[3.5]Clone and Lich, do they stack.

[Nightmarenny]

In the core MM it doesn't say anything about souls. So assuming a Lich still has his soul could he cast clone incase both he and his phylactery were destroyed? Would he come back as a Lich or the Base Creature?

[Rhiannon87]

I think what's going to prevent it is this clause in Clone:

To create the duplicate, you must have a piece of flesh (not hair, nails, scales, or the like) with a volume of at least 1 cubic inch that was taken from the original creature’s living body. The piece of flesh need not be fresh, but it must be kept from rotting.

Liches, as per the description, are undead and rotting, and thus unable to provide that material component.

Now. If you had someone cast Clone prior to becoming a lich, things become a bit more unclear, and the questions of does undead count as dead and what happens to a lich's soul become much more important.

[HamsterOfTheGod]

In the core MM it doesn't say anything about souls. So assuming a Lich still has his soul could he cast clone incase both he and his phylactery were destroyed? Would he come back as a Lich or the Base Creature?

I would say no. The lich being undead can be considered to be have died (and is now undead) for the purposes of the clone spell and so the clone spell would fail. Similarly raise dead fails on undead. The metagaming reason is that cloning a lich is too good a trick even if you then have to worry about the age of the lich in order to whether the clone would work.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The lich being undead can be considered to be have died (and is now undead) for the purposes of the clone spell and so the clone spell would fail.

Actually, you don't need to worry about semantics, because the process of becoming a lich involves committing suicide--as soon as you tried to become a lich, you'd wake up in the clone first.

[HamsterOfTheGod]

Actually, you don't need to worry about semantics, because the process of becoming a lich involves committing suicide--as soon as you tried to become a lich, you'd wake up in the clone first.

Even better!