really should band together and stop the paladin regardless of whether you're using modern morality or blue/orange alternate morality - anything else is pretty self-destructive of them.

Unoriginal
2017-04-01, 05:52 AM
Part of the problem of this thread is that it's handling different settings and games with very different conceptions of alignment.

Elderand
2017-04-01, 06:15 AM
As far as I'm aware, the lichification rituals was given at least once in great details, Van richten's guide to the lich for ravenloft adnd 2nd edition details the whole process of becoming a lich.

None of it is actually evil aside from getting the fresh heart of a sentient creature for a potion. But even then, that can be arranged without going into evil.
Then once a century or so, a lich need to do a ritual were again, the heart of a sentient creature is used to help preserve the body of the lich. But that's not even necessary, the book mention liches can just let his or her body crumble to dust, have the spirit go into the phylactery and possess a random corpse nearby.

Unoriginal
2017-04-01, 06:25 AM
The process to become a Lich changed several time.

The 2e Van Richten's version is very different from the 5e version, for exemple. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit the 3.X or 4e versions either.

Elderand
2017-04-01, 07:59 AM
The process to become a Lich changed several time.

The 2e Van Richten's version is very different from the 5e version, for exemple. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit the 3.X or 4e versions either.

You can't really say the process as changed when every other version makes it a point to not say what the process is.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-04-01, 12:47 PM
This is also true, but I guess the thing I was getting at with previous posts is that there is a reason for D&D Good to try to be the same thing as actually doing right, inasmuch as possible (in this case, both from the in-universe point of view of cosmic forces arrayed behind the banner, and from the out-of-universe point of view of the GM and players trying to maintain verisimilitude). The reason being that if they're generally pretty correlated, people in a D&D universe have reason to allow themselves to be guided by cosmic alignment considerations when their own judgement might be lacking or their information incomplete. But if you move too many ticks in the direction of blue/orange morality, you're going to start to get people judging the cosmos and finding it wanting (both in-universe, and players at the table saying 'yeah, alignment is pretty random isn't it, lets just ignore that').

I don't think it's as bad as all that. I think most of the time "Good" aligns with "morally right", it just isn't a perfect match. And I kind of think that's a feature, not a bug. I sort of like that there exists legitimate reasons for people to pick different alignments. If you can make arguments why being evil is a good thing then that adds a little something over the villains just being cackling moustache twirlers.


Well I think the issue is, interactions between sentient entities aren't arbitrary. Consequences remain the same even if you change the underlying philosophy. So even if you try to embrace it, the fact of the matter is the guy who is nominally a paragon of blue!good may well be a jerk that ruins everything your blue!good character holds dear but does so according to the playbook of the alternate moral system. You're supposed to be on the same side, but the consequence of that pattern of behavior is still real and so either you tend to bias the playable archetypes more towards madmen and extremists of various stripes, excluding the middle ground of people with generally reasonable and stable behavior. Even if the paladin is blue!good and the peasants of the lich king is blue!good and the lich king is orange!evil (but is doing a good job), those peasants really should band together and stop the paladin regardless of whether you're using modern morality or blue/orange alternate morality - anything else is pretty self-destructive of them.

I sort of think the peasants in this example should be grey/neutral. And I sort of like that dynamic where good is potentially fighting for high minded long term moral concerns that the average peasant couldn't give two ****s about. I like the conflict between good and practicality.

I do think it's a bug in the intended system when two people of the same alignment have to fight, as the intended system is just to present people with different jerseys for ease of killing each other. But I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing either if you want to use that simplistic system to get some more interesting nuance.

Something weird has just occured to me. Contrary to what most people seem to say the point of alignment is, getting new roleplayers to roleplay. I think alignment is a tool that should only be used as entertainment for experienced roleplayers to fool around with if they feel like it. Alignment is a terrible system for roleplay. It encourages making shallow characters and then stuffing them in a straightjacket. But I do think it potentially has some value as a system where the point is exploring the weirdness that follows from a setting where alignment is a real actual flawed thing.

Reboot
2017-04-01, 06:30 PM
Some Possiblities.

1.

Soldier The demon hordes are coming to despoil our land, and do awful things to our children, and kick our puppies, and talk at the theater. The army has been defeated in the field, we few survivors are not enough to defend the city, or even slow the horde long enough for the people to flee.

Wizard: What can be done, what can I do to save our people?

Scholar: Only someone of impossible arcane might can face the demon general and win, What's worse, all living things near him die immediately, and so that which kills him cannot be alive. There is a ritual, but it is...

Wizard: It is what?

Scholar: It is drastic, some would say wrong.

Wizard: It cannot be more wrong than allowing our children to fall into the clutches of the demon horde. Tell me, what must I do.

Scholar: We shall need... gods forgive us, we shall need a volunteer. She must be a virgin...
I would tend to think that an "unspeakably evil" process would prohibit the use of willing victims.


Situation 2

Evil Necromancer Lich: HA HA HA I SHALL KILL YOU AND REANIMATE YOU INTO A POWERFUL LICH LIKE MYSELF! THEN YOU SHALL BE EEEVIL LIKE ME AND WILLINGLY DESTROY ALL THAT WHICH YOU DEFEND! MUAH HA HA HA HA! I AM SO DELICIOUSLY EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL!

