How would you create and then protect YOUR lich phylactery?

[eyebreaker7]

Your preparing for lichdom and need to make your phylactery. What do you use, how do you protect it and how do you hide it?
The level at which you make it is whatever level YOU would be when you make it. Class is your choice as well. Just please don't get all crazy on me. I probably don't have half the books you'll want to use.
It doesn't have to be the common box.
How much do you have to spend on the whole deal is up to you to reasonably determine how much money you would have at your level.


"The most common form of phylactery is a sealed metal box containing strips of parchment on which magical phrases have been transcribed. The box is Tiny and has 40 hit points, hardness 20, and a break DC of 40."

[Segev]

An intelligent but nondescript sword magically disguised to faintly radiate and detect as good-aligned with the special purpose of protecting me, given out to “chosen ones” that it may pick, itself, and generally going on quests to do good deeds.


The classic box, sealed inside a gravestone in a normal graveyard with nondetection cast on it or with the gravestone designed to radiate no more evil or magic than the background level in the graveyard.


Encased in a golem. The toughest I can build. Maybe a shield guardian, or as the control amulet for a shield guardian, so that they think it’s loot.


A stone box filled with magical writing, but enormous: it’s a library. Either one designed for continual use so none realize it’s important beyond that use, or perhaps designed as a dungeon that supposedly contains the phylactery so those who get that close and find it think the box at the center of it is their goal.

[Melcar]

Your preparing for lichdom and need to make your phylactery. What do you use, how do you protect it and how do you hide it?
The level at which you make it is whatever level YOU would be when you make it. Class is your choice as well. Just please don't get all crazy on me. I probably don't have half the books you'll want to use.
It doesn't have to be the common box.
How much do you have to spend on the whole deal is up to you to reasonably determine how much money you would have at your level.


"The most common form of phylactery is a sealed metal box containing strips of parchment on which magical phrases have been transcribed. The box is Tiny and has 40 hit points, hardness 20, and a break DC of 40."

I would first of all make "the box" out of a 1" thick Oerthblooded Pureore Obdurium for hardness 120, 180 HP per inch of thickness and put 2 amazing locks on. Thereafter I would put the following enchantments on:

Resistance to energy (Major)
Sign of Sealing, Greater (Maximized)
Improved Arcane Lock
Hidden Ward
Augment Object
Hardness
Dragoneye Rune
Symbol of Spell Loss
Watchware
Invisibility
Glyph of Warding, Greater (Spell)
Fireburst, Greater (Maximized)


If possible, I would heighten everyone of the above spells to level 9

I would probably hide it on a pocket plane, but if that was out of the question, I would hide it somewhere in my personal vault! Well guarded by by a number of appropriate golems...

EDIT: The phylactery itself, the small bauble which actually contains the lich's soul, I would again make out of Oerthblooded Pureore Obdurium, but I would either make it as a medal/ large coin, with my personal rune on one side and possible my deity's symbol on the other. Or, maybe make it into an ornate dagger. That way, I can put weapon enchants on it, and my enemies might mistake if for just a weapon and use it instead of destroying it!

[Celestia]

Step 1: Disguise yourself as a living person, preferably an elf. Use whatever means necessary to ensure that this disguise can remain flawless for hundreds of years (slightly modify the disguise as necessary to make it appear like you're gradually aging).

Step 2: Travel back in time as far as you can go, the further the better.

Step 3: Find (or create) a royal couple with fertility issues. Approach them as a friendly wizard and offer your services to help them produce their heir. Discretely polymorph your phylactery into a fertilized egg which you then magically implant into the queen.

Step 4: Your phylactery becomes the prince of the kingdom, and when you are offered a reward, request only that you continue your services to the crown by serving as the new prince's tutor.

Step 5: Work in the background to build a kingdom of just and moral righteousness, a beacon Good across the world with the only "flaw" being that the royal family is notoriously slutty with countless bastard children, spreading the DNA of your phylactery as wide as possible.

