How to Run Liches in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

this episode of our show has been sponsored by elder mancy who are about to put out their new sunken isles on kickstarter coming in february 20 22. sunken isles is a seafaring adventure for fifth edition that takes your adventure through a magical island chain with a mysterious deity this book is also going to include lots of new rules for ships and naval combat this adventure has been headed up by logan uh one of our fellow youtubers his channel runesmith you should definitely check it out as well and the sunken isles adventure really draws on some different and uh unique inspiration from what we typically see in your average seafaring adventure so this is definitely one to keep an eye on you can follow the links in the description below to be notified when the kickstarter goes live and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d d including advice for players and guides for dms we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are talking about how to run a lich in dungeons and dragons 5th edition perhaps one of the most quintessential villains in dungeons and dragons the lich is a undead mastermind a powerful arcane spellcaster and a soul devouring monster besides being iconic in dungeons and dragons lidges have a lot of literary roots in fantasy and folklore a wizard who has been driven mad by the pursuit of eternal life is a great story in itself so today we're jumping into our monster series on how to run liches in this series we are going to take some of our favorite and most iconic dungeons dragons monsters we are going to talk about what they are uh role playing one combat tactics and building an adventure around one as well as possibly some variations and options to bring these creatures in this case the lich into the forefront as becoming the bbeg or a major villain for your party there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling so first of all what is a lich we kind of already talked about how they are the master of undead but let's dig into this a little bit more in dungeons of the dragon's 5th edition a lich is a challenge rating 21 legendary undead monster these creatures are former living human wizards who through a dark ritual sometimes involving a pact with the demon lord orcas have learned how to artificially extend their lives through undeath their flesh rots away and all that is left behind is their skeletal figure beyond just being a powerful undead spell caster they have many other interesting components to them one of which is the lich's phylactery this is an item that anchors the lich's soul allowing them to live eternally as long as their phylactery persists they get to live forever so you have a really interesting dynamic with this creature where they can't actually be fully destroyed unless their phylactery is also destroyed if the lich's physical body is annihilated the lich simply reforms several days later in close proximity to their phylactery this is why we often see liches hide their phylacteries in cunning ways behind deep death trap dungeons where few can learn to access them however there is a key component about a lich which must not be forgotten for fundamentally no matter the source undeath is always a curse a zombie feeds on the flesh a ghoul might gnaw the bones and a vampire drinks blood but for a lich to sustain their undead nature they must consume the souls of mortals which they must channel into their phylacteries in order to sustain their undead existence if they do not the lich will quickly degrade in both body and mind becoming a demi lich a cursed existence of madness that they must endure for centuries thereafter thus the lich is truly a tragic figure an ambitious and powerful wizard through their own doings has brought a horrific curse upon themselves and make no mistake for despite the vast power of a lich like all undead creatures they are fundamentally cursed and whatever remains of their brilliant minds is tainted by the madness of their undead nature in dnd lore itself we have seen some very prominent liches asarak and vekna being two of the most famous characters in all of d d history and even assarak has stood out as a villain in d5e in the tomb of annihilation but let's jump into some of the role-playing traits that you might use to bring your lich to life one of the first things just to jump off of what monty said is the madness of a lich the knowledge of how to become a lich is said to only be possessed by the demon lord orcus orcus is the lord of the undead and the process of becoming a lich drives them mad when you are role playing your lich you have to keep in mind that they are great spell casters which means that there is a brilliance about them so you really get to hone in on that concept of the brilliant mind who has stepped over the line into the realm of madness oftentimes one of the most common role-playing traits that we see deployed in liches is that they are undead masterminds who plan long-term schemes to ascend it to even greater levels of power and oftentimes the lich's quest for power and their intelligence tends to overshadow the underlying madness and unhingedness that they have as an undead creature and i think that for many intelligent undead this is also very common with vampires too is that we allow the power of these creatures and the intelligence of these creatures to just kind of take center stage and forget about the price that they had to pay to gain that immortality and that is where the flaws come into play when we are creating a lich one of my favorite perspectives to take with a lich in particular is that a lich may have had noble intentions in taking up the mantle of immortality perhaps they wanted to make sure that they would still be in existence to guide the world forward into a bright future or meet a horrific threat still yet to come yet in the process of doing that the lich has consigned themselves to a life of immortality and a lich is a wonderful opportunity to explore the dark side of immortality there is this idea that if you could live forever you would outlive everything that you cared about all the things that you grew up with all the people that you loved all the places that you once knew have changed and crumbled away and the lich has been unable to form any new connections there's nothing that they love anymore except for themselves a lich might make a great fallen hero and this is an archetype that you can actually use to inspire a lot of the role play and flaws and bonds of your lich perhaps they were a great wizard who foresaw an imminent threat and so as they set out to stop this threat they realized that they needed more power and more time which drove them to the path of lichten in the process of trying to prepare themselves to face this threat they lost their minds and so