Hero: NOOOOO!

One Dark Ritual Later

Lichified Hero: So I'm a powerfull lich now?

Evil Necromancer Lich: Yes, now use your newfound dark powers to lay waste to that which you formerly loved!

Lichified Hero: As a counterproposal, Chop, punch, stab, maim, ignite, thump, kaboom, impale, zzzap, biff, pow, I'm still intelligent you know, I still have free will. Idiot. Hey, newfound dark powers are great for killing things. Many evil things need killing. I should continue killing evil things, only now be better at it.

"The process of becoming a lich is unspeakably evil and can be undertaken only by a willing character." (emphasis mine)

Tetsubo 57
2017-04-01, 09:32 PM
I've had a neutral lich ruling an island kingdom before. He started by just buying up unwanted land. Over a few centuries he ended up with a majority of the island. They place had been an unaffiliated land. Eventually he just took over as the best option to rule fairly and justly. Turned half the island back into wild lands (for his own purposes), most of the rest into a plantation and a single city of the living. He became the breadbasket of a few neighboring kingdoms. Also, very wealthy.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-01, 11:08 PM
I'd ditch alignment entirely. "Good" and "evil" are about intent and action and effect, not about what jersey someone is wearing.

Really wouldn't allow a paladin to serve generic "good", it would have to be a specific deity, and that deity's code. When the deity's code or demands conflicted with what the paladin viewed as good, then the paladin would have a choice. No being is "good by definition", not even a deity, and "good" isn't defined by fiat.

JNAProductions
2017-04-01, 11:09 PM
I'd allow a Paladin to serve their own personal moral code, rather than any deity's, regardless of if I'm using alignment.

Keltest
2017-04-01, 11:36 PM
I'd allow a Paladin to serve their own personal moral code, rather than any deity's, regardless of if I'm using alignment.

Indeed. While I think a paladin works well as a holy agent, it diminishes them if theyre only serving the cause of good because their god is good, and not because they really are just that righteous.

NichG
2017-04-01, 11:52 PM
I don't think it's as bad as all that. I think most of the time "Good" aligns with "morally right", it just isn't a perfect match. And I kind of think that's a feature, not a bug. I sort of like that there exists legitimate reasons for people to pick different alignments. If you can make arguments why being evil is a good thing then that adds a little something over the villains just being cackling moustache twirlers.

You can get this even if you assume that people try to behave reasonably to each-other as much as possible - because people do have different desires, goals, contexts, and so on. When these things can be bridged by negotiation and cooperation, you have goodly societies. When there's a reason that they can't (and there can be many of these) then you have a fracturing into camps which have irreconcilable conflicts but are each able to argue why their way is right without needing self-deception or without one side being fundamentally mistaken about a point of fact or logic. And then of course you add back in all of those mistaken points of fact or logic, irrational choices, etc that make up actual people and actual life - but you can construct core disagreements that can actually make sense from multiple incompatible points of view without becoming caricatures.

The cost of doing so is that outsiders to the conflict experience a sort of moral friction - everyone involved is choosing their side because of realities of their life that they can't avoid, and here comes a team of outsiders who aren't subject to those constraints saying 'yeah, you guys are right and the other guys are wrong'. So the only 'pure' move is to somehow change the exigencies underlying the conflict, as opposed to picking a side. Which can create a kind of difficult gaming environment for players to feel good about the traditional style of adventuring.



I sort of think the peasants in this example should be grey/neutral. And I sort of like that dynamic where good is potentially fighting for high minded long term moral concerns that the average peasant couldn't give two ****s about. I like the conflict between good and practicality.

I do think it's a bug in the intended system when two people of the same alignment have to fight, as the intended system is just to present people with different jerseys for ease of killing each other. But I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing either if you want to use that simplistic system to get some more interesting nuance.

Something weird has just occured to me. Contrary to what most people seem to say the point of alignment is, getting new roleplayers to roleplay. I think alignment is a tool that should only be used as entertainment for experienced roleplayers to fool around with if they feel like it. Alignment is a terrible system for roleplay. It encourages making shallow characters and then stuffing them in a straightjacket. But I do think it potentially has some value as a system where the point is exploring the weirdness that follows from a setting where alignment is a real actual flawed thing.

Yeah, agreed. Creates a lot of bad habits when its people's first introduction to roleplay. The thing I notice, at least whenever I'm playing in campaigns which center around 'exploring the weirdness' is that inevitably the plot drifts towards 'change/tear down the flawed system'. If you play in Faerun long enough, you try to tear down the Wall of the Faithless, etc.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 12:20 AM
I'd allow a Paladin to serve their own personal moral code, rather than any deity's, regardless of if I'm using alignment.


Indeed. While I think a paladin works well as a holy agent, it diminishes them if theyre only serving the cause of good because their god is good, and not because they really are just that righteous.

Where then would the paladin's "powers" come from? Do they end up as a sort of belief-flavored sorcerer?

Milo v3
2017-04-02, 12:26 AM
Where then would the paladin's "powers" come from? Do they end up as a sort of belief-flavored sorcerer?
Considering that in 3.5e and Pathfinder paladins already don't get their power from deities by default but get their power from the concepts of "Good and Law" itself, getting powers from philosophies rather than isn't that surprising or big of a change.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 12:31 AM
Considering that in 3.5e and Pathfinder paladins already don't get their power from deities by default, getting powers from philosophies isn't that surprising or big of a change.


