Phylactery concept [MY PLAYERS OUT OUT OUT]

[shadow_archmagi]

Can you declare your phylactery to be something intangible?

IE: Poem, Drawing, math equation, libertarian system of belief....

Regardless of whether it is possible or not, what would some repercussions be? I'm thinking of having the players find a wizard's spellbook with a schematic for a strange box; the intelligent spellbook declares that this is the phylactery. The schematic itself is the phylactery; any time someone draws it the wizard has another respawn point.

[Shinizak]

I tried that once. My players had one hell of a ***** fit over it. I suggest not trying it for sake of ease.

[Allan Surgite]

...how would it work? How does the Lich respawn from something intangible? Does he appear in the mouth of whoever says the poem? Does he appear in the drawing and become "real"? Does the math equation = continued unlife? Does he appear in the face of his High Priest?

[shadow_archmagi]

...how would it work? How does the Lich respawn from something intangible? Does he appear in the mouth of whoever says the poem? Does he appear in the drawing and become "real"? Does the math equation = continued unlife? Does he appear in the face of his High Priest?

I'd like to think a crappy stick-figure lich climbs out of the box and then gradually becomes more detailed until he looks real and then climbs out of the book.

[sofawall]

Other forms of phylacteries can exist, such as rings, amulets, or similar items.

Intangible objects are not similar.

[Closak]

Well, there's that one guy who uses people's memories of him as a type of phylactery.
As long as anyone remembers that he exists he just keeps coming back over and over, and due to having had such a big impact on the world pretty much everyone knows who he is.

Add in that this also applies to people in the afterlife who remembers him...

Unkillable villain much?

Admitedly he's more of a ghost/revenant/evil spirit/whatever than a lich...

[Bayar]

Phylacteries need to be made out of tough material to not sunder easily. Get an osmium bolt as your phylactery, mount it somewhere on a warforged titan.

[Edwin]

Well, there's that one guy who uses people's memories of him as a type of phylactery.
As long as anyone remembers that he exists he just keeps coming back over and over, and due to having had such a big impact on the world pretty much everyone knows who he is.

Add in that this also applies to people in the afterlife who remembers him...

Unkillable villain much?

Admitedly he's more of a ghost/revenant/evil spirit/whatever than a lich...

Freddy?

Edit: admittedly, that was more of a fear than a memory thing.

[SparkMandriller]

IE: Poem, Drawing, math equation, libertarian system of belief....

120000 gp worth of poem, huh? I wonder how you'd measure that.

[Emmerask]

Can you declare your phylactery to be something intangible?

IE: Poem, Drawing, math equation, libertarian system of belief....

Regardless of whether it is possible or not, what would some repercussions be? I'm thinking of having the players find a wizard's spellbook with a schematic for a strange box; the intelligent spellbook declares that this is the phylactery. The schematic itself is the phylactery; any time someone draws it the wizard has another respawn point.

You are the dm you can declare whatever you want

So if they want to kill the lich they would need to hunt down any such drawing, after they have discovered that each drawing is a pyhlactery .
This seems like a pretty undoable task to me it could have been copied thousands of times and could be anywhere (drawn inside a cave, in some random book on an emtpy page etcetc).

I do like the idea of an intangible phylactery very much but the pc´s still need a chance to destroy the evil I think^^
So how about a book is a phylactery not the book itself but its contents if the book is copied the lich gets another respawn point (lots easier to track down book copies then a random drawing)

Anyway if you stick to the drawing phylactery I would impose the following rules to the integible phylacterys:
-It can only be copied x amounts of times ie you can only split your soul so many times) [Yes I do copy shamelessly from Harry Potter :-P]

-After that maximum amount any further drawing is just that a drawing

-Each time a Phylactery is destroyed the part of soul in it is destroyed too
If the Lich realizes that or not is up to you

-due to having a part of the superpowerful lich in it each drawing is magical and can defend itself (yes yes like in Harry Potter -.-)

-Put each drawing in a different environment and have it defend itself accordingly (ie one is in a library it will create lots of animated objects (books) to attack for example)

[sofawall]

Phylacteries need to be made out of tough material to not sunder easily. Get an osmium bolt as your phylactery, mount it somewhere on a warforged titan.

Why not obdurium?

[Closak]

Freddy?

Edit: admittedly, that was more of a fear than a memory thing.

Not quite.

Think about it for a minute.


Uses the memories that others have of him in order to pull his conciousness and essence back together when killed, then proceeds to use sheer willpower to avoid going where people are supposed to go after death, thus leaving him with the issue of getting a physical presence.
Once that problem is solved he be back again.