Step 6: After reaching the end of your fake life, return to the present. If all went according to plan, your phylactery should now reside within the bodies of millions of people, including the entire royal family of the greatest kingdom in the world. If any foolish heroes wish to kill you, they will not only have to commit mass genocide, but they will also have to desecrate millions of bodies to destroy your phylactery, including digging up the graves of everyone for the past however many centuries that still have your phylactery in their bones. And after all that, they'll still probably fail because if they miss even one body, your phylactery is still safe.

Step 7: Do whatever you want as the undead abomination that you are, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever try to destroy you.

[noob]

Make your phylactery be something that when destroyed results in the end of the entire setting then laugh as you did not gain any extra weak point.
Alternatively be a ghost in addition to being a lich and a worms that walks so that your phylactery is irrelevant.

[liquidformat]

Step 1: Disguise yourself as a living person, preferably an elf. Use whatever means necessary to ensure that this disguise can remain flawless for hundreds of years (slightly modify the disguise as necessary to make it appear like you're gradually aging).

Step 2: Travel back in time as far as you can go, the further the better.

Step 3: Find (or create) a royal couple with fertility issues. Approach them as a friendly wizard and offer your services to help them produce their heir. Discretely polymorph your phylactery into a fertilized egg which you then magically implant into the queen.

Step 4: Your phylactery becomes the prince of the kingdom, and when you are offered a reward, request only that you continue your services to the crown by serving as the new prince's tutor.

Step 5: Work in the background to build a kingdom of just and moral righteousness, a beacon Good across the world with the only "flaw" being that the royal family is notoriously slutty with countless bastard children, spreading the DNA of your phylactery as wide as possible.

Step 6: After reaching the end of your fake life, return to the present. If all went according to plan, your phylactery should now reside within the bodies of millions of people, including the entire royal family of the greatest kingdom in the world. If any foolish heroes wish to kill you, they will not only have to commit mass genocide, but they will also have to desecrate millions of bodies to destroy your phylactery, including digging up the graves of everyone for the past however many centuries that still have your phylactery in their bones. And after all that, they'll still probably fail because if they miss even one body, your phylactery is still safe.

Step 7: Do whatever you want as the undead abomination that you are, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever try to destroy you.

This is brilliant!

[Shirow]

Step 1: Disguise yourself as a living person, preferably an elf. Use whatever means necessary to ensure that this disguise can remain flawless for hundreds of years (slightly modify the disguise as necessary to make it appear like you're gradually aging).

Step 2: Travel back in time as far as you can go, the further the better.

Step 3: Find (or create) a royal couple with fertility issues. Approach them as a friendly wizard and offer your services to help them produce their heir. Discretely polymorph your phylactery into a fertilized egg which you then magically implant into the queen.

Step 4: Your phylactery becomes the prince of the kingdom, and when you are offered a reward, request only that you continue your services to the crown by serving as the new prince's tutor.

Step 5: Work in the background to build a kingdom of just and moral righteousness, a beacon Good across the world with the only "flaw" being that the royal family is notoriously slutty with countless bastard children, spreading the DNA of your phylactery as wide as possible.

Step 6: After reaching the end of your fake life, return to the present. If all went according to plan, your phylactery should now reside within the bodies of millions of people, including the entire royal family of the greatest kingdom in the world. If any foolish heroes wish to kill you, they will not only have to commit mass genocide, but they will also have to desecrate millions of bodies to destroy your phylactery, including digging up the graves of everyone for the past however many centuries that still have your phylactery in their bones. And after all that, they'll still probably fail because if they miss even one body, your phylactery is still safe.

Step 7: Do whatever you want as the undead abomination that you are, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever try to destroy you.

Sweet Jesus, that's eveil.
You'd have to be sealed forever in a way that you cannot destroy yourself I guess? So you'd need a failsafe against that as well I guess. But if you can time travel you probably have hyper epic capabilities.
Do you imagine growing simultaneously in all of the bodies of this descendants if you're destroyed? Or do you pick one?
Do they perhaps get any dark magic perks?
I'd seriously read this novel.

---

Some sort of invulnerable minute sarcophagus inside a star. Access to streaming services. Maybe it changes from star to star every once in a while.
The usual abjurations. Some star detonating traps that also teleport it somewhere else so the good guys can't come knocking in without the help of the gods or something in that order of magnitude.

