Quote Originally Posted by noob View Post
That is nonsense.
Due to the imperfect nature of language and due to the way language evolve someone who is unable to "have ideas" would after some time be unable to understand a portion of the new texts without external help due to the fact that very few texts describe the evolutions of language and due to the fact that many connection between words can contain meaning that the grammar and the words together do not have.
It is also impossible to understand the way other people write spells (unless wizard did standardisation relatively to the assumptions of the system) because wizards write their spells fundamentally differently from each other and as I said a text does not contain all the ideas that can be found by reading it.
It is even worse if the text is not written by someone that specifies absolutely everything because for each thing that is not specified (for example demonstration skipping) you are literally unable to find it unless you already knew it from another source.
Yes...and? That's a fundamental problem with being immortal in this setting. You constantly need someone else's input to keep you functional. The gods/ascended get it from their connections to the world (in a bunch of different ways, whether worship, downloaded from the Great Mechanism, or whatever). Those that try to be "independently immortal" fail. Because the First Law is that everything that lives must die. Whether physically or not, there are no true immortals. Without input from the outside, all creatures stagnate and fail.

Not having ideas basically makes basic language nearly impossible(after a while) unless there is some extreme force of stagnation enforcing complete non variance in the language and making so that people who write texts are forced to be extremely specific and to write everything in detail. (or making an assumption of the text magically imprinting with anima pertaining to the contained ideas but then someone who did not understand what they wrote despite writing the same text would have an impossible to understand text for people who are unable to make new anima which would result in many mortal wizards asking someone who does not understand magic to recopy their symbols in order to have a spellbook that can not be read easily by people who are long lived or eternal and other weird shenanigans like books being printed through automation being unreadable for immortals)

You made eternal life not being desirable due to the imperfection of the processes people uses instead of making it be a result of the fundamental mechanics (which is a bad thing if you fundamentally want eternal life to be bad).
And you have not proven how it is bad to become immortal through being a demon if you are a person which does not care about murder (which is the baseline for evil people wanting to be immortal).
Making eternal life undesirable is the whole point here. Feature, not bug. Immortals (outside of those with defined roles and thus compensating mechanisms built in) fundamentally represent a rejection of the world's order. As such they are doomed to stagnation and senescence to the degree that they try to go it alone.

As to demons...demons are not inherently evil. Dangerous, sure. Comes with tradeoffs, sure. For one thing, demons cannot interact with the mortal realm without corrupting it, because they are swarming with jotnar. As such, the structure of the world rejects them; demons without a steady food supply (the requirements for such accelerate as time goes on) in the mortal realm get ejected back to the Abyss. The only place they can exist in a stable fashion is in the Abyss. And there they have to fight both each other (for demons can feed on demons as well as on mortals, taking the stolen souls and adding them to their own supply) and the sucking draw of the Oblivion Gate. Demons are a precarious, unstable group of people. Sure, you won't die of old age. But in some respects, you're even more constrained than mortals.

Also you did not answer my question: would a lich be able to get the idea to research an assistant after taking a kingdom if they never had an assistant before?
The idea of having an assistant is something that anyone who reaches that ritual would have encountered, unless really really weird things are in play. So yeah, that's not a concern. In principle, they'd require someone to point it out to them.

By the way you have proven even more the overwhelming superiority in terms of intelligence of dragons hatchlings: due to them having an absurdly short lifespan they would have an absurd rate of idea creation (combined with their insane learning rate and the ability to generate lacking information out of nowhere proves them to be so much more intelligent than any other creature that measuring this intelligence would be nearly impossible).
Dragons have a very long lifespan as a species. Wyrmlings are dragons, they just don't stay wyrmlings forever. Those that fail to make the transformation die untimely, their potential cut short. The universe doesn't allocate based on individual lifetime as much as averaged species lifespan.