It is possible to stop the "Regain a physical body" part of the process, but he still won't be really dead so ultimately you can't get rid of him.

[shadow_archmagi]

This seems like a pretty undoable task to me it could have been copied thousands of times and could be anywhere (drawn inside a cave, in some random book on an emtpy page etcetc).

That would depend on just how you defined the drawing. If "All squares are meeee" then yeah, it'd be nigh unstoppable. But if it were something complicated like

http://www.leonardoda-vinci.org/Flying-Machine.jpg

Then it's unlikely there would be all that many copies. In fact, it'd mostly just be the copies that the PCs draw and hand out saying "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?"

[Foryn Gilnith]

120000 gp worth of poem, huh? I wonder how you'd measure that.

Just use the Craft rules in Races of Stone. :) You'd need a collection of poetry to be your phylactery, though, given the values listed. Even if they're all haikus...

[Rainbownaga]

libertarian system of belief

Woah, I like that: crush all hope for equality and human rites in the local village or the lich will come back and get you.

[Jokasti]

It gets really fun when these concepts are on a Secret Page...

[Willfor]

Woah, I like that: crush all hope for equality and human rites in the local village or the lich will come back and get you.

Give the players a hook that leads them to kill/remove a seemingly horrible despot from the area. The village reverts to its old free ways. The lich begins reforming...

[Optimystik]

Libris Mortis expands on the MM entry.

"The phylactery can exist in other forms as well, though it must either contain or bear an arcane inscription. Regardless of the phylactery’s form, its game statistics remain the same: size Tiny, hp 40, hardness 20, break DC 40."

A poem does not have Hardness 20 and cannot be broken, so I doubt it. Now if you put the poem on a piece of parchment that's another matter.

[Khatoblepas]

A poem does not have Hardness 20 and cannot be broken, so I doubt it. Now if you put the poem on a piece of parchment that's another matter.

What about a riddle, the player's least favorite puzzle choice ever? That has a measurement of hardness, and you can crack a riddle, at least. The puzzle isn't to solve the riddle, it's to make the riddle seem ridiculous and offer valid but wrong answers...

.. breaking the riddle. B3

[Rainbownaga]

Getting back to the drawing thing, if you just wanted the lich to reform out of a stick figure drawing, making that specific book or image a phylactary would be totally within the acceptable ranges of what is given (not that you're technically limmited to that).

Given the medieval nature of the game, making duplicates of the book (restricted to using certain magical inks or some-such) count as additional phylacteries is cool because it makes a type of sense (inscribing your soul onto a

What i think is awesome is that, given the medieval setting, copying illuminated scripts is a slow and laborious process, and magic that could speed the process wouldn't create 'true copies'. Suddenly, the players become aware of a new technology, the wood-block print. Will they be able to stop the lich before he can set up a production chain making him effectively immortal?

[shadow_archmagi]

Woah, I like that: crush all hope for equality and human rites in the local village or the lich will come back and get you.

Sounds like something out of 40k

"IF ANYONE AT ALL SO MUCH AS *THINKS* ABOUT FREEDOM, AN EVIL WIZARD APPEARS.

[ericgrau]

The most common phylactery is a box of significant size.

Other forms of phylacteries can exist, such as rings, amulets, or similar items.

That and the common box suggest that every lich out there and his brother isn't trying to hide his phylactery by making it seemingly unimportant. "Similar items" implies that it cannot be such a thing. It is a significant magic item. The PCs detect magic it, find it, identify it as a phylactery and destroy it. Or if the lich is smart he Nystul's Magic Auras it. Then the PCs have to do some investigation (hmm, there's a "non-magical" amulet tucked under a floorboard) and/or area dispels. Get over making it into a grain of sand or 1000 other easy to think up and hard to find objects. That's not clever, it's dumb and annoying.

[Chrono22]

Polymorph Any Object the phylactery into a living creature.

[Emmerask]

Libris Mortis expands on the MM entry.

"The phylactery can exist in other forms as well, though it must either contain or bear an arcane inscription. Regardless of the phylactery’s form, its game statistics remain the same: size Tiny, hp 40, hardness 20, break DC 40."

A poem does not have Hardness 20 and cannot be broken, so I doubt it. Now if you put the poem on a piece of parchment that's another matter.