[ExLibrisMortis]

I usually prefer to use baelnorn (good lich variant, MoF) to avoid the problem entirely, but if you have to have a phylactery, make it a fragment of voidstone, and send it spinning across the negative energy plane.

[Efrate]

Inside an otherwise unremarkable golem. encase In riverine first if you must but have it inside one (or more) of several stone golems. Iron has some value, flesh rots, clay is easily molded. But stone is difficult to break and not worth ripping apart. It's very nice in a room covered in anti magic with dead adventurer bodies "smashed" by the golems with loot on them in various stages of rumination. If in a room with multiple golems and blanketed in anti magic have it be in one of several destroyed golem left in said area.

[InvisibleBison]

Basic Scenario - for a lich who's just getting started: Planar bind an earth elemental. Have it hollow out a small room ~10 miles underground. Line the walls of the room with lead and fill it with poisonous gas. Stash your phylactery in the room, along with whatever undead or construct guardians you can obtain. Any would-be phylactery smashers would have difficulty finding the room, as the lead lining blocks most divinations. If they manage to find its location, they'll have to teleport into it with at most a 76% chance of success unless they're able to use greater teleport. Once they get there, they'll have to deal with the extreme heat (assuming a roughly earthlike planet, temperatures 10 miles underground would be around 800 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit), the poisonous gas, and the guardians, at least one of which they're likely to be unprepared for.

More Advanced Scenario - for a lich who's amassed a good amount of resources: Construct a few dozen of the rooms from the basic scenario. Put a skeleton and a teleport object trap in each one. Order the skeleton to activate the trap whenever anyone other than you arrives in the room. Thus, if the phylactery-smashers manage to get to the room that actually has your phylactery in it it will be immediately teleported to another room, greatly increasing the amount of work that needs to be done to actually smash the phylactery and putting the smashers at a commensurately greater risk of being killed by the guardians of one of the rooms.

[sleepyphoenixx]

I take a completely unremarkable rock (something hard like granite), ward it against divination and drop it at the bottom of an cave that has similar rocks.
Then i put some decent treasure there, create some undead guardians and ward the place with everything in the books.

Anyone who gets through the defenses will hopefully assume they're protecting the treasure and leave the rocks alone.

[Rijan_Sai]

Amounts of Pure EVIL

I, too, enjoy destroying a beehive with a nuclear warhead!

Right... so...

*Note: If Arcane Genesis allows for planar-trait control, can skip the first two steps.*
1) Become Epic-leveled (before or after lichdom is not too important.)

2) Research an epic version of Genesis that allows for full planar-trait control.

3) Create a demi-plane with the Fast-flowing Time and Major Positive-Dominant planar traits.*

4) Once expanded enough, build your lair/keep/castle; in one of the hardest to access areas, build a "Treasure Trove."

5(optional-if Epic level)) Research a variant of Fragmented Phylactery (CoR37), and use it to fill the "Treasure Trove" as much as possible (magically disguising them with the "standard" defenses, as usual), supplementing other treasures as needed to fill most of the room. Also spread out a few of them throughout the cosmology (Kingdom treasure vaults; dragon hoards (<-pre-arrange this one with the dragon if possible); etc.) Not a lot, but enough that they will be difficult to track down...

6) Set up a separate. "Teleport-access Only" chamber for step 8.

7) "Recruit" a small army of undead creatures to guard your lair.

8) Never leave. Do all your adventuring "eviling" anything-you-would-want-to-do-for-the-rest-of-your-existence through use of the Astral Projection spell.**

*

Spoiler: Why Those Traits

Show

Fast-flowing Time: You're undead, so the passage of time is really no concern; also, while you may need to take some time in your sanctum for research/spell recovery/whatever, your "adventuring time" on (i.e.) the Material Plane is not delayed.
Major Positive-Dominant: Look at the entry for Positive-Dominant planes, then the entry for Undead. Now read them again. Note that the undead entry does not specifically call out positive energy as harming undead, and also that the "fast healing special quality works..." and that undead are immune to "any effect that requires a Fortitude save (unless the effect also works on objects or is harmless)."
So now any adventurer that wants to permanently remove the cosmology of you has to:
Find your demi-plane; figure out how to access it; deal with a small army of undead with potentially NI HP; find your "Treasure Trove"; determine which (if any) are the "True Phylactery"; and destroy it (or "them", if step 5 was completed). All while dealing the potential time-bomb of the Positive Energy Demi-plane they stepped into!
None of those are insurmountable by the determined adventurer, but certainly enough of a delay for an escape, if needed!

