The Lich King (3.5)

[Mind's Eye]

My challenge to you: Create an unkillable lich king, with a well-protected phylactery and a knack for taking down PC's.

Your 'Allowance':
20 levels, any class
10k Gp and 100 yrs to make it grow through a moneymaking scheme (I recommend boatmaking)
Starting with an 18 in every stat (before racial mods)
A necromantic starter pack of 20 skeletons or zombies (your choice)

Be creative and have fun!:smallsmile:

[The Kool]

10k Gp and 100 yrs to make it grow through a moneymaking scheme (I recommend boatmaking)

Can I use my actually-played-out Lich's actually-played-out moneymaking strategy that took less than 100 years in game?

[Falontani]

Sounds fun. I'll look into this.

[liquidformat]

A necromantic starter pack of 20 skeletons or zombies (your choice)

any hd restrictions on these or just a hard limit of 20 skeletons/zombies? also could it be a mix of skeletons and zombies or is that a hard or?

[StevenC21]

As is, this is pretty generous, so I'd assume he means 20 HD of zombies and/or skeletons.

[MultitudeMan]

Is it inappropriate to reference Fishy's "The Dream of Metal" (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?121334-The-Dream-of-Metal) here? I'm think it meets the criteria, and it takes down PC's pretty well, if "letting them die of old age or the universe being undone" counts.

[magic9mushroom]

As is, this is pretty generous

The amount of money is kinda tiny. L20 NPC gear value is 220k; total net worth for a L20 lich should be either 220k or 320k gear (depending on whether you count the LA) + 173k partially-doubled treasure for CR 22. Also, investments have less facial return in a world where inflation is essentially zero due to sound money (the value return is the same).

[Seerow]

So I'm going to stay away from the Lich King aspect of it and instead focus in on the Money Making aspect of it, to see what we actually have to play with. Going to ignore the low hanging fruit of using spells to gain infinite wealth, and assume the intention is that the Lich King actually starts up a business to make money over the next 100 years to make himself wealthy and powerful.

So we're referencing the business rules in DMG2. These rules strongly encourage wanting low resources, low capitol, and running a high risk business. To avoid just easy minmaxing and taking a low/low/high, we'll grab one of the sample businesses from the book: The Lich Shopkeeper (Low Resources, Medium Capitol, High Risk). For skills, we need Profession Shopkeeper maxed, and Appraise/Sense Motive at 15 ranks. Easy enough.


We started with all 18s, Lich gives a +2, so to start we're looking at a +5 wis mod, for +28 profession check (assuming our Lich is not a wisdom based caster who will be putting boosts into that, and don't have gold to invesst in items just yet).

We'll start our business in a Rural area. 4,000gp for the capitol investment, 1,000gp for a simple house, leaves 5000gp left over. We'll go ahead and dump that into a custom +5 profession item for 2500gp, over the next century or so it should pay for itself. We can hire in 4 specialists for 160gp a month, given that each specialist brings in +100gp on a high risk business, this is the cutoff point where they pay for themselves. More is just wasting money. We can also invest 1000gp every 3 months to gain a +1d4 cumulative bonus to profit checks, we'll go ahead and make that first investment right away.

So month 1 we start with 10k gp, spend 5k on initial investment, 2.5k on magic item, and 1k gp on upgrades, so we're set with 1,340gp to spare.

Our profit check is:
+33 (profession)
+3 (secondary skills)
+2 (spend more than 40hours a week)
-4 (in a rural area)
+1 (low resource business)
-4 (high risk business)
+2 (business partner aided)
+8 (4 specialists on staff)
+2 (Business Upgrades)
--------------
+41

We can explicitly take a 10 on profit checks, so we've got a check result of 51. So we make 26*50 - 160gp (specialists) = 1140gp back in the first month.


What we're looking to do eventually here is get to the point where we can fund starting up a new business with a single month of income, and maintain that while not investing any time in the business (and taking that -10 penalty to profit checks), we'll get there, but it'll take a few years.

By month 3 we've made 3,420gp and can invest in the business again. Doing so gets us an extra 150gp per month. So we go down to 2420, but begin making 1290gp per month.
By month 6 we've made 6290. We invest again taking us down to 5290, but now begin making 1390gp per month.
By month 9 we've made 9460. We invest again taking us down to 8460, and are now making 1540gp per month. At this point we can afford the 7500gp to upgrade our skill item from +5 to +10, so we will do that. Bringing us down to 1940gp, but making 1790gp per month.
By month 12 we're at 7,310gp. Invest taking us down to 6310gp. Here we'll go ahead and invest in a +2 stat item now leaving us with 2310gp and making 1940gp per month.

By month 21 we can afford the +15 profession item, leaving us with 5470gp making 2590gp monthly.
By month 27 we can afford to upgrade to a +20 profession item, leaving us with 1810gp making 3090gp monthly
By month 36, we can afford to upgrade the wis item to +4, leaving us with 6,640gp, making 3290gp monthly
By month 39, we can afford to upgrade to a +25 profession item, leaving us with 3180gp making 3790gp monthly
By month 48 we can afford to max out at a +30 profession item, leaving us with 6840gp making 4390gp monthly.


Now we're going to slow down a bit, drop to 8 hours a week (the minimum before taking the -8 penalty), dropping income to 4290gp monthly.

We're going to take 6k of that 6840gp (840gp remaining) and invest it in starting up a second shop. It'll be just like the first one, but our profession is now 32 points higher and we're giving up the +2 bonus for spending 40+ hours a week on it. So it will start with a +70 profit check, so it will make 2,090gp in its first month of operation. Adding that to our existing shop, our income is now 6480gp monthly

This means for month 49, we can open a third shop (1320gp remaining after opening), adding another 2090gp in profit monthly for a total of 8570gp/month.