Which just takes us back around to where I'd immediately ditch alignment, which IMO would include the existence of "good" and "evil" as cosmic forces.

Of course, I've never cared for the notion of concept or philosophy clerics, either.

Milo v3
2017-04-02, 12:48 AM
Which just takes us back around to where I'd immediately ditch alignment, which IMO would include the existence of "good" and "evil" as cosmic forces.

Of course, I've never cared for the notion of concept or philosophy clerics, either.
I never understood the dislike of philosophy clerics considering that multiple religions lack deities.

I do use both philosophy/concept clerics and subjective morality in my games though.

ImNotTrevor
2017-04-02, 12:59 AM
Which just takes us back around to where I'd immediately ditch alignment, which IMO would include the existence of "good" and "evil" as cosmic forces.

Of course, I've never cared for the notion of concept or philosophy clerics, either.

Could a Cleric get his powers from Karma?

How about, to get weirder, ambient Chi?

Could a Cleric of the concept of Natural Harmony get power from Nature in the same way a Druid does?

For generally any philosophy cleric you can imagine a force to grant power outside of Good and Evil and Law and Chaos.

Clerics of Communism obviously take their power from the bourgeoisie to serve the proletariat.

Clerics of Nihilism take their power from The Absurd.

Clerics of Aestheticism take their power from the force of ART!!

Etc.

(Yes, these are basically a joke but then again we're playing D&D where every base powersource is reskinned Handwavium and adding another one is trivial.)

Efrate
2017-04-02, 12:59 AM
I think the evil of becoming a lich is pretty simple. When a being dies, its soul goes to whatever outer plane, where its memories and essence ends up getting reabsorbed by the plane/the dieties. Willfully becoming undead denys this to deities, the creators and enforcers of good/evil. Even evil deities, perhaps moreso than good deities, crave power. You are denying them this. They see it as evil. You are taking what is rightfully theirs, and they do what they can to deny that. Even evil deities of undeath tend to prefer unintelligent undead, which are just corpses animated by negative energy.

On a sidenote, do evil deities think of themselves as evil, or are they like most humans that think themselves the only one in the right? Is Heironius evil to Hextor?

I think it works.

As for your paladin, I say he plays nice in all cases. It doesn't effect him. Unless you play paladins all leroy jenkins all the time smiting everything that pings regardless of anything else, he has no real reason to kill the lich. If a dragon is evil but protecting a village (and by extension his horde/food suppliers) from bandits, a paladin would not seek to eliminate that dragon. He would not work with it willingly, but he is not required by his oath to kill anything that is even remotely evil. And he would not be beholden to do something about said dragon either. He might try to convert it later but that would be it.

As for why become a lich, if its easy immortality or not, that doesn't have to be evil. Your wizard craves arcane power beyond all measure, but wants to study at his pace without regard for time, lichdom is an option. If he does nothing/has done nothing else to infringe upon anyone, can he still be evil? What if he needs that power for something, or he has to confront a threat far into the future with more experience than he has? Maybe he has an immediate need for power, the raiding village example for earlier, and has only 8 days to prepare (takes a week to do the ritual IIRC).

This is ignoring Baelnorns and archliches obviously.

As for why unspeakable evil, I think its meant as a balance point for the PCs from a game design perspective. You are supposed to play goodie two shoes characters, and be challenged, but being more or less unkillable as a PC needs to have a cost that makes it best suited for NPCs, insomuch as you are supposed to be the good guys.

My 2 copper.

Bohandas
2017-04-02, 01:40 AM
Where then would the paladin's "powers" come from? Do they end up as a sort of belief-flavored sorcerer?

They're powered by their own sense of self-righteousness

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 09:03 AM
They're powered by their own sense of self-righteousness

Which wouldn't in any way restrict empowerment to the actually-righteous...

(Plus that doesn't really explain where their power comes from.)

Keltest
2017-04-02, 09:28 AM
Which wouldn't in any way restrict empowerment to the actually-righteous...

(Plus that doesn't really explain where their power comes from.)

Where does any magic come from? The Righteous know specific techniques that let them manifest specific magical abilities through the strength of their faith, or righteousness, or goodness, or whatever your given edition says paladins are powered by.

JNAProductions
2017-04-02, 09:30 AM
The gestalt subconscious of the moral. (And immoral, for anti-Paladins/Oathbreakers.)

The vast majority of people-even neutral people, if we're sticking to alignment-believe in doing good. They might not do much good themselves, but the psychic resonance of their souls yearning for good creates a well of power that the truly moral can tap into. Therefore, Paladins.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 09:46 AM
Where does any magic come from? The Righteous know specific techniques that let them manifest specific magical abilities through the strength of their faith, or righteousness, or goodness, or whatever your given edition says paladins are powered by.


Special techniques? That doesn't sound like paladins, it sounds like "monks".




The gestalt subconscious of the moral. (And immoral, for anti-Paladins/Oathbreakers.)

The vast majority of people-even neutral people, if we're sticking to alignment-believe in doing good. They might not do much good themselves, but the psychic resonance of their souls yearning for good creates a well of power that the truly moral can tap into. Therefore, Paladins.


