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The Jack
2018-11-08, 09:59 AM
L

Pros
-Resistance or immunity to many damage types.
"Immortality"
- dont need to breath.
-You're really scary, if you're into that.
-you can hang around undead and worry a lot less about maintaining control.

However, almost every pro here can be done via other means, and as a high level spellcaster, most of them are available to you.

Cons
-Crazy startup costs:
Impractical amount of sacrifices.
Have to suicide.
Probably entered into a bad deal with a demon lord such as orcus, becoming his/her little slave.
-Costly maintainence in souls.
-can't eat.
-sexless.
-everyone halfway decent hates you and then some.

Unless eating souls is the best feeling ever or the state of lichdom feels like bliss, why would you go through the process, other than it being really cool (It sounds impressive but your existence will suck). There's half a hundred other things you could transform into without such flaws.

legomaster00156
2018-11-08, 10:16 AM
Liches don't need to eat souls, nor perform any sacrifices. There's also no requirement for allegiance to any deity or fiend. :smallconfused:

Silly Name
2018-11-08, 10:21 AM
Impractical amount of sacrifices.
The kind of people who consider lichdom usually aren't opposed to committing an incredible amount of atrocities.

Have to suicide.
Arguable, a lich is still "living" in a sense, and thus probably don't see this step as "killing yourself" but more of a temporary part of the process.

Probably entered into a bad deal with a demon lord such as orcus, becoming his/her little slave.
Not necessarily, you can often turn into a lich without making deals with Demon Lords or similar entities.

Costly maintainence in souls.
I don't think this is part of standard lichdom.

-can't eat.
-sexless.
The first might be seen as getting rid of a time-consuming necessity, while how aggravating the latter is depends entirely on the person.

everyone halfway decent hates you and then some.
Again, if you are the type of person who would ponder about becoming a lich, chances are everyone halfway decent already hates you.


Unless eating souls is the best feeling ever or the state of lichdom feels like bliss, why would you go through the process, other than it being really cool (It sounds impressive but your existence will suck). There's half a hundred other things you could transform into without such flaws.

Because the other things might not be available or as easy to attain as becoming a lich. Because the phylactery adds an extra layer of protection that, say, vampires don't have. And if you stick around long enough, you might even turn into a demilich! Apart from godhood, what other "fundamentally alter your nature" options offer this kind of upwards mobility? :smallwink:

The Glyphstone
2018-11-08, 10:38 AM
*pages AOTRCommander to the courtesy phone*

hotflungwok
2018-11-08, 11:16 AM
ob·ses·sion
/əbˈseSHən/
noun


1. the state of being obsessed with someone or something.
"she cared for him with a devotion bordering on obsession"

2. an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person's mind.
"he was in the grip of an obsession he was powerless to resist"

You don't become a lich cuz you really like knitting. Obsession with magic can do some weird **** to a mind, just look at whoever first made a Wand of Wonder.

Jeraa
2018-11-08, 11:19 AM
One thing to remember is that we, as players, can see all the options available. Some people tend to assume that if it is written, it is 100% always available to those in game. That is very likely not the case however. NPCs don't have a convenient book lying around that lists the pros and cons of all immorality options. One wizards may have been lucky enough to discover a method of attaining lichdom, another might not. One might know a trustworthy vampire, but another doesn't. One may have heard of a certain spell (or combination of spells) but another has never heard of any such spell in his life.

Just because everything is conveniently listed for the players reference doesn't mean it is always 100% available to every one in the game.


Liches don't need to eat souls, nor perform any sacrifices. There's also no requirement for allegiance to any deity or fiend.

Presumably, he is using 5e D&D rules. Those specify that many turn to demons, and that sacrifices are required to maintain the lich (though no guidelines or rules are mentioned saying how often).

Esprit15
2018-11-08, 11:25 AM
It’s a shortcut compared to most methods of borderline immortality. Consider: at 11th level, there are not as many options to turn off death for a mage. Private Sanctum, Magic Jar, and similar spells are online for a sorcerer. For the Wizard, Tenser’s Transformation and Contingency may be in their book now, but Anti-Magic Field has come online too.

It’s a scary time, and if not getting laid and never tasting cake will keep you alive through all of that, sometimes villages need to burn and their inhabitants systematically sacrificed in an unspeakable ritual.

Kaptin Keen
2018-11-08, 11:44 AM
Lichdom wouldn't be interesting if it wasn't as gruesome a deal as it is. It takes rather a lot of determination to carve out your own heart with a dull knife in the hopes that the recipe for immortality you're reading from isn't just some long dead bastards idea of a really funny practical joke. Thus, lichdom - from a literary or story perspective - really isn't about becoming immortal, but about what drives you to that choice, and what sort of person that makes you.

mucat
2018-11-08, 11:48 AM
You don't become a lich cuz you really like knitting.

Now I'm totally making that character.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-08, 11:52 AM
Liches don't need to eat souls, nor perform any sacrifices. There's also no requirement for allegiance to any deity or fiend. :smallconfused:

Probably buried somewhere in that vague "unspeakable vile acts" clause.

Tvtyrant
2018-11-08, 12:15 PM
Liches are immortal and largely in control of themselves.

In some settings (Forgotten Realms) some lichea have survives for thousands upon thousands of years and risen to be stronger than anything none-deific (Larloch, Ioulaum.)

In Greyhawk one became a deity (Vecna) and others actively seek it out.

In Spelljammer they float through open space for all eternity practicing their craft on funeral ships.

Basically Lichdom works. True immortality is difficult, or perverts you. Becoming a vampire makes you fixated on feeding and sex, deathknights on war, and most other forms don't age but are fragile. Lichdom leaves younas yourself, but smarter and undead cockroach hard to kill.

Darth Ultron
2018-11-08, 12:26 PM
I would point out your ''cons" are not all that bad to many people.

*Important things cost a lot...but some are more then willing to pay

*No food? Who cares? Eat food for 50 years, and it becomes more boring then anything. Worse, as a character ages, they can't eat and drink all the ''fun" food and drinks...so they are not loosing anything.

*No bedroom stuff....again, many older people can care less about this...and some people never cared.

*Everyone hates you? This is likely true already for most people. There is a lot of hate in the world.

*Service to an evil power? So what? Almost everyone serves someone. And the trick is live with it, or try to break away.


What are the does of other ways your talking about?

hotflungwok
2018-11-08, 01:01 PM
Now I'm totally making that character.
Two words: yarn golem

JeenLeen
2018-11-08, 01:20 PM
I'll admit that, in 5e, lichdom is a lot worse. I think there's something about needing to eat souls routinely (however vagulely 'routinely' is defined) and that you devolve into a mindless monster if not. But in earlier D&D, it didn't seem to have much downside besides the negatives that come with being undead. And a well-hidden phylactery is probably one of the best defenses you can have, so there's a lot of protection against dying if you happen to die.


Lichdom wouldn't be interesting if it wasn't as gruesome a deal as it is. It takes rather a lot of determination to carve out your own heart with a dull knife in the hopes that the recipe for immortality you're reading from isn't just some long dead bastards idea of a really funny practical joke. Thus, lichdom - from a literary or story perspective - really isn't about becoming immortal, but about what drives you to that choice, and what sort of person that makes you.

Next game I run, I may try to put in an evil wizard trying to do such a ritual. When he succeeds, the party finds out it was a joke by some ancient being they've been in touch with from time to time.

The Jack
2018-11-08, 01:33 PM
*No food? Who cares? Eat food for 50 years, and it becomes more boring then anything. Worse, as a character ages, they can't eat and drink all the ''fun" food and drinks...so they are not loosing anything.

*No bedroom stuff....again, many older people can care less about this...and some people never cared.

*Everyone hates you? This is likely true already for most people. There is a lot of hate in the world.

*Service to an evil power? So what? Almost everyone serves someone. And the trick is live with it, or try to break away.


What are the does of other ways your talking about?
-There are ways to get a younger body for yourself. All the fun food, all the time.
- Sex, hey, if you're powerful enough and evil enough to lich yourself, you can surely find ways to make it interesting.
And well, if you can't enjoy either of those, what have you got? Studies and drama? Novelties?

Hate, now, there's name calling, there's sticks and stones, there's your brutal and bloody extermination, and then there's a very justified brutal extermination that brings happiness to children at the end of storytime: lichdome very completely puts you in that last camp.

As for that last one
Again, once you're at that level, you aught to be your own master. You can turn junk into dragons but you'll be a puppet.

Tvtyrant
2018-11-08, 01:52 PM
-There are ways to get a younger body for yourself. All the fun food, all the time.
- Sex, hey, if you're powerful enough and evil enough to lich yourself, you can surely find ways to make it interesting.
And well, if you can't enjoy either of those, what have you got? Studies and drama? Novelties?

Hate, now, there's name calling, there's sticks and stones, there's your brutal and bloody extermination, and then there's a very justified brutal extermination that brings happiness to children at the end of storytime: lichdome very completely puts you in that last camp.

As for that last one
Again, once you're at that level, you aught to be your own master. You can turn junk into dragons but you'll be a puppet.

5E Lich fluff turns them into vampires, I would discard it for the better older fluff.

NecroDancer
2018-11-08, 01:56 PM
One thing to remember is that we, as players, can see all the options available. Some people tend to assume that if it is written, it is 100% always available to those in game. That is very likely not the case however. NPCs don't have a convenient book lying around that lists the pros and cons of all immorality options. One wizards may have been lucky enough to discover a method of attaining lichdom, another might not. One might know a trustworthy vampire, but another doesn't. One may have heard of a certain spell (or combination of spells) but another has never heard of any such spell in his life.


This is a very good reason to be a Lich. If you want to become immortal there is no guarantee that you’ll know the best way to become immortal. Maybe lichdom is the only path that you have access or even know about?

LibraryOgre
2018-11-08, 02:58 PM
Two words: yarn golem

Dangerous Denizens: Monsters of Tellene (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/54246/Dangerous-Denizens-The-Monsters-of-Tellene?affiliate_id=315505) has the Twine Golem.

As to different paths of immortality, you might look at Palladium's Mystic China (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217341/Mystic-ChinaTM?affiliate_id=315505), which has a few different kinds of immortals and, as others have pointed out... you might not know about every method of immortality out there. Lichdom is kind of a classic, and might be better known than others, or be viewed as having fewer strings, or lower requirements... or even less risks.

Florian
2018-11-08, 03:14 PM
In a game/setting with a very clearly spelled-out afterlife, choosing any form of undeath voluntarily is actually quite dubious, unless some third party is involved.

Seriously, if I knew for a fact that I could either be reborn as an potential angel in Heaven or a larva in Abadon, I´d chose lichdom because I'm greedy and amoral enough to want it now, but shirk from paying the price. That's basically the polar opposite when you have the prospect to actually rise as an outsider, mostly meaning being good aligned and ending up in the upper spheres.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-08, 03:30 PM
Because there's a class of people you wouldn't mind see go missing (such as noisy neighbors or people who are rude to waiters) and all of this pesky biological stuff is getting in the way of your arcane studies. Sex? Who needs it! No one outside of third party material ever became an arcane demigod using that!

JeenLeen
2018-11-08, 03:37 PM
In a game/setting with a very clearly spelled-out afterlife, choosing any form of undeath voluntarily is actually quite dubious, unless some third party is involved.

Seriously, if I knew for a fact that I could either be reborn as an potential angel in Heaven or a larva in Abadon, I´d chose lichdom because I'm greedy and amoral enough to want it now, but shirk from paying the price. That's basically the polar opposite when you have the prospect to actually rise as an outsider, mostly meaning being good aligned and ending up in the upper spheres.

Most D&D afterlifes aren't that great if you want some preservation of sense of self. I'm sure it differs a lot in different established settings, but going off what I've read in a lot of splatbooks, it seems that, generally,
1) evil souls go to an evil plane, and either become near-mindless larvae-rank demons/devils OR are tortured as fuel/fun for demons/devils
2) good/neutral souls go to their respective plane as petitioners, and eventually merge with the plane
3) clerics, or those strongly devoted to a god, go to the god's realm. They eventually merge with the plane
(I hadn't read about good beings becoming outsiders in the sense of angels or archons.)

All methods I've read end with no sense of self with about 99.99% of cases: you're either a low-rank grub or tortured soul in Hell, or you merge with Heaven/neutral-Heaven. Maybe it takes a few millenia, and you really enjoy those times, but eventually those end. And maybe some demon/devil-larvae do keep a sense of self as they raise in rank, but that's the exception to the rule (though a really arrogant wizard might think they can raise in the ranks.)

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-08, 03:41 PM
Most D&D afterlifes aren't that great if you want some preservation of sense of self. I'm sure it differs a lot in different established settings, but going off what I've read in a lot of splatbooks, it seems that, generally,
1) evil souls go to an evil plane, and either become near-mindless larvae-rank demons/devils OR are tortured as fuel/fun for demons/devils
2) good/neutral souls go to their respective plane as petitioners, and eventually merge with the plane
3) clerics, or those strongly devoted to a god, go to the god's realm. They eventually merge with the plane
(I hadn't read about good beings becoming outsiders in the sense of angels or archons.)

All methods I've read end with no sense of self with about 99.99% of cases: you're either a low-rank grub or tortured soul in Hell, or you merge with Heaven/neutral-Heaven. Maybe it takes a few millenia, and you really enjoy those times, but eventually those end. And maybe some demon/devil-larvae do keep a sense of self as they raise in rank, but that's the exception to the rule (though a really arrogant wizard might think they can raise in the ranks.)

Yeah, none of those are an afterlife in any meaningful sense, they're just prolonged death.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-08, 03:42 PM
Yeah, none of those are an afterlife in any meaningful sense, they're just prolonged death.

So...Oblivion, or never having to worry about annoying bodily fluids? Decisions, decisions.

Kadzar
2018-11-08, 11:21 PM
So...Oblivion, or never having to worry about annoying bodily fluids? Decisions, decisions.
Why must I choose only one?

But, seriously, if you're a powerful mage on a quest for ultimate arcane perfection, you can't let a little thing like death get in the way. You think they're going to let you keep unraveling the mysteries of the universe in heaven or hell? Pssh. Also, what's great about becoming a lich compared to some other forms of immortality is that you get a bunch of nice bonuses in addition, and the only weakness you pick up is that possibly a cleric could turn you, but you're very good at resisting that even if it does happen.

Pauly
2018-11-08, 11:48 PM
Reverse the question Why wouldn’t you want to be an immortal lich?

Pro
Other forms of immortality - vampire, death knight etc. are more fragile and are closer to extended mortality than true immortality.

Can be a pro or a con
Loss of fleshly concerns - sex, love, friendship, other pleasures that come from interaction with living beings.

Definite cons
Constant paranoia. That phylactery doesn’t guard itself and now you are guarding your immortal self, not your mortal self.

Turning yourself into a quest item. Inevitably other people are going to want you destroyed or your stuff. Now human life is too shortnfor that to be guaranteed, but it will happen 100% of the time to liches.

Linked to the above 2 - you need to be solitary as every living and unliving thing that is not 100% under your control is a risk.

Cealocanth
2018-11-08, 11:58 PM
In standard D&D, seeking out lichdom takes a special kind of crazy. At least in the game I'm running, lichdom makes sense as one of the only ways where someone can "survive" an apocalyptic scenario if their civilization didn't develop decent enough technology to make robots or something. Yes, there are other ways to do it with magic, and there are those who took those paths, but when you're talking a scenario where you basically have to survive in a world of exceedingly boring eternal darkness for a thousand years while all semblance of life on the planet grows cold, the mental numbing effect of lichdom could be useful.

Anyway, that's how I justify it when it comes up.

Kaptin Keen
2018-11-09, 01:30 AM
Next game I run, I may try to put in an evil wizard trying to do such a ritual. When he succeeds, the party finds out it was a joke by some ancient being they've been in touch with from time to time.

Hm - the joke I'm getting at is that the ritual doesn't work, so ... he can't really succeed. But an interesting twist would be if your ancient entity gains control of the wizards soul =)

But then it's more of a trap, and less of a practical joke.

It's a good joke, though. I hadn't really thought it through, but next game I run, the players will absolutely find a dead wizard, who carved out his own heart and just died, following instructions in a book that promised lichdom. And they'll have to wonder - did the wizard just botch it? Because ... even with such evidence, it's unlikely they'll think it was just a practical joke.

That's frankly so evil, though. Pulling that on my unsuspecting players - does that make me a bad person?

oxybe
2018-11-09, 02:08 AM
Cons
-Crazy startup costs:
Impractical amount of sacrifices.
Have to suicide.
Probably entered into a bad deal with a demon lord such as orcus, becoming his/her little slave.
-Costly maintainence in souls.
-can't eat.
-sexless.
-everyone halfway decent hates you and then some.

1 - you're gaining a form of immortality, shouldn't be too hard to make the cash back.

2 - impractical to some is... a challenge worth undertaking to others. note that the tons-o-sacrifice thing is not a constant through editions: 2nd ed's lichdom was largely a 3 step process: make a phylactary, make the transformation potion, "survive". 2nd ed just needs the fresh heart of one sentient creature as an ingredient in the potion, so murder is more of a byproduct of the process then a strictly listed step.

3 - if all goes well, it's more like a temporary excursion into the outer planes.

4 - not really? depends on the lore/setting. for some settings, yeah it might require a pact with the demon lords but others might be able to find that information squirreled away in some guarded tome, figure out the pricess themselves or be it uncommon but not unheard of that it's studied, if only so people know how to see the early warning of a lich in the making.

5 - again, setting dependant and one i've never heard of before.

6 & 7 - I'm sure you can develop a spell to give you tastebuds or temporarily revive your lil' lich if you really want to.

8 - eh... you probably won't win any favours by being a lich alone, but it all depends on what you do with your power. spend 200 years growing a utopia out of nothing simply out of raw, sheer and unshakeable spite towards the kingdom that shunned you and your ways... while your methods may be... unconventional... on one hand, on the other: universal health care, low crime, no caste system outside of "I'M KING, Y'ALL ARE EQUAL." and a guaranteed income for all.

Satinavian
2018-11-09, 02:44 AM
Yes, 5th edition made Lichdom really unattractive and stupid.

Not only is the soul maintenance a big vulnerability, it also negates one other central benefit of earlier Lichdom : That you could exist and do your own thing without bothering anyone else, thus avoiding making enemies or drawing attention.

Instead now you are just another undead parasite that has to be fought to protect whatever community is nearby. And making the transformation ritual more likely to generate victims didn't help either.





I mean, i see why the change was done. So that adventurer groups actually have a reason to fight lichs instead of looking like douchbags for killing reclusive passive inoffensive researchers just to take their stuff. But that also destroyed any incentive for reclusive passive inoffensive researches to try to become a lich in the first place. It is no longer a way to do your own thing and research arcane knowledge for millenia while not having to pay attention to the rest of the world anymore.

Millstone85
2018-11-09, 04:58 AM
You think they're going to let you keep unraveling the mysteries of the universe in heaven or hell? Pssh.According to the 5e book Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, the plane of Cania, one of the Nine Hells, is full of wizards who do just that. Except all of the fun has been taken out of it. They don't get to choose their topics of research. They can't leave their citadels or take a break. They have to write extensive reports that Mephistopheles will read when he feels like it. It is like real-life academia, but longer. :-p

Now, I would have a hard time believing that good or neutral gods of arcana and knowledge wouldn't shape their afterlives as more palatable versions of this.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-09, 07:58 AM
Yes, 5th edition made Lichdom really unattractive and stupid.

Not only is the soul maintenance a big vulnerability, it also negates one other central benefit of earlier Lichdom : That you could exist and do your own thing without bothering anyone else, thus avoiding making enemies or drawing attention.

Instead now you are just another undead parasite that has to be fought to protect whatever community is nearby. And making the transformation ritual more likely to generate victims didn't help either.





I mean, i see why the change was done. So that adventurer groups actually have a reason to fight lichs instead of looking like douchbags for killing reclusive passive inoffensive researchers just to take their stuff. But that also destroyed any incentive for reclusive passive inoffensive researches to try to become a lich in the first place. It is no longer a way to do your own thing and research arcane knowledge for millenia while not having to pay attention to the rest of the world anymore.

Also, given some past conversations and general observations of literature/stories, there's also evidently a strong undercurrent of "wanting to be immortal is actively evil, a blasphemy against nature and/or the divine", to the extent that some believe quite vehemently that any method or means of gaining immortality must be evil and destructive and horrible.

RandomNPC
2018-11-09, 08:40 AM
I still use the 3e lore that becoming a lich requires an act so horrible none speak of it.

So right after becoming a lich, and probably for a few generations after (elf generations folks....) you'll be remembered as that jerk who did the thing, and it will be up and coming heros with big egos who try to put you in your place. But after the heros stop showing up and everyone forgets the thing you did, or at least quits blaming you? Time to make up for it.

Pick the city with the highest crime rate, with threat of monster invasion nightly, where kingdoms fight over not wanting to claim it as a part of their lands. Then? make it perfect. Start a rumor that speaking a word in the dead of night will summon a guardian for children. Eventually a child will be found outside their home late at night, surrounded by half wild dogs, and they will speak whatever nonsense word you spread around to trigger your teleportation to their location. It may not go well at first, there will be some details to address, and false summons will need to be dealt with. But soon, maybe three years, maybe in thirty, people will walk the streets at night unafraid, not knowing that a lich has adopted their city as its own. It's been 2000 years, you did your studying, now it's time to put that knowledge to use.

And soon after? A vampire rogue comes to town, hearing of the nightly events, trying to set up shop. Maybe a Death Knight fighter comes with the rogue, as old friends do travel together often. A century later, a Mummy Lord Cleric rolls into town, having heard from anonymous gods that it may be needed. Not a decade later, epic elder evils start to target the town, and an adventuring party that traveled together 2300 years ago stands at the ready yet again.

LibraryOgre
2018-11-09, 10:06 AM
An immortal being who seeds obscure libraries with texts about how to become a lich that will actually make the person undergoing the process their slave.

Pleh
2018-11-09, 10:22 AM
The first might be seen as getting rid of a time-consuming necessity, while how aggravating the latter is depends entirely on the person.

I would expect the biological imperative most people feel would stop with the body's life energy. Liches probably don't feel the same impulse as the living.

But even if the memory of it were a nuisance, you could probably permanency a Calm spell on yourself. Might protect you from making irrational mistakes.

The Jack
2018-11-09, 10:32 AM
At some point though, you're going to unravel those mysteries you gave up life for (I mean the lvl 8 clone spell seems easier...)

But, what about the grand feasts, Harems... oh I'm a simple man, but all the lich has left to enjoy is fine architecture and groveling servants who'll perform for him/her, and maybe killing things... all things you can enjoy without lichdom, probably moreso for the former.

I dont know if you can have more than one clone waiting for you, but it's a nicer method.

comicshorse
2018-11-09, 11:09 AM
At some point though, you're going to unravel those mysteries you gave up life for (I mean the lvl 8 clone spell seems easier...)

But, what about the grand feasts, Harems... oh I'm a simple man, but all the lich has left to enjoy is fine architecture and groveling servants who'll perform for him/her, and maybe killing things... all things you can enjoy without lichdom, probably moreso for the former.

I dont know if you can have more than one clone waiting for you, but it's a nicer method.

Which brings on the Star Trek argument that the clone isn't you its just a identical copy of you

Also from an expert on the subject http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0652.html

Millstone85
2018-11-09, 11:28 AM
Which brings on the Star Trek argument that the clone isn't you its just a identical copy of youStar Trek is ambiguous on the existence of souls. But in D&D, the spell explicitly transfers your soul to the new meatsuit.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-09, 11:39 AM
Also, given some past conversations and general observations of literature/stories, there's also evidently a strong undercurrent of "wanting to be immortal is actively evil, a blasphemy against nature and/or the divine", to the extent that some believe quite vehemently that any method or means of gaining immortality must be evil and destructive and horrible.

Probably because if the setting wasn't firmly against immortality, you'd have a few too many hanging around and the party will want to be one. If immortality can be obtained without having to kidnap people who talk in theatres, why hasn't it been done for sages and other great people? It could be done, but I think it would be very far away from the archetypal 'Young vagabond becomes embroiled in schemes' thing that most people tend to play that it'll be quite niche.

I mean, elves present enough problems as is. Oh, it took you 80 ****ing years to get to level one, you complete buffoon? Oh, I see why YOUR people haven't taken over yet, yup.

Millstone85
2018-11-09, 11:56 AM
I mean, elves present enough problems as is. Oh, it took you 80 ****ing years to get to level one, you complete buffoon? Oh, I see why YOUR people haven't taken over yet, yup.To be fair, whether your human character is a 10-year-old street urchin or a 60-year-old veteran, they will start at the same level and gain many more in a much shorter in-story time.

The Jack
2018-11-09, 12:13 PM
Somewhat.
We also have stories where people live a long time or grow rediculously old. Tolkien gives us a history of races that had a perfect start but then generally had shorter and shorter lifespans, weaker and weaker abilities, and were morally weaker (there are a few outliers).

One extremely notable book begins with a bunch of dudes living 900 years, but then the creator of man told them He'd give them a cap of 100 or so. Some notable figures still live longer because they're favoured.

Now, most importantly, if we look at chinese mythology; immortals are everywhere. Using exercises and chi and alchemy and secret techniques a person can become immortal. They've got so many immortal stories, and of late have been churning them out.

But, these immortals often fight eachother, fight gods/demons, are greedy, or sequester themselves in mountains. So low teir play is very possible.

ps; In a western context, zues and odin could be a couple of chinese-style immortals

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-09, 12:24 PM
Just because Yoda exists doesn't mean all DMs want him to be playable as opposed to your Reys and Lukes. Most of the time the immortal characters are guys hanging around inaccessible locations to dispense wisdom and the occasional plot Macguffin. Even Lord of the Rings seems to focus far more on Aragon and the Hobbits, who don't usually get past 100 if I remember correctly.