Oh! Almost forgot: if you are a wizard-base, make sure to either take the Eidetic Spellcaster ACF (Drag. 357 pg. 89), or have some form of alternate spellbook (CAr 186) for at least the most important spells (Plane Shift/Teleport/Whatever else may be needed) - recommended tatoos, carved into your bones if need be. Those should reform with you.

**

Spoiler: Secondary Question, not Directly Related to the Post

Show

Out of curiosity, what actually happens if a Githyanki(?) attacks (and even destroys) a lich's silver cord while they are astral projecting? I would guess the lich would be "killed" and reform 1d10 days later as normal but I'm not sure... (also, when you have created a "new physical body" on another plane, can you return to the Astral Plane, or are you stuck there until the body is destroyed and you are returned to your primary body?)

[King of Nowhere]

those things rely on some specificities of my campaign world, but here is how some of my most powerful liches protected themselves

1) give your philactery to minions allies. for this to work, you need allies you can trust. if you are the strongest wizard loial to a major nation, or the high priest of a widespread religion, then giving your philactery to your trusted underlings is the most sensible approach.

2) put your philactery in an anonymous safety in a bank. this works because in my world there are banks with the protections needed to keep off even high level adventurers. of course, if they have this kind of power, then they are also pretty competent and they will certainly figure out that you're giving them your philactery. they will ask you for a steep price, but as you are a high level spellcaster, you can barter it with a few days every year of working to reinforce their magical protections.

3) cast the best anti-divinations available on the phylactery, encase it in lead, then drop the thing in magma to create a perfect ordinary-looking rock. hide it in a very remote, but unremarkable, place. in my setting the best choice is the moon, as teleporting there won't work and there's no known workaround to get there than spending several years flying.

4) don't instigate conflicts.
seriously, avoid giving powerful people reasons to try to kill you. you'd be surprised how effective that is at curtailing the number of people actually trying to kill you.

Step 1: Disguise yourself as a living person, preferably an elf. Use whatever means necessary to ensure that this disguise can remain flawless for hundreds of years (slightly modify the disguise as necessary to make it appear like you're gradually aging).

Step 2: Travel back in time as far as you can go, the further the better.

Step 3: Find (or create) a royal couple with fertility issues. Approach them as a friendly wizard and offer your services to help them produce their heir. Discretely polymorph your phylactery into a fertilized egg which you then magically implant into the queen.

Step 4: Your phylactery becomes the prince of the kingdom, and when you are offered a reward, request only that you continue your services to the crown by serving as the new prince's tutor.

Step 5: Work in the background to build a kingdom of just and moral righteousness, a beacon Good across the world with the only "flaw" being that the royal family is notoriously slutty with countless bastard children, spreading the DNA of your phylactery as wide as possible.

Step 6: After reaching the end of your fake life, return to the present. If all went according to plan, your phylactery should now reside within the bodies of millions of people, including the entire royal family of the greatest kingdom in the world. If any foolish heroes wish to kill you, they will not only have to commit mass genocide, but they will also have to desecrate millions of bodies to destroy your phylactery, including digging up the graves of everyone for the past however many centuries that still have your phylactery in their bones. And after all that, they'll still probably fail because if they miss even one body, your phylactery is still safe.

Step 7: Do whatever you want as the undead abomination that you are, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever try to destroy you.

would that actually work?
making your philactery a living person, and then having all offspring of this person be also your philacteries, would require not just bending the rules, but throwing them out of the window.

[GrayDeath]

I take a completely unremarkable rock (something hard like granite), ward it against divination and drop it at the bottom of an cave that has similar rocks.
Then i put some decent treasure there, create some undead guardians and ward the place with everything in the books.