I guess that would work in some settings... definitely not in others.

JNAProductions
2017-04-02, 09:48 AM
I guess that would work in some settings... definitely not in others.

Then figure out your explanations for other settings. If you take away cosmic good and evil, find some power to replace them, for the purposes of Paladins.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 10:00 AM
Then figure out your explanations for other settings. If you take away cosmic good and evil, find some power to replace them, for the purposes of Paladins.

My explanation was "deity's hitman lackey errand boy paragon", with their code of conduct defined by the deity and not by "good", but that was rejected.

For any setting I've worked on, "good" and "evil" as cosmic forces just doesn't pass muster, and the idea of "collective unconscious" is a non-starter.

Of course, I'm also not fond of class-based systems, so I'd probably refocus "paladin" as based on the character's motives and actions, and if the setting had magic, they'd get it the same way everyone else does.


Turns out that "what is a paladin?" is as open-ended as "how do you become a lich?" Makes the whole question of the thread kinda hard to answer in a straight-forward way.

NichG
2017-04-02, 10:51 AM
In 2ed D&D (by way of Planescape), it's implied that all power - divine, arcane, psionic, martial, whatever - ultimately originates from belief.

That's not necessarily faith or adherence to an ideal, or the belief that the user of that power personally has. If enough people believe that self-appointed holy knights and miraculous events tend to happen side by side, then holy knights might gradually find themselves developing the ability to call down miracles. The scale required is big enough that the belief or disbelief of a single person isn't really enough to make a dent, and there's not much indication in the Planescape material about how the effects of belief are localized - so maybe a city full of atheists makes divine magic marginally weaker across the multiverse, but it doesn't necessarily make it particularly weaker in that one city compared to other places.

So at least in that set of settings, a paladin could gain their powers simply because they're a close enough fit to the image people have of a paladin that the gaps get filled in. And if someone in particular has reason to suspect that a particular paladin is just exploiting the image for gain, that belief on its own isn't really enough to budge things. But if the person moves too far away from the idealized image of a paladin, in ways that are hard to reconcile with the expected outward image at least, they 'fall'.

And of course gods can just force the issue if they want a mortal representative, since they're sitting on a sufficiently large pool of focused belief to smooth over the gaps on their own. Though in Planescape that more often takes the form of a Proxy (more like an applied template than a class) than a paladin.

Which I suppose in the context of the conversation would imply that (in 2ed D&D) as long as a paladin looked the part and dressed up their destructive actions in a sufficiently paladin-ey and piously-intended way, their powers won't go away for it. But if paladins as a whole were to become seen as heralds of great destruction that spares neither sinner nor innocent, paladinism itself would actually undergo a shift.

Keltest
2017-04-02, 10:53 AM
Special techniques? That doesn't sound like paladins, it sounds like "monks".

It sounds like every magic user who isn't a sorcerer or warlock. A Wizard's techniques are the hand gestures, magic words, and intense study. A cleric's are prayer. The paladin's are whatever force of willpower invokes their Smite Evil effects.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 11:19 AM
It sounds like every magic user who isn't a sorcerer or warlock. A Wizard's techniques are the hand gestures, magic words, and intense study. A cleric's are prayer. The paladin's are whatever force of willpower invokes their Smite Evil effects.

How did willpower enter into it?

If the paladin can have this powers taken away, that implies that they come from outside the paladin in some way.

ImNotTrevor
2017-04-02, 11:37 AM
This is easy if you're willing to be a tad more creative.

Paladins are powered by Concepts.

Concepts can be even more powerful than the Gods, but have no individual will. They just exist. They are so powerful, in fact, that theirs is the power from which Gods draw their own. The more ancient and practiced a concept is within the universe, the more powerful it becomes.

Concepts such as Good and Evil have titanic amounts of power, but no individual wills of their own. But they empower good and evil deities alike.

Paladins have 2 methods of accessing the powers of Good. The first is to worship a God empowered by Good, which is the easier route. The more difficult route is to bypass a deity and be empowered by Good itself. This requires time and dedication to the Concept itself, which requires its discovery. Very few know of the existence of the entities known as Concepts, so one must be very lucky to come across knowledge of their existence. It also requires living by a strict code to keep oneself in-tune with the Concept they connect to.

AAAAND done.

There are non-sentient, incredibly powerful entities empowered by the existence and practice of themselves. (When you do a Good thing, the Concept of Good becomes more powerful.) Since Concepts aren't Sentient, there is no need to worry about them as cosmic forces doing battle. While Good and Evil do compete, it is less like a war and more like two trees planted a little too close together. They compete, but not in any kind of informed or deliberate way. Each does its own thing and will hopefully crowd out the other.

This does not require alignments to function, either. In fact, this allows for all kinds of neato Paladins!
Paladins of Knowledge
Paladins of Revenge
Paladins of Rage
Paladins of Life
Etc.

You're welcome. We can now move on from this topic.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 11:47 AM
This is easy if you're willing to be a tad more creative.

Paladins are powered by Concepts.

Concepts can be even more powerful than the Gods, but have no individual will. They just exist. They are so powerful, in fact, that theirs is the power from which Gods draw their own. The more ancient and practiced a concept is within the universe, the more powerful it becomes.

