Sealed Lich

[Gerner]

So you are a good aligned unable to kill the lich as you could not find his phylactery, so instead you have sealed him in a tomb for all eternity. What creatures would you summon/create to protect the tomb from unwanted visitors?

I would like a good spread on the CR :)

(Yes my players will end-up freeing a lich by accident)

[Eldariel]

What am I? Wizard or Cleric will probably turn to good Outsiders of the appropriate alignment. Wizard would most likely use Golems too, and perhaps a Simulacrum of self or some such. Cleric might turn to the Deathless. Druid or Artificer would be very different. Non-casters would probably just hire someone competent.

Inevitables would be of interest, particularly the one that seeks to stop those, who try to cheat death. Perhaps some longlived Lawful race too; Githzerai perhaps to keep watch on the coterminous location on the Astral Plane with some gate or whatever to do incursions as necessary (and some Clerics always at hand). Dwarves would be the best race from the PHB: subterranean, lawful tint, relatively long-lived, lean towards good.

[magic9mushroom]

So you are a good aligned unable to kill the lich as you could not find his phylactery, so instead you have sealed him in a tomb for all eternity. What creatures would you summon/create to protect the tomb from unwanted visitors?

I would like a good spread on the CR :)

(Yes my players will end-up freeing a lich by accident)

It had better be a dimensionally locked tomb, otherwise the lich can simply teleport (or planeshift, in the case of cleric liches) out of it.

And since it's supposed to be a prison for something that doesn't need food, there's no need for access. So no corridors leading in or anything, just build a hill on top of it (and by this I mean a "real" hill, a hundred metres tall or so). All you really need then is something to tell people not to mine there and to stop breakout attempts; a planetar would do nicely, though if you can't get one of those a bunch of golems would be adequate (note that they don't need to warn people away from the hill or slay intruders or anything, just stop any attempts to mine it).

[Eldariel]

It had better be a dimensionally locked tomb, otherwise the lich can simply teleport (or planeshift, in the case of cleric liches) out of it.

And since it's supposed to be a prison for something that doesn't need food, there's no need for access. So no corridors leading in or anything, just build a hill on top of it (and by this I mean a "real" hill, a hundred metres tall or so). All you really need then is something to tell people not to mine there and to stop breakout attempts; a planetar would do nicely, though if you can't get one of those a bunch of golems would be adequate (note that they don't need to warn people away from the hill or slay intruders or anything, just stop any attempts to mine it).

I'd assume the Lich is just sealed in Quintessence in the middle of nowhere inside the ground.

[Quertus]

I'd assume the Lich is just sealed in Quintessence in the middle of nowhere inside the ground.

Pretty much this. Sealed in Quintessence inside a Portable Hole, buried, in a dead zone, in the middle of nowhere.

Said lich has been subjected to a Helm of Opposite Alignment, Mindrape, or some other "Guess what - if you were an evil being freeing me, you're ****ed" magic. Perhaps their entire body reads "I prepared (Twinned Repeating Maximized Subdual Substitution Fell Drain) Explosive Runes today."

[Telonius]

More of a Neutral solution, but I'd see if I could enlist the help of a Necropolitan of some sort. Stack on a few levels of Tomb Warden (both from Libris Mortis). Necropolitan is a template, so the CR spread is as wide as you want it to be.

To ensure that no adventurers come poking around, strip the entire area of anything worth looting. Possibly start a rumor that the hill was the site of the latrine in the Troll War a few centuries back.

[Mr Adventurer]

Gnomes, obviously

[Anachronity]

Well, my priorities, in order, would be...
1) Make sure the lich can't escape. This is probably pretty hard, given they are both immortal and obviously cunning enough to have discerned the means to cheat death itself.

2) Making sure it is well understood despite the passage of time what is sealed here and why it shouldn't be released. Yucca Mountain is a good example of a real-life attempt to do this.

3) Establish a 'good enough' defense of the tomb; enough so that some nobody can't just sneak/wander in and release the lich, but not enough to stand up to the Legions of Doom

So angels/archons are probably ideal. They're both intelligent and willing to communicate with potential interlopers to clarify why they should leave this place be, in lieu of making it seem like something valuable is hidden here. They can also use their teleportation to try to go get aid if the Legions of Doom do draw near.



But your wording concerns me. It sounds like their accidental freeing of the lich is a foregone conclusion. You shouldn't rely on them to do that; doing so leads to railroading.

I would instead have it be the goal of the PCs to stop someone else who is intent upon releasing the lich. Possibly a subordinate or follower, whom the lich has found some clever means to contact from within the tomb and possibly promised a final totally real reward to upon being released. Perhaps they found the lich's phylactery and it was able to communicate to them for that reason.

However, the PCs may not know all the details of what is within the tomb, and this subordinate (or perhaps the lich itself, if it can find a means to communicate) could attempt to manipulate the PCs into unwittingly releasing the sealed evil (possibly reasoning that the good-aligned PCs will stand a better chance). If that plan succeeds, either because the players don't ask enough questions or they murder-hobo too hard to care, then they deserve the consequences of their actions and it actually feels like their fault rather than like artifice. If the plan fails, then the subordinate can bust out the Legions of Doom and force the PCs to defend the tomb at all costs!



Of course, I may just not be giving you the benefit of a doubt here. Maybe they're already dead-set on releasing the sealed evil or you just know them well enough to know that they will. Just, don't ignore the possibility that the lich doesn't get released. The players need to be able to affect the story by their own choices.

[magic9mushroom]

Mindrape

Can't. Liches are immune to mind-affecting attacks, even those that would work on undead.

Also, if you made the lich Good, there would be no need to seal them up in the first place.

[Silva Stormrage]

Can't. Liches are immune to mind-affecting attacks, even those that would work on undead.

Also, if you made the lich Good, there would be no need to seal them up in the first place.

Song of the Dead metamagic allows you to use mind affecting spells on undead.

Your other point is correct though, if the lich is vulnerable to mind rape you don't need to seal him because he is effectively your minion.

[Bronk]

So you are a good aligned unable to kill the lich as you could not find his phylactery, so instead you have sealed him in a tomb for all eternity. What creatures would you summon/create to protect the tomb from unwanted visitors?

I would like a good spread on the CR :)

(Yes my players will end-up freeing a lich by accident)

I agree with the others... there are a whole lot of options to deal with this thing.

But, it sounds like this is a situation where 9th level spells are off the table. If they weren't, I'd drain the lich of spells, lock it down, and then pass it on to be guarded for all eternity in some divine realm where it would be easily contained and no one would forget what it was or why it was there.

But this thing is barely trapped somehow, probably by a good aligned cleric who could barely manage it, so they would probably construct a Sacred Guardian (Beastiary of Krynn). It's a divine construct that can be made any size and scaled to fit your PCs' party, would have an obvious good divine aura, and knows three languages determined by the creator. You would be able to make it fairly obvious it was guarding something evil, but, you could still have it attack to kick things off after some sort of misunderstanding based on a language barrier, perhaps because it only speaks dead languages.

[rel]

Locking the lich in a box and burying it seems like a great idea. It's like hiding a book in a library. Security through obscurity.

The problem occurs when the box goes missing.
When that happens you are at a disadvantage; You don't actually know that the box was breached or that the lich is free.
The first sign of trouble is an angry lich teleporting into you bedroom.

Divination is unreliable, there are spells specifically designed to counter it. The only solution is guards. And guards need housing, defense's, support so on.

Thus, for legitimate if regrettable in game reasons the lich will have to be housed inside an expensive defensive complex, a dungeon if you will. The cheaper and fantastically boring chest full of quintessence prison just isn't practical.