I know I said no posts from me this week, but I stole some time to write this. Regular posts still resuming Sunday. EDIT: Sorry to drop a bunch of replies then bounce, but I’ll be out again until Sunday. I’ll read everyone else then.

There’s no greater moment in a roleplaying game than when players are surprised by something that makes complete sense–especially if the surprising part is that it makes complete sense. Players who aren’t totally bloody-minded are normally willing to politely ignore monsters with asinine ecologies, cities with no obvious food source, or magic items tailor-made for adventures, so when you reveal that the ecology does make sense, that the city’s food source is weird and unexpected but totally logical, or reveal the magic item’s quaint intended usage, the result is something between respect and relief and amusement that things were thought through after all. Every time players discover that some part of their fantastical world is more logical and organized than they’d given it credit for, their faith in the quality of the GMing, strength of the worldbuilding, and reach of the GM’s imagination surge forward. They’re more inclined to think themselves about how the game fits together–they’re more inclined to think about what NPCs would do, about how the gameworld will react, than plan in mechanical and metagame terms. It’s an all-around Martha Stewart Good Thing.

This companion series to my GMinars is all about those moments. I’ll take features of a standard fantasy roleplaying setting that players expect, and don’t expect a lot of logic out of, and I’ll examine interesting or uncommon logical reinterpretations.

This week we’re going to talk about one of my favorite antagonists–the Lich.

Intro to Ick

In most games, liches are wizards who’ve used some kind of dark endgame magic to stick a piece of their souls into inanimate objects called “phylacteries”. From then on they become immortal, shriveled-yet-powerful corpses with enhanced physical toughness, innate abilities, and (usually) increased spellcasting aptitude. Even if the lich’s physical body is destroyed, it always reappears at the location of the phlyactery after a certain amount of time has passed. So why do wizards do this again? Some do it to become hard cases or cheat death, reasonably enough, but the reason that’s made it into the cultural consciousness–and that’s all too frequently forgotten or overlooked–is that becoming a lich is supposed to be some stepping stone to becoming more magically gifted. Which begs the question: what does becoming a shriveled (albeit magically-enhanced) corpse have to do with becoming a more powerful mage?

It Isn’t Easy Being Unclean

On the one hand, the lich’s gross corpsebody has some physical boons that make resting unnecessary, defending against assassination easier, and fighting pissants less spell-consuming. On the other hand, while these abilities unquestionably make liches more powerful, they mostly don’t make them better wizards. Some new abilities do, but there’s no end of magic items and spells that have similar effects and are cheaper, easier to make, and less morally imperiling than a lich’s phylactery is. If the main reason to go lichy is to get more magically powerful, nobody would become a lich until they’d already gathered a complete set of items with mage’s or archmagi‘s or intellect in the name. So how many liches in modules or campaigns have done that? If it’s all about the bonuses, why have so few liches bothered to acquire as many easy bonuses as possible before flogging their immortal souls?

The longevity and toughness that comes with a phylactery is nice, but they’re less attractive when they come with an item and physical transformation that make you a target for every righteous warrior alive. At some point in the process of gaining power conventionally (through stealing, killing, and resource accumulation, all classic tactics for liches in fantasy stories), somebody’s going to notice an always-evil escapee from the Monstrous Manual wandering around getting dangerously mighty. Disguise spells will delay Team Good’s realization, but sooner or later the very lichy advantages that made your transformation worthwhile will inevitably blow your cover. That will be the day you regret your progress as the universe Mario Karts you, hard.

There’s no two ways about it: if you’re famous, dangerous, exposed, and obviously evil, you’re asking for some reasonably self-interested party or parties to throw you a beatdown. Cabals of enemies will start forming pacts and calling in favors and using charges on magic items and mobilizing their armies and calling up their Gods in real short order–and if you want to win, you’re going to have to fight on their terms. That means a lot of admin, salaries, and paperwork and not a whole lot of time doing sample problems in the ol’ spellbook. And the Axis of Good will get you sooner or later–you’re too dangerous to let alone. You can hide your phylactery under a thousand tons of rubble and a hundred anti-scrying wards and all it’s going to do is eventually force some do-goody wizard to waste a blue chip spell like Wish. A moral victory, but not any kind of reassuring one.

Obviously there’s a thousand ways you can make a lich a credible antagonist without seriously examining their role in your campaign. My argument here isn’t that liches don’t make sense–it’s more that as a concept in a vacuum they can certainly make more sense than most give them credit for. So let’s take the mechanics and circumstances with a lich and try a different interpretation. How is a lich well suited to gaining power? What is the way of the lich toward magical domination? What’s the key advantage of self-lichification?

To put it in the most roundabout way possible: not starving.

Doing Science and Not Still Alive

Let’s say you’re a hunter-gatherer.