Concepts such as Good and Evil have titanic amounts of power, but no individual wills of their own. But they empower good and evil deities alike.

Paladins have 2 methods of accessing the powers of Good. The first is to worship a God empowered by Good, which is the easier route. The more difficult route is to bypass a deity and be empowered by Good itself. This requires time and dedication to the Concept itself, which requires its discovery. Very few know of the existence of the entities known as Concepts, so one must be very lucky to come across knowledge of their existence. It also requires living by a strict code to keep oneself in-tune with the Concept they connect to.

AAAAND done.

There are non-sentient, incredibly powerful entities empowered by the existence and practice of themselves. (When you do a Good thing, the Concept of Good becomes more powerful.) Since Concepts aren't Sentient, there is no need to worry about them as cosmic forces doing battle. While Good and Evil do compete, it is less like a war and more like two trees planted a little too close together. They compete, but not in any kind of informed or deliberate way. Each does its own thing and will hopefully crowd out the other.

This does not require alignments to function, either. In fact, this allows for all kinds of neato Paladins!
Paladins of Knowledge
Paladins of Revenge
Paladins of Rage
Paladins of Life
Etc.

You're welcome. We can now move on from this topic.

If the "concept" has no will, how are paladins granted their powers, and stripped of their powers?

Almarck
2017-04-02, 11:50 AM
If the "concept" has no will, how are paladins granted their powers, and stripped of their powers?

By failure to align with the concept.


Imagine if you will the placement of your alignment was a spatial coordinate. to access the power of the concept you must be near enough to reach it.

failure to align means you are no longer near.

places in metaphysics aren't so much physical space in the real world, but points on a sort of emotional cosmic fabric

Knaight
2017-04-02, 11:59 AM
If the paladin can have this powers taken away, that implies that they come from outside the paladin in some way.

No it doesn't. My ability to fight with a spear comes from me, that doesn't mean you couldn't take it away by removing an arm.

ImNotTrevor
2017-04-02, 12:00 PM
If the "concept" has no will, how are paladins granted their powers, and stripped of their powers?

Almarck nailed it. It's an attunement thing. To use a more musical metaphor, you need to make sure you and your chosen Concept are in the same "key" to have access. Maintaining that tuning is outlined in your Code of Conduct. These actions aren't arbitrary prescribed restrictions, but the actual method of retaining your attunement to the Concept you serve. Acting outside of that code throws you out-of-tune, and requires great effort to return to the correct state. In this case, an Atonement spell would be acting as an Attunement spell, instead. Same general concept, (teehee) but for a different purpose.

That's actually hinted at/partially covered in the initial post when I bring up the Code of Conduct. It's easy to infer.

Cazero
2017-04-02, 12:08 PM
Considering that in the real world, anything solid can be broken apart by an accurately calibrated soundwave, gaining powers from attunment with a concept doesn't sound outlandish for a high fantasy setting. It's called resonance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance).

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 12:10 PM
By failure to align with the concept.


Imagine if you will the placement of your alignment was a spatial coordinate. to access the power of the concept you must be near enough to reach it.

failure to align means you are no longer near.

places in metaphysics aren't so much physical space in the real world, but points on a sort of emotional cosmic fabric


I guess that works well enough.

halfeye
2017-04-02, 12:44 PM
By failure to align with the concept.


Imagine if you will the placement of your alignment was a spatial coordinate. to access the power of the concept you must be near enough to reach it.

failure to align means you are no longer near.

places in metaphysics aren't so much physical space in the real world, but points on a sort of emotional cosmic fabric

No.

If that was true, everyone would know what good or evil was. Hitler thought he was the good guy, that the people he persecuted were Evil. By our standards he was wrong. By his standards he was a paladin. If there's a universal standard of good and evil in the real universe, we haven't found it yet.

Keltest
2017-04-02, 12:48 PM
No.

If that was true, everyone would know what good or evil was. Hitler thought he was the good guy, that the people he persecuted were Evil. By our standards he was wrong. By his standards he was a paladin. If there's a universal standard of good and evil in the real universe, we haven't found it yet.

Youre not allowing for the possibility that people can be wrong. In editions where paladins have an alignment requirement, just thinking that youre doing good isn't enough, you need to actually conform to a specific set of standards, more strict than even just enough to qualify as "good".

hamishspence
2017-04-02, 12:48 PM
If you're haven't been a paladin once already, you won't know you're "not properly aligned with the concept of Good" - because you haven't a state to fall from in the first place.

Thus, you can have "Evil people who think they are Good" even in a D&D world governed by this idea.

halfeye
2017-04-02, 12:56 PM
Youre not allowing for the possibility that people can be wrong. In editions where paladins have an alignment requirement, just thinking that youre doing good isn't enough, you need to actually conform to a specific set of standards, more strict than even just enough to qualify as "good".

That may work in D&D, but in the real world, it really, really doesn't, which means that in a meta way, it doesn't really work in D&D.

hamishspence
2017-04-02, 12:59 PM
By his standards he was a paladin. If there's a universal standard of good and evil in the real universe, we haven't found it yet.

For gaming, they don't need a standard that will satisfy everyone on the planet - only everyone at the table.