Anyone who gets through the defenses will hopefully assume they're protecting the treasure and leave the rocks alone.

Without knowing the exact setting and variant of rules available, that.

With it, I`df probably try to create a non glossy, black, extrahard one that survives easily in space, bind a "Return to plane X, place X" (namelky my supersecret plane i us eONLY for hiding) to it, and send it off into the voids of outer space.

those things rely on some specificities of my campaign world, but here is how some of my most powerful liches protected themselves

1) give your philactery to minions allies. for this to work, you need allies you can trust. if you are the strongest wizard loial to a major nation, or the high priest of a widespread religion, then giving your philactery to your trusted underlings is the most sensible approach.

2) put your philactery in an anonymous safety in a bank. this works because in my world there are banks with the protections needed to keep off even high level adventurers. of course, if they have this kind of power, then they are also pretty competent and they will certainly figure out that you're giving them your philactery. they will ask you for a steep price, but as you are a high level spellcaster, you can barter it with a few days every year of working to reinforce their magical protections.

3) cast the best anti-divinations available on the phylactery, encase it in lead, then drop the thing in magma to create a perfect ordinary-looking rock. hide it in a very remote, but unremarkable, place. in my setting the best choice is the moon, as teleporting there won't work and there's no known workaround to get there than spending several years flying.

4) don't instigate conflicts.
seriously, avoid giving powerful people reasons to try to kill you. you'd be surprised how effective that is at curtailing the number of people actually trying to kill you.



would that actually work?
making your philactery a living person, and then having all offspring of this person be also your philacteries, would require not just bending the rules, but throwing them out of the window.

Sadly, no.

The Phylactery must be "an Item". As soon as it is true polimorphed, it stops being your phylactery until that change is removed, and if you makle a fertile foetus out of it, it cant be returned to its original form as soon as it is born.

Hella cool idea though. ^^

[noob]

those things rely on some specificities of my campaign world, but here is how some of my most powerful liches protected themselves

1) give your philactery to minions allies. for this to work, you need allies you can trust. if you are the strongest wizard loial to a major nation, or the high priest of a widespread religion, then giving your philactery to your trusted underlings is the most sensible approach.

2) put your philactery in an anonymous safety in a bank. this works because in my world there are banks with the protections needed to keep off even high level adventurers. of course, if they have this kind of power, then they are also pretty competent and they will certainly figure out that you're giving them your philactery. they will ask you for a steep price, but as you are a high level spellcaster, you can barter it with a few days every year of working to reinforce their magical protections.

3) cast the best anti-divinations available on the phylactery, encase it in lead, then drop the thing in magma to create a perfect ordinary-looking rock. hide it in a very remote, but unremarkable, place. in my setting the best choice is the moon, as teleporting there won't work and there's no known workaround to get there than spending several years flying.

4) don't instigate conflicts.
seriously, avoid giving powerful people reasons to try to kill you. you'd be surprised how effective that is at curtailing the number of people actually trying to kill you.



would that actually work?
making your philactery a living person, and then having all offspring of this person be also your philacteries, would require not just bending the rules, but throwing them out of the window.

If you make your phylactery be an ooze since oozes turns into smaller copies of themselves would the smaller copies get to be phylacteries?
Are cells oozes?
If cells works like ooze if someone gets to have one of their cells become a level 1 wizard would there be a risk to get a tumour made out of a whole lot of small wizards?

Essentially if it works it means that everything was already messed up and that everyone was at risk to die killed by armies of hundreds of billions of tiny wizards.

[zlefin]

I make the standard box phylactery and put it on my mantle. Once I've achieved lichdom, I don't really need anything else, and conquest is such a bother. So I just sit around at home all day being a couch potato, and scrying or something to get an entertainment source. I don't plan on ever going out anymore now that I'm immortal and don't need to.

[Telonius]

An intelligent but nondescript sword magically disguised to faintly radiate and detect as good-aligned with the special purpose of protecting me, given out to “chosen ones” that it may pick, itself, and generally going on quests to do good deeds.

