Quote Originally Posted by Segev View Post
We've already had some such discussion, with people commenting that something ongoing may be NECESSARY to create such genuine evil. After all, if one has an eternity to do good, how could one act stain all of that? We've also had examples of the kinds of acts one might do (murdering your own children has come up), with people chiming in as to why they find that insufficiently evil.

I contend that a lich tainting things by his existence doesn't qualify mainly because it ceases then to be a factor of his creation of the phylactery, and more a factor of his continued being.

But what if the act required the destruction of all hope for potential of a certain great good? Perhaps it consumes the potential lives of a family line, race, or species. Perhaps it cuts off through murder something that would have been a great force for good. Perhaps it so ruins a person or thing that it now creates harm when it could have created weal for many.

What if the act requires a great act of divination to even perform successfully: you must find the as-yet unrealized youths, children, babies, or parents of as-yet unborn such...who will one day become a party with a great destiny for good, and ritually sacrifice them all so that you can consume their destiny. Each time a depravity goes unthwarted, each time an evil grows unabated, and each time innocents suffer where they would not have thanks to the actions of that party, the lich's phylactery draws power to hold the lich's life force to the mortal plane. As one example of a potential evil act.

You could, again, even gauge it such that the divinations also rely on a hint of how much good the lich has the potential to do with his eternal existence, and thus require the sacrifices to be of a group who would have exceeded that good, through direct or indirect consequence-trees.

And this is getting into another reason why I don't like it. It's thematic, not factual. It's not "here's what the would-be lich must do, is it evil?", it's "what the would-be lich has to do MUST be evil, so no matter how far you have to imagine for it to be evil, that's what it is". It's a bottomless rabbit-hole, and evil just because it must be evil on this side of the 4th wall.


IMO, the only way this works is if it's the in-setting truth of the matter -- that the would-be lich has to do something that he/she considers too evil to be redeemed from, too awful to contemplate, to vile to even consider. Whatever ancient arch-necromancer or evil trickster god cursed humanity with the ritual purposefully made it that way, intentionally.