Almarck
2017-04-02, 01:12 PM
That may work in D&D, but in the real world, it really, really doesn't, which means that in a meta way, it doesn't really work in D&D.



Because the real world doesn't have avatars of divine magical powet.... atleast that everyone knows


We make the assumption that magic has to follow human morality, this is flawed

The Aboleth
2017-04-02, 01:31 PM
SNIP "The Story of Bob, the Dark Lord Lich"

That's a great story! It actually inspired me to write a story of my own. I wondered: Could a person undergo the "unspeakably evil" process of becoming a lich for "good" reasons? Could a person who was, up to that point, seen as fair and just commit the act and still rule afterward in a fair and just manner? Can a single act make a good person bad--or are they a simply a good person who made a bad decision?

To answer these questions, I present to you "The Wizard-King of Sevillus" and invite you to give me your thoughts and feedback on the matter. Enjoy!


The Wizard-King of Sevillus had ruled his nation for 72 years. Before he came to the throne, the kingdom was a chaotic and brutal country filled with constant violence both from within and without; upon the Wizard-King’s ascent to power, he was able to unite—through a combination of shrewd diplomacy, sage-like wisdom, and unmatched arcane power--the disparate factions and establish a peace and unity that was unheard of in Sevillus centuries-spanning history. The Wizard-King was adored by his people for his just, fair, and compassionate style of governance.

Though his mind was as sharp as ever, the Wizard-King’s body had begun to fail him. Both his own people and the enemy nations that surrounded Sevillus knew this, and all waited cautiously to learn who the Wizard-King would choose as his successor. Yet of all the people who worried about this fact, none were more conflicted than the Wizard-King himself.

The Wizard-King had two sons, and neither had lived up to his expectations. The oldest was a selfish and hedonistic soul—he wanted all the pleasures and benefits that his royal blood provided but cared nothing for the responsibilities that came with it. Were he to be crowned King, the eldest son would doubtless be content to watch the entire land fall back into chaos so long as he had his wine and women. The younger son, by contrast, cared nothing for the pleasures of life but was instead pragmatic to the point of lacking emotion—if confronted with a problem, he would always choose the most logical solution regardless of the emotional or moral consequences thereof. Were the younger son to be crowned King, he would likely abandon an entire province to an advancing demon horde without a second thought if it meant gaining even a slight tactical advantage later on.

For these reasons, the people of Sevillus were fearful of either son gaining the throne. The Wizard-King likewise felt strongly that neither of his sons were fit to rule. Who, then, could be trusted to take over from him once he shuffled off his mortal coil? He considered choosing a successor from his royal court, but again found himself lacking options. His High General, for example, possessed great skill in martial and military matters, but lacked the patience and nuance necessary to effectively govern in the political arena. His Court Wizard, similarly, possessed an almost unmatched level of intelligence in magical matters but was severely lost in any areas that didn’t relate to his chosen line of work. No matter where or how hard he looked, the Wizard-King could not find a single person who possessed the intelligence, wisdom, compassion, or level-headedness that he had felt was crucial to continuing the peace and prosperity he had worked so hard to achieve for over seven decades.

The problem weighed upon the Wizard-King’s heart and mind daily, and every hour that went by without a successor being named caused his people greater anxiety. Already there were rumors of old factions readying to ignite dormant blood-feuds as soon as the rule of law collapsed following the Wizard-King’s death. Additionally, spies reported that the neighboring kingdoms were secretly making battle plans to invade Sevillus at an opportune time—with the Wizard-King dead and the country in turmoil, they reasoned, nothing would be able to prevent them from swooping in and taking advantage of the situation at the expense of Sevillus’s people. The Wizard-King alone had forged stability from anarchy throughout his reign, and once he shuffled off the mortal coil everyone—even the Wizard-King himself—believed those terrible, bloody days would return.

The only option, then, was to NOT shuffle off the mortal coil—immortality would allow the Wizard-King to continue protecting his kingdom without the fear of death hanging over him like a black cloud. How, though, to achieve immortality? The Wizard-King locked himself inside his great library for days on end, eating little and sleeping less. He weighed the pros and cons of every option—Vampirism would give him everlasting life, but being restricted to the night would severely limit his ability to govern—until finally his mind wandered to the unthinkable: Becoming a Lich.

Certainly, there were some benefits to the process: He would be unbound by the bodily needs of sleep, hunger, or thirst which would allow him to devote more time to his kingdom, and he would be virtually immune to destruction—even if his body was destroyed by an assassin from another kingdom, for example, his form would regenerate within a short while so long as his phylactery was well-hidden. The resulting boost in arcane power and intelligence likewise appealed to the monarch, for such boons would increase his ability to lead his people in a fair and just manner.

However, the disadvantages were well and truly evil: The separation of one’s body and soul was not to be taken lightly, and the need to feed the phylactery with more souls every so often was an act so horrible the very thought of it filled the Wizard-King with dread. And the process itself of becoming a Lich…by the Gods, could he go through with it? Could he shoulder the guilt and remorse he would carry for all of eternity? And yet, the kingdom needed him….without his hand, thousands—perhaps even millions—of innocents would die in the chaos and bloodlust that would follow the expiration of his life.

His decision made, the King made the necessary preparations…and then called his sons into the grand library.

“What is it, father? Make this quick, I was in the middle of a hugely important matter concerning two very lovely women from the southwest province!” the eldest son snapped.