what you have is again a person with good intentions a person who set out into the world to be a hero but fell to their own madness along the way this makes a much more interesting villain and i think rather than just a master of an undead army who is seeking power that's one way to present this and really there's nothing wrong with buying into that trope but some of our favorite villains are the ones that we can understand their path to becoming this and so thinking a little bit more about your lich's journey to lichten and what set them on that course the core notion that a lich has pursued this they have chosen this they have made their bed and now they must sleep in it and i i think that that dark side of it is something that is so often forgotten about in the kind of the the skeletal style cackling mad with power villain that liches are often portrayed as liches are often portrayed as being very very competent very very skilled very very intelligent like they don't have any flaws aside from like the standard the villain is too powerful and has the classic villainous hubris or pride sort of thing but i i really like exploring this kind of meteor idea of a lich being someone that did this to themselves and it really comes back to two ultimately the essence of the lich's curse is the same thing that powers all undead undead fall to evil because they must consume life to sustain their undeath and in the case of the lich they must consume the soul itself which is fundamentally like the most evil thing right because you are destroying the essence of what someone could be there's nothing wrong with having your lich just be a thinly veiled skeletor but i think that we can do more nuanced and interesting things with such fan fantastic material to work with and with such fantastic material to work with now we want to talk about actually battling the lich as a dungeon master liches are masterminds and their stat block advertises something that i think leaves a little to be desired in the sense that they have pretty low hit points but when you are bringing your lich to life on the table in terms of battlefield tactics you need to keep in mind their intelligence their minions and all of the things they have at their disposal to really threaten the players now of course it goes without saying that as an undead mastermind creature that has a very long view perspective thanks to their immortality liches are great planners and schemers and it's very unlikely your player characters are going to come toe to toe with a lich without having to battle through a horrific stronghold or undead army of some kind and a lich will ultimately have tons of escape plans and other ways of getting out of the situation with without being destroyed but it is worth mentioning that a lich who knows their phylactery is secure has a sense of invulnerability about them and so a lich that knows that if they're going to be destroyed they will simply reform a short line time later might have a level of hubris and pride about them that prompts them to come to battle with the player characters when another villain would much rather flee and this is because a lich can use this trait of rejuvenation to win a battle of attrition against the player characters a lich knows that yes perhaps they don't have to survive this battle but if they're able to kill or incapacitate or maim or destroy several of the player characters in the process then that's kind of a victory for them we often talk about how intelligent creatures and characters you should keep in mind their ability to escape and flee but a lich doesn't really care about fleeing if their phylactery is intact death is just temporary for them and they're going to come back so if you can use everything you've got to take out one player character and then die in the process that seems valuable for lynch because unlike the lich that player character has a much harder time coming back on the flip side of that if the lich knows that their phylactery has been destroyed or is in danger they are much less likely to stick around at all for a combat encounter if they are threatened or the player characters actually find them they will do their best to escape ultimately however one of the great things about a lich is having that final showdown against the evil wizard to cap off an amazing campaign perhaps there is a situation where the lich needs to be brought to battle and maybe their phylactery isn't threatened but their greater goal or their greater objective is so for example if the lich is about to succeed on their ultimate ritual to bring about whatever age of darkness they want to they're probably gonna put fight pretty hard in those situations because this is the culmination of thousands of years of work they might not be so willing to abandon their stronghold where they have assembled thousands of years of arcane lore so readily or perhaps even the lich has been deceived by the player characters and is not aware that the player characters have actually secured a way to destroy their phylactery without their notice and is fighting with a confidence that they really shouldn't have with alicia's battle tactics they are all about their spell casting so think more about just blasting the party and think about how a lich might use their spells to thwart stop or undo the party's plans as well one of the great things about a lich is because we do consider them the master of undeath you really have your pick of the litter for who their henchmen are with a lot of the great monsters that have been added in with volos fizzbands and van rickton's guide to ravenloft there are a lot of great monsters to choose who could be more than just the skeleton and zombie minions of course we have great staples like wraiths and banshees and ghosts that could serve a lich but now there are so many more interesting options that you can really bring to life who is he sending out to thwart his enemies and undo his their plans or protect his phylactery you really have a great choice for some really amazing battles to bring to life before the player characters can even get to the lich now ever since vecna got betrayed by his vampire lieutenant cass lyches have not been too enthusiastic about having vampiric lieutenants although death knights still seem to be mostly loyal but if there is one iconic minion that every true lich lord needs to have it's an undead dragon yeah yeah nothing tells your player characters i am the master of death like a lich riding an undead dragon and we got some great things to use out of fizzband's treasure of dragons in this respect prior to fizzbands there was also the draco lich which i thought was a great candidate for let's put a lich on a giant undead dragon or make the lich into a giant and undead dragon right but now with fizzbands we have seen some great additions and we're going to