Month 50 we can open a 4th shop (3890gp remaining after opening), adding another 2090gp in profit monthly for a total of 10,660gp monthly.

Month 51 we have 14,550gp, so we can easily open our 5th shop (now up to 12750), as well as invest in our first 2 businesses (which are now available for upgrade) bringing us up to 13,000gp monthly.


At this point we're back up to 40+ hours a week to maintain 5 businesses. But we can opt to take a -8 penalty to each business, and spend less than 8 hours a week. Or realistically no time at all besides throwing money at it. This drops our income by 400 per business, so down to 11k per month, but lets us open as many shops as we'd like! Each new business now starts at 1690 instead of 2090, but it's still enough to pay for its own upgrades which is the important thing.

So we're going to go ahead and open the 6th business on month 51, to get us back to 12,690/month (with 550gp remaining)

Month 52 we've got 13240gp, with one business available to upgrade. So we do the upgrade, and open two new shops. Bringing us up to 16,170 monthly.

Month 53, we've got 16,410gp, one business available to upgrade. Do the upgrade, open two shops. 3,410gp remaining. Brings us up to 19,700gp monthly.

Month 54, we've got 23,110gp with three businesses available to upgrade. We do the upgrades, and open 3 new shops. 2,110gp remaining, Brings us up to 25,120gp monthly.

Month 55, we've got 27,230gp and 3 businesses available to upgrade. After that we have money to open 4 new shops with 230gp remaining. Brings us up to 32,280gp per month

Month 56, we've got 32,510gp and 3 businesses available to upgrade. So we open 4 new shops with 5510gp remaining. Gets us 39,390gp per month

And as you can see it pretty much spirals from there. We're less than 5 years in and growing exponentially (tripled monthly revenue over the course of about 6 months). I've been doing this by hand and am getting tired, but following that trend if tripling about every 6 months, by the end of the first decade you should be pulling in epic levels of wealth each month.

Or at this point you've got 20 shops puling in 40 grand a month. You can choose to sit back on that and by the end of the century you've got 45,760,000gp give or take, and that's assuming you don't even bother with the every-3-month upgrades to your shop.

[Doxkid]

5 Wizard/10 Dweomerkeeper/5 Archmage

It's a very uninspired answer, but it will get the job done of demolishing the GP limit you imposed simply by Wishing for more GP. From there it's easy to arrange to abuse other spells, tricks, combos and so on.

[StevenC21]

I was referring to the free 20 HD of monsters.

[Mato]

So we're referencing the business rules in DMG2.And I'm going to reference the crafting rules in the PHB.

Step 1: Start Up!!!
Hire a bunch of trained hirelings to craft a copper pieces using one thirds of other copper pieces.
Which means they really are just printing money.

Step 2: Reread The Original Post!!!
I guess the OP want to do it with a limit of 10,000gp, not a limit of 1x10^365gp that comes from ignoring WBL, so I will most certainly not try to post an even more convoluted way of doing it (such as sacrificing orphans to craft rings of wishes for free and wish for more rings of wishes or optimizing a knowledge check to summon Pazuzu and wish for whatever "add to the powers of an existing magic item" can mean).

Ahem

1. Make your piece of gravel looking phylactery your item familiar to grant it an ego score making it a construct creature.
2. Cast extended sequester on it, it is now immune to divinations and cannot be seen without magical items.
3. Proceed to drop the pebble off at a local brothel. No one will notice a pebble kicked under the bed even if they spent a 75,000gp item to search the room. And when you need to come back and renew the spell you can claim it's for other interests.

[khadgar567]

I am gonna use seerow's plan as it gives us constant money which gives us ability to tailor made monsters and as my 20 hd monster i am gonna use succubus which gonna be sacrifaced to start air mephid simulcara chain which gives us the workers need to keep trade empire going and thanks to his updates and succubus having much better charisma score we sell more for less investment and energy draining heroes team will help us for the long run by securing our reign. basing the setting as pathfinder i might need to craft or find three most important books in the setting( book of damned, angelic book of law and the neutural book of what ever) this gives us enough knowledge about true history of the universe which gives us ability to blackmail the heaven and hell to not claim us aka complete lobo style immunity to dead which allows us to enjoy the eternity until the universes reset time comes

[Yael]

>opens Manual of Monsters.
>searches for Lich King

I'd build him as a CR 50, 42HD Undead (lich) that casts as a 20th wizard and 14th level healer (priest variant). :smallbiggrin:

[Mind's Eye]

Just to clarify, the 20 undead are 20 hd of undead that do not count against any limit.

[The Kool]

Given no objections, I'll assume that I can follow my actually-played Lich's actually-played method of acquiring wealth.

ahem

Financial monopoly. Start a bank, expand to another city, start more banks, invest in kingdoms, expand to new lands, slowly "insist" all other financial institutions join my conglomerate. I own all the banks, and over the course of decades all major kingdoms have their wealth stored in the safest vaults known to the planes.

I own all the money.

[Segev]

Given no objections, I'll assume that I can follow my actually-played Lich's actually-played method of acquiring wealth.

ahem

Financial monopoly. Start a bank, expand to another city, start more banks, invest in kingdoms, expand to new lands, slowly "insist" all other financial institutions join my conglomerate. I own all the banks, and over the course of decades all major kingdoms have their wealth stored in the safest vaults known to the planes.

I own all the money.

Ah, so you're the Federal Reserve? :smallwink:

[The Kool]

Ah, so you're the Federal Reserve? :smallwink:

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