“Yes, father, I must agree that this unexpected summoning is an inefficient use of time. It would be best for everyone involved if we made this quick,” said the younger.

“My boys…” the Wizard-King began, and then choked back tears. Could they ever forgive him? Could he ever forgive himself?

“Ugh! Is this going to be another dreary conversation about the responsibilities of Kingship and the need to put the kingdom’s welfare above all? Spare me!” the first son commanded, and made to leave the library. When he made to open the door, however, he found it locked from the outside. “What is this?! Why won’t it open?!” he shouted, proceeding with futile attempts at banging the door down with his fists and feet.

The younger son did not say anything at first, instead choosing to take in his surroundings. The locked doors…the runes and symbols newly inscribed on the floor and walls…the sight of his father holding back tears. “I understand,” he said at last. “You mean to kill us.”

The older son stopped his attempts to open the door, and slowly turned to face his father with a profound look of fear on his face. “Kill us? But…why?!”

The Wizard-King could keep himself from sobbing, but could not hold back a silent stream of tears from flowing down his face. “I am sorry. I…it is my failure that you have not grown up to be what I had hoped. Perhaps if I had spent more time being a father instead of a king, things would be different. But…I can’t let the kingdom fall into chaos. Sevillus needs me. Sevillus needs me…to live.”

“I understand, Father,” said the youngest son. “It is the logical course of action.”

“Logical course of…are you mad?!” chastised the other brother. He ran to the door and returned to pounding on it, though this time with greater effort. “Help! Someone, please help us!” His pleas went unanswered.

“May the Gods forgive me,” The Wizard-King wept. He cast his spell, and the world went quiet save for the screams of the his children and the sound of his own sobbing.

The Wizard-King emerged from the library several hours later. His flesh was still mostly intact, but he knew in time that it would rot away—indeed, his right hand already showed subtle signs of decomposition. While his flesh would eventually cease to exist, the Wizard-King knew that his sorrow would not—whatever their faults, he loved his boys as only a father truly could. Their ultimate fate was a burden he would carry—indeed, had chosen to carry—for all eternity to ensure the safety and welfare of his Sevillus and its citizens. Time would tell if the Wizard-King had made the right decision…and time was now a resource he possessed in everlasting abundance.


Now, after the transformation into a Lich I imagine the Wizard-King would continue to rule in the fair and just manner he had before. Perhaps initially some of the people of Sevillus would be shocked and horrified at what the Wizard-King had done to his own sons, but I think over time they would forgive him after seeing his rule was as good and prosperus as ever. They may even grow to see the murder of his sons as an act of selfless sacrifice--a father cut down his own flesh-and-blood to ensure his subjects remained safe from the dangers of a chaotic and brutal world. After all, he must live with that guilt for eternity, and only it takes a special kind of man to willingly take on that suffering for the good of his people, right?

So, what do you all think? Is the Wizard-King an example of a "good" Lich, or is he misguided and selfish to the point of being "evil?" Or somewhere in-between?

EDIT: And also, how do you think a Paladin would/should react to this situation? Obviously not all Paladins are the same and they could have very different reactions depending on their Oaths/character designs. But how would a Paladin YOU play react to the Wizard-King of Sevillus?

Keltest
2017-04-02, 02:02 PM
That may work in D&D, but in the real world, it really, really doesn't, which means that in a meta way, it doesn't really work in D&D.

It doesn't work in the real world because we don't have people who get super powers just by being good people. Or bad people, for that matter.

Tiktakkat
2017-04-02, 03:53 PM
Now, after the transformation into a Lich I imagine the Wizard-King would continue to rule in the fair and just manner he had before.

You mean he would look at events, consider the various possibilities, then calmly murder anyone who might fall short of his standards of performance and concern for others, wailing and moaning every time he has to slaughter another person, family, village, or even province, because he so regrets having to take their lives "for the greater good".

By the by, he was king for 72 years and has 2 sons, but those sons have no children at all? That seems rather . . . implausible. Indeed, the king has no nephews? Cousins? Any reasonable relations that he could fairly pass the throne to? Even an advisor of noble heart and competence? He must continue to rule?
And his sons must die? They cannot be imprisoned or exiled? He has ruled for 72 years but despite his efforts at unification, if his sons survive the kingdom will immediately fall back into factionalism and war? That doesn't sound as if he were particularly successful at ruling in the first place.

He is not indulging his desire to rule and wallowing in the power like his older son how exactly?
He is not being dispassionately logical no matter the consequences like his younger son just because he cries about it afterward?
His people will trust him not massacre them if they fail to meet standards after he slaughtered his own children for the same "crime"?

This is just another form of Lawful Evil, with extra angst for self-delusion.
Any paladin should want to remove such a callous kinslayer from power merely for the inherent justice. Saving the people subject to his rule from his tyranny for their own benefit would merely be a collateral Good on a grand scale.

halfeye
2017-04-02, 04:37 PM
It doesn't work in the real world because we don't have people who get super powers just by being good people. Or bad people, for that matter.

It doesn't work in the real world, because we don't have objective standards of good or bad. Which means, in D&D it depends on the people playing, and thus could be anything.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 04:42 PM
It doesn't work in the real world because we don't have people who get super powers just by being good people. Or bad people, for that matter.