Yes, higher tier play is possible, but most stories are going to lean to the idea that your character is probably going to be Han at best when starting. So most settings really don't want immortality to come without some strings attached.

BWR
2018-11-09, 12:28 PM
Star Trek is ambiguous on the existence of souls. But in D&D, the spell explicitly transfers your soul to the new meatsuit.

In 3.x (possibly 5e, I don't know enough about that edition).
Pre-3.x it made an exact copy of you at the time your pound of flesh was taken. If more than one instance of you was active, the newest version to come online went mad and tried to kill all other versions in existence in order to be the real one. This, you might perceive, played merry hell with the concept of souls if you tried to reconcile the two.

Silly Name
2018-11-09, 02:16 PM
At some point though, you're going to unravel those mysteries you gave up life for (I mean the lvl 8 clone spell seems easier...)

But, what about the grand feasts, Harems... oh I'm a simple man, but all the lich has left to enjoy is fine architecture and groveling servants who'll perform for him/her, and maybe killing things... all things you can enjoy without lichdom, probably moreso for the former.

I dont know if you can have more than one clone waiting for you, but it's a nicer method.

The issue with Clone is that you can still die of old age, and this spell can't stop that. It is more of an emergency backup if you get killed, but it isn't effectively immortality.

I also think you're downplaying the number of pleasures one can enjoy even without flesh: what about the many, many forms of art that exist? As a lich, you can witness the creation of masterpieces and remember them for all of eternity. You can take your time to perfect so many crafts and disciplines, and all this time is enhanced by not having to worry about bodily functions or needs. You could explore all the world, and then the planes beyond. And as long as your phylactery is kept safe, you can take on a bunch of risks other forms of immortality can't.

Millstone85
2018-11-09, 02:44 PM
In 3.x (possibly 5e, I don't know enough about that edition).
Pre-3.x it made an exact copy of you at the time your pound of flesh was taken. If more than one instance of you was active, the newest version to come online went mad and tried to kill all other versions in existence in order to be the real one. This, you might perceive, played merry hell with the concept of souls if you tried to reconcile the two.
The issue with Clone is that you can still die of old age, and this spell can't stop that. It is more of an emergency backup if you get killed, but it isn't effectively immortality.I was reading the 5e version of the spell.

And not only does it transfer your soul when you die, but it also allows you to make a younger clone if you so choose, independently from the cubic inch of flesh used as a component.

Quertus
2018-11-09, 07:06 PM
Obsession with magic can do some weird **** to a mind, just look at whoever first made a Wand of Wonder.

What are you talking about? Wand of Wonder is, like, up there with Bag of Beans in competition for coolest item ever!


Probably buried somewhere in that vague "unspeakable vile acts" clause.


I still use the 3e lore that becoming a lich requires an act so horrible none speak of it.

Well,


Sure.


There are three versions, actually, at least three I am familiar with. The aforementioned Dragon Mag one, an updated version in Wizard's Spell Compendium vol 4. and the VRGtL one.

Dragon Magazine # 26
- Must be 14th level or higher
- Must have magic jar, trap the soul, enchant an item
- must create the phylactery with at least 2000 cp worth of materials (insert 1e ad hoc crafting rules). The phylactery is called a 'jar'.
- create a potion consisting of:
- 2 pinches pure arsenic
- 1 pinch belladonna
- phase spider venom less than 30 days old
- wyvern venom less than 60 days old
- blood of a dead humanoid infant killed by phase spider venom
- blood of a dead humanoid infant killed by a mixture of arsenic and belladonna
- the heart of a virgin humanoid killed by wyvern venom
- 1 quart vampire blood
The potion is mixed by the light of a full moon, added to each other in the order listed.

Roll percentile dice!
% result
1-10 all hair falls out. no other result
11-40 coma 2-7 days, but potion works
41-70 Feebleminded. Each attempt to remove the feeblemind has 10% chance of killing target. Potion works
71-90 Paralyzed 4-14 days, 30% chance of 1d6 Dex drain. Potion works
91-96 Permanently deaf, dumb or blind. Wish to remove condition. Potion works
97-00 Dead. Hope you can be resurrected.

This version doesn't create new bodies, it inserts the soul of the lich into corpses near the phylactery. Corpses receive a saving throw, modified by their in life alignment. Lich can retry once per week until successful on its own corpse, but other corpses are immune after a successful save. If in a body other than its own, the lich has limited abilities until it finds the remains of its original body and consumes those. The only way to completely destroy the original body is to disintegrate it. Returning to a jar costs a level and if its level went lower than 11 the lich died the next time it is returned to the jar. They cannot level up or use scrolls.



WSC
Mostly the same as above, but they added Nulathoe's ninemen to required spells and a 100 000+ gp research cost.
The ingredients are the same as above except that they removed the infant blood (wussies!) and change them to:
- heart of a humanoid killed by the arsenic/belladonna mixture
- reproductive organs of 10 giant moths, dead less than 10 days.

Potion is sparkling black with blusish radiance and must be drunk within 7 days of creation, and over the course of six rounds the changes occur. Once a potion works, you don't die or transform quite yet. Craft the phylactery in no more than nine days (insert 2e crafting rules), using EAI, then TtS, and NN and MJ within 10 minutes of each other. Your soul is drawn into the phylactery and you lose one level and the top three spell levels are wiped clean from your memory until you have rested 1d6+1 days in your own body. Now you are a lichnee (I'm not quite dead, sir) until you die. After this, the same as the DrMg version, including failure chance for potion. No mention of inability to increase level or use scrolls. Phylactery can be anything.



VRGtL
Phylactery must be an amulet worth at least 1500 gp, The interior (itmust be able to contain things) is engraved with the wizard's sigil and filled with silver. Spells required are enchant an item, permanency, magic jar and reincarnation.
The potion is less specific, but said to contain arsenic, belladonna, nightshade, heart's worry, the blood of any number of rare venomous creatures, then the following spells must be cast: wraithform, cone of cold, feign death, animate dead, permanency. No fancy table, just a System Shock to survive the process and hope you don't fail because if you do you are dead and gone for good. No Wish can help you now.

It looks like there's some historic precisely for what that "unspeakable horror" looks like.

Thanks, BWR!


I still use the 3e lore that becoming a lich requires an act so horrible none speak of it.

So right after becoming a lich, and probably for a few generations after (elf generations folks....) you'll be remembered as that jerk who did the thing, and it will be up and coming heros with big egos who try to put you in your place. But after the heros stop showing up and everyone forgets the thing you did, or at least quits blaming you? Time to make up for it.

Pick the city with the highest crime rate, with threat of monster invasion nightly, where kingdoms fight over not wanting to claim it as a part of their lands. Then? make it perfect. Start a rumor that speaking a word in the dead of night will summon a guardian for children. Eventually a child will be found outside their home late at night, surrounded by half wild dogs, and they will speak whatever nonsense word you spread around to trigger your teleportation to their location. It may not go well at first, there will be some details to address, and false summons will need to be dealt with. But soon, maybe three years, maybe in thirty, people will walk the streets at night unafraid, not knowing that a lich has adopted their city as its own. It's been 2000 years, you did your studying, now it's time to put that knowledge to use.

And soon after? A vampire rogue comes to town, hearing of the nightly events, trying to set up shop. Maybe a Death Knight fighter comes with the rogue, as old friends do travel together often. A century later, a Mummy Lord Cleric rolls into town, having heard from anonymous gods that it may be needed. Not a decade later, epic elder evils start to target the town, and an adventuring party that traveled together 2300 years ago stands at the ready yet again.

That sounds bloody awesome!

Quertus
2018-11-09, 08:46 PM
Oh, to answer the OP, let's ignore these modern wussy immigration Lich wannabes. What does being a Lich entail?

Immortality, in a setting where such was all but unheard of.

Self-Resurrection, in a setting where resurrection was all but unheard of.

Self-Resurrection, on an evil character, in a setting where evil characters were often cartoon backstabbing villains, and good characters would murderhobo you for being evil. (Translation: nobody was gonna resurrect you, sucker!)

Vulnerable to being turned? Are you joking? Clerics didn't have the power to destroy the mighty Lich back in the day.

And there was no WBL, no LA, and probably (?) no listed cost for the phylactery. Even if there was, there were no magic shops, so "wealth" and "magic treasure" were two completely unrelated entries in your ledger.

So, aside from a few minor physical inconveniences (which old age probably took from you / made more inconvenient already - and you were in a setting where there was almost no way to turn back the clock), it was purely a Power-Up.

Unless you knew that crazy changes to the laws of magic were coming, why wouldn't you become a Lich?

If you were already an evil Mage, that is.

Oh, and in the really old days, before time itself, apparently there was such a thing as a good Lich.

icefractal
2018-11-09, 09:09 PM
For the 3.x Lich:
It's not the best form of immortality in the long run, but it may be the best you can achieve alone at 11th level, without stuff like "infinite Wishes at low level" on the table. A lot of the "casters are invulnerable" stuff comes online at 17th level (or by using methods that make 90% of the game moot). And unlike many forms, it doesn't require allies, or ongoing sources of supplies, or anything. You can pretty much ignore the rest of the world.

In most settings, the super-rapid pace of advancement for PCs isn't available for everyone, and so a given NPC Necromancer might never reach past 12th level within their normal lifespan.

In 5e:
It's a worse deal, but there also aren't as many alternatives. No way to replicate the inherent immunities AFAIK, and a phylactery is easier to guard than a clone. Plus the whole "being available earlier, and there's no guarantee you make it to higher level" thing.

Xuc Xac
2018-11-10, 12:29 AM
Also, given some past conversations and general observations of literature/stories, there's also evidently a strong undercurrent of "wanting to be immortal is actively evil, a blasphemy against nature and/or the divine", to the extent that some believe quite vehemently that any method or means of gaining immortality must be evil and destructive and horrible.

That's just in Western civilization where the default assumption is that the afterlife will either be infinitely good or infinitely terrible, so the only people that would want to stay in the mortal world forever are the ones that know they are headed for the infinitely terrible afterlife. In the Sinosphere, immortality is not a bad thing, but it takes a really long time to achieve it. You can't work on immortality as a hobby. It's a full time occupation that requires living like a hermit up in the mountains, so it's not really compatible with an active adventurer/conquering warlord lifestyle.

Millstone85
2018-11-10, 06:01 AM
Oh, and in the really old days, before time itself, apparently there was such a thing as a good Lich.More recently, the 3.5 book Monsters of Faerûn gave archliches and baelnorns as examples of good liches, and the 4e book Arcane Power offered the Archlich epic destiny.

Quertus
2018-11-10, 10:32 AM
More recently, the 3.5 book Monsters of Faerûn gave archliches and baelnorns as examples of good liches, and the 4e book Arcane Power offered the Archlich epic destiny.

Well, that's certainly something to look into.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and guess that they didn't require unspeakably vial acts to achieve?

Millstone85
2018-11-10, 11:00 AM
Well, that's certainly something to look into.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and guess that they didn't require unspeakably vial acts to achieve?Most likely.

The idea seems to be that:
* the path to archlichdom is longer, refusing any pact or theft.
* baelnorns are a community effort, with the help of the Seldarine.

Altheus
2018-11-10, 01:58 PM
So you can remain around to look after the place / family / people you love.

Pleh
2018-11-10, 08:01 PM
Lichdom wouldn't be interesting if it wasn't as gruesome a deal as it is. It takes rather a lot of determination to carve out your own heart with a dull knife in the hopes that the recipe for immortality you're reading from isn't just some long dead bastards idea of a really funny practical joke. Thus, lichdom - from a literary or story perspective - really isn't about becoming immortal, but about what drives you to that choice, and what sort of person that makes you.

In its generic form, yes. Lichdom (and more generally, undeath) can have profound subtext in a setting. In one of my custom worlds, undeath is produced due primarily to the way death and the afterlife interact. Messing with a person's corpse can afflict their existence in the afterlife. Robbing their grave and moving their bones might be enough to make them come back from the afterlife to repossess their body and defend their grave, but necromancy involves using magic to dominate their remains. Having your remains animated is torturous and can break the spirit's will, causing their soul to fragment and erode into nothingness.

Hence lichdom, in that world, is worse than just cutting your own heart out with a dull spoon. That's just a painful moment in your life. Animating yourself is to subject yourself to an eternally tortured existence. You'll never die, but you'll never find peace (like the Curse of the Black Pearl). And it's especially bizarre because death isn't even the end for your soul normally in that world. You are signing on for eternal misery to stay here instead of starting your next life. The heck of it is that most people can't conceive of a less pleasant afterlife than lichdom, so why would anyone in their right mind do that to themselves? Surely even hell is better (and doesn't require you to cut out your heart with a dull spoon).

Ultimately the common consensus is that only two kinds of people become liches voluntarily in that world. There are the wizards obsessed with their study and refuse to let the afterlife stop their research, and then there are mad men who have some dangerous delusion that somehow they're special and they'll be stronger as a lich or that the side effects surely won't affect THEM.

In any case, becoming a lich isn't evil in and of itself in that setting. It's your own business if you want to damn yourself. But such individuals are usually deemed too dangerous for society and get hunted and destroyed if they hang around too close to civilization (or their graveyards).

And this is only one example. Any setting that adds nuance to the subject can spin this any number of ways.

Forum Explorer
2018-11-18, 01:06 PM
Yes, 5th edition made Lichdom really unattractive and stupid.

Not only is the soul maintenance a big vulnerability, it also negates one other central benefit of earlier Lichdom : That you could exist and do your own thing without bothering anyone else, thus avoiding making enemies or drawing attention.

Instead now you are just another undead parasite that has to be fought to protect whatever community is nearby. And making the transformation ritual more likely to generate victims didn't help either.





I mean, i see why the change was done. So that adventurer groups actually have a reason to fight lichs instead of looking like douchbags for killing reclusive passive inoffensive researchers just to take their stuff. But that also destroyed any incentive for reclusive passive inoffensive researches to try to become a lich in the first place. It is no longer a way to do your own thing and research arcane knowledge for millenia while not having to pay attention to the rest of the world anymore.

I actually like that for a couple of reasons. One, it makes the point that entropy is still a thing. Even the soul will rot if left long enough. Two, it means that the Lich can't just hide his Phylactery beneath an avanlanche or something. It needs to have access to it so it can feed the souls to it and maintain its existence.

Goaty14
2018-11-18, 05:02 PM
- Sex, hey, if you're powerful enough and evil enough to lich yourself, you can surely find ways to make it interesting.

Two Words:
1) Lich-Loved
2) Disgusting :smallyuk:

Mechalich
2018-11-18, 05:21 PM
Also, given some past conversations and general observations of literature/stories, there's also evidently a strong undercurrent of "wanting to be immortal is actively evil, a blasphemy against nature and/or the divine", to the extent that some believe quite vehemently that any method or means of gaining immortality must be evil and destructive and horrible.

Given that, in standard D&D cosmology, the gods and other entities controlling the outer planes need an ever-increasing supply of souls for their various projects, widespread immortality is indeed a bad thing from their perspective. I mean, if someone does kick off the wightocalypse on a given world, then everyone is converted into undead and the god's die off. Likewise, there is a species of impossibly intelligent immortals running around the D&D cosmos: the Ethergaunts, who recognize the gods as their mortal enemies. Widespread immortality is a threat to the status quo.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-18, 05:51 PM
Given that, in standard D&D cosmology, the gods and other entities controlling the outer planes need an ever-increasing supply of souls for their various projects, widespread immortality is indeed a bad thing from their perspective. I mean, if someone does kick off the wightocalypse on a given world, then everyone is converted into undead and the god's die off. Likewise, there is a species of impossibly intelligent immortals running around the D&D cosmos: the Ethergaunts, who recognize the gods as their mortal enemies. Widespread immortality is a threat to the status quo.

...That is a horrifying view of the gods, as parasitic entities that require the death (and in most cases, eventual oblivion) of all mortal races to keep themselves alive. Really good idea for an epic campaign setting.

Through if this was the case becoming a 3rd edition lich sounds pretty good. Or selling your soul to Asmodeus if you don't mind a red color scheme and Clippy in the form of an Imp.

Quertus
2018-11-18, 05:56 PM
...That is a horrifying view of the gods, as parasitic entities that require the death (and in most cases, eventual oblivion) of all mortal races to keep themselves alive.

And people wondered why most of my characters desire to be god-slayers when they grow up.

At least in this system, it makes easily-seen sense.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-18, 11:33 PM
Given that, in standard D&D cosmology, the gods and other entities controlling the outer planes need an ever-increasing supply of souls for their various projects, widespread immortality is indeed a bad thing from their perspective. I mean, if someone does kick off the wightocalypse on a given world, then everyone is converted into undead and the god's die off. Likewise, there is a species of impossibly intelligent immortals running around the D&D cosmos: the Ethergaunts, who recognize the gods as their mortal enemies. Widespread immortality is a threat to the status quo.


...That is a horrifying view of the gods, as parasitic entities that require the death (and in most cases, eventual oblivion) of all mortal races to keep themselves alive. Really good idea for an epic campaign setting.

Through if this was the case becoming a 3rd edition lich sounds pretty good. Or selling your soul to Asmodeus if you don't mind a red color scheme and Clippy in the form of an Imp.


And people wondered why most of my characters desire to be god-slayers when they grow up.

At least in this system, it makes easily-seen sense.

There are certain sorts of horror or epic settings were "parasite gods" are a perfect fit.

Outside those specific settings, it makes a lot more sense to go with "force of nature", "symbiotic exchange", or "bargain with a monster".

In a setting with "parasite gods", everyone should be striving to become some sort of immortal, intelligent undead or otherwise. Everyone. Cut the gods off and let them starve to death.

Malphegor
2018-11-19, 02:44 AM
In a game/setting with a very clearly spelled-out afterlife, choosing any form of undeath voluntarily is actually quite dubious, unless some third party is involved.

Seriously, if I knew for a fact that I could either be reborn as an potential angel in Heaven or a larva in Abadon, I´d chose lichdom because I'm greedy and amoral enough to want it now, but shirk from paying the price. That's basically the polar opposite when you have the prospect to actually rise as an outsider, mostly meaning being good aligned and ending up in the upper spheres.


Eh, a lot of afterlives suck though if you’re not the holiest of holies (the Wall, everything involving chaotic frogs, various Valhalla expies), and how dare the universe get in my way!

Tvtyrant
2018-11-19, 03:58 AM
There are certain sorts of horror or epic settings were "parasite gods" are a perfect fit.

Outside those specific settings, it makes a lot more sense to go with "force of nature", "symbiotic exchange", or "bargain with a monster".

In a setting with "parasite gods", everyone should be striving to become some sort of immortal, intelligent undead or otherwise. Everyone. Cut the gods off and let them starve to death.

I've been writing a story sort of like that. Bodies are like jars that fill up with soul-ink over a beings lifetime, and when they die the stopper comes ou5 and the gods can draw new material things using the ink. The entire universe is a result of them slowly growing the universe to have more and more ink jars so they can make more and more universe, the gods being essentially the crazed artist type writ large.

The side effect of having too much ink for your container/body? Aging.

Magic is what occurs when someone figures out how to punch a straw in their own stopper, and then draws on reality themselves. It has the side effect of stopping aging in the wizard, but also draws the irate attention of thr gods.

Ink can't be taken out of someone living by force. They have to either do it themselves or you have to kill them and grab as much ink as possible at the moment of death. That effectively splits wizards into good and evil groups, both of whom have to watch out for angels and other god-sent entities.

Demons are a kind of corruption of the whole process. Self-aware ink without a jar, they can rewrite reality by using up their bodies, and kill living beings to drink their ink and add it to themselves. Some wizards make deals with demons but they can neither be trusted nor controlled.

Quertus
2018-11-19, 09:02 AM
I've been writing a story sort of like that. Bodies are like jars that fill up with soul-ink over a beings lifetime, and when they die the stopper comes ou5 and the gods can draw new material things using the ink. The entire universe is a result of them slowly growing the universe to have more and more ink jars so they can make more and more universe, the gods being essentially the crazed artist type writ large.

The side effect of having too much ink for your container/body? Aging.

Magic is what occurs when someone figures out how to punch a straw in their own stopper, and then draws on reality themselves. It has the side effect of stopping aging in the wizard, but also draws the irate attention of thr gods.

Ink can't be taken out of someone living by force. They have to either do it themselves or you have to kill them and grab as much ink as possible at the moment of death. That effectively splits wizards into good and evil groups, both of whom have to watch out for angels and other god-sent entities.

Demons are a kind of corruption of the whole process. Self-aware ink without a jar, they can rewrite reality by using up their bodies, and kill living beings to drink their ink and add it to themselves. Some wizards make deals with demons but they can neither be trusted nor controlled.

Insert me a) trying to research ways to simultaneously reverse aging and draw out ink safely; b) trying to outdo the gods, creating custom creatures that gain ink faster / reproduce faster / require less resources to live. Basically, "don't hate me, in the grand scheme of things, I'm helping you out".

Of course, I'd still prefer to topple the old gods in the end. :smallwink:

Tvtyrant
2018-11-19, 11:47 AM
Insert me a) trying to research ways to simultaneously reverse aging and draw out ink safely; b) trying to outdo the gods, creating custom creatures that gain ink faster / reproduce faster / require less resources to live. Basically, "don't hate me, in the grand scheme of things, I'm helping you out".

Of course, I'd still prefer to topple the old gods in the end. :smallwink:
That is the point of the setting :)

Creatures created by none-gods (ie demons and wizards) are constructs and no one has successfully made one that produces ink.

The universe was originally just a void full of demons, and a group of them made the first god out of boredom and loneliness. It turned on its creators, using them to create the other gods and then begin making the first worlds.

The gods are actually technically extremely powerful constructs, they are neither demons nor alive. It turns out the secret to making life is making a construct then allowing it to kill you and use your ink to create life.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-19, 12:32 PM
That is the point of the setting :)

Creatures created by none-gods (ie demons and wizards) are constructs and no one has successfully made one that produces ink.

The universe was originally just a void full of demons, and a group of them made the first god out of boredom and loneliness. It turned on its creators, using them to create the other gods and then begin making the first worlds.

The gods are actually technically extremely powerful constructs, they are neither demons nor alive. It turns out the secret to making life is making a construct then allowing it to kill you and use your ink to create life.


...one of the original "old gods" in my 4th BCE / Greco-Sumerian setting created (accidentally?) the entire physical universe in what amounts to a mad science lab incident resulting in the "collapse" of their timeless, spaceless, limitless reality dominated by imagination, into a physical, temporal, reality dominated by causality and "laws" and finite boundaries. She was completely obliterated, and all reality is infused with the remnants of her infinite self, which is what makes life and spirits and so on possible in this setting.

One of the other "old gods" used to rant at mortals that their reality was a corpse and they were all worms wriggling about in it, which everyone took as just the insane gibbering of a god gone mad, or a macabre metaphor about mortality.

The remaining "old gods" are still effectively the "souls of reality", immense forces of nature, but bound by finite limits, and other than one who is at least nominally sane, they're not right in the head, possessed of great intellect but pathologically obsessed with getting back what they lost... while always just barely unable to remember what it was, like that word on the tip of your tongue, or the song you can hum the tune of but not recall the lyrics or name.... they'd tear apart an entire world if they thought the answer, the key, was buried at the center...

Tvtyrant
2018-11-19, 01:29 PM
...one of the original "old gods" in my 4th BCE / Greco-Sumerian setting created (accidentally?) the entire physical universe in what amounts to a mad science lab incident resulting in the "collapse" of their timeless, spaceless, limitless reality dominated by imagination, into a physical, temporal, reality dominated by causality and "laws" and finite boundaries. She was completely obliterated, and all reality is infused with the remnants of her infinite self, which is what makes life and spirits and so on possible in this setting.

One of the other "old gods" used to rant at mortals that their reality was a corpse and they were all worms wriggling about in it, which everyone took as just the insane gibbering of a god gone mad, or a macabre metaphor about mortality.

The remaining "old gods" are still effectively the "souls of reality", immense forces of nature, but bound by finite limits, and other than one who is at least nominally sane, they're not right in the head, possessed of great intellect but pathologically obsessed with getting back what they lost... while always just barely unable to remember what it was, like that word on the tip of your tongue, or the song you can hum the tune of but not recall the lyrics or name.... they'd tear apart an entire world if they thought the answer, the key, was buried at the center...


That is super cool as far as settings go, like Aboleths/Obyriths scaled up to 11. What if Yog-Sothoth didn't especially like time and space existing?



The other part that makes my setting function is that the more ink an object or construct has the more real it is. So a fire made with very little ink is super weak, to the point where it wouldn't really hurt you. A wall made of small amounts of ink would break like balsa wood and while it would be normal weight it would be easy to lift.

It is noticeable in some indescribable way how real something is, so very low ink (ie illusions) aren't transparent or flickery, but they are still visibly less real then the world. An angel is visibly much more real than the world and is a lot like superman, the whole world is cardboard to them.

Gods were made with so much ink they cut through reality by simply interacting with it, their breath is like a hurricane.