I pulled a version of this on my players once. Bad guy was a Dracolich. It kept a +5 Dragonbane sword in his hoard. The phylactery was embedded in the lead scabbard. So, if it was ever defeated, the heroes would go out and slay some more dragons, creating more dead dragon bodies for the Dracolich to inhabit.

[Segev]

I pulled a version of this on my players once. Bad guy was a Dracolich. It kept a +5 Dragonbane sword in his hoard. The phylactery was embedded in the lead scabbard. So, if it was ever defeated, the heroes would go out and slay some more dragons, creating more dead dragon bodies for the Dracolich to inhabit.

Nicely done! Evil and pragmatic!

[aglondier]

I pulled a version of this on my players once. Bad guy was a Dracolich. It kept a +5 Dragonbane sword in his hoard. The phylactery was embedded in the lead scabbard. So, if it was ever defeated, the heroes would go out and slay some more dragons, creating more dead dragon bodies for the Dracolich to inhabit.

A magebane weapon would go a fair way to achieving this for a regular lich...it's easy enough to disguise the magical aura to hide its true nature from the players.

[Pinkie Pyro]

Step 1: Disguise yourself as a living person, preferably an elf. Use whatever means necessary to ensure that this disguise can remain flawless for hundreds of years (slightly modify the disguise as necessary to make it appear like you're gradually aging).

Step 2: Travel back in time as far as you can go, the further the better.

Step 3: Find (or create) a royal couple with fertility issues. Approach them as a friendly wizard and offer your services to help them produce their heir. Discretely polymorph your phylactery into a fertilized egg which you then magically implant into the queen.

Step 4: Your phylactery becomes the prince of the kingdom, and when you are offered a reward, request only that you continue your services to the crown by serving as the new prince's tutor.

Step 5: Work in the background to build a kingdom of just and moral righteousness, a beacon Good across the world with the only "flaw" being that the royal family is notoriously slutty with countless bastard children, spreading the DNA of your phylactery as wide as possible.

Step 6: After reaching the end of your fake life, return to the present. If all went according to plan, your phylactery should now reside within the bodies of millions of people, including the entire royal family of the greatest kingdom in the world. If any foolish heroes wish to kill you, they will not only have to commit mass genocide, but they will also have to desecrate millions of bodies to destroy your phylactery, including digging up the graves of everyone for the past however many centuries that still have your phylactery in their bones. And after all that, they'll still probably fail because if they miss even one body, your phylactery is still safe.

Step 7: Do whatever you want as the undead abomination that you are, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever try to destroy you.

That's great until another wizard uses teleport through time to go back and stop you from starting the royal family in the first place. saves them a lot of effort.

[Eldonauran]

That's great until another wizard uses teleport through time to go back and stop you from starting the royal family in the first place. saves them a lot of effort.

I'm just curious as to how in the hell he was able to polymorph a phylactery into a fertilized egg. Pretty sure that 'creating new life' is something limited to epic level magic.

[Segev]

I'm just curious as to how in the hell he was able to polymorph a phylactery into a fertilized egg. Pretty sure that 'creating new life' is something limited to epic level magic.

Polymorph any object can turn a statue into a human, at least temporarily. There are probably tricks for managing to step it into permanency.

[Celestia]

That's great until another wizard uses teleport through time to go back and stop you from starting the royal family in the first place. saves them a lot of effort.

I mean, erasing the greatest force for Good from history is arguably even worse than killing a bunch of people.

[PraxisVetli]

Shoutout to Aumvor's Fragmented Phylactery for splitting your phylactery up. I guess they forgot to trademark Horcruxes?

[noob]

Shoutout to Aumvor's Fragmented Phylactery for splitting your phylactery up. I guess they forgot to trademark Horcruxes?

In my opinion Horcruxes are just voldemort using the human heritage feat (it is specified that voldemort is half human) in order to be able to get the lich template multiple times.
(Hence the horrific evil act for each Horcruxe and Horcruxes lasting forever and voldemort saying that by making multiple horcruxes he would be more powerful: all points toward staking the lich template multiple times and not toward that epic spell)

[Vaern]

I'm fairly certain I've seen somewhere that a dead lich grafts is undead spirit to a nearby corpse, mindless undead, or weak minded creature within a few miles of its phylactery. I saw someone else mention the same thing in another thread yesterday, and Google turned up the same result for me just now. A phylactery stashed in a demiplane, launched out to space, cast into the ocean, or otherwise isolated from civilization is likely to not function depending on how your DM plays it, unless you have a way of supplying it with corpses to ressurect you.