also

is incompatible with
"there is enough lich variety to have one pacifist lich"
Because people wanting to become liches and having the possibility to try to do so are insanely rare because you need to be very powerful(like level 12 when many lower levels were already told to be extremely rare), evil (because most people do not necessarily knows that it is possible to become a lich and not drain people to death), think they have the right ritual (which involves a high level of delusion or making yourself all the ritual from scratch with no outside sources in which case it is unlikely the lich would decide "it is a good idea to use a jonthar" and would probably devise another way which might be as much lethal but without that added risk) and also be willing to give up the pleasures of the flesh (which is unlikely if you are evil because let us face it: it is common draw toward many evil behaviours) on top of that you need to be a caster(ex: a bard, a wizard, a cleric, a sorcerer etc) which are also rare.
If you combine all that and make so that most who tries dies then you have like 1 lich every 10^12 people who lives or some other stupidly low value and it would prevent having liches that strand away from the norm too much. (ex: the lich which decided to use a hoard to feed itself)
So you need to make all of the following statements false to get sufficient liches despite the death rate: "High levels are rare", "Most people are not casters", "Knowledge about vampires is comparably rare to knowledge about liches" (because it is a very seducing alternative if you can just try to outsmart a low grade vampire to make it die just after it converts you even if you are likely to fail or to get trouble with higher rank vampires)
That or make so that somehow liches never ever get killed and that the setting had living sentients for so long that the only way for the state of things to be as it is currently would be an extreme force of stagnation causing medieval stasis for such absurd time spans it is unbelievable or that it is just a rule of physics of that setting like "it is impossible to create ideas that advance civilisation beyond the medieval era" or a recent apocalypse.
There is a pacifist lich despite probability. Because I've already written one in and he's appeared in play. Low probability events happen quite frequently, after all. And don't be so sure about the requirements for becoming a lich. Remember, I've already departed greatly from even the 5e canon here. The lich ritual is usually undertaken by those with arcane power, sure. But not always. Anyone can attempt it--it's not particularly complex. The moral prerequisites are non-starters for the vast majority of people, plus you need the knowledge (not power, but knowledge) to make contact with the Black Lord. The rest is pretty simple. So the primary filters are morality, knowledge, and then endurance.

And as for durations/medieval stasis--the world has had sentient life for ~25k years. And has been in and out of medieval stasis many times. There just seem to be these pesky apocalypses that keep popping up...

Age Timespan (before present) starting/ending tech level Ending event
Age of Tyrants 25k~12k Non-technological - Iron Age Orb of All Might gets used, breaking both titans and wyrm. Continent gets cracked in half.
Age of Wizardry/Age of Aelvar ~12k~4k Iron Age -- High Magitek (crystal spires/toga variety) Moon's Fall--the 3rd moon gets dropped on the aelvar capital. Eastern continent gets cracked into Noefra and Soefra
Interregnum ~4k~2k Iron Age, venturing up as far as early Medieval. Noefra mostly depopulated until creation of humans and orcs, then constant war. Rise of the Red Fang, the War of Blood (continent-scale war of annihilation)
Age of Man ~2k~250 ybp Iron Age - high magitek (soul-powered and mechanical this time) - mid-medieval Two events: the War of Souls (magical nuclear war) about 800 years ago, then the Cataclysm (all magic goes away for 50 years, planes changed, massive destruction, 70% mortality worldwide)
Age of Hope 250 BC - present early medieval - high medieval None...so far

So there's been lots of progress. It's accelerating and each cycle starts off slightly better than the last, but lots of knowledge and tech gets lost at each reset. Which usually come because people mess around with souls. Not as a direct consequence, but...
  • The Orb of All Might drew its power from most of the titan race, diminishing them to dwarves. Then it backfired and made a mess of everyone.
  • Moon's Fall capped off a continued effort by the aelvar to shape the souls of the ihmisi; they didn't like that and convinced the moon to fall.
  • The War of Blood happened because a hag tried to make a demonhost out of an orc, but the orc ate the jotnar instead, becoming a proto-demon himiself. Genocidal armies, and the rest is history.
  • The War of Souls happened because the Western Empire made dragonborn by injecting fragments of dragon souls into unborn human children. Factions didn't like that, and went nuclear.
  • The Cataclysm happened when the Nameless got free of the Abyss and led a host of demons and angry creatures around breaking things. Then adventurers got involved and...well...made a mess.


So soul magic is considered like nuclear waste to the Nth power. Only madmen, demon worshipers, and hags touch it.