Wizards have access to a limited stock of ink (unless they sacrifice a lot of people) so they tend to use thin inks to make weak temporary versions of things. A wizard wrought dragon is huge, breaths 300 degree flames and can be killed by a few stray arrows.

gkathellar
2018-11-19, 02:14 PM
I don't think this has been mentioned yet, but it appears in at least some sources: when a lich exhausts their avenues of research and learning in the material world, they have the option of using astral projection spells to wander the planes in spirit. The result is a demilich - most of the body is abandoned, and what remains serves principally as an anchor and port-of-call for the undying wizard's spirit. If your main interest is arcane lore, there's some appeal to this progression, and lichdom becomes attractive not just as a way of avoiding death but as a route to tremendous knowledge.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-19, 02:45 PM
I don't think this has been mentioned yet, but it appears in at least some sources: when a lich exhausts their avenues of research and learning in the material world, they have the option of using astral projection spells to wander the planes in spirit. The result is a demilich - most of the body is abandoned, and what remains serves principally as an anchor and port-of-call for the undying wizard's spirit. If your main interest is arcane lore, there's some appeal to this progression, and lichdom becomes attractive not just as a way of avoiding death but as a route to tremendous knowledge.

So they basically become some sort of interdimensional Snowbird. Still a better fate than oblivion.

Can someone tell me why the afterlife in DnD sucks so much? Or if ANY published DnD setting has a better option than 'lol, sucks to be you, non-lich!'?

gkathellar
2018-11-19, 03:57 PM
Can someone tell me why the afterlife in DnD sucks so much? Or if ANY published DnD setting has a better option than 'lol, sucks to be you, non-lich!'?

It doesn't, exactly, or at least it depends on your perspective. The Great Wheel doesn't have punishments or rewards. It has ... like attracts like, I guess would the best way to put it? In theory, at least, there's a process of becoming one's ideal self. The worshipers of a god go to be with that god, and as petitioners they contemplate their chosen deity and mold themselves in its image until, at last, they become an equal participant in its divinity. Non-worshipers find their way to a plane appropriate to their nature (read: alignment, with some minor variation), and with labor and comprehension of the plane's ultimate reality can either merge with the fabric of the plane or else learn to exemplify it (read: become an outsider).

This may seem a lot less desirable for evil-aligned people, but the Lower Planes can be paradise for those who have power, and the opportunity to achieve power is there - remember, Orcus was once a lowly mane. The big exception to all this is the Nine Hells, which are ruled by an occupying army (the baatezu) that reproduces by grinding up mortal souls for raw materials. But if you're really clever and really lawful evil, it's possible to work something out with the baatezu beforehand and avoid such a fate. So, again: it can be a paradise for people of the right inclinations.

D&D is strange (and I think, sort of accidentally, profoundly moving) in that it has an afterlife, but in many ways death is still the end, the ultimate loss of self: knowledge, power, and identity all fade away as one becomes integrated into a higher reality. If losing all that terrifies a person, it's understandable that they might be willing to take the road of lichdom. But fear - of loss, of change, of becoming something else - is the central thing. The lich cannot stomach the thought that all the fruits of their labors will be taken away, and that all of their knowledge is ultimately self-knowledge. Death is so abhorrent to them that they choose to shun life.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-19, 04:05 PM
gkathellar, I do think your post was good and well written and does explain a bit of the great wheel and the ideas behind it. I just...Don't know if many people are going to be on board the oblivion train even if it is a neat concept when it will happen to them personally.

Especially to followers of certain gods, like a god of knowledge. I'm sorry, you want me to give up my what now? That knowledge I worshiped you for!? Worst rewards program ever!

Anymage
2018-11-19, 04:14 PM
gkathellar, I do think your post was good and well written and does explain a bit of the great wheel and the ideas behind it. I just...Don't know if many people are going to be on board the oblivion train even if it is a neat concept when it will happen to them personally.

Especially to followers of certain gods, like a god of knowledge. I'm sorry, you want me to give up my what now? That knowledge I worshiped you for!? Worst rewards program ever!

How much of it is oblivion, vs. how much is growth when having a discrete physical body is unnecessary? If Durkon's thoughts, memories, personality, and experiences merged into the composite entity that is Thor, how would becoming part of a greater collective whole mean oblivion?

It's not the only way to look at things. But becoming part of a collective is something that many people could see the appeal of, as opposed to seeing it as being rendered down to god food.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-19, 04:26 PM
How much of it is oblivion, vs. how much is growth when having a discrete physical body is unnecessary? If Durkon's thoughts, memories, personality, and experiences merged into the composite entity that is Thor, how would becoming part of a greater collective whole mean oblivion?

It's not the only way to look at things. But becoming part of a collective is something that many people could see the appeal of, as opposed to seeing it as being rendered down to god food.

Being subsumed into a collective whole is oblivion. There is no functional difference.

gkathellar
2018-11-19, 04:26 PM
gkathellar, I do think your post was good and well written and does explain a bit of the great wheel and the ideas behind it. I just...Don't know if many people are going to be on board the oblivion train even if it is a neat concept when it will happen to them personally.

Especially to followers of certain gods, like a god of knowledge. I'm sorry, you want me to give up my what now? That knowledge I worshiped you for!? Worst rewards program ever!

Definitely. I think it's rational, knowing all this (and most people in Great Wheel settings don't know all this), for death to still be fearful in settings where it applies. It's not annihilation or oblivion, per se, but it is the certainty that you will become someone and something else, and that's an absolutely terrifying notion, especially for someone who devotes their life to self-improvement. "You'll gradually forget who you are and all of your works will be lost to you, but you can move on to a life of infinite evil and cruelty," is not a very appealing proposition for an evil spellcaster who has left ruin in their wake in the pursuit of power and knowledge.


Being subsumed into a collective whole is oblivion. There is no functional difference.

The trick is that it's less like being eaten, and more like ... a merger of consciousness? Like, let's say you worship Kord. As a petitioner, you labor and meditate to understand Kord's might, glory, righteous spirit, and perfection, hoping to be more like the god who is everything you idealize and look up to. When the day comes that you achieve that goal ... well, there's only one Kord. To be exactly like Kord is to be Kord, to be one with him and participate in his existence as a Power.

Mind, this may sound like a bit of logical trickery to you. That's totally reasonable, and the whole thing hinges on the Powers being near-platonic entities. But it is coherent.

Tvtyrant
2018-11-19, 04:30 PM
Being subsumed into a collective whole is oblivion. There is no functional difference.

That is a matter of perspective, several major religions are focused on achieving the destruction of the self and merger with something greater. Singular conciousness is not a universal good or goal.

icefractal
2018-11-19, 05:38 PM
And depending on the cosmology, it might be as much "oblivion" for Kord as for you, except that Kord never considered itself a single unchanging mind to begin with. If gods are made of souls, then each soul that gets merged in changes them a tiny bit; just like the fact that you are currently exerting gravity on the earth just as much as vice-versa.

Lemmy
2018-11-19, 05:45 PM
Well... If your undead body really craves some ice cream and bedtime fun, there's always Alter Self. Become humanoid for a few hours and go to town!

Millstone85
2018-11-19, 07:36 PM
Being subsumed into a collective whole is oblivion. There is no functional difference.
The trick is that it's less like being eaten, and more like ... a merger of consciousness?But see, while illithids believe this is what awaits them within the elder brain, a communion of knowledge and intellect so full that the illithid effectively becomes the elder, the truth is clearly stated to be exactly what it looks like: the elder eating illithid brains in much the same way that illithids eat human and demihuman/humanoid brains.

So really, those few illithids who pursue the path of the alhoon, they are the sane ones.

Wait... We weren't talking about illithids? Oh my Ilsensine!

Kami2awa
2018-11-20, 02:57 AM
The path of the lich gives you indestructibility, if you hide your phylactery well enough. Other forms of immortality don't.

And there are disadvantages to most of the other options. Vampirism traditionally makes you the slave of the infecting vampire. Other types of undead either lose a lot of their original personality, or can't be created reliably (eg Death Knights, who seem to arise from a curse that's hard to replicate). Other routes, like the BoVD spell that allows you to swap bodies with someone younger, still leave you vulnerable to mortal wounds or disease. Potions of longevity will bite you in the butt eventually. Apotheosis is hard, and you can always do it after you become a lich.

And hey, you can always research spells that give you access to the pleasures of the flesh, if you really want. Or Magic Jar yourself into other bodies, allowing you to indulge in whatever awful fantasies liches have these days.

Plus you get a paralysing touch, immunity to practically everything, bigger hit dice, and a really cool evil laugh.

snowblizz
2018-11-20, 04:47 AM
And hey, you can always research spells that give you access to the pleasures of the flesh, if you really want.
If this is something that's important to you I don't see that person turning to lichdom.


and a really cool evil laugh.

Xykon would disagree. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0097.html)

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-20, 11:06 AM
Being subsumed into a collective whole is oblivion. There is no functional difference.

'We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.'

Yeah, I don't think that many people would be embracing the borg with open arms and willingly joining the collective to make sure they get that cool laser eye.

LibraryOgre
2018-11-20, 11:38 AM
This seems appropriate, here. (http://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2013/07/corpses-and-caches.html)

In my view, the afterlife doesn't "suck" for evil people, per se... they're not sent there to be punished, after all. Rather, the afterlife is where the things you believed are real. If you're Lawful and Good, society will help people and people will help society. If you're Chaotic Evil, everyone is out for themselves and you're only as strong as you can keep.

The problem comes in when someone is a 1st level commoner and dies. A LG commoner goes to a place where helping people is its own reward and society rewards you for it anyway. A CE commoner goes to a place where he's slightly more valuable than a pile of warm crap, and that's only because he can be eaten and turned into a pile of warm crap. A 20th level character who goes to either place? They're still THEM, at least at first, and can affect changes on the world they find themselves in... moreso if you note my bit about the value of grave goods.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-20, 11:40 AM
'We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.'

Yeah, I don't think that many people would be embracing the borg with open arms and willingly joining the collective to make sure they get that cool laser eye.

Yeah. The end distinct and autonomous, memories, thoughts, feelings, etc, is the end of the individual. It's oblivion. Doesn't matter if it's becoming one with some deity, or "shedding the self" ascension, or reincarnation (of some types, at least), or "uploading to the collective", or anything else -- all of those afterlives might as well be death.

Quertus
2018-11-20, 12:35 PM
So, let's look at this backwards (as I've been thinking about making a campaign setting like this anyway).

What if, originally, we were all one person? Or, for D&D's sake, X people? Then those people kinda had their soul, their self, exploded, thus creating Life.

What if, when we die, our soul shard rejoins with the rest of itself?

Is that really that bad?

The Jack
2018-11-20, 12:38 PM
There are real world religions and philosophies like gnosticism that deal with stuff like that.


But somehow, i imagine the hell of undeath being worse than the hell of life, unless of course the hell of unlife was life, which is why those animated skeletons are so ticked off.

gkathellar
2018-11-20, 12:47 PM
Yeah. The end distinct and autonomous, memories, thoughts, feelings, etc, is the end of the individual. It's oblivion. Doesn't matter if it's becoming one with some deity, or "shedding the self" ascension, or reincarnation (of some types, at least), or "uploading to the collective", or anything else -- all of those afterlives might as well be death.

Oblivion strikes me as implying the end of continuity, and that’s very much the opposite of what happens. A petitioner doesn’t become a part of the Power or its embodiment so much as they become the Power in its entire. Given that it’s the culmination of a lengthy process of imitation, nothing has really changed. The final culmination of trying to be like Gruumsh is being Gruumsh.

To me, the potentially unnerving part is actually being a petitioner, a process of shedding everything that’s not in tune with the deity. Our Gruumsh-worshipper slowly forgets everything about themselves that isn’t a whirlwind of spite and fury clothed in ancient subtlety and will to dominate. Only once everything not-Gruumsh is gone do they become the Power.

On the one hand, there’s an argument to be made that what I’m describing is just life - the process of constantly becoming something else in imitation of an imagined self. But on the other hand, even if you buy that, it’s usually not literal. And if all this freaks you out, immortality starts to look extremely attractive.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-20, 12:58 PM
What if, originally, we were all one person? Or, for D&D's sake, X people? Then those people kinda had their soul, their self, exploded, thus creating Life.

What if, when we die, our soul shard rejoins with the rest of itself?

Is that really that bad?

Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few if the needs of the few are immense powerful beings outside of the scope of those many? Life was created by no fault of the mortals. And yet, that little spark of what was lost means so much to the mortals that they will do whatever it takes to keep it. Who is to say that the mortals are worthless than these primordial beings?


On the one hand, there’s an argument to be made that what I’m describing is just life - the process of constantly becoming something else in imitation of an imagined self. But on the other hand, even if you buy that, it’s usually not literal. And if all this freaks you out, immortality starts to look extremely attractive.

And that's why some people desire to look the grim reaper in the face and say 'nah, I'm good'. Even if it is a natural part of life, many natural parts of life are terrifying. Doesn't mean everyone is on board to just yanno...Let it happen. That's loser talk for loser people who don't have immense knowledge.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-20, 01:05 PM
Oblivion strikes me as implying the end of continuity, and that’s very much the opposite of what happens. A petitioner doesn’t become a part of the Power or its embodiment so much as they become the Power in its entire. Given that it’s the culmination of a lengthy process of imitation, nothing has really changed. The final culmination of trying to be like Gruumsh is being Gruumsh.

To me, the potentially unnerving part is actually being a petitioner, a process of shedding everything that’s not in tune with the deity. Our Gruumsh-worshipper slowly forgets everything about themselves that isn’t a whirlwind of spite and fury clothed in ancient subtlety and will to dominate. Only once everything not-Gruumsh is gone do they become the Power.


And that's the point I'm trying to make -- the loss of all that "other stuff" is the loss of what made the individual that individual. You are literally describing oblivion.

Maybe I'm not getting it because I've never wanted or even been able to imagine wanting to be someone else, or just like someone else, or whatever.

Millstone85
2018-11-20, 01:10 PM
So, let's look at this backwards (as I've been thinking about making a campaign setting like this anyway).

What if, originally, we were all one person? Or, for D&D's sake, X people? Then those people kinda had their soul, their self, exploded, thus creating Life.

What if, when we die, our soul shard rejoins with the rest of itself?

Is that really that bad?There is a Marvel character named Jamie "Multiple Man" Madrox. He has the power to create and absorb duplicates of himself. They have all his memories up to the split, while he gains their memories when he absorbs them.

Now, some of his duplicates make major life choices, such as joining the S.H.I.EL.D. or getting married. And they all know that while Jamie "prime" regards them as pieces of his soul, he will not abide by their choices. They see him as their very personal reaper, who will fully negate who they became.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-20, 01:23 PM
At this rate, I wonder how many liches just figure that committing an evil act towards an evil soul is no big deal. Most of those are headed to oblivion either by being eaten by the plane itself or aren't going to be lucky enough to even become a mane/lemure. You're not really destroying anything that wouldn't be destroyed anyway and this way, you are stopping them from either powering the plane, or adding to it.

Xasten
2018-11-20, 01:26 PM
On the afterlife topic, I haven't seen it mentioned yet, so here goes. I once ran a campaign where the Great Wheel afterlife was as blasé as it seems to be here. The real Afterlife was the 7th level of Celestia that functioned as a great filter for those who had really "earned it." The rest were on an endless cycle of birth, death, become and outsider/whatever, and then rebirth if they're lucky until they hopefully, one day, found The Way.

Anymage
2018-11-20, 01:42 PM
And that's the point I'm trying to make -- the loss of all that "other stuff" is the loss of what made the individual that individual. You are literally describing oblivion.

Maybe I'm not getting it because I've never wanted or even been able to imagine wanting to be someone else, or just like someone else, or whatever.

To someone who does aspire to become part of a greater whole, using blood magic to ensure that you stay as you are now would be analogous to your sixteen year old self using blood magic to ensure that you never changed or sold out. Over a long enough span of time, you're going to change into something quite different from you as you are now. Doubly so if a discrete physical body becomes more of a suggestion than a mandate for you.

Plus, let's take your position as it stands (that becoming part of something other than your self necessarily means dissolution of yourself, and therefore oblivion), and add another assumption. Biological immortality cannot be achieved by simply combining the right items and spells, and requires some deep metaphysical costs. Undead externalize most of the costs, and have some unpleasant side effects they personally face as well. (E.G: vampires and sun, or liches and withering.) Internalizing the costs puts severe limits on you, like requiring treatments that put a big dent in a kingdom's treasury, being at the beck and call of some god, or having to stay in the monastery with the right balance of forces and never leaving. Dying will hasten the process of you being transformed into something unrecognizable to you as you are now.

If cheap immortality were off the table, which option would you chose?

icefractal
2018-11-20, 03:47 PM
Come to think of it, it also depends on what the reason for "merging" is.

If it's just to make the gods stronger, then "screw that, I'm not here to be a snack" seems pretty reasonable.

But if recycled soul energy is the only source for new life, as in Tvtyrant's setting, then becoming a Lich is saying "I don't care if nothing new ever gets created as long as I stick around." And while it's understandable that somebody would feel that way, it's also understandable that other people would call them evil for it and seek to destroy them.

And what if souls just don't last forever? If merging with a god is the alternative to going completely senile or straight-up disintegrating, it sounds like the better option.

gkathellar
2018-11-20, 05:57 PM
And that's the point I'm trying to make -- the loss of all that "other stuff" is the loss of what made the individual that individual. You are literally describing oblivion.

Maybe I'm not getting it because I've never wanted or even been able to imagine wanting to be someone else, or just like someone else, or whatever.

I think there’s two points you’re overlooking. The first is continuity: just like any other change, there’s no single moment the Petitioner stops being themselves. Conceptually, it’s no different from the way they were a different person as a child than they were as an adult. There’s no cessation of consciousness followed by another person waking up in their skull, just the slow process of forgetting who they were and becoming one of the people they could be.

The second is idealization: we all have things about ourselves we want to change, whether those things are as high-falutin’ as “I want to be a better person,” and, “I want to subjugate my enemies,” or as pithy as “I want to get real swole” and “I want to be clever enough to win arguments on the Internet.” A god is a constellation of such desirable traits, a being that the worshiper admires, imitates, and asks for guidance because they deem it worthy of such an important role in their lives and because they believe it knows how to live the way they want to. Given that Powers are sentient packages of abstract concepts powered by mortal belief, they’re right.

I started writing an example, but it got really long and pretentious, so spoiler block.

Let’s suppose there’s a LN fighter devoted to Hieroneous, Sir Jim. Jim doesn’t quite buy into all of the goody two-shoes stuff, but he’s a brave sort of warrior who likes a fair fight, believes in legitimate authority and respects his peers, so the God of Valor holds a special place in Jim’s heart. Something about that knightly ideal just stirs Jim’s soul.

And now Jim is dead (choked on an apple, very sad).

Jim wakes up in Hieroneous’ divine realm, and after a bit of hem-hawing realizes he’s effectively in paradise and reconciles himself with his death. An afterlife of knightly fellowship, martial arts practice, and serious contemplation alongside the worthiest liege he can imagine doesn’t strike Jim as half bad. He attends practice sessions with archons in the morning and discussion groups with angels in the afternoon. Always present is Hieroneous, the thunderbolt, immeasurable in his wisdom and magnanimity, terrible in his wrath: chivalry incarnate.

Slowly, Jim realizes there can be no peerage or brotherhood without true benevolence - his alignment turns to Lawful Good. The knightly ideal that has always beguiled him seems embodied in the angels, the archons, the senior petitioners, and most of all Lord Hieroneous, so he looks to their examples. He becomes aware of the scope of the evil and chaos in the universe, and as he does the slights and injustice of his life in particular begin to seem at once petty in scale and yet laden with lessons he has begun to learn. Jim’s valor grows, and with it comes a deep and abiding sorrow for those who twist that concept into something self-serving - the very thought of Hextor and those who follow him fills Jim with a sense of broken fellowship, pain at the knowledge of what could have been, and white-hot fury. Other petitioners ask him questions, and he give them answers he didn’t know he had.

His honor is unimpeachable now, his kindness boundless. He thinks of his old life, at times, and is overcome with love and pity for the countless millions of Jims out there, who can not appreciate everything he has come to, who are only one bad day away from turning from the righteous path. Would that he could guide them, as Lord Hieroneous does! But his past matters less than the past, now, for there are so many lives that could have brought him to where he is, and they all matter, don’t they (he could swear he had a brother with a huge inferiority complex, though). At times, the angels look as if they’re bowing to him, and in the midst of his exercises, he feels the crash of thunder in his heart. He looks out on a world full of cruelty and injustice and people, worthy people, fighting to make it better and knows that he owes them his shining sword.

There is a name for what he has become, a name the Planes themselves know. Hieroneous.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-20, 06:41 PM
And yet, I would say that the parable of Sir Jim is a very sad one. Every memory you have, every choice you made, every sacrifice you suffered through becomes...Nothing.

The only part that remains is that which suits another, and everything, including all memory of his brother is gone. That which made Sir Jim Sir Jim is stripped away if it does not fit within another being. Sir Jim disagreed with the God of Valor, and not only lost his sense of why he disagreed, he completely lost his free will to do so.

That isn't a minor change, that is the absolute destruction of what made Sir Jim different from his god. Giving answers he did not have and having emotions he had no reason to feel does not make him a part of the god, but makes him a puppet bereft of any choice.

What's the difference, anyway, between a god that obliterates a person's very being, and a lich who sends souls to oblivion a touch early?

gkathellar
2018-11-20, 07:20 PM
And yet, I would say that the parable of Sir Jim is a very sad one. Every memory you have, every choice you made, every sacrifice you suffered through becomes...Nothing.

No, it's all still there. It may not be as significant in light of the millions upon millions of other lives you've lived, or it might be even more significant, depending on the god. What changes is perspective - the material is all still there.


The only part that remains is that which suits another, and everything, including all memory of his brother is gone.

The brother I was actually referring to was Hextor, fwiw.


That which made Sir Jim Sir Jim is stripped away if it does not fit within another being. Sir Jim disagreed with the God of Valor, and not only lost his sense of why he disagreed, he completely lost his free will to do so.

I don't really see how being persuaded of a different worldview constitutes a loss of free will, which may be the crux of our disagreement. It may be that the concept works for me because I entirely reject the notion that some part of a person is immovable and unchanging and that any such change constitutes the end of that person. YMMV, I guess.

My intended point was that it's a process of personal growth like any other, but loaded with weird magical significance because you're a dead person in a place literally made from belief hanging out with a manifestation of the Platonic forms.


That isn't a minor change, that is the absolute destruction of what made Sir Jim different from his god. Giving answers he did not have and having emotions he had no reason to feel does not make him a part of the god, but makes him a puppet bereft of any choice.

If that's the way it came across, then I did a bad job of writing it. I know I, personally, have had experiences where I answered someone's question and then realized, "huh, my view on that is different than what it was in the past," and perhaps I've unfairly generalized that sort of experience. Likewise, I may be wrongly assuming that people other than me develop passionate opinions about things through exposure to people they respect.

What I was attempting to convey was that he became wise in ways he hadn't been previously, and came to appreciate a more complete worldview (and to be clear, exactly the same thing would be happening with a Chaotic Evil god, although it'd look a lot different for obvious reasons).


What's the difference, anyway, between a god that obliterates a person's very being, and a lich who sends souls to oblivion a touch early?

Well, see, one of those things isn't what's happening, and the other one involves killing a person. :P

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-20, 08:14 PM
I think there’s two points you’re overlooking. The first is continuity: just like any other change, there’s no single moment the Petitioner stops being themselves. Conceptually, it’s no different from the way they were a different person as a child than they were as an adult. There’s no cessation of consciousness followed by another person waking up in their skull, just the slow process of forgetting who they were and becoming one of the people they could be.

The second is idealization: we all have things about ourselves we want to change, whether those things are as high-falutin’ as “I want to be a better person,” and, “I want to subjugate my enemies,” or as pithy as “I want to get real swole” and “I want to be clever enough to win arguments on the Internet.” A god is a constellation of such desirable traits, a being that the worshiper admires, imitates, and asks for guidance because they deem it worthy of such an important role in their lives and because they believe it knows how to live the way they want to. Given that Powers are sentient packages of abstract concepts powered by mortal belief, they’re right.

I started writing an example, but it got really long and pretentious, so spoiler block.

Let’s suppose there’s a LN fighter devoted to Hieroneous, Sir Jim. Jim doesn’t quite buy into all of the goody two-shoes stuff, but he’s a brave sort of warrior who likes a fair fight, believes in legitimate authority and respects his peers, so the God of Valor holds a special place in Jim’s heart. Something about that knightly ideal just stirs Jim’s soul.

And now Jim is dead (choked on an apple, very sad).

Jim wakes up in Hieroneous’ divine realm, and after a bit of hem-hawing realizes he’s effectively in paradise and reconciles himself with his death. An afterlife of knightly fellowship, martial arts practice, and serious contemplation alongside the worthiest liege he can imagine doesn’t strike Jim as half bad. He attends practice sessions with archons in the morning and discussion groups with angels in the afternoon. Always present is Hieroneous, the thunderbolt, immeasurable in his wisdom and magnanimity, terrible in his wrath: chivalry incarnate.

Slowly, Jim realizes there can be no peerage or brotherhood without true benevolence - his alignment turns to Lawful Good. The knightly ideal that has always beguiled him seems embodied in the angels, the archons, the senior petitioners, and most of all Lord Hieroneous, so he looks to their examples. He becomes aware of the scope of the evil and chaos in the universe, and as he does the slights and injustice of his life in particular begin to seem at once petty in scale and yet laden with lessons he has begun to learn. Jim’s valor grows, and with it comes a deep and abiding sorrow for those who twist that concept into something self-serving - the very thought of Hextor and those who follow him fills Jim with a sense of broken fellowship, pain at the knowledge of what could have been, and white-hot fury. Other petitioners ask him questions, and he give them answers he didn’t know he had.