It doesn't work in the real world, because we don't have objective standards of good or bad. Which means, in D&D it depends on the people playing, and thus could be anything.


And, well, you know... no magic in the real world, either.

Beleriphon
2017-04-02, 04:49 PM
And, well, you know... no magic in the real world, either.

I think this might be the more important consideration.

Drascin
2017-04-02, 05:06 PM
No particular reason why a good-aligned PC would need to go all RAR KILL at an undead spellcaster reigning in a kingdom, by itself.

Granted, it's probably worth keeping an eye on him. But overall, if the people in the country are fed, happy, and fairly judged, then a paladin is probably going to think twice before shattering the government and tossing the country into anarchy. Anarchy kills a lot of innocent people.

You might want to check the book series Craft Sequence, by Max Gladstone, to see what pretty classic Lich-kings that are actually not capital-E-Evil (but still quite humanly evil in most cases) can look like.

Max_Killjoy
2017-04-02, 05:16 PM
By failure to align with the concept.


Imagine if you will the placement of your alignment was a spatial coordinate. to access the power of the concept you must be near enough to reach it.

failure to align means you are no longer near.

places in metaphysics aren't so much physical space in the real world, but points on a sort of emotional cosmic fabric


Almarck nailed it. It's an attunement thing. To use a more musical metaphor, you need to make sure you and your chosen Concept are in the same "key" to have access. Maintaining that tuning is outlined in your Code of Conduct. These actions aren't arbitrary prescribed restrictions, but the actual method of retaining your attunement to the Concept you serve. Acting outside of that code throws you out-of-tune, and requires great effort to return to the correct state. In this case, an Atonement spell would be acting as an Attunement spell, instead. Same general concept, (teehee) but for a different purpose.

That's actually hinted at/partially covered in the initial post when I bring up the Code of Conduct. It's easy to infer.


Thought of something -- does this mean that anyone who aligned or attuned sufficiently would just wake up one morning with paladin of _____ abilities?

Beleriphon
2017-04-02, 05:26 PM
Now, after the transformation into a Lich I imagine the Wizard-King would continue to rule in the fair and just manner he had before. Perhaps initially some of the people of Sevillus would be shocked and horrified at what the Wizard-King had done to his own sons, but I think over time they would forgive him after seeing his rule was as good and prosperus as ever. They may even grow to see the murder of his sons as an act of selfless sacrifice--a father cut down his own flesh-and-blood to ensure his subjects remained safe from the dangers of a chaotic and brutal world. After all, he must live with that guilt for eternity, and only it takes a special kind of man to willingly take on that suffering for the good of his people, right?

So, what do you all think? Is the Wizard-King an example of a "good" Lich, or is he misguided and selfish to the point of being "evil?" Or somewhere in-between?

He's evil. He killed two people for no reason other than to become a lich. The specific reason why often isn't as important as the specific act, there are myriad other answers to the question of succession and lichdom was the one that was chosen. Its an act of tremendous hubris and arrogance to assume only the Wizard-King can keep things in control.

Add to that the fact the Wizard-King knows any other evil actions required to continue being a lich and you have a recipe for that person that makes one decision that changes them forever.


EDIT: And also, how do you think a Paladin would/should react to this situation? Obviously not all Paladins are the same and they could have very different reactions depending on their Oaths/character designs. But how would a Paladin YOU play react to the Wizard-King of Sevillus?

Depends, I mean the Wizard-King did murder his own children for to his gain. By any stretch that would require justice for the dead. Perhaps the Wizard-King being reasonable accepts the Paladin's justice and begs them to take on the mantle of ruler. Or maybe they don't and it ends up in a fight where the people proclaim that paladin the new monarch of Sevillus. It wouldn't exactly be unrealistic for the people to follow a more popular foreign conqueror in favour of the person one would normally assume as the rightful heir.

That's even assuming the story about how the Wizard-King became a lich is public knowledge. There will be rumours, and supposition but after a while it will just be normal. In a century or two it will be just the way things are.


Thought of something -- does this mean that anyone who aligned or attuned sufficiently would just wake up one morning with paladin of _____ abilities?

Probably, but that doesn't mean they're actually paladins in the sense of trained warriors. It does make for a fun character though if that's the background you wanted. All that being said given the way Oaths works in 5E since its the system that's closest to the way this is described I'd assume its more an order of warriors that dedicate themselves to an ideal to achieve such a state. I'd suggest becoming in tune enough to become a paladin requires a level of intentional effort to become in tune with a Platonic Ideal (paladin of ideal tables?) or Concept.

ImNotTrevor
2017-04-03, 02:00 AM
Thought of something -- does this mean that anyone who aligned or attuned sufficiently would just wake up one morning with paladin of _____ abilities?

Let me answer your question with another question:

Does anyone who merely believes really hard in their deity become a cleric out of nowhere?

The answer is likely no, for similar reasons.

And as stated before, you have to KNOW about the Concept to tap into it.

So basically, it works like this:
Do some people happen to be attuned to a concept on their own? Yes!
Do those people have the requisite knowledge to be aware of their attunement and make use of it?
Probably not!

Easy peasy. Becoming a Paladin requires effort and dedication. You can't accidentally become a Paladin.