[noob]

I'm fairly certain I've seen somewhere that a dead lich grafts is undead spirit to a nearby corpse, mindless undead, or weak minded creature within a few miles of its phylactery. I saw someone else mention the same thing in another thread yesterday, and Google turned up the same result for me just now. A phylactery stashed in a demiplane, launched out to space, cast into the ocean, or otherwise isolated from civilization is likely to not function depending on how your DM plays it, unless you have a way of supplying it with corpses to ressurect you.

It depends on the phylactery and of how you became a lich.
As some people said "each lich is unique"

[Alcore]

Well let's see...


As a lich i won't have the physical needs of the living. My phylactery will likely radiate Evil with a capital E. Additionally it will radiate other magical auras as i make it resist 20 versus the usual damages (fire, cold, electric, acid and sonic). So what i will want to do is to physically place this object someplace you can't walk to.

So i will build a tomb for me. A small two room affair. In my unmarked casket will be some random dude with great bone structure. Decked out like some viking warlord. A few feet below that is a 5 by 5 by 5 cell lined with lead with a simple pedestal with my phylactery sitting on it. Formed from spells the cell is technically encased in stone and lead. Not like i need to breath, right?

It will be an adamantine mace with a hollow handle. If the handle is also adamantine then it will still have hardness 20.

Also note that i am a level 20 dread necromancer (Heroes of Horror? Libris Mortis? I think the class name is slightly off) that is a level 1 to 20 progression that culminates into lichdom. So wealth will not be an issue.

Now another feature of the class is the ability to cast while wearing light armor with no penalties. They also have slightly better than wizard BAB and health. With four feats (two from core and two from the book that gave us warmages) i can run around in full plate mail and cast spells without penalty. This may sound like a tagent but it is not.


I want to be known for my martial abilities. I want others to think death knight or some avenger spirit thingie. I don't just want it to be hidden; i want my phylactery to be unlooked for. I want my phylactery to come in a shape that people will find value in. You don't toss an awesome mace into mount doom...


My defense is shattering all notions and expectations of what a lich should be.

[Fouredged Sword]

Use Planer Binding to summon a Rajkar. They are evil demon goats with access to fabricate at will. Have them use their material component-less fabricate to coat the small locket you use as your phylactery first with a coating of lead sufficient to block divination and then a few thousand layers of atom thick riverine layers sandwiched between layers of adamantine. Because Riverine is immune to HP damage and can only be broken by specific spells and adamantine blocks line of effect this means that anyone wishing to destroy the phylactery needs to expend a couple of thousand spell slots to get through your ablative armor. Pay the evil demon goat by casting planer binding to pull a bunch of his demon goat friends and unleash them on primitive unsuspecting norther barbarians.

If you ever suspect that your phylactery has been taken from it's hiding spot, don't go attempt to fetch it. Immediately cast wish and use the instant relocation feature to move your phylactery from wherever it is on any plane directly to a new hiding spot. This effect ignores local conditions so it's almost impossible to stop.

Alternatively you POA your phylactery into a newborn baby via a chain of castings that give it a permanent duration. Place the baby in a loving foster home in some backwater. When they die you just collect the corpse and POA it into a new baby. This is compatible with all of the above.

[Aldrakan]

Three liches in my setting with different approaches. All of them assume that being killed isn't something that's going to happen very often:

1. Embed the phylactery into an ancient sea serpent, which in Pathfinder have constant nondetection. Hard to scry, constantly moving somewhere within hundreds of miles of ocean.
2. Make the phylactery the core of an enhanced skeletal champion dragon and fight alongside it, deliberate risk-taking intended to combat falling into the torpor liches often suffer, which they fear more than death.
3. Secretly not being a lich at all, but an immortal wizard who uses shapechanging, illusion, and the Clone spell to fake it. Enemies waste time searching for a phylactery that doesn't exist.