His honor is unimpeachable now, his kindness boundless. He thinks of his old life, at times, and is overcome with love and pity for the countless millions of Jims out there, who can not appreciate everything he has come to, who are only one bad day away from turning from the righteous path. Would that he could guide them, as Lord Hieroneous does! But his past matters less than the past, now, for there are so many lives that could have brought him to where he is, and they all matter, don’t they (he could swear he had a brother with a huge inferiority complex, though). At times, the angels look as if they’re bowing to him, and in the midst of his exercises, he feels the crash of thunder in his heart. He looks out on a world full of cruelty and injustice and people, worthy people, fighting to make it better and knows that he owes them his shining sword.

There is a name for what he has become, a name the Planes themselves know. Hieroneous.

Yeah, that "idealization" thing... again... I don't get it. It's utterly foreign to me. To become someone else, rather than yourself... that's not something to hope for, or strive for. Personal growth is building up, building on what's already there, because you can never actually get rid of it. What you're describing is loss, of parts being torn away, of someone slowly losing their identity.

Jim is gone. There is no Jim. Jim does not exist any more. It's worse than that, Jim's dead. You said it yourself, Jim's memories are gone. That "slow process of forgetting who they were" is oblivion -- the person is no more, replaced with a copy of the god, or subsumed into the god.

In a world where that's the "best" afterlife a reality (setting) has to offer the people (characters) who live there... no wonder some of them choose to become liches, or vampires, or whatever.

icefractal
2018-11-20, 09:29 PM
On the other hand, would you say that the act of giving someone a single memory they didn't experience kills them? What if it was several memories? What if it was thousands of years of memories? At some point, the change is larger, but I don't think there's a strict "you are no longer you" line. And that's how merging works, in most versions - you don't /lose/ any memories. You just gain so many that any single lifetime is only a tiny fraction of who you are.

For that matter, I don't think "current me" is the same person as "ten year old me", nor would either of us likely volunteer to suddenly become the other.

Quertus
2018-11-20, 11:45 PM
So, I agree with Max on the notion of building on what is already there.

I view who I am as being my data + my algorithms, my knowledge + my... choices, I suppose.

Strip away my memories, and I am no longer me.

If I got amnesia, that person would not be me. If, after a year or so, they got my memories back, I would be me again, albeit changed.

If I were the one with amnesia, would I want my old memories back? Getting them back could fundamentally change who I am. But do I have the right to "kill" my old self to prevent that change?

If, instead, my soul were magically cut in half, and I lived two lives in two bodies, which, after a year, were merged back together, and reintegrated with my memories, I would be myself again, albeit changed by the experience.

If I were one of the two people with amnesia, would I want my old memories back? Getting them back could fundamentally change who I am. But do I have the right to "kill" my old self to prevent that change?

Would I want to merge with my other self? Doing so could fundamentally change who we are, but is their experience any less real than if I'd lived it myself, since, in effect, I did?

Personally, I would love for some immortal being to integrate my memories of those I've loved, to remember and cherish them forever. I can think of few greater purposes for this life. But then, when I heard the Queen song with the lyrics "who wants to live forever... when love must die?", I immediately responded, "me". Because, if the choice is between "that which I love must die, and I die, too" or "that which I love must die, and I keep its memory alive forever", I know which I choose.

Anyway, point is (I think) that, in my exploded soul example, everyone you're merging with very literally is you - they did exactly what you would have done in the same situation, because they literally are you.

Now, do note that "teenage me" would not have killed, even in self defense, whereas current me has no such qualms against murder. Same person, same soul, different point on the journey. Well, the "shattered soul" concept has many points in more than just a 1d line. But, still, the concept is that each of these people fundamentally is you, as truly as "teenage me" is "current me". Not wanting to merge with them is like not wanting the memories of the person who played Magneto to merge with the memories of the person who played Gandalf.

Millstone85
2018-11-21, 04:39 AM
For that matter, I don't think "current me" is the same person as "ten year old me", nor would either of us likely volunteer to suddenly become the other.This is one of my existential fears.

I have a hard time remembering anything, and what little I remember must have been reprocessed multiple times through the lens of my crippling depression. I have recently been diagnosed with a malformation of the left hippocampus, which explains a lot.

So what is really left of the kid who lived a couple decades ago? And what if everyone else is in the same boat, just in a less obvious manner?

gkathellar
2018-11-21, 07:47 AM
On the other hand, would you say that the act of giving someone a single memory they didn't experience kills them? What if it was several memories? What if it was thousands of years of memories? At some point, the change is larger, but I don't think there's a strict "you are no longer you" line. And that's how merging works, in most versions - you don't /lose/ any memories. You just gain so many that any single lifetime is only a tiny fraction of who you are.

For that matter, I don't think "current me" is the same person as "ten year old me", nor would either of us likely volunteer to suddenly become the other.

This is pretty much where I stand.


So, I agree with Max on the notion of building on what is already there.

I view who I am as being my data + my algorithms, my knowledge + my... choices, I suppose.

Strip away my memories, and I am no longer me.

The trouble is that memories are not some perfect well of information to which a person has flawless access. They're mutable, both in the long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory) and extremely short (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_phi_phenomenon) terms. Most neurological evidence suggests that consciousness is emergent from the interactions of the different parts of the brain, which may be operating under a wide variety of assumptions and theories until they have to confer for some reason or another, at which point many of those theories are discarded (Daniel Dennett calls this the "Multiple Drafts theory," in contrast to the "Cartesian materialist" who believes there is some core self observing the rest of the brain from within).

Most information a person consciously perceives doesn't even make it from working memory to short-term, and there are physiological limits on how much working and short-term memory you can hold, beyond which stuff just gets thrown out. Arguably, this is why people so frequently forget what they were doing or why they were doing things. They had a thought, and they initiated the behaviors necessary to put that thought into action, and then they weren't having that thought anymore (losing our keys isn't just a thing we all do, it's a borderline neurological inevitability).

We can see compelling cases of this happening at an unnaturally accelerated pace in cases of traumatic brain injury. Phineas Gage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) is perhaps the ur-example, a man who took a railroad spike through the head and whose personality changed dramatically as a result. It's pretty clear that Gage didn't die or shut down - he simply suffered a sudden change in machinery. Acquired savants like Tony Cicoria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Cicoria) develop passionate, even obsessive interests as a result of TBIs but are still, ultimately, the same people (Cicoria was struck by lightning, an event that frequently leaves behind neurological changes). Such dramatic and sudden changes can lead to depression and disassociation, but even that is grounded in a sense that the continuity doesn't make sense to the person experiencing it.


If I got amnesia, that person would not be me. If, after a year or so, they got my memories back, I would be me again, albeit changed.

If I were the one with amnesia, would I want my old memories back? Getting them back could fundamentally change who I am. But do I have the right to "kill" my old self to prevent that change?

I had the experience of meeting a woman suffering from partial retrograde amnesia following an operation to remove a brain tumor. She was in her late-30s, with a husband and teenage daughter, but could not remember anything after the age of 18. And yet, despite having no particular basis for continued attachment, she still cared about and wanted to know her husband, and felt responsible for and affectionate towards her daughter. Indeed, she didn't experience any dysphoria as a result of being 20 years older than she recalled being, and the contrivances of the modern world didn't surprise or displace here. It struck me that while the experiences "justifying" her identity were gone, the identity itself remained as brute fact. Memory was only one piece of her existence, and removing it caused a change, but not a collapse.

Or, in the words of a great man (http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110109075718/bigo/images/thumb/b/b3/Roger_Smith.jpg/500px-Roger_Smith.jpg): people are not ruled by their memories!


Anyway, point is (I think) that, in my exploded soul example, everyone you're merging with very literally is you - they did exactly what you would have done in the same situation, because they literally are you.

And that is another big part of what I'm trying to get at.


This is one of my existential fears.

I have a hard time remembering anything, and what little I remember must have been reprocessed multiple times through the lens of my crippling depression. I have recently been diagnosed with a malformation of the left hippocampus, which explains a lot.

So what is really left of the kid who lived a couple decades ago? And what if everyone else is in the same boat, just in a less obvious manner?

That's an understandable anxiety, and I think a lot of people struggle with some variation on it. "Who am I?" is a pretty foundational worry. Personally, I try to think of my self/identity/personhood as a process (verb-tense), rather than an object (noun-tense), which ... is a hard thing to do, but I think it helps.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-21, 12:08 PM
I don't really see how being persuaded of a different worldview constitutes a loss of free will, which may be the crux of our disagreement. It may be that the concept works for me because I entirely reject the notion that some part of a person is immovable and unchanging and that any such change constitutes the end of that person. YMMV, I guess.

It's not that I can't accept that a person will change, but the way the story was presented wasn't persuasion. It seemed like the greater personality of the god crushed everything of the petitioner while painting a smiley face on the entire affair.

That's pretty terrifying to me.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-21, 12:50 PM
It's not that I can't accept that a person will change, but the way the story was presented wasn't persuasion. It seemed like the greater personality of the god crushed everything of the petitioner while painting a smiley face on the entire affair.

That's pretty terrifying to me.

To me it sounded something like the process of the god digesting Jim slowly over the course of time. Sure, the "Jim protein" is still there, in the god, but to call that anything other than oblivion is really stretching it.

Pleh
2018-11-21, 01:51 PM
Creatures created by none-gods (ie demons and wizards) are constructs and no one has successfully made one that produces ink.

Enter the Warforged: that one time we accidentally did it, but we can't remember or figure out how.

In reality, the warforged was a divine experiment to see if the gods could trick mortals into creating ink with manufacturing rather than breeding, generating a new form of sustenance for the gods.

The secrets endowed to mortals for the experminent were wiped from their minds after the experiment was abandoned. The knowledge is literally locked in a god's subconsicious mind.

Warforged are GMO god chow.

War_lord
2018-11-22, 07:12 AM
To answer this question we have to refer back to the author who basically invented the stereotypical fantasy Necromancer:

I will repeat a subtle rune—
And thronging suns of Otherwhere
Shall blaze upon the blinded air,
And spectres terrible and fair
Shall wake the riven world at noon.

The star that was mine empery
In dust upon unwinnowed skies:
But primal dreams have made me wise,
And soon the shattered years shall rise
To my remembered sorcery.

To mantic mutterings, brief and low,
My palaces shall lift amain,
My bowers bloom; I will regain
The lips whereon my lips have lain
In rose-red twilights long ago.

Before my murmured exorcism
The world, a wispy wraith, shall flee:
A stranger earth, a weirder sea,
People with shapes of Fäery,
Shall swell upon the waste abysm.

The pantheons of darkened stars
Shall file athwart the crocus dawn;
Goddess and Gorgon, Lar and faun,
Shall tread the amaranthine lawn,
And giants fight their thunderous wars.

Like graven mountains of basalt,
Dark idols of my demons there
Shall tower through bright zones of air,
Fronting the sun with level stare;
And hell shall pave my deepest vault.

Phantom and fiend and sorceror
Shall serve me...till my term shall pass,
And I become no more, alas,
Than a frail shadow on the glass
Before some latter conjurer.

A Lich is a Necromancer who refuses to accept the idea that their "term shall pass", they want to live forever. And if you've already spent your life perfecting magic that traps a mockery of life in a body around long after it's end, naturally you're going to want to turn that to the business of keeping yourself going. Lichdom is a horrifying existence to us because (I would hope) none of us have spent 20+ years desecrating graves and committing unspeakable crimes against nature in the search for power over life and death. Once you're that far gone mentally, you don't have much capacity for love anyway.

Also relevant: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/112/the-last-incantation

Millstone85
2018-11-22, 08:48 AM
My earlier post about elder brains was on a joking tone, but I actually think it is an interesting parallel.

Especially in 5e lore, where the elder brains themselves hold these beliefs.


An elder brain also sees itself as a savior of the mind flayer race and a living memorial that preserves the memories of the mind flayers' prey. By its twisted logic, humanoids whose brains are devoured by the colony are rendered immortal, their memories preserved forever in the elder brain's labyrinthine mind.
Ilsensine is a broader philosophical ideal than Maanzecorian, leading many sages to assume it must be the more important or more powerful of the two "gods." Ilsensine represents not just mastery of one's own mind but a psionic union between oneself and the realm of universal knowledge. Different elder brains have different interpretations of what this state consists of and how to achieve it. Elder brains and illithids that devote themselves to Ilsensine sometimes pursue ways to dominate gods of knowledge or even aspire to supplant those gods on the way to attaining the state of full incorporation into the universal consciousness.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-22, 10:46 AM
I feel like at the point that the god's behavior mimics both the Borg and Mindflayers eating people's brains, there's a serious problem in the afterlife. The afterlife should not be the same thing as horrific villians. I mean, as far as horrific villians go they are pretty un-horrific given audiences they were trying to appeal to, but they are still considered to be horrible fates.

Especially in Faerun, where you get a choice between painful oblivion (because the overgod is a donkey cavity), less painful oblivion, or making a deal with a devil. No wonder the place has so many warlocks nowadays!

Florian
2018-11-22, 11:20 AM
@Max:

It´s almost boring how certain patterns repeat. It mostly is a cultural thing how the standing between individual and society is and what forms that takes. There´re more than enough cultures that see the individual only as part of the family, clan, or nation and those raised in those cultures have no problem with it, seeing the absolute objective value there. The same holds true for the opposite end, that a society or nation should always thrive to help and individual prosper. Either you dread being part of a collective, or you see the merit in it and look forward to it, no grey areas here.

But: Consider one simple point: What if your afterlife expense of being part of the collective proves you wrong then?

King of Nowhere
2018-11-22, 12:30 PM
Sex, food and other fleshy pleasures can easily be accessed again by spells. You can shapeshift into something flesh-made, and enjoy yourself.

As for other ways to immortality, not aging is supposed to be extremely difficult. that by raw you can live forever just by reincarnating once per lifetime is simply because they didn't think it through. when writing a corpus of spells as vast as that of d&d, it's impossible to think through anything. and then they also went on and made a lot of immortal races.

As foor needing to consume souls, I agree that it
- sucks
- makes liches basically a vampire variant
- makes becoming a lich less attractive
- make liches less interesting
- makes for sloppy worldbuilding

the good thing about having an open sandbox game with a lot of different fluff is that you can pick the fluff you want, or even come up with something yourself.




You don't become a lich cuz you really like knitting.

there are some. A lich in my campaign world had a grandmotherly attitude, she liked to knit, and she offered tea and biscuits to passing adventurers. She was also the best diviner in the world. She also owned a magic mummified tongue that she could stick in her mouth to restore her sense of taste.
She became the best diviner in the world by spending five centuries looking for her family, which was killed and soul-bound by an evil dragon (yes, I totally got that from varsuuvius' story arc). Now that I think about it, her grandmotherly attitude may have been a way to compensate for the grandchildren she wanted but never had, for the family she lost.
She was remarkably not-evil both in intent and personality, but she had to be evil to become a lich, else the negative energy would drive her crazy (homebrewed fluff). So she killed random people every decade or two to make sure she'd stay evil. She took care to kill families whole, though, so that they'd still be together. Also, she covered well her tracks, and she killed perfect nobodies from the poorest, least important parts of the world. And nobody ever got an inkling where she hid her philactery - being the best divinator also gives you a good idea on how to protect against detection. So nobody bothered her, not seriously.
After the party helped her free her family, she destroyed herself to reunite with them. the party got all of her possession as reward.
she was a cool npc. Now I'm missing her.

War_lord
2018-11-22, 12:32 PM
I feel like at the point that the god's behavior mimics both the Borg and Mindflayers eating people's brains, there's a serious problem in the afterlife. The afterlife should not be the same thing as horrific villians. I mean, as far as horrific villians go they are pretty un-horrific given audiences they were trying to appeal to, but they are still considered to be horrible fates.

Especially in Faerun, where you get a choice between painful oblivion (because the overgod is a donkey cavity), less painful oblivion, or making a deal with a devil. No wonder the place has so many warlocks nowadays!

But that's not what the gods are doing. There's no real similarity between having your mortal brain eaten and achieving enlightenment.

Frankly a crap afterlife to me is struggling all your life against the urge to be a selfish jerk ("individualism"), and then dying righteous, only to be told the afterlife is exactly like life, only as a ghost person. That's a profoundly shallow ideal afterlife you're in favor of.

Millstone85
2018-11-22, 01:36 PM
It´s almost boring how certain patterns repeat. It mostly is a cultural thing how the standing between individual and society is and what forms that takes. There´re more than enough cultures that see the individual only as part of the family, clan, or nation and those raised in those cultures have no problem with it, seeing the absolute objective value there. The same holds true for the opposite end, that a society or nation should always thrive to help and individual prosper. Either you dread being part of a collective, or you see the merit in it and look forward to it, no grey areas here.In the Great Wheel, this is called the Law-Chaos axis, and there are in fact many shades from Mechanus to Limbo.

I can totally buy Sir Jim's story happening on the plane of Arcadia. This looks like a place where they would gently ease you into becoming part of something greater, even to the point of complete self-sacrifice. Acheron would have a similar end goal, but through an "I only want to see one head in the rank!" approach.

I start having a problem when every single one of the Outer Planes does this. Like when The Giant explained...
In the Nine Hells, they torture you until you forget everything else. In Celestia, you meditate until you renounce all worldly concerns. In Valhalla, you party until you can't remember your own name. In Limbo, the chaos drives you mad. In Mechanus, you sit in grey cubicle stamping paperwork until you are bored into oblivion. And so on and so forth. Shouldn't the chaotic side of the Wheel drive you toward finding what makes you unique?


Frankly a crap afterlife to me is struggling all your life against the urge to be a selfish jerk ("individualism"), and then dying righteous, only to be told the afterlife is exactly like life, only as a ghost person. That's a profoundly shallow ideal afterlife you're in favor of.Maybe, but that's how I picture Bytopia. A simple and industrious afterlife, with decent neighbourly relations.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-22, 01:39 PM
@Max:

It´s almost boring how certain patterns repeat. It mostly is a cultural thing how the standing between individual and society is and what forms that takes. There´re more than enough cultures that see the individual only as part of the family, clan, or nation and those raised in those cultures have no problem with it, seeing the absolute objective value there. The same holds true for the opposite end, that a society or nation should always thrive to help and individual prosper. Either you dread being part of a collective, or you see the merit in it and look forward to it, no grey areas here.

But: Consider one simple point: What if your afterlife expense of being part of the collective proves you wrong then?

"Part of the collective" would be my hell. I'd rather oblivion.




But that's not what the gods are doing. There's no real similarity between having your mortal brain eaten and achieving enlightenment.

Frankly a crap afterlife to me is struggling all your life against the urge to be a selfish jerk ("individualism"), and then dying righteous, only to be told the afterlife is exactly like life, only as a ghost person. That's a profoundly shallow ideal afterlife you're in favor of.


Two assumptions there:

* That individualism is inherently selfish.
* That there's even such a thing as "enlightenment".

Regardless, though, a person being subsumed into a collective, or losing what makes that person that person and having it overwritten to become a carbon copy of some idealized self-important twit (ie, a deity)... they might as well just be eaten and cease to exist.

Honest Tiefling
2018-11-22, 02:39 PM
But that's not what the gods are doing. There's no real similarity between having your mortal brain eaten and achieving enlightenment.

If you have to have your personality stripped to achieve enlightenment, then you didn't achieve it. Something (which might not even qualify as a person) wearing your face was just brainwashed into accepting whatever the bigger soul says.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-22, 02:57 PM
If you have to have your personality stripped to achieve enlightenment, then you didn't achieve it. Something (which might not even qualify as a person) wearing your face was just brainwashed into accepting whatever the bigger soul says.

Exactly.

What good is "enlightenment" (assuming it even exists) if it destroys everything it touches?

Pleh
2018-11-22, 03:18 PM
I always assumed the D&D afterlife system was meant to convey a "reap what you sow" philosophy. When you are destined to go to a dimensional plane full of people like yourself (to varying degrees), it encourages you to "dress for the afterlife you want" or at least be the biggest bully on the schoolyard. Whatever way you lived, you go to a world built and occupied exclusively by like minded individuals, almost like getting a cosmic, "this is what the ultimate conclusion of your lifestyle is and the impact it has on the world."

It's not necessarily a punishment, even for evil characters. Some LE characters might see themselves as a force of good and deem their fate at the courts of pandemonium unjust punishment for their contributions to society, while others might see it as an opportunity to become the next new archfiend. This is just the next throne they'll conquer and it will be all the more sweet because of the competition.

Similarly, good characters might not have much regard for their final adventures. They might have lead a life of fighting for the weak, hoping for a blissful rest only to find themselves in the Eternal Hunt.

Either way, a Wizard (the prime source of liches) would likely have the sufficient knowledge to predict where they will end up. It's natural that some of them will just decide to opt out of the mandatory evictions from the material plane.

Probably statistically most liches are LE and most would rather maintain their power base in the material plane and expand into binding devils as needed rather than starting completely over in a new playground where others have dominated the scene for millenia.

Florian
2018-11-22, 03:46 PM
@Pleh:

Nah. The D&D cosmology was developed with a very christian sensibility as a background. That actually hurt it very much,

Anymage
2018-11-22, 03:56 PM
I feel like at the point that the god's behavior mimics both the Borg and Mindflayers eating people's brains, there's a serious problem in the afterlife. The afterlife should not be the same thing as horrific villians. I mean, as far as horrific villians go they are pretty un-horrific given audiences they were trying to appeal to, but they are still considered to be horrible fates.

One of the key things about both Borg and Illithids is that they'll integrate you without giving a toss about your consent. If the borg only assimilated you if you sought them out and asked them, they'd be a very different sort of critter.

More generally, dead people are going to have to change due to the experiences of having a soulstuff body, and due to spending an amount of time dead that dwarfs the amount of time they spent alive. When biological instincts and indeed the idea of having a discrete humanoid form are more suggestions than mandates, you're going to turn into something different. Gods are popular aspirational targets because they embody a lot of people's aspirations. You get to pick the god and how quickly you follow in their footsteps, though. You could turn into something else conceptual instead, like a baker becoming the currents inside an oven to guarantee that the bread is baked just right, but that seems even more alien to human experience.

Really, you have three options for an afterlife. Pick your poison, because they all have problems.

There are stories where dead life is basically living life that goes on forever, but they don't really fit into D&D's heroic milieu. If dead people live the same sorts of mundane lives that living people do, only going on forever, it starts to feel depressingly existentialist. More importantly, the mundanity of day-to-day life such works tend to focus on is directly counter to the epic heroism of D&D. If your archmage dies and faces eternity afterwards as a commoner, I don't see people quite liking that outcome.

If dead you is like living you, only going on forever, and if dead people can continue to gain XP and levels, you have the Elminster problem on steroids. If people could keep adventuring and gaining XP and levels with no end in sight, why don't you have afterlife adventuring parties with levels in the quadruple digits, who simply by existing change the scope of problems that can exist around them.

If dead people have to be removed somehow to keep them from continuing to hang around and dominate the afterlife, there needs to be some mechanism for it. You can look for interpretations that allow good gods to stay Good instead of having to be a pretty face on parasitism. But at some point arbitrarily down the line, you as an independent actor have to be removed from the equation.

Millstone85
2018-11-22, 06:05 PM
More generally, dead people are going to have to change due to the experiences of having a soulstuff body, and due to spending an amount of time dead that dwarfs the amount of time they spent alive. When biological instincts and indeed the idea of having a discrete humanoid form are more suggestions than mandates, you're going to turn into something different.
If dead people have to be removed somehow to keep them from continuing to hang around and dominate the afterlife, there needs to be some mechanism for it.Here is something I like about the 5e description of the planes, though I don't know how different that is from previous editions:
At their innermost edges, where they are closest to the Material Plane (in a conceptual if not a literal geographical sense), the four Elemental Planes resemble places in the Material Plane. The four elements mingle together as they do in the Material Plane, forming land, sea, and sky. But the dominant element exerts a strong influence on the environment, reflecting its fundamental qualities.
As they extend farther from the Material Plane, the Elemental Planes become increasingly alien and hostile. Here, in the outermost regions, the elements exist in their purest form: great expanses of solid earth, blazing fire, crystal-clear water, and unsullied air.
As with the Elemental Planes, one can imagine the perceptible part of the Outer Planes as a border region, while extensive spiritual regions lie beyond ordinary sensory experience.

I could see "merging" with an outer plane as moving to its deeper layers, progressively shedding the pretense of physicality. You do not lose your sense of self, nor do you become identical to the souls you meet there. You just disappear to the senses of planar travelers and recent petitioners. What you do then is essential for the perennity of the plane, though the details are left as a narrative blank. Only some beings, notably the gods, are able to converse with your kind and with recent petitioners both.

Beleriphon
2018-11-23, 11:44 PM
As an example, think of the Vampire and Durkon. The vampire didn't suddenly get destroyed by Durkon's spirit, but rather became so like him through exposure that they are no longer indistinguishable. The same process for D&D deities applies. A good aligned deity is going to get people that are happy to become more and more like their deity until they are indistinguishable, same for an evil deity. The particulars will be different, but the end result is the same: two being become one.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-24, 08:52 AM
As an example, think of the Vampire and Durkon. The vampire didn't suddenly get destroyed by Durkon's spirit, but rather became so like him through exposure that they are no longer indistinguishable. The same process for D&D deities applies. A good aligned deity is going to get people that are happy to become more and more like their deity until they are indistinguishable, same for an evil deity. The particulars will be different, but the end result is the same: two being become one.

So what awaits someone who doesn't idealize a deity and doesn't want to be overwritten?

Millstone85
2018-11-24, 10:13 AM
I would note that, to me, it is a huge paradox that a soul could lose its identity. Or perhaps an oxymoron, like water becoming dehydrated.

Your soul is, not your prideful ego, but the core of who you are. It can't stop being you. It can't become indistinguishable from another soul. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a soul, just an inner ball of mana that sticks around for a bit after your death.

Please see this as being only tangential to my IRL beliefs. I could as well say that sparkling vampires are too different from my concept of a vampire.