You spend a little time hunting animals and eating foraged food. You don’t have to work that hard–it’s actually pretty easy stuff. Sometimes food gets a little scarcer, but no big deal–all you have to do is pick up your stuff and head for the nearest grazing pasture. Leaves a lot of time for personal errands and interpretive dance classes and all sorts of other stuff not keyed to day-to-day survival.

Except there’s a problem. You like beer, or your garden got out of hand, or insert historically obscure reason here–doesn’t matter, you’re farming now. It’s farming time. And now, for the sake of argument and simplification, we’ve gone medieval.

Farming takes a lot of time. You need constant effort to produce barely enough food for everybody producing food. Sometimes you can’t even make that much. Everybody who’s in this society who’s not making food all the time needs to seriously justify their continued existence, because resources are tight and the fields can always use another strong back.

Eventually the society gets bigger, gets a bit more stable, and some of the food budget gets spent on maintaining specialists and dedicated craftspersons. Let’s have an aristocrat, because this system either needs or invariably produces some kind of authority figure. Priests–they’ll learn to read and write, they’ll review records and define the character of a society and give moral instruction. The occasional soldier will keep everyone else safe. Finally, now that things are going really well, let’s get some playwrights and pamphleteers and artists in there too.

But the underlying threat of hunger, even starvation in a bad winter, hangs over the whole system. Grain stores let the society embark on nonessential pursuits, but everything that happens needs to be pretty immediately useful or desirable to someone, or else it’s going to have to have a very good reason to be around. People who weren’t landed or doing work essential to society would have to do quite a bit of work to make ends meet.

So what does a scientist of this period–someone looking to spend their lives expanding the horizons of knowledge–look like? A few unusually dedicated (to the point of probably not being entirely objective) individuals either endowed by a rich patron or independently wealthy themselves, all poking around in small and clannish communities with reasonably limited resources. In other words, it looks like screwing around. Good, honest, hard science requires huge amounts of data-gathering–it takes thousands of tedious mind-numbing and perversely even-handed experiments to really shake up our understanding of any practical field, from rocketry to medicine to cosmetics. Accomplishing that with a medieval economy is practically inconceivable.

Now let’s go one step further and look at a standard medieval fantasy setting–and magical science. What does it take, really, to attain a level of magical power that’s never been attained before?

Imagine you’re a high-level wizard. You’ve got all the most powerful spells ever devised and you’re interested in getting even more powerful. Only question is, how could you possibly accomplish that in your lifetime?

First of all, you’re incredibly rare. Progress was easier with the lower spell levels–those required less intelligence and experience to attain, meaning there was more people spending more time creating more powerful spells. But now you’re at the top of a very tall pyramid. You have very few peers, and in fact there’s only a few other people in the world who understand a fraction of what you do. And every day you spend without casting your biggest, baddest spells in some practical context, you are–at absolute best–leaving huge amounts of money on the table. At worst, you’re suffering great evils and deprivations that you could be fighting to continue to exist.

Imagine if the sum total of medicine in the world plummeted every time scientists wanted to test new ones. The science team might not care, but doctors and stockholders certainly would.

But let’s say that doesn’t matter to you. Let’s say you don’t care about the opportunity cost–you just want to do magic science. So every day you wake up, you get your breakfast, you set up your experiment, you cast your most powerful spell in a few experimental contexts–and, uh, you’re done. No more spellcasting today. You need to rest and that is both time-consuming and really going to mess with your sleep schedule. And also there are no lab assistants in the world of appropriate skill to help you. And you’re probably already of advanced age and not getting any younger. And now that you’ve dipped into your spells-per-day you’re vulnerable to an assassin who’d be happy to put your spellbook back into the economy for you.

I put it to you that this is the best reason for a high-level wizard to become a lich. Stretching the boundaries of magic requires science that a standard fantasy world, or standard human physiology, is very ill-equipped to support. Liches get to be one-person science teams. They’ve transcended the need to eat or sleep, for one thing. They’ll never get older, never die–probably don’t much notice time passing. If anyone is going to be content walled up in some secret lab, patiently performing an hour of experiments and eight hours of spell recovery in an unceasing, little-varying pattern, it’s going to be them.

Of course, said liches are also going to need test subjects, resources, possibly even labor. They don’t exist in a vacuum–they still stand to perpetrate evil–but reasonably speaking it’d all be incidental to progress. And while the liches might reluctantly administrate all this, their real role is (in my own strictly personal interpretation) going to be patiently, implacably wearing holes in the floor of a very secret lab with no entrances or exits.

When I think of liches and their role in the world, I don’t think of Thulsa Doom, or Voldemort, or Kel’Thuzad. I think of an amoral Deep Thought.