Well if some "rule" stands in the way of a good plot or story there is only one thing a dm can do... bend or break it
Well it depends on the players of course if they like original stuff or if they stick by the official rules no matter what, such players wouldn´t be happy in my campaigns but to each his own

And if your players really want an official explanation just say that some epic spell was used (can do anything with that anyway:-P) to create an epic phylactery :-P

Anyway I really like the idea of an intengible phylactery and will put something like that in my campaign too

[Haven]

It would be awesome, therefore yes.

[RiOrius]

I like the idea of making it an intangible object, but I don't really like the consequences you're talking about. Specifically, the business of making copies to grant additional phylacteries.

I think it'd be totally cools if there were a poem that was the lich's phylactery. But it would be some mystical poem that only one person could know at a time. If you spoke the poem aloud, the person nearest you would hear it and remember it, and you would forget it (along with everyone else within earshot; they'd hear it, but couldn't remember it). And then to destroy the phylactery, you'd have to kill whoever currently has possession of the poem.

Similarly, with the drawing idea: if the drawing is ever copied, the previous original vanishes. The power is in the drawing, not in the object. So by some (possibly contrived) means, the PC's can see the drawing on a shield, but lose the shield. Later, the lich has moved the phylactery onto the trunk of a withered tree, etc. I'm not sure how you'd get it to work (since to be really awesome the PC's would need to see it on different objects), but it could be pretty awesome if you pulled it off.

But yeah, the whole "every copy of this schematic is another fully functional phylactery" seems kinda wrong, IMHO.

The whole idea is clearly against RAW, so you're definitely getting into DM Fiat territory, where the question is no longer "is it legal" but rather "will the players enjoy it", and I'd probably not in the latter case. It'd just be annoying to never know how many copies there are, y'know? Kinda ruins the climax of destroying the lich, which I tend to think the players deserve. If you do go through with it, make sure there's some way that the players can know that they've got 'em all, so they still get closure.

[Rainbownaga]

Anybody else get the mental image of the characters walking into a city only to find the lich's phylactery-sigil scrawled hundreds of times on walls, doors and windowframes throughout the city?

[Sstoopidtallkid]

The most common phylactery is a box of significant size.

That and the common box suggest that every lich out there and his brother isn't trying to hide his phylactery by making it seemingly unimportant. "Similar items" implies that it cannot be such a thing. It is a significant magic item. The PCs detect magic it, find it, identify it as a phylactery and destroy it. Or if the lich is smart he Nystul's Magic Auras it. Then the PCs have to do some investigation (hmm, there's a "non-magical" amulet tucked under a floorboard) and/or area dispels. Get over making it into a grain of sand or 1000 other easy to think up and hard to find objects. That's not clever, it's dumb and annoying.

Polymorph Any Object.

Also, WotC should have gone into more detail on what is required to become a Lich. If we knew why the phylactary is usually(but, very specifically, not always) that shape, it would give us a better idea of what's possible.

[Rainbownaga]

That and the common box suggest that every lich out there and his brother isn't trying to hide his phylactery by making it seemingly unimportant. "Similar items" implies that it cannot be such a thing. It is a significant magic item. The PCs detect magic it, find it, identify it as a phylactery and destroy it. Or if the lich is smart he Nystul's Magic Auras it. Then the PCs have to do some investigation (hmm, there's a "non-magical" amulet tucked under a floorboard) and/or area dispels. Get over making it into a grain of sand or 1000 other easy to think up and hard to find objects. That's not clever, it's dumb and annoying.

I agree totally. IMHO there are two ways of running a lich. In the first case, you have a recurring enemy who will continually attack you until you finally storm his base and break the phylactery hidden somewhere in his base. Messing around with different shapes isn't useful.

The second way is to make finding and destroying the phylactery a mystery and puzzle in itself. I agree, making it a grain of sand or the lich's toilet brush isn't really helpful, but the examples in this thread are. You can force moral dillemas, make the party feel intimidated by the lich having an indefinite number of them, force them to track down some bric-a-brac that got sold in a market stall and changed hands a dozen times before the players realised its significance.

It's all good

[Zephyros]

Sounds like something out of 40k

"IF ANYONE AT ALL SO MUCH AS *THINKS* ABOUT FREEDOM, AN EVIL WIZARD APPEARS.

I once did that using the ToB's adaptation on JPM (the eeeeeevil Obsidian Destroyers as I named them...) "The Evil of the Order has haunted the memories of the people..."

All the players confessed that "if the story wasn't so damn good" they would have gone "PURGATUS on my ass".

(on a side note it was the first time I saw a paladin trading levels to get at Black guard 10 asap and then continuing with Crusader.)