J-H
2018-11-24, 10:52 AM
But fear - of loss, of change, of becoming something else - is the central thing. The lich cannot stomach the thought that all the fruits of their labors will be taken away, and that all of their knowledge is ultimately self-knowledge. Death is so abhorrent to them that they choose to shun life.

This reminds me of the book of Ecclesiastes. The lich is someone who says "No" to the passing mortality, and "No" to everyone coming into the world naked and going to the grave naked (ie without possessions).

Florian
2018-11-24, 11:43 AM
So what awaits someone who doesn't idealize a deity and doesn't want to be overwritten?

One quick question, Max, do you have access to some PF stuff, especially the Planar Adventures, especially the chapter on the River of Souls?


I would note that, to me, it is a huge paradox that a soul could lose its identity. Or perhaps an oxymoron, like water becoming dehydrated.

Your soul is, not your prideful ego, but the core of who you are. It can't stop being you. It can't become indistinguishable from another soul. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a soul, just an inner ball of mana that sticks around for a bit after your death.

See, this is not how it works in D&D/PF.

First, take a look at the six Inner Planes (Planes of Power). The four elemental and two energy planes are the direct source of anything that happens in the Prime Material Plane. Yes, that means that we´re talking about "mythical physics" because the existence of a flame is tied to the existence of the Plane of Fire and the whole physical mechanics of using a lighter to light a cigarette also touches on those basic building blocks, that make up out physics than.

The existence of Life itself is tied to the Positive Energy Plane and the core of it are souls and quintessence. Basically, for any life to function, it need that certain "spark". Brutally speaking, the flesh is just a shell around that and will fail once that spark is lost. Quintessence is what the whole outer planes are made out of, the "egg shell" for the soul and the record of what you did and who you are.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-24, 12:05 PM
I would note that, to me, it is a huge paradox that a soul could lose its identity. Or perhaps an oxymoron, like water becoming dehydrated.

Your soul is, not your prideful ego, but the core of who you are. It can't stop being you. It can't become indistinguishable from another soul. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a soul, just an inner ball of mana that sticks around for a bit after your death.


Yeah, I think overall the thread is dealing with multiple understandings of "soul", "self", "identity", etc. It would seem you and I might agree in that the three are nearly synonymous in the context of this discussion.




The lich is someone who says "No" to the passing mortality, and "No" to everyone coming into the world naked and going to the grave naked (ie without possessions).


Given most of the afterlives presented in gaming settings, I can't say as I'd blame them for saying that.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-24, 12:12 PM
One quick question, Max, do you have access to some PF stuff, especially the Planar Adventures, especially the chapter on the River of Souls?


Will this do? https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/River_of_Souls

Florian
2018-11-24, 12:20 PM
Will this do? https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/River_of_Souls

Nope, sorry, that is the very abridged version that doesn't carry all of the full implications.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-24, 12:37 PM
Nope, sorry, that is the very abridged version that doesn't carry all of the full implications.

I'd hope not, that article makes it sound like a cheap knockoff melange of certain cosmologies, and just another "why bother" afterlife.

Florian
2018-11-24, 01:04 PM
I'd hope not, that article makes it sound like a cheap knockoff melange of certain cosmologies, and just another "why bother" afterlife.

The full version is indeed a bit more complex and is also centered around the afterlife being way more fluid and flexible and actively reacting to the influx of the souls (and quintessence) coming from the Prime.

War_lord
2018-11-24, 03:13 PM
@Pleh:

Nah. The D&D cosmology was developed with a very christian sensibility as a background. That actually hurt it very much,

What? There's a pretty clear eastern influence in all the annihilation-of-the-self meditation-to-an-ideal stuff. If anything the complaint in this thread is that the D&D cosmology lacks the western preoccupation with material rewards for faith.

noob
2018-11-24, 03:58 PM
As an example, think of the Vampire and Durkon. The vampire didn't suddenly get destroyed by Durkon's spirit, but rather became so like him through exposure that they are no longer indistinguishable. The same process for D&D deities applies. A good aligned deity is going to get people that are happy to become more and more like their deity until they are indistinguishable, same for an evil deity. The particulars will be different, but the end result is the same: two being become one.

In the scene the two became identical but they did not merge together.
Afterwards vampire durkon decided to end for real its existence by killing the vampiric body and since vampire durkon while being similar to durkon is still a negative energy spirit it stops existing when its body is destroyed and so suffers from true oblivion while the trapped non vampire durkon escapes the dying dead body and goes to see thor.
the durkon which meets thor is in no way vampire durkon and have nothing from vampire durkon.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-24, 04:18 PM
The full version is indeed a bit more complex and is also centered around the afterlife being way more fluid and flexible and actively reacting to the influx of the souls (and quintessence) coming from the Prime.

Someone needs to do a serious edit of that wiki if that's the case, because reading on to different pages, it sounds just like the the standard D&D setting afterlife, with all its issues.

https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Petitioner
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Soul

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-24, 04:43 PM
Regarding influences (while staying away from any verboten badwrongdiscussion areas)... there are elements of both that have been mentioned, and they haven't been meshed well. D&D's "standard" cosmology, and the related setting cosmologies, are a rather slapdash melange of influences, and that's the source of some of the issues.

Now, as for me, none of my objections have to do with material rewards... it's that an afterlife that results in the dissolution of the character's identity/self, isn't an afterlife for that character, it's just, IDK, recycling or repurposing. It's as if the best they can hope for is to choose whether their metaphysical remnant will be made into a park bench or a garbage can, or food for a deity, or just stroking some deity's bloated ego while slowly dissolving into sameness or nothingness.

War_lord
2018-11-24, 06:10 PM
Now, as for me, none of my objections have to do with material rewards... it's that an afterlife that results in the dissolution of the character's identity/self, isn't an afterlife for that character, it's just, IDK, recycling or repurposing. It's as if the best they can hope for is to choose whether their metaphysical remnant will be made into a park bench or a garbage can, or food for a deity, or just stroking some deity's bloated ego while slowly dissolving into sameness or nothingness.

I'm not sure how that's a problem exactly, how "should" it be if what you're complaining about isn't a lack of material reward?

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-24, 07:43 PM
I'm not sure how that's a problem exactly, how "should" it be if what you're complaining about isn't a lack of material reward?

Having trouble seeing why anyone would care about an afterlife that amounted to being recycled or consumed in some way. For that matter, why the temples and shrines aren't deserted or even torn down as soon as this becomes known. "Oh, you get to be just like your deity!" "Oh you get to be part of something bigger than yourself!" Woopity freaking do.


Like I said, there's the answer to the question that started the thread, at least in most D&D settings and similar.

J-H
2018-11-24, 11:21 PM
Given most of the afterlives presented in gaming settings, I can't say as I'd blame them for saying that.

Yep. I have a Dread Necromancer who's about to start up a game, but this still makes me want to try playing a Lich... heck, even a Wizard Lich despite the bookkeeping.

AMFV
2018-11-24, 11:29 PM
Having trouble seeing why anyone would care about an afterlife that amounted to being recycled or consumed in some way. For that matter, why the temples and shrines aren't deserted or even torn down as soon as this becomes known. "Oh, you get to be just like your deity!" "Oh you get to be part of something bigger than yourself!" Woopity freaking do.


Like I said, there's the answer to the question that started the thread, at least in most D&D settings and similar.

Not to be too IRL here (since I can't) but there are real world religions that exist where that is a fundamental premise. Ones where people continue to care about the afterlife. So just because you can't rationalize it, doesn't mean that there are no people who would, otherwise most of Asia would not have the religion that it happens to.

Edit: Although the fact that there are people with your particular outlook shows exactly why somebody might "bother" with Lichdom if they had the power to do so.

Rater202
2018-11-25, 12:50 AM
Lichdom in any setting but a core 5e fluff cosmology is a reliable way to not die.

Put your soul in the jewel, put the jewel in a detect magic proof(or magic aura suppressing) box, put the box in a vault or SDB at a secure bank and then just chill out and lay low until you either get bored with life, decide to move on and become a Demilich, or discover some alternate form of immortality that's better than being a lich or else find out how to become a God.(Or are the single most personally, politically, and/or financially powerful person in existence.)

Furthermore, various editions have sources confirming the existence of non-evil Liches, such as the Arch Lich and the Baelnorn.

In 3.5 Supplement Libris Mortis, the Good Lich variant for use with such things is objectively better than the base template for Evil Liches. The fluff for the Archlich epic destiny also implies that they're much more powerful than the normal kind in 4e and that anyone who becomes the regular kind is either stupid evil or impatient so in those editions at least not only is there no need for something morally reprehensible but the non-evil version is more rewarding than the bad kind.

The Jack
2018-11-25, 02:25 AM
....or discover some alternate form of immortality that's better than being a lich or else find out how to become a God.(Or are the single most personally, politically, and/or financially powerful person in existence.)
.

I reckon most alternate forms of immortality are excluded from the dude who killed himself to put his soul in a jar.

Millstone85
2018-11-25, 06:31 AM
In the scene the two became identical but they did not merge together.
Afterwards vampire durkon decided to end for real its existence by killing the vampiric body and since vampire durkon while being similar to durkon is still a negative energy spirit it stops existing when its body is destroyed and so suffers from true oblivion while the trapped non vampire durkon escapes the dying dead body and goes to see thor.
the durkon which meets thor is in no way vampire durkon and have nothing from vampire durkon.The Durkon who meets Thor has all the memories of vampire Durkon. However, Thor compares this to a melon being smashed with a rock: "The rock's gonna get some pulp on it, you know?". Strip #1138.

Rater202
2018-11-25, 10:54 AM
I reckon most alternate forms of immortality are excluded from the dude who killed himself to put his soul in a jar.

Worst case scenario you have to get a True Resurrection effect on you before you can do the better one. That's one extra step.

icefractal
2018-11-25, 03:34 PM
Given most of the afterlives presented in gaming settings, I can't say as I'd blame them for saying that.Although TBF, most people ITT are taking a pessimistic spin on how the (vaguely specified) "merging with a god" thing works, while taking an optimistic spin on how being a Lich works, so not surprising the latter looks better.


Also - what would the hypothetical "decent" afterlife that beats being a Lich look like? Bearing in mind that, as Anymage mentioned, the dead do have to be removed from the stage somehow if the actions of the living are supposed to matter.

Florian
2018-11-25, 04:19 PM
Although TBF, most people ITT are taking a pessimistic spin on how the (vaguely specified) "merging with a god" thing works, while taking an optimistic spin on how being a Lich works, so not surprising the latter looks better.


Also - what would the hypothetical "decent" afterlife that beats being a Lich look like? Bearing in mind that, as Anymage mentioned, the dead do have to be removed from the stage somehow if the actions of the living are supposed to matter.

Again, this is what I really love about the PF cosmology. The whole reason behind the existence of undeath goes far above and beyond the mere Negative Energy thing (which is, like the Positive Energy counterpart, just the "spark of life" that powers you). Once you understand the connection between undeath and the ethereal plane, than you grasp what horribly mentally mutiliated creatures undead are in that setting, that are truly removed from their once-living origins, then it becomes understandable why only the insane go for something like lichdom.

For the other question, I don't have a clue. Or rather, if I was to exist in an objective morality universe, I wouldn't need to give an answer because how I am and how I lived my life will always result in me going to a place that I was already aligned towards while alive. That would only then be tragic, if I was living under some self-imposed illusions, like I'm a good person or something.

Quertus
2018-11-25, 06:46 PM
what would the hypothetical "decent" afterlife that beats being a Lich look like? Bearing in mind that, as Anymage mentioned, the dead do have to be removed from the stage somehow if the actions of the living are supposed to matter.


if I was to exist in an objective morality universe, I wouldn't need to give an answer because how I am and how I lived my life will always result in me going to a place that I was already aligned towards while alive. That would only then be tragic, if I was living under some self-imposed illusions, like I'm a good person or something.

"Personality" is so much more than "alignment". I would certainly not want to be forced to choose one of 9 personalities to adopt, because I am is far more than that.

Transhumanists, if I understand correctly, posit that only one's personality and memories really comprise the "self", and that, if those could be transferred from body to body, one could achieve functional immortality.

Personally, I am much more interested in the notion of transferring, not whole consciousnesses, but simply copying select memories and experiences.

To me, it is the memories that are worth preserving, not "which of these 9 philosophical outlooks best describes you".

So, what could a "good" afterlife look like, to me? Hmmm... Well, for one, what if the dead, being no longer comprised of anything physical, could no longer interact with the physical world? This would, then, require that there was some inherent value in the physical world, like "all new souls can only form on the Prime Material", or, to address another poster's concerns, "souls can only grow on the Prime Material. So, once you hit the afterlife, that's it - no more leveling, no radical personality changes - you're fundamentally who you were when you died. Kinda like a Simulacrum.

So, me and my MtG buddies could, if we all died at the "correct" points in our lives, enjoy playing MtG with one another for eternity. Same with any other activities one enjoys.

Now, IMO, a true paradise would, as an example, actually allow one to regress to the happiest moment in their life, and live as that person. But then we start getting into the whole Mindrape / Obliviate killing people, and have to discuss things in terms of acceptable methods of personality/memory/reflex suppression. And how really old spirits would have nothing in common with newer spirits - the ultimate unbridgeable generation gap.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-25, 08:08 PM
Speaking of afterlives, here's what I settled on for my setting.

Living souls consist of 3 parts: a body (physical matter), a spark (the core of the personality, the part that can create and grow), and the nimbus (a non-physical aura by which the spark and the body interact, as well as letting the spark interact with other non-physical things/magic).

As a creature grows it accumulates anima (soul-stuff) in its body and nimbus until the spark can no longer hold onto new anima. At this point the stress of unmanaged anima wears on the body until it ages and dies (if it wasn't killed earlier). At death, the spark (trailing the nimbus) departs from the body and crosses the Barrier into Shadow. This is a distorted reflection of mortal life; a stage where the soul continues the sort of existence it lived in life. Barring complications, this only lasts for so long. Without a physical shell to contain the nimbus, the nimbus starts to fade. When it's gone, the spark...vanishes. Does it go out? Is it reborn? No one quite knows. Lots of people have theories, including the gods themselves. Some of these theories are written up at my setting blog (https://www.admiralbenbo.org/index.php/the-council-lands/11-metaphysics/110-theories-on-the-afterlife-and-the-eternal-fate-of-the-soul). They include a linear path from non-existence to a return to the Cosmic All to a cycle of rebirth and death until transcendence is reached, and the nihilistic "they're just sparks from a cosmic fire--when they're gone, they're gone".

Some individuals escape this fate by ascending to another plane--some aided by gods, arch devils or elemental princes, some on the wings of the worship of their fellow mortals. Some, steeped in the violently-taken souls of other mortals, descend to the Abyss as demons. Whatever the method of this apotheosis, they require a source of power to stabilize their existence.

Gods and demigods (those raised up by the gods) draw power from the Great Mechanism based on upholding certain domains and answering prayers of mortals. As long as their domains exist, they exist--they're not dependent on the worship of mortals.

Contractors become devils themselves, although most sacrifice most of their memories and personalities in the process as this transformation is traumatic. They subsist on anima gained through contracts--pay for performance.

Those who rise on the faith of mortals become Ascended Heroes and depend on this worship. Individually less powerful than the gods or arch devils, they are much more numerous and less bound by cosmic law. However, their existence is (relatively) fleeting. Without worship they wither away and vanish like any other soul.

Elementally-transfigured souls become the genies of the elemental realms, drawing power from their elements. Over time they tend to become less and less interested in mortal affairs. They also are bound by their Princes in their interactions with mortals.

Demons subsist by devouring souls, spark and all. Their very presence defiles the mortal realm and they must take care not to cause too many problems, lest the angels and devils join forces to drive them back to the abyss wholesale.

What about the undead? These are those who bound their souls to the mortal realm in defiance of the First Law ("All that is born must die"). They are the Hungry Dead; they are incapable of creating their own anima like living beings--instead they feed on the ambient anima around them. This inevitably kills life in their vicinity, starting with the small plants. Liches require the life (not soul, per se, but definitely the killing) of other sentient beings to survive--animals don't have enough to sustain their sanity.

There are exceptions to this dread fate, however. Those that have some other source of energy can act more normally. One group, in particular, is bound by an ancient Oath and Rite--this keeps most of them sane and sated, so they can exist in relative peace with living beings. This comes at the cost of their freedom--if they break the Oath or depart from this vowed way of life, the hunger returns and sentience receeds.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-25, 10:11 PM
Although TBF, most people ITT are taking a pessimistic spin on how the (vaguely specified) "merging with a god" thing works


I honestly, really, truthfully have no conception of how to put a good spin on that.




Also - what would the hypothetical "decent" afterlife that beats being a Lich look like? Bearing in mind that, as Anymage mentioned, the dead do have to be removed from the stage somehow if the actions of the living are supposed to matter.

Start with retention of the self, of identity, of what makes that character that character in terms of memories, thoughts, feelings, preferences, etc. Retention of free will and agency and choice. Not for a while, not until it wears out, not until they fade away, but permanently. That part is completely non-negotiable in defining a "decent" afterlife. Beyond that, really, it might only need to go so far as the things the character enjoyed in life, without any of the struggles they don't want.





Again, this is what I really love about the PF cosmology. The whole reason behind the existence of undeath goes far above and beyond the mere Negative Energy thing (which is, like the Positive Energy counterpart, just the "spark of life" that powers you). Once you understand the connection between undeath and the ethereal plane, than you grasp what horribly mentally mutiliated creatures undead are in that setting, that are truly removed from their once-living origins, then it becomes understandable why only the insane go for something like lichdom.


I tried to look into that, but it appears that there's no way to read it shy of buying the book it appears in (Pyramid of the Sky Pharaoh).

What's the fundamental issue about being "animated" by this or that "energy"?




For the other question, I don't have a clue. Or rather, if I was to exist in an objective morality universe, I wouldn't need to give an answer because how I am and how I lived my life will always result in me going to a place that I was already aligned towards while alive. That would only then be tragic, if I was living under some self-imposed illusions, like I'm a good person or something.


IMO, it can safely be said that the D&D cosmologies are not objectively moral in the context of this discussion.

And as Quertus notes...



"Personality" is so much more than "alignment". I would certainly not want to be forced to choose one of 9 personalities to adopt, because I am is far more than that.

...

To me, it is the memories that are worth preserving, not "which of these 9 philosophical outlooks best describes you".

Florian
2018-11-26, 01:11 AM
IWhat's the fundamental issue about being "animated" by this or that "energy"?

A should has two components: Life spark (core) and unaligned quintessence (shell). The shell houses the sum of your existence and what makes you = you and is made up of pure planar matter. The life spark is either a fresh one generated in the positive energy plane, or the result of reincarnation, as that is what happens at the end of the petitioner lifecycle (we can talk about "absorption" and such later). Natural occurring negative energy-based life sparks als exist, for creatures that are either native to that plane, the deeper reaches of the Plane of Shadow or have a natural connection to undeath, like Dhampirs.

Now when a being dies, the soul is untethered from the body and on the Ethereal Plane, the plane of souls, dreams and emotions. (Our dreams do happen on the ethereal plane, or to be concrete, soul and mind will form dreamscapes.....). It will then automatically start moving towards the Astral Plane, already being part of the River of Souls.

The only thing that can prevent this (beyond magic, like Breath of Life or Reincarnate) is undeath. Real hard-core trauma, mixed with negative energy, can be enough to rip the spark from the shell and "anchor" the shell to the Ethereal Plane, replacing the spark not with a negative energy counterpart (which would also be a life spark), but mostly with a conduit (The need to feed or else consume, for example create spawn).

Basically, once "anchored", even the most sophisticated undead ... just stops functioning as a real person.

The Ghost is a good example: Created by intense trauma, it understands and feels the world entirely thru the filter of its own moment of death. That anchor is so strong as to allow for rejuvenation, but the Ghost will basically always "reset" to the same exact state as when it first appeared. "Life" and "Experience" during the "last incarnation as a Ghost" are lost.

The second best example are prolly Phantoms. They are eternally stuck in feeling the last intense emotion they experienced at death. Eternally in a constant state of despair, rage, envy, lust....

This concept is behind any form of "higher undead": You need to inflict massiv emotional trauma to yourself, enough to separate spark from shell, to be able to replace the spark and transfer over your personality. Talking about the Lich, each Transformation Ritual is unique and must be tailored to the individual, not so much because of the sacrifice(s) and so on, but rather because it is very individual what sort and strength of hard-core trauma to get the process started. Also why Liches will go mad and paranoid over time, because even the strongest will is not able to withstand that forever.

(Sources: Planar Adventures, Undead Revisited).

noob
2018-11-26, 04:55 AM
What prevents to make a resurrection spell which does not restore anima and then once the target have lost enough anima for being again below the anima cap resurrect him and basically remove the anima excess problem.
memories are not in the anima since else liches would constantly lose memories and steal memories from new people and so very quickly stop being able to cast spells or being a threat due to the lich quickly having not enough of the spellcasting memories to be able to cast spells.

J-H
2018-11-26, 08:09 AM
Ok, here's another one from what I was just reading this morning. Lichdom also prevents the aging process, and for a character who's seen a parent get enfeebled by age and possibly dementia - it becomes very attractive in that respect. It becomes "preserve my mind before I hit age 40/50/60."


1
Remember your Creator
in the days of your youth,
before the days of trouble come
and the years approach when you will say,
“I find no pleasure in them”—
2
before the sun and the light
and the moon and the stars grow dark,
and the clouds return after the rain;
3
when the keepers of the house tremble,
and the strong men stoop,
when the grinders cease because they are few,
and those looking through the windows grow dim;
4
when the doors to the street are closed
and the sound of grinding fades;
when people rise up at the sound of birds,
but all their songs grow faint;
5
when people are afraid of heights
and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
and the grasshopper drags itself along
and desire no longer is stirred.
Then people go to their eternal home
and mourners go about the streets.
6
Remember him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
7
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.


I could see a lich as a family patriarch/matriarch who watches over his or her great- great- great- grandchildren as part of the setting...but at the same time, also as a selfish family head, because becoming a lich indicates a strong amount of that, as it likely involves "someone else must die so that I can become immortal." So there's a contradiction there. Is the lich really looking out for the family's good, or just for the family to conform to a vision? Beneficial protector or selfish manipulator? Quest-giver and helper, or hoarder of the family inheritance? Plot hooks and conflict ahoy!

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-26, 08:34 AM
[1]What prevents to make a resurrection spell which does not restore anima and then once the target have lost enough anima for being again below the anima cap resurrect him and basically remove the anima excess problem.

[2]memories are not in the anima since else liches would constantly lose memories and steal memories from new people and so very quickly stop being able to cast spells or being a threat due to the lich quickly having not enough of the spellcasting memories to be able to cast spells.

[1] doesn't work that way for a few reasons.
First, resurrection requires divine-level intervention (even wish is a system call to the Great Mechanism, basically bypassing the gods but getting the same effect). And the gods are bound to the First Law (All that lives must die), as is the Great Mechanism itself. As a result, they can't create that spell. The exception to this is reincarnate (which lacks the "didn't die of old age" clause), which cajoles the local nature spirits into forming a new body for the person. In theory, a person could serially-reincarnate, but a) people who can cast that spell are rare anyway, and many have personal beliefs against disrupting the cycle of nature that way.

Second, the dissolution of a soul in the Shadows is slow, then very fast. It's also not really measurable and varies from person to person. So once they've lost sufficient anima to give them much more time at all, they're unlikely to be able to be resurrected (or have lost significant parts of their memory and personality).

[2] Anima, by itself, is the stuff of creation. Everything's made out of it. Memories are a harmonic pattern imposed on the anima of a person (body and nimbus) by the spark. So when a lich (or any other life-drinking undead) consumes a person, they strip off this pattern and impose their own on top of it. This has actually come up--there was a society that had been tricked into worshiping a demon by blood sacrifice (they thought they were worshiping a living demigoddess, but she was the unwilling conduit for the souls of the sacrifices). This conduit was put there as a filter--to "catch" and "strip" the parts of the soul that the demon didn't find tasty--the memories, the personality, etc. Those stayed behind in the conduit's own soul. In other cases, living souls have been used as conduits for fragments of other people's souls (the creation of the ancestors of the dragonborn by forcibly impressing pieces of a dragon's soul into unborn human infants, for example). This is generally considered a bad thing; rare exceptions (e.g. voluntary movement of souls) exist.

So a lich could subsist and not be evil on freely granted sacrifices. It'd be a precarious existence, fighting the pull of existential hunger on one hand and the revulsion of nature itself against your existence. There's been a lich who basically did this, except he learned to draw on a hoard of treasure (and the admiration of museum/gallery goers at this treasure) much like dragons do (but that's a different story). He lived for centuries before getting eaten himself by a far realms incarnation of hunger itself.

Xuc Xac
2018-11-27, 12:55 AM
Although TBF, most people ITT are taking a pessimistic spin on how the (vaguely specified) "merging with a god" thing works, while taking an optimistic spin on how being a Lich works, so not surprising the latter looks better.



I honestly, really, truthfully have no conception of how to put a good spin on that.


I'm in my 40s now. I clearly remember being 3 years old. I remember being in high school. I remember being a wild partier in my 20s. The child and the young man are both gone. I don't think or act like them anymore. But they aren't lost because they still live on in me. I wouldn't want to go back to the limited understanding of the world that they had. I have only gained knowledge, insight, and power with age.

When you're a child, you don't want to grow up. When you grow up, you don't want to go back to that ignorance even if there are happy memories from that time. Merging with a god and becoming a minor part of them is just like growing up and becoming some old man's childhood memory. You gain a lot more than you lose and the afterlife is just another level of growth.

Railing against it as a loss of your special uniqueness is like a child demanding to stay a child forever. It's a foolish decision made in ignorance. Attempting to gain physical immortality locked into your present self forever is just as ignorant. When kids do it, they become the Lost Boys. When wizards do it, they become liches.

Satinavian
2018-11-27, 01:08 AM
Basically, once "anchored", even the most sophisticated undead ... just stops functioning as a real person.

The Ghost is a good example: Created by intense trauma, it understands and feels the world entirely thru the filter of its own moment of death. That anchor is so strong as to allow for rejuvenation, but the Ghost will basically always "reset" to the same exact state as when it first appeared. "Life" and "Experience" during the "last incarnation as a Ghost" are lost.

The second best example are prolly Phantoms. They are eternally stuck in feeling the last intense emotion they experienced at death. Eternally in a constant state of despair, rage, envy, lust....

This concept is behind any form of "higher undead": You need to inflict massiv emotional trauma to yourself, enough to separate spark from shell, to be able to replace the spark and transfer over your personality. Talking about the Lich, each Transformation Ritual is unique and must be tailored to the individual, not so much because of the sacrifice(s) and so on, but rather because it is very individual what sort and strength of hard-core trauma to get the process started. Also why Liches will go mad and paranoid over time, because even the strongest will is not able to withstand that forever.

(Sources: Planar Adventures, Undead Revisited).Sounds like a horrible way to do undeath. Would certainly not use it in my games.

And it really doesn't help with the problem of the OP : That Lichdom in 5e seems to be to bad a bargain to take.

Anymage
2018-11-27, 02:05 AM
Sounds like a horrible way to do undeath. Would certainly not use it in my games.

And it really doesn't help with the problem of the OP : That Lichdom in 5e seems to be to bad a bargain to take.

Assuming that you want things like the 3.5 necropolitan, or even the 3.5 lich where you had to do something bad once and then you could comfortably exist into perpetuity, why haven't all the heroes of past ages decided that existing forever as an undead sounded peachy keen? I mean if you want that, good on you, but a world where all its greatest heroes are still around and active won't have much room for your PCs to do much of anything meaningful.

Undead as morally neutral agents with no added complications are useful as minions/tools (from a player perspective, extra hands are nice to have around even if they're skeletal hands), and for helping to build a post-scarcity fantasy utopia. They're lackluster as villains, which tends to be more productive for writing/playing adventures. As such, I don't mind the spin 5e took on all forms of undead.

Millstone85
2018-11-27, 02:51 AM
Something I like about D&D gods is the notion of "aspect".

For example, in Forgotten Realms, the LN sun god Amaunator and the NG dawn god Lathander are sometimes believed to be one and the same, yet different. It is also common to link the pantheons of different races in this fashion. Of course, the books often remain vague on whether those beliefs are correct.

Merging with such a multifaceted deity could mean becoming a very minor aspect of it, both recognizable as such and yet distinct from all other aspects.

Satinavian
2018-11-27, 03:28 AM
Assuming that you want things like the 3.5 necropolitan, or even the 3.5 lich where you had to do something bad once and then you could comfortably exist into perpetuity, why haven't all the heroes of past ages decided that existing forever as an undead sounded peachy keen? I mean if you want that, good on you, but a world where all its greatest heroes are still around and active won't have much room for your PCs to do much of anything meaningful.I don't really have a problem with that.

So really powerful people are around somewhere doing their thing. Which is kinda always the case when a campaign starts at low levels and moves to high levels. All those other actors/monsters/NPCs that are relevant in the high level game don't just pop into existence when the party levels up. They have always been there, just too busy/indifferent to deal with low level stuff. How would it be any different if some of those were undead ? Actually it is just the opposite as undead have kind of a reputation of being a tad inflexible (because they are in essence old people) and less likely to react adequately to new developments.

Yes, i do prefer undead as neutral agents as you put it. I can still make an undead a villain whenever i want by giving it appropriate motivation and actions. But if undead can in principle not work as reasonable beings i lose a whole swath of options to use them in my games.

Florian
2018-11-27, 04:33 AM
Sounds like a horrible way to do undeath. Would certainly not use it in my games.

And it really doesn't help with the problem of the OP : That Lichdom in 5e seems to be to bad a bargain to take.

Ah, well, it is "the curse of undeath", not "the blessing" (No matter what Urgathoa preaches....).

Satinavian
2018-11-27, 07:19 AM
Ah, well, it is "the curse of undeath", not "the blessing" (No matter what Urgathoa preaches....).
That would be an argument for being that are actually cursed (in the way that someone/something powerful uses magic to make them suffer). That doesn't apply
to people seeking undeath for themself.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-27, 07:27 AM
I'm in my 40s now. I clearly remember being 3 years old. I remember being in high school. I remember being a wild partier in my 20s. The child and the young man are both gone. I don't think or act like them anymore. But they aren't lost because they still live on in me. I wouldn't want to go back to the limited understanding of the world that they had. I have only gained knowledge, insight, and power with age.

When you're a child, you don't want to grow up. When you grow up, you don't want to go back to that ignorance even if there are happy memories from that time. Merging with a god and becoming a minor part of them is just like growing up and becoming some old man's childhood memory. You gain a lot more than you lose and the afterlife is just another level of growth.

Railing against it as a loss of your special uniqueness is like a child demanding to stay a child forever. It's a foolish decision made in ignorance. Attempting to gain physical immortality locked into your present self forever is just as ignorant. When kids do it, they become the Lost Boys. When wizards do it, they become liches.

I don't recall growing up as a process of being devoured by a cosmic egomaniac and losing all individuality and free will, but YMMV.

noob
2018-11-27, 08:08 AM
I don't recall growing up as a process of being devoured by a cosmic egomaniac and losing all individuality and free will, but YMMV.

In the forgotten realms the most evil soul eating liches looks like exalted paragons of good who sincerely cares about helping people relatively to the most good god in this setting.
So I would definitively consider getting eaten by a lich as a better fate than being eaten by a 'good' god of that setting.

Quertus
2018-11-27, 09:45 AM
I'm in my 40s now. I clearly remember being 3 years old. I remember being in high school. I remember being a wild partier in my 20s. The child and the young man are both gone. I don't think or act like them anymore. But they aren't lost because they still live on in me. I wouldn't want to go back to the limited understanding of the world that they had. I have only gained knowledge, insight, and power with age.

When you're a child, you don't want to grow up. When you grow up, you don't want to go back to that ignorance even if there are happy memories from that time. Merging with a god and becoming a minor part of them is just like growing up and becoming some old man's childhood memory. You gain a lot more than you lose and the afterlife is just another level of growth.

Railing against it as a loss of your special uniqueness is like a child demanding to stay a child forever. It's a foolish decision made in ignorance. Attempting to gain physical immortality locked into your present self forever is just as ignorant. When kids do it, they become the Lost Boys. When wizards do it, they become liches.

If the D&D gods seemed more mature than my 3-year-old self, this might make more impact.

As it stands, my generic character template includes putting "overthrow the gods" as a life goal.


I don't recall growing up as a process of being devoured by a cosmic egomaniac and losing all individuality and free will, but YMMV.

And there's that.

So, I wouldn't, but would you mind having all your memories and identity merged with that of an immortal? Or, to put it backwards, would you mind absorbing all the memories and personality of a like-minded immortal, gaining their power and immortality in the process?

Now, D&D gods lack that whole "like-minded" or in any way not morally inferior to myself or my characters as a rule, so they're a horrible choice, but, if a valid being existed, would you mind becoming "more" by absorbing them into yourself?

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-27, 10:06 AM
If the D&D gods seemed more mature than my 3-year-old self, this might make more impact.

As it stands, my generic character template includes putting "overthrow the gods" as a life goal.


On the first... so true.

On the second, I can't really find any objection.




And there's that.

So, I wouldn't, but would you mind having all your memories and identity merged with that of an immortal? Or, to put it backwards, would you mind absorbing all the memories and personality of a like-minded immortal, gaining their power and immortality in the process?

Now, D&D gods lack that whole "like-minded" or in any way not morally inferior to myself or my characters as a rule, so they're a horrible choice, but, if a valid being existed, would you mind becoming "more" by absorbing them into yourself?


Still not interested, most of my characters wouldn't be either.

There's one character who would if she could guarantee "remaining herself", but her core character trait was hunger for knowledge and magical power.

Xuc Xac
2018-11-27, 10:21 AM
I don't recall growing up as a process of being devoured by a cosmic egomaniac and losing all individuality and free will, but YMMV.

When I was a kid, I thought "When I grow up, nobody can tell me what to do! I'm going to eat cookies and ice cream for dinner and stay up all night!" Now that I actually have the authority to do that, I know it's a stupid thing to do that isn't even appealing now that I know more about nutrition and have a more mature palate that can appreciate more flavors than "Sweet!" I remember wanting to do it, but now that I can, I no longer want to.

The child didn't lose his free will. The child now has much greater knowledge and perception and makes more informed decisions.

Complaining that the gods seem capricious or selfish doesn't do anything to disrupt the analogy. It's just like a kid complaining that their parent's rules are "unfair" and "mean".

(Note that this is just a way to put a positive spin on it. I wouldn't actually go for it either. I tend to favor the Denis Diderot school of thought on priests and kings.)

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-27, 10:40 AM
When I was a kid, I thought "When I grow up, nobody can tell me what to do! I'm going to eat cookies and ice cream for dinner and stay up all night!" Now that I actually have the authority to do that, I know it's a stupid thing to do that isn't even appealing now that I know more about nutrition and have a more mature palate that can appreciate more flavors than "Sweet!" I remember wanting to do it, but now that I can, I no longer want to.

The child didn't lose his free will. The child now has much greater knowledge and perception and makes more informed decisions.

Complaining that the gods seem capricious or selfish doesn't do anything to disrupt the analogy. It's just like a kid complaining that their parent's rules are "unfair" and "mean".

(Note that this is just a way to put a positive spin on it. I wouldn't actually go for it either. I tend to favor the Denis Diderot school of thought on priests and kings.)

The difference is, you gained knowledge, perspective, and freedom of choice as you grew -- as you note, you could choose to spend a day eating cookies and ice cream, and then stay up all night. You remained you, however.

The processes being "sold" in these D&D afterlives all in some way involve loss of choice and/or loss of knowledge (especially in the sense of the unique collection of knowledge that is part of what makes an individual who they are). They're not growth of the individual, they're all the death of the individual.

Rater202
2018-11-27, 01:11 PM
So, I wouldn't, but would you mind having all your memories and identity merged with that of an immortal? Or, to put it backwards, would you mind absorbing all the memories and personality of a like-minded immortal, gaining their power and immortality in the process?

Now, D&D gods lack that whole "like-minded" or in any way not morally inferior to myself or my characters as a rule, so they're a horrible choice, but, if a valid being existed, would you mind becoming "more" by absorbing them into yourself?

You weren't asking me, but honestly i'd be down for that if I was sufficiently "big" that taking the immortal into myself didn't dilute my core essence.

I've got "hellsing style vampire" on my list of potential routes to power if I ever get the power to travel to fictional realities and I honestly think that "eat something to absorb it's power/knowledge/skills/memories/destiny/shape/life" is an interesting power type.

That naturally includes being able to consume the essence of another being.

So as long as certain moral or ethical constraints aren't a problem(IE, if they're willing and/or a big enough of a jerk that I don't feel bad Abbott eating them) and there's no risk of being eaten from the inside or drastically altered then I'd be down for that.

icefractal
2018-11-27, 01:28 PM
I honestly, really, truthfully have no conception of how to put a good spin on that. One way would be -

Getting absorbed by a god is like moving to a new country. A country inside the deity, populated by all the followers from times past. Maybe everyone is telepathically linked beings of pure thought, or maybe it's pretty similar to "outside". You even get to vote on what the god does.

Now there's no canon support for that, but there's also no support for "your soul just gets used as fuel and destroyed" in most settings - it's vaguely specified. That's what I mean by people taking a pessimistic angle.

Anymage
2018-11-27, 02:14 PM
One way would be -

Getting absorbed by a god is like moving to a new country. A country inside the deity, populated by all the followers from times past. Maybe everyone is telepathically linked beings of pure thought, or maybe it's pretty similar to "outside". You even get to vote on what the god does.

Now there's no canon support for that, but there's also no support for "your soul just gets used as fuel and destroyed" in most settings - it's vaguely specified. That's what I mean by people taking a pessimistic angle.

I don't think anybody is going to dissuade Max. He's very much the sort of person who would chose undeath if it were an option, and might even consider having to regularly eat souls an acceptable cost to ensure that he gets to persist, as a continuous him, into perpetuity. Which come to think about it, if nobody found the idea of undeath appealing, those entires in the MM wouldn't exist.

Maybe gods wind up as composite entities, and you can engage in speed-of-thought deliberations with the other souls in the composite and vote on the long term goals of the god. Maybe your eventual dissolution is a fact of existence in the multiverse (unless you regularly feed on others), and good gods merely ask you to chose to dissolve into them to strengthen them as crusaders towards certain goals, as opposed to just dissolving into the landscape. Both of these allow good gods to stay Good, as opposed to grabbing handfuls of unwilling souls and snacking on them.

But so long as the metaphysical underpinnings of the universe don't allow a comfortable and permanent discrete existence, some people are going to be upset with that. And while those feelings can sometimes be misplaced (you can't be too upset at gods about rules that predate them and that they have no say in), that won't stop upset people from looking for alternatives.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-27, 02:20 PM
I don't think anybody is going to dissuade Max. He's very much the sort of person who would chose undeath if it were an option, and might even consider having to regularly eat souls an acceptable cost to ensure that he gets to persist, as a continuous him, into perpetuity.


:confused:




Maybe gods wind up as composite entities, and you can engage in speed-of-thought deliberations with the other souls in the composite and vote on the long term goals of the god. Maybe your eventual dissolution is a fact of existence in the multiverse (unless you regularly feed on others), and good gods merely ask you to chose to dissolve into them to strengthen them as crusaders towards certain goals, as opposed to just dissolving into the landscape. Both of these allow good gods to stay Good, as opposed to grabbing handfuls of unwilling souls and snacking on them.

But so long as the metaphysical underpinnings of the universe don't allow a comfortable and permanent discrete existence, some people are going to be upset with that. And while those feelings can sometimes be misplaced (you can't be too upset at gods about rules that predate them and that they have no say in), that won't stop upset people from looking for alternatives.


If they have no say in the rules, are they really gods? Are they really worth venerating?

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-27, 02:27 PM
If they have no say in the rules, are they really gods? Are they really worth venerating?

The idea that the gods-that-are-worshiped made the rules (as opposed to the gods being subordinate to those that actually did) isn't part of FR (or many other D&D worlds).

For example, the D&D meta-setting has the idea of "Greater Gods"--Ao in particular for FR. He sits "above" the gods and does not need worship himself. In fact, he doesn't respond to mortals at all. Then again, he didn't make the rules either. The rules existed before anything, before anything else existed. They pre-exist the gods (as should be obvious--apotheosis happens. There have been how many gods of magic in FR? More than 1.).

This does change the nature of what we mean by "god", but that shouldn't be too odd for a student of real religions (about which I won't say more due to forum rules).

Anymage
2018-11-27, 02:32 PM
If they have no say in the rules, are they really gods? Are they really worth venerating?

Unless you're talking the monotheistic, big G God, very few gods are portrayed as truly omnipotent. You might even have a case like Ao, where there's an overgod who would be very deserving of a boot up the backside (except you can't, because of overgod stats of You Lose), and gods who focus on the actual running of the world but who have to deal with the overgod's decrees.

Are they worth worshipping? If a quick prayer to the god of knowledge might help you remember what you're studying better, why not? And if a little time on your knees devoting your victories to a cosmically aligned entity empowers said entity, it's very much like sending a donation to a charity you consider worthy. Both are reasons that a good aligned character might offer prayers, even if they're not getting spells or any other mechanically tangible benefit out of the deal.

Edit to add: Assume that there either aren't any entities you can meaningfully complain about cosmic rules to, or that they're too distant to meaningfully interact with. Also assume that the 5e philosophy of TANSTAAFL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch), so you can't find a method of immortality that doesn't require some form of costly upkeep, usually at the expense of other people. In such a world, what would your long-term goal be?

Millstone85
2018-11-27, 04:56 PM
There have been how many gods of magic in FR? More than 1.Rhetorical, I know, but I think there have been 3:
Mystril (CN) In the beginning, Ao created Realmspace, which was naught but shadow. Then the shadow separated into light and darkness, Selûne and Shar. The two goddesses worked as one to create matter, and with it Chauntea. When the latter asked for more warmth to nurture mortal life, it brought a conflict in which Mystril was accidentally created. Siding with Selûne and Chauntea against Shar, Mystril allowed Selûne to ignite the sun (thus creating Amaunator? I don't know). Eons later, a wizard named Karsus would try to take Mystril's place. The attempt failed but caused the goddess' death.
Mystra (LN) The successor and/or reincarnation of Mystril. It was her who got depowered along with most other deities during the Time of Troubles. She died at the hand of Helm, a god kept powerful by Ao to make sure none of the others could return to their divine realms before his little game was over.
Midnight (NG) The successor of Mystra, whose name she assumed. She would meet her own doom at the hand of Cyric, which started the Spellplague.

After the Second Sundering and its surrounding events, Midnight is back and possibly merged with both Mystril and Mystra. So there is like a Trinity thing going on, maybe.

Segev
2018-11-27, 05:54 PM
I prefer to set up lichdom as a contingency. I have a phylactery ready, I've performed all the steps of the ritual, but I haven't yet actually died (normally the last step of said ritual). If it takes modifying the ritual to set it up this way, I do. Then, when I die, I don't look like I did. The first clue something happened is when my fear aura suddenly bursts into existence and my touch on the hand that dealt the deathblow paralyzes my would-be murderer with the chill of the grave.


I do agree that any form of lichdom that requires you to become an ongoing serial-murderer is just plain inefficiently undesirable. It's one reason demilichdom is not a pure upgrade, and something to consider carefully before embarking on (unless you foolishly just let yourself go to the point that it was your only option left). Stick with the methods that leave you undead because your life force is already in its final resting place: your phylactery. Any leaky, energy-wasting phylacteries that require constant "feeding" are to be repaired and upgraded to proper ones that are self-sustaining.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-27, 07:02 PM
I do agree that any form of lichdom that requires you to become an ongoing serial-murderer is just plain inefficiently undesirable. It's one reason demilichdom is not a pure upgrade, and something to consider carefully before embarking on (unless you foolishly just let yourself go to the point that it was your only option left). Stick with the methods that leave you undead because your life force is already in its final resting place: your phylactery. Any leaky, energy-wasting phylacteries that require constant "feeding" are to be repaired and upgraded to proper ones that are self-sustaining.

All life, even unlife, requires the expenditure of energy. For living beings, that comes from food. But liches don't eat. So where does the energy to move, talk, cast spells, rebuild that fancy body, etc come from? A single ritual can't provide infinite energy, and certainly not a ritual a mid level caster can do alone.

The philactery doesn't leak, but it's not a perpetual motion machine either. You're not an elemental, to pull energy directly from the weave (or wherever), so where do you propose it come from?

Rater202
2018-11-27, 07:53 PM
In 3.5 at least, all undead have a connection to the Negative energy plane, which is to say a reservoir of infinite negatively-charge life-force, and that is what sustains them. (Except vampires and wights and the like, who need to take in Life-force from the living to augment this energy. Undead that needs to eat people have it as a craving but no biological need to, per Libris Mortis.)

Liches, in 3.5 at least, were an undead creature sustained entirely by this connection.

Also, I'll be honest, assuming that Entropy is an inescapable law in a multiverse that's default cosmology includes six self-sustaining planes of energy(four of elemental energy, one of life, one of death/anti-life/whatever) is flimsy logic--you might not be able to make yourself eternal, but there are at least six sources of infinite energy that you can theoretically tap to sustain yourself indefinitely and multiple classes of being that never die of natural causes that you can theoretically become.

To argue that it's impossible to become genuinely eternal or that it requires constant, active, and costly upkeep when multiple eternal things exist is folly.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-27, 09:30 PM
In 3.5 at least, all undead have a connection to the Negative energy plane, which is to say a reservoir of infinite negatively-charge life-force, and that is what sustains them. (Except vampires and wights and the like, who need to take in Life-force from the living to augment this energy. Undead that needs to eat people have it as a craving but no biological need to, per Libris Mortis.)

Liches, in 3.5 at least, were an undead creature sustained entirely by this connection.

Also, I'll be honest, assuming that Entropy is an inescapable law in a multiverse that's default cosmology includes six self-sustaining planes of energy(four of elemental energy, one of life, one of death/anti-life/whatever) is flimsy logic--you might not be able to make yourself eternal, but there are at least six sources of infinite energy that you can theoretically tap to sustain yourself indefinitely and multiple classes of being that never die of natural causes that you can theoretically become.

To argue that it's impossible to become genuinely eternal or that it requires constant, active, and costly upkeep when multiple eternal things exist is folly.

Ah yes, the Negative Energy Plane justification. I had blocked that excrescence from my memory. The idea that you can be powered by drawing energy from a plane of infinite entropy is so hideous a thought as to make all the rest of the odd decisions in the Great Wheel cosmology pale in comparison. As a physicist, my mind rebels against it. At most you could have the NEP as an infinite sink--energy comes from the PEP and falls down through creation to the NEP, where it ends--this is the "energy as electric field" model. But the "there's negative energy and positive energy" thing causes way too many problems from a worldbuilding standpoint.

One reason that had to change for 5e is that they (thankfully) removed the idea of the Positive and Negative Energy planes as discrete things from the cosmology. Because they (like so many other things) were just there out of a misguided desire for symmetry IMO.

So no, saying "they're powered by negative energy" doesn't make things any better. Even if it did, negative energy is always described as hungry, it sucks the energy out of things being there. It doesn't build, which is what's required to sustain a lich.

I'm not saying that you can't have an infinite lifespan. Go to the Astral, or become an ageless creature (True Polymorph into an elemental or other unaging being). But even so, you need a source of energy. And there are tradeoffs. Even the Gods aren't truly eternal--the Gods can die. And that's better for settings anyway--without turnover, the world would be glutted with these immortals who just clutter up the landscape. Nothing would progress; all would grind to a halt.

Edit: and as far as not wanting to be a serial murderer--which is better? Being a serial murderer or being a walking wound in the natural world? Because having a direct link to the NEP is exactly the latter. Your very existence offends nature and breaks down the walls of the Material Plane. Your existence destroys everything you come in contact with by its very nature. You are decay, personified. And that's supposed to be the better choice?

Rater202
2018-11-27, 09:49 PM
Regardless of your feeling about it, the NEgative Energy Plane having energy that acts as sustenance for the undead is canon in 3.5

I mean, Negative Energy isn't Entropy--that's an aspect of Limbo(See the Entropic reaper.)

The Negative Energy Plane is the plane of deathly energy--it sustains the dead just as positive energy sustains the living and positive energy harms the dead just as negative harms the living

I imagine that a man who found a way to sustain himself directly by a connection to the positive energy plane, that he'd be just as long lived and unaging as an undead--that is, forever until manually killed.

not only is "Undead have a direct connection to he plane of negative energy and that's why most of them can go indefinitely without food" canon, but there's an entire template built around the idea of what happens when that connection gets stronger(Evolved Undead)

Pleh
2018-11-27, 10:08 PM
I'm not one terribly much for "overthrow the gods" excuses. I really don't believe any replacement will do better, nor do I think "no one will be gods" is very beneficial for D&D cosmology. It creates a power vacuum and who is next on the list to fill it? The archangels/archfiends. Like a corrupt corporation, you take out the top and everyone below just shuffles a step up the pyramid.

So let's destroy all the heavens and the hells and get rid of all of them.

That totally won't tear the Material plane apart. Total multiversal annihilation into oblivion is probably not going to happen. It's not like oblivion and nonexistence wasn't already exactly what we were trying to avoid by deposing the deities to begin with.

And when the Material Plane remains totally stable and goes back to normal, there totally will never be powerful adventurers gradually leveling into divine rank 0 with no deities to oppose them. They surely won't be the murderhobos the last deities were.

Nah. Taking such a pessemistic, nihilistic view of D&D cosmology just seems plainly unsustainable and not very fun. Either everyone just has to grin and bear having toddler gods or the universe gets the option to implode to save itself.

Much better to reframe the cosmology that each of these deities has valid reasons to follow them and valid reasons to oppose them so that the nutjobs that want to kill the gods typically don't get much support or very far.

As for afterlives, the D&D cosmology makes most sense to me when the afterlife is basically a New Game+ for your character, with the setting based on their deeds and motives in the first life. You just go to the world as your actions would shape it and from there continue to grow more or less into what would constitute and angel of that realm. That process takes so long that by the time you earn your proverbial (and possibly literal) wings, you have little to no connection to the material plane anymore.

It feel like this interpretation gives players the most amount of room to play however they like, rather than kind of pidgeon holing them into, "save the universe from the incompetence and profiteering of the gods." That's kind of fun once, but does it have to be the focus of every game? You'd think the gods would eventually start to catch on that someone is God of Warring them all off one by one and squish them promptly.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-27, 11:06 PM
The idea that the gods-that-are-worshiped made the rules (as opposed to the gods being subordinate to those that actually did) isn't part of FR (or many other D&D worlds).

For example, the D&D meta-setting has the idea of "Greater Gods"--Ao in particular for FR. He sits "above" the gods and does not need worship himself. In fact, he doesn't respond to mortals at all. Then again, he didn't make the rules either. The rules existed before anything, before anything else existed. They pre-exist the gods (as should be obvious--apotheosis happens. There have been how many gods of magic in FR? More than 1.).

This does change the nature of what we mean by "god", but that shouldn't be too odd for a student of real religions (about which I won't say more due to forum rules).


On the other hand, that assumes that the ability to have some say in the rules, or to bend the rules, requires one to have actually made the rules.

Using the Forgotten Realms example, didn't the present day deities keep changing the rules for the afterlife, including the ultimate blackmail of "worship at least one of us or you end up spending eternity as a brick at best"?

Using my own setting as an example, the mortals who achieved their own apotheosis and sealed the "old gods" away, then promptly used their new power to make it harder for other mortals to do the same.




Unless you're talking the monotheistic, big G God, very few gods are portrayed as truly omnipotent. You might even have a case like Ao, where there's an overgod who would be very deserving of a boot up the backside (except you can't, because of overgod stats of You Lose), and gods who focus on the actual running of the world but who have to deal with the overgod's decrees.


Which really amounts to a sort of "might makes right" situation that's fig-leafed by "but they're gods" -- and that includes Ao.




Are they worth worshipping? If a quick prayer to the god of knowledge might help you remember what you're studying better, why not?


Why not? At least for some characters, because it's a crutch, a dependence. Or because they just want nothing to do with cosmic egomaniacs who routinely fail to use whatever power they do have to actually live up to the responsibilities they supposedly have.




Edit to add: Assume that there either aren't any entities you can meaningfully complain about cosmic rules to, or that they're too distant to meaningfully interact with. Also assume that the 5e philosophy of TANSTAAFL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch), so you can't find a method of immortality that doesn't require some form of costly upkeep, usually at the expense of other people. In such a world, what would your long-term goal be?


As a character in such a setting... find a way to kick the gods in the teeth and/or seize immortality from the universe, or go down swinging and take as many of them with me as possible.

Anymage
2018-11-27, 11:14 PM
In 3.5 at least, all undead have a connection to the Negative energy plane, which is to say a reservoir of infinite negatively-charge life-force, and that is what sustains them. (Except vampires and wights and the like, who need to take in Life-force from the living to augment this energy. Undead that needs to eat people have it as a craving but no biological need to, per Libris Mortis.)

Liches, in 3.5 at least, were an undead creature sustained entirely by this connection.

Also, I'll be honest, assuming that Entropy is an inescapable law in a multiverse that's default cosmology includes six self-sustaining planes of energy(four of elemental energy, one of life, one of death/anti-life/whatever) is flimsy logic--you might not be able to make yourself eternal, but there are at least six sources of infinite energy that you can theoretically tap to sustain yourself indefinitely and multiple classes of being that never die of natural causes that you can theoretically become.

To argue that it's impossible to become genuinely eternal or that it requires constant, active, and costly upkeep when multiple eternal things exist is folly.

I'm sure everybody on this board knows that 3.5, in both rules and fluff, allows for you to make infinite free stuff and create a post-scarcity utopia.

Many people, myself included, find that post scarcity utopias aren't really conducive to letting epic fantasy adventurers do their thing. We're two editions of the game out from 3.5. Presumably, the devs agree with that some things could really use changing.

"Everything comes with a cost" is a popular trope in many forms of fantasy. I'm not disputing what the 3.5 model allows. Just highlighting that there are reasons why people might prefer something different.

Millstone85
2018-11-28, 07:08 AM
Also, I'll be honest, assuming that Entropy is an inescapable law in a multiverse that's default cosmology includes six self-sustaining planes of energy(four of elemental energy, one of life, one of death/anti-life/whatever) is flimsy logic--you might not be able to make yourself eternal, but there are at least six sources of infinite energy that you can theoretically tap to sustain yourself indefinitely and multiple classes of being that never die of natural causes that you can theoretically become.Tell that to the Doomguard in Sigil. Unless I misunderstand their credo, that's exactly it.


One reason that had to change for 5e is that they (thankfully) removed the idea of the Positive and Negative Energy planes as discrete things from the cosmology. Because they (like so many other things) were just there out of a misguided desire for symmetry IMO.But the Positive and Negative are still part of the 5e Great Wheel. What has changed is that they no longer count as inner planes, and the quasi-elemental planes are gone.

Satinavian
2018-11-28, 07:39 AM
People should really have avoided ever to inlude the term "entropy" into D&D. Not only is D&D full of stuff that blatantly not follows thermodynamics, but every instance where it is used in D&D is an instance where it is grossly misused.

What physics understands as chaos has nothing to do with what D&D calles chaos.

Pleh
2018-11-28, 07:41 AM
People should really have avoided ever to inlude the term "entropy" into D&D. Not only is D&D full of stuff that blatantly not follows thermodynamics, but every instance where it is used in D&D is an instance where it is grossly misused.

What physics understands as chaos has nothing to do with what D&D calles chaos.

To be fair, it's hard to avoid when core rules have Entropic Shield.

Rater202
2018-11-28, 07:42 AM
Tell that to the Doomguard in Sigil. Unless I misunderstand their credo, that's exactly it.

They believe that everything ends, but they're essentially a cult that worships the concept of entropy. They have no more say on whether or not it's truly an inescapable law of reality then that one cult of Weirdos that thinks that Vecna, Bane, and Hexxtor are all a single god forcibly split in three on the nature of their own deity.

(and the distance of six--eternal planes of infinite energy--18 if you count the Pseudo and Quasi-elemental planes--says that no, i's not.)

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 07:53 AM
But the Positive and Negative are still part of the 5e Great Wheel. What has changed is that they no longer count as inner planes, and the quasi-elemental planes are gone.

The only mention of the Positive and Negative Planes (note the word Energy is gone) is in the DMG:


The Positive and Negative Planes. These two planes enfold the rest of the cosmology, providing the raw forces of life and death that underlie the rest of existence in the multiverse.


They're not mentioned in the later descriptions of all the planes in that same chapter. They're shown in the graphic in the PHB as outside the outer planes. There's not mention in any of the monster descriptions of them being "powered by negative energy"--in fact there is no mention of "negative energy" as a type of thing. Nor is there a mention of positive energy.

Thus, these vestigial planes are best interpreted as the source and sink of unified "energy"--the power of creation starts in the Positive plane, cascades down through the functional planes, and dissipates in the Negative.

Edit: Honestly, though, I strongly dislike the Great Wheel, both Planescape's version and 3e's version. It's rigid in all the wrong ways but wishy-washy in other ways. It's obsessed with symmetry for the sake of symmetry and, most damning, it's not usually useful for adventuring.

Rater202
2018-11-28, 07:56 AM
The only mention of the Positive and Negative Planes (note the word Energy is gone) is in the DMG:


They're not mentioned in the later descriptions of all the planes in that same chapter. They're shown in the graphic in the PHB as outside the outer planes. There's not mention in any of the monster descriptions of them being "powered by negative energy"--in fact there is no mention of "negative energy" as a type of thing. Nor is there a mention of positive energy.

Thus, these vestigial planes are best interpreted as the source and sink of unified "energy"--the power of creation starts in the Positive plane, cascades down through the functional planes, and dissipates in the Negative.Then where do the "raw forces of death" come from?(Mentioned in the text)

where does the energy used in Cure and Inflict spells come from?

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 08:49 AM
Then where do the "raw forces of death" come from?(Mentioned in the text)

where does the energy used in Cure and Inflict spells come from?

Death is the absence of life, so it comes when your personal energy sinks too low for various reasons.

Cure doesn't do positive energy any more as such (and is an evocation spell, although that hardly matters here, as the schools are mostly fluff):



A creature you touch regains a number of hit points equal to 1d8 + your spellcasting ability modifier. This spell has no effect on undead or constructs.


Inflict deals necrotic damage (which is basically called out as decay/corrosion/dissolution/entropy), which deals normal damage against undead unless they're specifically immune/resistant to necrotic (which most aren't). It's a necromancy-school spell, but that's also nearly vestigial, at least for clerics (who are the only ones that get the spell by default).



Make a melee spell attack against a creature you can reach. On a hit, the target takes 3d10 necrotic damage.


I did forget a few uses of the words "Negative Energy" in that sense--
* Finger of Death references negative energy (but does necrotic damage) as does circle of death, * Negative Energy Flood from Xanathar's Guide to Everything, which bucks the trend by "healing" (really giving temporary hit points to) undead.
*Negative energy is also mentioned in the Mummy Lord's Channel Negative Energy legendary action (which prevents healing on affected targets but deals no damage and does not interact with undead).

I stand corrected on it not being mentioned anywhere.


The only mentions of "positive energy" are Heal, which still doesn't do anything to undead (useful or harmful), and Greater Restoration.

Harm is specifically a disease, not negative energy.

Millstone85
2018-11-28, 09:14 AM
The only mention of the Positive and Negative Planes (note the word Energy is gone) is in the DMG:
The Positive and Negative Planes. These two planes enfold the rest of the cosmology, providing the raw forces of life and death that underlie the rest of existence in the multiverse.

They're not mentioned in the later descriptions of all the planes in that same chapter. They're shown in the graphic in the PHB as outside the outer planes. There's not mention in any of the monster descriptions of them being "powered by negative energy"--in fact there is no mention of "negative energy" as a type of thing. Nor is there a mention of positive energy.You missed something in the PHB:
Positive and Negative Planes
Like a dome above the other planes, the Positive Plane is the source of radiant energy and the raw life force that suffuses all living beings, from the puny to the sublime. Its dark reflection is the Negative Plane, the source of necrotic energy that destroys the living and animates the undead.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-28, 09:17 AM
People should really have avoided ever to inlude the term "entropy" into D&D. Not only is D&D full of stuff that blatantly not follows thermodynamics, but every instance where it is used in D&D is an instance where it is grossly misused.

What physics understands as chaos has nothing to do with what D&D calls chaos.


Outside of RPGs, the common popular usage of "entropy" as a synonym for the common meaning of "chaos" is just plain wrong anyway.

If I'm not completely off in my understanding, maximum entropy is not popular-meaning "chaos" at all, as everything has settled into "lowest-energy" and just sits there, so to speak.




Then where do the "raw forces of death" come from?(Mentioned in the text)


Death, cold, darkness... these sorts of things as active "energies" or "forces" has some very bizarre implication for the "physics" of a reality.

Rater202
2018-11-28, 09:26 AM
Death is the absence of life, so it comes when your personal energy sinks too low for various reasons.Hmmm, no.

That wouldn't be a Force. That would be a lack of Force.

The text that you quoted specifically mentions forces, plural, of both life and death.

Ergo, there must be a "force" of death that is not simply the lack of the forces of life.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 09:55 AM
Outside of RPGs, the common popular usage of "entropy" as a synonym for the common meaning of "chaos" is just plain wrong anyway.

If I'm not completely off in my understanding, maximum entropy is not popular-meaning "chaos" at all, as everything has settled into "lowest-energy" and just sits there, so to speak.




Death, cold, darkness... these sorts of things as active "energies" or "forces" has some very bizarre implication for the "physics" of a reality.

I agree. Hence the "fueled by the force of death" is so obnoxious to me.


Hmmm, no.

That wouldn't be a Force. That would be a lack of Force.

The text that you quoted specifically mentions forces, plural, of both life and death.

Ergo, there must be a "force" of death that is not simply the lack of the forces of life.

Or they're speaking colloquially, the same way they speak of Cold being a force, not simply the absence of heat. Or they just didn't think things through.

But I do stand corrected on that. I guess it was just wishful thinking on my part.

As I said, I dislike the great wheel and its legacy. It's one reason I completely overhauled the planar structure for my personal setting.

Satinavian
2018-11-28, 12:23 PM
Outside of RPGs, the common popular usage of "entropy" as a synonym for the common meaning of "chaos" is just plain wrong anyway.

If I'm not completely off in my understanding, maximum entropy is not popular-meaning "chaos" at all, as everything has settled into "lowest-energy" and just sits there, so to speak.
Well, that is another thing. If we ignore cosmology for a moment, energy can never be created or destroyed. The state of maximum entropy has the same energy as every earlier state of lower entropy.
Entropy is only about how this energy is distributed. Or rather how much information about that exists. That is where the whole order/chaos thing comes from.

Segev
2018-11-28, 12:31 PM
For those questioning how a lich sustains himself without feeding on souls or some-such, I turn the question back on them: How does a skeleton or zombie sustain itself? How does a necropolitan?

I'll not insist you must agree with the canon D&D answers to these questions, but if you're going to question it for the lich, you really need to question it for all undead that don't have feeding requirements.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 12:40 PM
For those questioning how a lich sustains himself without feeding on souls or some-such, I turn the question back on them: How does a skeleton or zombie sustain itself? How does a necropolitan?

I'll not insist you must agree with the canon D&D answers to these questions, but if you're going to question it for the lich, you really need to question it for all undead that don't have feeding requirements.

In my cosmology? By drawing anima (life-force) from everything around them unless being actively supported by a spell, just like any other undead. Being lower on the scale, their depredations are small (but do add up). As a result, anywhere with significant undead presence will have weaker life--fewer insects, weaker plant life, etc. And major undead infestations cause absolute sterility and even "rot" on non-living things. The only exceptions are for actively (and temporarily) conjured undead as well as those sustained by some other power source such as a ritual Oath. While a single animated skeleton causes minimal harm, an army blights the land.

Everything must have a power source. Yes, this includes planar beings. That, to me, is the difference between categories of planar beings--some draw their power from the Great Mechanism (which distributes anima around the planes) directly (gods/demigods, angels, elementals); others from voluntary donations by faith or contract (ascended heroes, devils); others by forcible consumption of souls (demons).

This idea is actually a center-point for my entire setting. It's something I consider for each and every piece of the setting--where does the energy for this come from? The lack of this is, to me, one of the many reasons I dislike the Great Wheel. It's just thrown together without care for cycles or flows.

Rater202
2018-11-28, 01:18 PM
Why are you assuming that a fantasy setting that blatantly ignores other forms of physics must obey the laws of thermodynamics?

Why are you dismissive of the idea that in a setting with differant physics, "cold" and "death" can be forces instead of merely the lack of heat or life.

Segev
2018-11-28, 01:30 PM
In my cosmology? By drawing anima (life-force) from everything around them unless being actively supported by a spell, just like any other undead. Being lower on the scale, their depredations are small (but do add up). As a result, anywhere with significant undead presence will have weaker life--fewer insects, weaker plant life, etc. And major undead infestations cause absolute sterility and even "rot" on non-living things. The only exceptions are for actively (and temporarily) conjured undead as well as those sustained by some other power source such as a ritual Oath. While a single animated skeleton causes minimal harm, an army blights the land.

Everything must have a power source. Yes, this includes planar beings. That, to me, is the difference between categories of planar beings--some draw their power from the Great Mechanism (which distributes anima around the planes) directly (gods/demigods, angels, elementals); others from voluntary donations by faith or contract (ascended heroes, devils); others by forcible consumption of souls (demons).

This idea is actually a center-point for my entire setting. It's something I consider for each and every piece of the setting--where does the energy for this come from? The lack of this is, to me, one of the many reasons I dislike the Great Wheel. It's just thrown together without care for cycles or flows.

That is some interesting world-building, and a nice explanation for why animating undead is inherently evil (if one assumes that creating blights that reduce life in the world to be evil inherently rather than merely if done irresponsibly). I am now amused, incidentally, by the idea of controlling insects in cities by having carefully-managed numbers of undead doing maintenance work. They would, of course, be kept away from places of birthing and baby-care and the sick, but would be very useful around offal and sanitation work to keep maggots and other pests from growing out of control.

This would also permit a non-soul-eating lich; he just is such a powerful undead creature that he has what 5e would term environmental effects on the region around his lair. The sun is dimmer, winter-barrenness seems to cling to plants longer, birth rates are lower. If he stays too long, it becomes a wasteland around him as his dark energies suck in the life of the surroundings. A lich in a major city where life is forcibly renewed by the close press of humanity (and demihumanity), or in an evil metropolis populated by fecund minions such as goblins or kobolds, may have less notable impact, simply by virtue of all the currents of life being drawn through by passers-by and new births. One who surrounds himself with more undead and dwells alone in remote towers or keeps will, instead, have a very thematic death-lair.

Vampires probably have similar impacts, despite or because of their more direct life-feeding.

Edit: It may even be that the lich himself isn't the locus of the depredation on the land. The barren wasteland is in an abandoned keep surrounded by the undead, but the lich himself lives in a major metropolis and is known as a lively academic. It's his phylactery that is feeding on the life force of the world, after all.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 01:32 PM
Why are you assuming that a fantasy setting that blatantly ignores other forms of physics must obey the laws of thermodynamics?

Why are you dismissive of the idea that in a setting with differant physics, "cold" and "death" can be forces instead of merely the lack of heat or life.

They don't obey our laws, but they must be consistent with their own rules (which they aren't). It's not wrong because it does what it does, it's wrong (for me) because it tries to justify it and does so badly (by misusing terms and contradicting itself). Better to be open and clear about your deviations and artistic choices than to pretend to be "simulationist" but do it so badly wrong even on your own terms. One of my biggest setting peeves is when settings take themselves seriously and then don't follow their own rules. Don't set the rules if you can't follow them; if you do set the rules, make sure you can follow through. Don't set your rules and then dodge around whenever it's convenient.

Millstone85
2018-11-28, 01:52 PM
As I said, I dislike the great wheel and its legacy. It's one reason I completely overhauled the planar structure for my personal setting.Me, I would go with a collapsed Great Wheel:

Ysgard, the Plane of Creation
Combines aspects of the Far Realm, Limbo and Ysgard. This is where everything started, both spontaneously and through the will of primordial deities. It is filled with a shapeshifting mist in which drift various landscapes, some wholly alien.

Arcadia, the Plane of Perpetuation
Combines aspects of Arcadia, Mechanus and the Outlands. This is the keystone of the cosmos, filled with rune-engraved clockwork and inhabited by most of the current gods. It is in fact obessed with symmetry and keeping the planes in balance.

Carceri, the Plane of Oblivion
Combines aspects of Carceri and the Nine Hells. This is the cosmic oubliette, where everything from truly-damned souls to world-ending entities gets banished. Devils are the jailers, though most of them also count as inmates.

The Material
Spelljammer style.

The Feywild
Combines aspects of the Feywild and the Elemental Planes. This is an echo of the Material where the forces of nature are, paradoxically, at their most supernatural.

The Shadowfell
In its 4e version. This is an echo of the Material that serves as the primary afterlife. And yeah, it sucks, as being afterliving is just a different word for being undead. Souls wander there until they fade away or reincarnate, which can take any amount of time. Reaching the realm of one's deity is also considered a rebirth.

Segev
2018-11-28, 02:12 PM
My own take on life, unlife, and the positive/negative energy planes is not wholly complete, yet, because I'm not 100% satisfied with all implications, but here's the broad strokes of it:

The positive energy plane is an infinite source, and the negative energy plane is an infinite sink. The other inner planes - including the Prime Material - are through which the energy from one flows into the other. "Negative energy" is really just a dearth of positive energy causing a forcible pull of positive energy to fill the void.

Living things are conduits for positive energy to flow into the plane on which they reside. This flow of energy through the conduit "powers" life processes. Up to a point, adding extra positive energy into the conduit "supercharges" it, giving it more immediate reserves to draw upon rather than having to wait for the constant stream to flow through naturally. This re-energizes tiredness, strengthens regenerative processes, or whatever else your positive energy spell is doing to heal/repair the person (based on how the spell shapes the energy, etc. etc.). Imbuing them with negative energy is like taking it out of the infeed pipe, leaving the machinery it's meant to run with less fuel. This leads to tiredness, increased injury, and possibly death, until the flow can restore itself to normal. (Again, shaped by whatever the spell is supposed to be doing.)

Undead things are conduits for negative energy to flow into the plane on which they reside. Or, rather, they're conduits for the positive energy on that plane to flow into the infinite sink that is the negative energy plane, but most people perceive it as a flow of negative energy into the plane when they can perceive it at all. Similar rules apply for adding negative energy to the undead as do for adding positive energy to the living, and vice-versa. Clogging the undead with positive energy backs up the flow, making them sluggish, tired, injured, or just less animate, as the spell effects dictate. Hitting them up with negative energy increases the suction, pulling more of the energy through and invigorating/healing them (again, per whatever the spell involved says).

Anymage
2018-11-28, 02:16 PM
Why are you assuming that a fantasy setting that blatantly ignores other forms of physics must obey the laws of thermodynamics?

Why are you dismissive of the idea that in a setting with differant physics, "cold" and "death" can be forces instead of merely the lack of heat or life.

The issue, at least for me, isn't that these cosmic forces are treated as energies of their own. It's that there's a popular and dramatically impactful meta-rule that all things have a cost, and allowing you to tap infinite free energy very much contradicts that. Plus worldbuilding headaches that come from allowing immortals to stick around forever, and the fact that someone who sits in their sanctum doing private research forever is hard to make adventurers care about.

Nobody doubts that 3.5, by both rules and fluff, allows for everybody to live forever in a post-scarcity utopia. What I'm saying is that post-scarcity utopias tend not to have much room for PC types to get their adventuring on.

Millstone85
2018-11-28, 02:42 PM
My take on positive and negative energies would compare them to nanites.

Positive energy is a form of magic that is like the perfect healing nanites. It bolsters everything it touches, with the exception of what it identifies as a pathogen, which it instead destroys.

Negative energy is the grey goo of magic. It transforms everything into more of itself, or into something able to propagate it.

Quertus
2018-11-28, 02:51 PM
You weren't asking me, but honestly i'd be down for that if I was sufficiently "big" that taking the immortal into myself didn't dilute my core essence.

I've got "hellsing style vampire" on my list of potential routes to power if I ever get the power to travel to fictional realities and I honestly think that "eat something to absorb it's power/knowledge/skills/memories/destiny/shape/life" is an interesting power type.

That naturally includes being able to consume the essence of another being.

So as long as certain moral or ethical constraints aren't a problem(IE, if they're willing and/or a big enough of a jerk that I don't feel bad Abbott eating them) and there's no risk of being eaten from the inside or drastically altered then I'd be down for that.

This gets back to the child being sufficiently "big" to still go with their plan of eating nothing but cookies when they grow up.

...And my response got eaten. So this may make less sense than usual. You've been warned.

Can you imagine someone with a sufficiently similar "soul" that merging with them needn't change "you" any more than life does? Say, an alternate reality you, who made a different "what if?" choice?

Or, to pull a page from Transhumanity, you, from 5 minutes ago, who was loaded into a different body for the past 5 minutes. Could you see integrating with them?

Or, to put a huge wrinkle in things, and look this from yet another angle, would anyone* really bully/abuse/whatever anyone else if they knew for a fact that that was themselves that they were doing that to? That, in the end, all those memories and experiences would be theirs?

* Barring masochists, or equivalent, who would intentionally do so


Edit to add: Assume that there either aren't any entities you can meaningfully complain about cosmic rules to, or that they're too distant to meaningfully interact with. Also assume that the 5e philosophy of TANSTAAFL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch), so you can't find a method of immortality that doesn't require some form of costly upkeep, usually at the expense of other people. In such a world, what would your long-term goal be?

Be the Wizard that everyone thinks D&D Wizards are, and change reality.

In the mean time, consume the souls of those I don't want adding to some greater evil. In other words, continue murder-hoboing the bad guys - this time, with style and finality!


I'm not one terribly much for "overthrow the gods" excuses. I really don't believe any replacement will do better,

Either everyone just has to grin and bear having toddler gods or the universe gets the option to implode to save itself.

I guess, having stepped in and done a better job, both in games and IRL in many scenarios, and having seen others do so, too, I find your pessimism unwarranted.

"Reform" need not merely be empty words. Or would you prefer a return to the Dark Ages, since, clearly, nothing can ever be done better?

If D&D gods were written as competent, that would be one thing. A bad thing, mind you, but still a thing. But, happily, they're well written to be the ultimate adversary of the PCs. Who can do better. And should.

Rater202
2018-11-28, 03:03 PM
Nobody doubts that 3.5, by both rules and fluff, allows for everybody to live forever in a post-scarcity utopia. What I'm saying is that post-scarcity utopias tend not to have much room for PC types to get their adventuring on.

That's why creating the Post-Scarcity Utopia is something that happens in the future after the necessary magic/technology/psionics for it to be propagated on a massive scale.

Or else is the goal/endgame of the Campaign.

Instead of the backstory.

(Or maybe the reagents needed make people immortal en mass can't be easily synthesized in large quantities and a team of Arch-Lichs needs to infiltrate another reality where it's more plentiful to bring some back for replication and that's the campaign.)

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 03:31 PM
That's why creating the Post-Scarcity Utopia is something that happens in the future after the necessary magic/technology/psionics for it to be propagated on a massive scale.

Or else is the goal/endgame of the Campaign.

Instead of the backstory.

(Or maybe the reagents needed make people immortal en mass can't be easily synthesized in large quantities and a team of Arch-Lichs needs to infiltrate another reality where it's more plentiful to bring some back for replication and that's the campaign.)

But that only allows a single style of campaign and drastically limits what kinds of settings you can have. It also forces all campaigns to happen in that tiny happy space where magic has developed but before it all falls apart (from an adventuring stand point). And that's bad worldbuilding--you're forced into all sorts of contrivances to explain why this world is in the sweet spot despite having been around for a while. To me, it feels very artificial and none of the 3e worlds do a decent job of justifying it. They all either ignore the issue entirely or give a half-baked explanation.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-28, 03:56 PM
They don't obey our laws, but they must be consistent with their own rules (which they aren't). It's not wrong because it does what it does, it's wrong (for me) because it tries to justify it and does so badly (by misusing terms and contradicting itself). Better to be open and clear about your deviations and artistic choices than to pretend to be "simulationist" but do it so badly wrong even on your own terms. One of my biggest setting peeves is when settings take themselves seriously and then don't follow their own rules. Don't set the rules if you can't follow them; if you do set the rules, make sure you can follow through. Don't set your rules and then dodge around whenever it's convenient.

That's roughly where I stand.


One of my settings does have... something... beyond / below / beside the world of mortal men and warm bright day. I understand how it works and what's going on, but it's not easy to put it in simple terms for a game setting.

The "bright" world that mortals know was created by "interloper gods of light", superimposed over a realm that to the mortal mind is a place described as "darkness, void, infinity, shadow, nothing..." In rough terms, there's a spark of those gods' "light" in anything that lives, and their physical and "bright spiritual" realms push against the other realm... but the borders aren't solid, and the realms overlap a little, casting shadows into that other older realm, resulting in what some call the "Near Gloaming", where those who can enter find a "through a glass darkly" shadow-reflection of the physical world... but it's dangerous, and easy to slip deeper the dark, into the "Far Gloaming" of eternal dark, and finally into the void itself, whence it is said no being of the light returns.

That other realm also has a personification of sorts, a vast formless thing that cannot be named... for It Was before "names". It does not hate life, or reality, or light... it is fascinated by these interloper gods and their creation. The things it created have not a bright spark, but rather a dark mote, at their core.


http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22816488&postcount=53
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22893656&postcount=101


So I have to somehow resolve the presence of this setting and story critical idea of the "spiritual" / cosmological infinite darkness/void as something that can in fact "power" life, while not getting into the wonkiness of physical "light" and "darkness" being actual balanced / competing forms of energy.

One quote I've seen that somewhat evokes the right feeling: “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-28, 04:00 PM
The issue, at least for me, isn't that these cosmic forces are treated as energies of their own. It's that there's a popular and dramatically impactful meta-rule that all things have a cost, and allowing you to tap infinite free energy very much contradicts that. Plus worldbuilding headaches that come from allowing immortals to stick around forever, and the fact that someone who sits in their sanctum doing private research forever is hard to make adventurers care about.


Even though both my WIP settings make big magic scarce, and most magic cost something (even if it's just a little piece of your freedom or autonomy), I loath "all things must have a cost" as a meta-rule. It's too absolute and too just-so.

Pleh
2018-11-28, 04:05 PM
I guess, having stepped in and done a better job, both in games and IRL in many scenarios, and having seen others do so, too, I find your pessimism unwarranted.

"Reform" need not merely be empty words. Or would you prefer a return to the Dark Ages, since, clearly, nothing can ever be done better?

If D&D gods were written as competent, that would be one thing. A bad thing, mind you, but still a thing. But, happily, they're well written to be the ultimate adversary of the PCs. Who can do better. And should.

Again. It's all about how you define the setting. If there is no REASON that the current gods aren't already doing the best that anyone could do, then sure.

I feel like it'd be more satisfying for your character to otherthrow, take their place, and fall into the same patterns because the limitations of divine power, the state of the universe, and the needs of mortalkind. It rather justifies why, if overthrowing the gods is an idea that should work, why no one else had already done it. The answer being you just deposed the last dude to try to fix the system, only to find yourself trapped in the same scenario without much recourse.

I mean, that's the real problem for me. If you're going to be that critical of the gods instead of accepting the setting as presented, it seems ridiculous that for much any reason that you would be the first. Being "the first to succeed where others had failed" at becoming gods seems mary sueish to me.

Quertus
2018-11-28, 04:07 PM
But that only allows a single style of campaign and drastically limits what kinds of settings you can have. It also forces all campaigns to happen in that tiny happy space where magic has developed but before it all falls apart (from an adventuring stand point). And that's bad worldbuilding--you're forced into all sorts of contrivances to explain why this world is in the sweet spot despite having been around for a while. To me, it feels very artificial and none of the 3e worlds do a decent job of justifying it. They all either ignore the issue entirely or give a half-baked explanation.

Personally, I'm all about living on an Earth where the idiotic indigenous species has had the physics to travel through space for how many thousands of years, and is still too dumb and petty, fighting wars over territory and resources, to actually do anything useful. And, on that world, playing in a setting where the inhabitants are just as dumb.

But, at least in the game, my PC has the option - by virtue of having the power - to singlehandedly make one or more changes that the species as a whole is too dumb to implement.

But it's an option, not a requirement. The PCs are under no obligation to create a post-scarcity paradise. So I reject the notion that only one style of game is valid.

As to the sweet spot - I mean, playing a game set in WW2 seems much more temporally limiting, and require as much more narrow "sweet spot", yet it's a thing. So, yeah, D&D is intended to be played on world where magic has existed for 0-NI years without anyone going all "post-scarcity paradise" on us (but technically can still be played in that "paradise" setting).

Why does a D&D world existing at this sweet spot require any worse world-building than "the Chinese invented gunpowder, but used it for fireworks", "gunpowder saw quick adoption in this world, when other explosives requiring the same technological proficiency are more efficient", of the results of many elections, votes, or even comedic military errors on entire battles / wars?

Earth has such horrific world-building, it'd be an epic feat to create a fantasy world with worse world-building.

Segev
2018-11-28, 04:09 PM
Even though both my WIP settings make big magic scarce, and most magic cost something (even if it's just a little piece of your freedom or autonomy), I loath "all things must have a cost" as a meta-rule. It's too absolute and too just-so.

Eh, all things DO have a cost, in the sense of "no free lunch" and opportunity cost, but I think I understand what you mean. Costs don't need to be - and shouldn't all be - "artificial" quid pro quo payments. They can and should often be just built-in aspects of making choices. And things come from other things.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 04:15 PM
Even though both my WIP settings make big magic scarce, and most magic cost something (even if it's just a little piece of your freedom or autonomy), I loath "all things must have a cost" as a meta-rule. It's too absolute and too just-so.

For me, that's a basic fact of reality. TAANSFL, the idea of opportunity cost, choices having consequences--all these are expressions of this fact. If there isn't a tradeoff, why hasn't everyone done it? Why even have a choice if there's an obvious, costless right answer?

I hate clear, obvious solutions. They're boring. There's no meaningful agency allowed. No ways to balance things differently--you can predict exactly what anyone will do unless they make a mistake, and mistakes are obvious. It's pure wish fulfillment. Or railroading, depending on the side of the screen/writer's table you're on.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 04:17 PM
Personally, I'm all about living on an Earth where the idiotic indigenous species has had the physics to travel through space for how many thousands of years, and is still too dumb and petty, fighting wars over territory and resources, to actually do anything useful. And, on that world, playing in a setting where the inhabitants are just as dumb.

But, at least in the game, my PC has the option - by virtue of having the power - to singlehandedly make one or more changes that the species as a whole is too dumb to implement.

But it's an option, not a requirement. The PCs are under no obligation to create a post-scarcity paradise. So I reject the notion that only one style of game is valid.

As to the sweet spot - I mean, playing a game set in WW2 seems much more temporally limiting, and require as much more narrow "sweet spot", yet it's a thing. So, yeah, D&D is intended to be played on world where magic has existed for 0-NI years without anyone going all "post-scarcity paradise" on us (but technically can still be played in that "paradise" setting).

Why does a D&D world existing at this sweet spot require any worse world-building than "the Chinese invented gunpowder, but used it for fireworks", "gunpowder saw quick adoption in this world, when other explosives requiring the same technological proficiency are more efficient", of the results of many elections, votes, or even comedic military errors on entire battles / wars?

Earth has such horrific world-building, it'd be an epic feat to create a fantasy world with worse world-building.

But Earth doesn't have costless, free-energy solutions. So post-scarcity utopias are actually forbidden in Earth's worldbuilding. That solution's not on the board. Life on Earth is a constant struggle against entropy and disorder. So your analogy is completely inapposite.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-28, 04:24 PM
Eh, all things DO have a cost, in the sense of "no free lunch" and opportunity cost, but I think I understand what you mean. Costs don't need to be - and shouldn't all be - "artificial" quid pro quo payments. They can and should often be just built-in aspects of making choices. And things come from other things.

Right, I don't mean things like opportunity cost, or how causality and finite nature make every choice made come at the cost of all the other choices that could have been made.

I mean things like "The Price of Magic".




For me, that's a basic fact of reality. TAANSFL, the idea of opportunity cost, choices having consequences--all these are expressions of this fact. If there isn't a tradeoff, why hasn't everyone done it? Why even have a choice if there's an obvious, costless right answer?

I hate clear, obvious solutions. They're boring. There's no meaningful agency allowed. No ways to balance things differently--you can predict exactly what anyone will do unless they make a mistake, and mistakes are obvious. It's pure wish fulfillment. Or railroading, depending on the side of the screen/writer's table you're on.


There's a difference between causality, and opportunity cost, and such, on one hand... and just-so narrative/dramatic meta-rules like "Every Spell Has a Price" or "For Every Good Fortune There Must Be Bad" being used as the basis of the "physics" of a setting.

Segev
2018-11-28, 05:16 PM
Right, I don't mean things like opportunity cost, or how causality and finite nature make every choice made come at the cost of all the other choices that could have been made.

I mean things like "The Price of Magic".


Yeah, that's what I thought you meant, and I felt it bore clarification. Because I largely agree with you: magic doesn't need to have a "price" inherently to be interesting, so if you're going to write one in, make the price itself interesting.

There's a relatively light-hearted series of novels called "Magic 2.0" that starts with "off to be the wizard." The only price to using magic in it is the effort (and luck) it takes to figure out how, and then the work you have to put in to make it work well for you. (The gist you learn in chapter 1 is that the wizard main character is a "wizard" because he found the root file of reality and learned it's surprisingly easy to edit, though rather risky as well because you're rewriting base code and have no safeties. Series is light-hearted, so none of the REALLY dark stuff you might imagine disastrously occurs due to his carelessness.)

Nevertheless, the first novel has conflict, interesting bits, and even challenges and limitations based on the rules of how magic works, all without a "cost of magic" cursed penalty thing lurking about.

On the other hand, having a "price of magic" that leads to interesting story elements (rather than just being a vague excuse to make using magic "a curse" or otherwise "bad" in ways that you only have to write about when you want to impose a narrative limitation as to why your mage character doesn't just wave his wand to fix a problem) can make for interesting stories, itself.

I keep wanting to find a use for an idea I had a while ago, for instance: using magic costs you age. You get younger when you cast spells, and the more powerful the spell, the more you get younger to pay for it. This is why mages live longer than non-mages, but also is a serious cost and limitation, since you don't want to cast yourself back into infancy! And you only get it back with time, of course.

Rater202
2018-11-28, 05:35 PM
But that only allows a single style of campaign and drastically limits what kinds of settings you can have. It also forces all campaigns to happen in that tiny happy space where magic has developed but before it all falls apart (from an adventuring stand point). And that's bad worldbuilding--you're forced into all sorts of contrivances to explain why this world is in the sweet spot despite having been around for a while. To me, it feels very artificial and none of the 3e worlds do a decent job of justifying it. They all either ignore the issue entirely or give a half-baked explanation.

No.

It doesn't.

Quite the opposite, it implicitly implies that only a minority of realities have reached the "immortal post-scarcity utopia" stage due to lack of resources or lack of propigation of tech.

I'm merely explaining how characters from a such a setting could still have adventures.

It' like the evolution of Humanity--Homo s neanderthalus was as smart as Homo s sapiens and also much stronger on average. They were the superior species, but we just happened to stumble upon the "tools" idea before them and had enough of a head start on that that we could more than make up the differance.

In otherwords, we're the main human subspecies with all others being exttinct becuase of what ammounts to a fluke.

Same thing: The Post Scarcisty Utopia world where everyone is immortal is the world that lucked into someone discovering a way to make people immortal and needless and then desimate that method to enough people receptive to it to use it and keeps spreading it to other people until such a time as the majority of the population including people in positions of power have used the ritual and build a society that favors it.

That's a million and five to one chance.

Clistenes
2018-11-28, 06:17 PM
But that only allows a single style of campaign and drastically limits what kinds of settings you can have. It also forces all campaigns to happen in that tiny happy space where magic has developed but before it all falls apart (from an adventuring stand point). And that's bad worldbuilding--you're forced into all sorts of contrivances to explain why this world is in the sweet spot despite having been around for a while. To me, it feels very artificial and none of the 3e worlds do a decent job of justifying it. They all either ignore the issue entirely or give a half-baked explanation.

Most of the most popular settings include a past in which one or several high magic civilizations flourished for a a few centuries or millennia before destroying themselves. That may be the reason post-scarcity societies of immortal humans don't exist: They blew themselves out, and we are rebuilding now...

There are also deities who may object humans becoming immortal, and fiends who may not like it if humans stopped dying and feeding the lower planes with their souls.

Greyhawk: Littered with the ruins of ancient super-civilizations. Magic is slowly fading, so powerful people who become immortal (there are loads of them, they are called hero-gods or quasi-gods) aren't trying to create a magical post-scarcity society, but just to keep what they have while securing an escape route out of Oerth for themselves.

Dragonlance: The gods hurled a meteorite againt Krynn to reset civilization back to a more primitive state. Divine magic came back only recently, arcane magic is rare and Wizards are distrusted and tend to be isolated.

Faerun: Several high magic civilizations blew themselves. Mystra, the goddess of magic imposed severe limitations on modern magic to avoid it happening again. Gods don't like when somebody (another god included) changes the status quo regarding life, death and the afterlife. Plus divine shenanigans or epic magic periodically wrecks the world to crap...

Dark Sun: Magic used to be incredibly powerful... then they used it to ruin the world, and now divine magic is very rare, you kill the planet if you use arcane magic (unless people kills you first), and while you can become an immortal godlike creature, it is hard and requires you to be evil as f##k and willing to kill the planet to get that status.

Eberron: Magic is still developing. It tends to be low level, and if you get too powerful, the Dragons of Argonnessen come and destroy your civilization or even your continent...

Golarion: There was the Earthfall and Age of Darkness thing, and some of the most powerful Magocracies ravaged each other... That said, eternal youth is canon in the setting, and there are post-scarcity high magic societies in the East, like the Impossible Kingdoms of Vudra, who make heavy use of bound genies and similar stuff...

Smart but selfish people who re-discover the secrets of immortality and of post-scarcity society would learn about the past too, and choose to keep these secrets for themselves to avoid being obliterated. Hence liches, immortal wizards and similar folk living in isolated Demiplanes...

icefractal
2018-11-28, 06:45 PM
I'm not a fan of narrative inevitability like "everything has a cost" either. Or the way that a lot of stories about immortality tend to morals that are sour grapes at best, "know your place" at worst.

However -
I don't think that "nothing has a cost" is ideal either. And if a setting says "X is very bad", but doesn't adequately explain why, then IMO:
"Ok, let's create an explanation why X is bad." is as valid a fix as:
"Well then actually, X isn't bad at all, it's just propaganda."
And both of those are changes/fixes, although people tend to consider the one they want to be true to be a natural conclusion.

For example, an approach I'm considering for undead is that they're basically pollution. The positive and negative poles are linked, and the negative energy an undead is sustained by comes at the expense of positive energy for the living. A single zombie isn't too bad by itself - each day it exists, one living creature will die a day earlier. But you can see how armies of them would become a problem. And "higher" undead like Liches are much more demanding in their energy usage. Since the harm happens to random people you've probably never met, and the effect of a single undead creature is relatively tiny, it's easy for people to justify creating more and more. But after a while, your necro-metropolis is consuming centuries of life each day, and you probably shouldn't be surprised when people show up wanting to purge it.

Of course that's just one option, and there's nothing wrong with undeath as a beneficial form of transhumanity only limited by the resources and knowledge required, if you think that'll make a better setting. Although in that case I'd expect to see the setting making some use of that - the existence of powerful necro-kingdoms, for example, or mage guilds whose leadership is dominated by the undead and consider someone with less than three centuries of experience "not truly mature yet".

I'm not generally a fan of "everyone so far has been idiots, the PCs are the first people to look at things rationally", unless that's the whole point of the campaign. So if something would make a huge difference to the world, that difference should probably be visible.

Although that said, utopia isn't necessarily a steady state. There are just as many tools to collapse a magically transhuman empire as create one (some of which are the exact same tools), and so a turbulent history where immortal societies have risen and fallen several times, and the world is both post-apocalyptic and heading toward a new golden age, simultaneously, seems totally believeable.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-28, 07:30 PM
No.

It doesn't.

Quite the opposite, it implicitly implies that only a minority of realities have reached the "immortal post-scarcity utopia" stage due to lack of resources or lack of propigation of tech.

I'm merely explaining how characters from a such a setting could still have adventures.

It' like the evolution of Humanity--Homo s neanderthalus was as smart as Homo s sapiens and also much stronger on average. They were the superior species, but we just happened to stumble upon the "tools" idea before them and had enough of a head start on that that we could more than make up the differance.

In otherwords, we're the main human subspecies with all others being exttinct becuase of what ammounts to a fluke.

Same thing: The Post Scarcisty Utopia world where everyone is immortal is the world that lucked into someone discovering a way to make people immortal and needless and then desimate that method to enough people receptive to it to use it and keeps spreading it to other people until such a time as the majority of the population including people in positions of power have used the ritual and build a society that favors it.

That's a million and five to one chance.

All it takes is one lich...and 3e makes it so easy that a mid-level caster can do it without significant risk. And you can start NI loops much earlier than that. The settings we see don't follow from the common interpretations of the rules--all the settings have meta-rules in place to prevent people from actually realizing what the rules say is possible, precisely because it's boring.

And none of the ones that were listed were really post-scarcity utopias. They were powerful, but still lots of oppression, starvation, etc. None of them were using the tricks that 3e optimizers take for granted (in part because except Eberron, all the "fallen utopia" pieces were established using older edition rules that weren't so easy to cheat due to more DM control and less fixed interactions).

And I'm not for "magic as a curse" type Everything has a Price. Just the standard TANSTAAFL/tradeoffs. There is no "I win" button. No shortcuts to phenominal cosmic power. You can become powerful, but taking on a god on his home turf is just not going to be an option unless you can first become a god. Which some of my players' characters have done.

Of course, for me, the gods are merely public servants, GS-14-ish rank bureaucrats. Nearly unassailable for something in their direct purview, but very limited in their direct involvement. Basically the more directly involved someone is, the lower their power (because with power comes constraints, mainly from other powerful individuals).

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-29, 01:38 PM
All it takes is one lich...and 3e makes it so easy that a mid-level caster can do it without significant risk.


"It only takes one... if even one of them gets away, this starts all over again."




And you can start NI loops much earlier than that.


What loops?




The settings we see don't follow from the common interpretations of the rules--all the settings have meta-rules in place to prevent people from actually realizing what the rules say is possible, precisely because it's boring.


There's even a point in the forward of one of the FR setting books where Ed Greenwood begs asks the players nicely to no break the setting.




And none of the ones that were listed were really post-scarcity utopias. They were powerful, but still lots of oppression, starvation, etc. None of them were using the tricks that 3e optimizers take for granted (in part because except Eberron, all the "fallen utopia" pieces were established using older edition rules that weren't so easy to cheat due to more DM control and less fixed interactions).


Yeah, I'd hardly call those fallen high-magic empires and civilizations "utopias" or "post-scarcity". They were just had a lot of magic and a lot of wealth and a lot of power. Some of them were actively not-nice places.

Reading through various FR settings sources, it's as if the writers are trying to hammer home an Aesop... if an ancient human civilization had a lot of magic, and they treated it like a tool instead of revering it, then that civilization was inherently corrupt and wicked and doomed to its eventual catastrophic fall by its own hubris and selfishness. *insert eyeroll emote here*




And I'm not for "magic as a curse" type Everything has a Price. Just the standard TANSTAAFL/tradeoffs. There is no "I win" button. No shortcuts to phenominal cosmic power. You can become powerful, but taking on a god on his home turf is just not going to be an option unless you can first become a god. Which some of my players' characters have done.


I get it, but in my experience people usually mean something more "karmic" and/or "metaphysical zero sum" when they invoke Magic Always Has A Price as a concept.

Clistenes
2018-11-29, 02:41 PM
And none of the ones that were listed were really post-scarcity utopias. They were powerful, but still lots of oppression, starvation, etc. None of them were using the tricks that 3e optimizers take for granted (in part because except Eberron, all the "fallen utopia" pieces were established using older edition rules that weren't so easy to cheat due to more DM control and less fixed interactions).


Yeah, I'd hardly call those fallen high-magic empires and civilizations "utopias" or "post-scarcity". They were just had a lot of magic and a lot of wealth and a lot of power. Some of them were actively not-nice places.

True, those weren't utopic post-scarcity societies, but my point was, they were high magic, and they blew themselves. That gives a reason for magic utopias not existing: People would rather hoard magic in order to become a magocratic elite and eventually self-destroy, before even being able to build the Tippyverse/Post-scarcity Utopia level...

Also, the ancient Netherese Empire was sort of a post-scarcity society, with the self-sufficient flying Enclaves relying entirely on magic for everything. It is true that they were tyrannies, but that doesn't mean they weren't post-scarcity societies, from an economic point of view.

Cormanthor probably was a post-scarcity society of sorts. Elves don't farm, don't mine, don't build factories, and don't even have money... but their living standards were extraordinary... how were they able to keep them? With magic. Hell, they even produced free magic flight for all the citizens!

The ancient Giant civilization in Xen'drik sound like they could be a post-scarcity Utopia... it's true they custom bred new species to serve them as slaves, but hey, for Giants themselves life probably was great.


Reading through various FR settings sources, it's as if the writers are trying to hammer home and Aesop... if an ancient human civilization had a lot of magic, and they treated it like a tool instead of revering it, then that civilization was inherently corrupt and wicked and doomed to its eventual catastrophic fall by its own hubris and selfishness. *insert eyeroll emote here* .

Well, Forgotten Realms relies heavily on the mandate "Thou Will Kowtow To Our Holy Cows" Such Holy Cows being Mystra, her Chosen, the Harpers and the Elves, in that order. Their only moral compass is, Ed Greenwood's holy cows are always right... hence, any empire they don't control is by definition, wrong and wicked...

PhoenixPhyre
2018-11-29, 02:55 PM
"It only takes one... if even one of them gets away, this starts all over again."


Yup. Liches are vermin.



What loops?


NI -- numerically infinite, meaning all this "infinite wish loops, self-resetting spell traps" stuff that 3e D&D delights in to reach post-scarcity.



There's even a point in the forward of one of the FR setting books where Ed Greenwood begs asks the players nicely to no break the setting.

Yeah, I'd hardly call those fallen high-magic empires and civilizations "utopias" or "post-scarcity". They were just had a lot of magic and a lot of wealth and a lot of power. Some of them were actively not-nice places.

Reading through various FR settings sources, it's as if the writers are trying to hammer home and Aesop... if an ancient human civilization had a lot of magic, and they treated it like a tool instead of revering it, then that civilization was inherently corrupt and wicked and doomed to its eventual catastrophic fall by its own hubris and selfishness. *insert eyeroll emote here*


I tend to run lots of "past civilization was powerful and then screwed up, usually catastrophically", but it's because I'm cynical about people. Power doesn't make people better, just lets them do more. Both good and bad, and when it falls apart because enough people were morons in the wrong places...Boom.

I've had the following:

* Titans and Dragons ruled, until elves used a super-wish (which did have a cost as it uses a person's existence as fuel--this has to be totally willing and knowing) to break their magic, creating wizardry.
* High elves ruled with wizardry, until their arcane-obsession led to the outcasts forming druidism (using a similar super-wish) and dropping a moon on them.
* Humans (created by elves from goblins) WISHED for divine power and ruled...and still kinda do, except that one empire imploded into civil war once news got out that they were doing horrible things with souls and innocent unborn children.
* 70% of everybody died when someone let some noobs (ie PCs) get their hands on a cosmic-level artifact which they promptly set to self-destruct. Oops.

No Aesops, just a cynical disbelief that anything done by imperfect people can last forever. People are people, and people can be jerks. Powerful people, even more so.



I get it, but in my experience people usually mean something more "karmic" and/or "metaphysical zero sum" when they invoke Magic Always Has A Price as a concept.

I don't know that I've ever seen that, personally.

Max_Killjoy
2018-11-29, 04:49 PM
NI -- numerically infinite, meaning all this "infinite wish loops, self-resetting spell traps" stuff that 3e D&D delights in to reach post-scarcity.


Ah, that makes sense.

I even tried searching "NI loops" and just got a bunch of ridiculous Myers-Brigs garbage.




I tend to run lots of "past civilization was powerful and then screwed up, usually catastrophically", but it's because I'm cynical about people. Power doesn't make people better, just lets them do more. Both good and bad, and when it falls apart because enough people were morons in the wrong places...Boom.

I've had the following:

* Titans and Dragons ruled, until elves used a super-wish (which did have a cost as it uses a person's existence as fuel--this has to be totally willing and knowing) to break their magic, creating wizardry.
* High elves ruled with wizardry, until their arcane-obsession led to the outcasts forming druidism (using a similar super-wish) and dropping a moon on them.
* Humans (created by elves from goblins) WISHED for divine power and ruled...and still kinda do, except that one empire imploded into civil war once news got out that they were doing horrible things with souls and innocent unborn children.
* 70% of everybody died when someone let some noobs (ie PCs) get their hands on a cosmic-level artifact which they promptly set to self-destruct. Oops.

No Aesops, just a cynical disbelief that anything done by imperfect people can last forever. People are people, and people can be jerks. Powerful people, even more so.


Makes sense, and it's "historically sound".

The setting I mentioned earlier actually has one of the states operating a "shadow service" with the primary job of monitoring and in "necessary" suppressing research and discovery in foreign states, because they need to maintain their advantage to have any hope of surviving against multiple zealously adversarial states.




I don't know that I've ever seen that, personally.


As one example, the Thieves World setting -- I'm trying to find a good reference to link to, so far no luck.