get into now this is the variations that we might add to a lich to make them more potent as a final villain for your campaign and i think adding in a ghost dragon yes is such a cool idea i love the ghost dragon what's really great here is that the ghost dragon is not technically a legendary creature it doesn't have legendary actions although it does have legendary resistance it does and it's resistant to a ton of damage including just having flat out resistance to bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage and 300 hit points so it can soak up a ton of damage yeah and the reason why it's important that it doesn't have legendary actions though is because your lich does and so when you go into that final battle you really want the lich to be the main villain so putting them on a ghost dragon makes the dragon a threat but makes the lich the star of the show i love the idea of a lich riding a ghost dragon but but fizzbands also gives us a really lovely uh kind of cherry on top in the form of the dragon bone golem yes so i love this idea of a lich that has bound a dragon body and soul to serve as its favored minion and it really gives you that extra action economy because the terrifying breath of the ghost dragon and the petrifying breath of the dragon bone golem are like a beautiful wine and cheese pairing combined with all the other abilities of the lich themselves the ghost dragon is great because it has hover and it can't be knocked prone so the lich can stay and fly on this thing it's immune to like so many status conditions too so the lich can very safely fly on the back of their ghost dragon while the dragon bone golem ravages the party on the ground and of course i want to grab the zombie clot from van rickton's to be kind of like the rank and file to really capture this idea of a mountain of undead minions coming towards the party i might kind of use a homebrew rule here where because the lich is riding the ghost dragon you can kind of use that lookout sir minion rule where yeah you can't target the lich while it's on the dragon until the dragon has been defeated my house rule that i propose here is actually stealing the rule from the shield guardian um which is the the bound shield guardian amulet but just applying that to another creature so basically the idea with this rule is is that well the lich is within 60 feet of the ghost dragon or the dragonborn golem the damage that the lich takes is transferred to those creatures instead um and with the shield guardian it's normally just half the damage but what i would probably do in this case is that any damage the lich takes is first split between the dragon bone golem and the ghost dragon until they're both destroyed and only once those two are destroyed will the lich take any actual damage so so that makes it a much more robust combat and it actually takes care of my main issue with the lich is that they only have a hundred or so hit points they they they can just get punked a lich on their own is actually a decent challenge for like a level 10 to 13 party despite having a challenge rating of 21 uh level 20 parties just gonna like knock over a lich like they're nothing yeah and i think the scariest thing is uh if you have a paladin in your party that just that manages to get up to the lich and use their highest level spell slot on a smite uh that which is going to go down real fast and that's why i think it's also worth changing the lich's spell list quite heavily um the default lich has power word kill which is a scary spell to give a lich but also just not a lot of fun because it either kills a player and takes them out of the fight right then and there or does nothing um so i recommend um changing the lich's spell list particularly they're high level level spells here's a list of spells that we think just take out your least favorite spell on the liches list and add each of these spells in to season to taste so starting at the top with cantrips giving them chill touch mage hand and told the dead seems really thematic we're also going to give them the first level spell silvery barbs if you're allowing it at in your game no i think even if you're not allowing your players to take this spell you should give your lich silvery barbs yeah it makes them much scarier same with the second level spell vortex warp which was also introduced in strict saving we'll get into how to use that properly in a moment we're also going to give them counter spell and thunderstep we're going to give them evard's black tentacles and dimension door bigby's hand eye bite force cage feeble mind and finally prismatic wall while we're on the subject of spell list another honorable mention to add to the lich's arsenal um in the midst of all this are a couple of deathlock whites or deathlock masterminds with counterspell just adding a couple other casting undead minions with counter spell to protect the lich's spell casting from the counter spells of your party can also be a nice way to smooth out the lich's power so when we talk about tactics with this spell casting the reason why we've given them some of these great spells is because of the power potential and the great plays that can be done at the table first of all with force cage in your back pocket you can trap a group of players in the force cage specifically the paladin yes if you trap your paladin in a force cage you also have another great spell that you can use which is vortex warp which we've talked about this tactic before but if the character trapped in the force cage leaves the force cage you can use vortex warp to just throw them right back in yeah exactly so um if you do happen to have a vengeance paladin that's going to be teleporting out of the force gauge and they probably will because they have a good charisma saving throw you can just stuff them right back in there with vortex warp and your paladin's gonna run out of spells before your lich does now we also have a lovely combo here by giving them prismatic wall and bigby's hand these spells go together much better than you might suspect prismatic wall you get to place and okay well the player characters can just avoid it well unless you're flicking them into it with bigby's hand and i also like to imagine a lich's bigby's hand being like a giant skeletal hand that grabs the players and throws them into the prismatic wall prismatic wall and force gauge don't require concentration from your lich either so these are spells that are gonna be put down on the battlefield and are gonna stay there despite the fact that the lich is probably gonna have to make a lot of concentration checks to keep their spells going so that's why having a lower level spell that they concentrate on can be a little bit better because oftentimes with something like bigby's hand well if the lich does lose their concentration on their turn they can just cast it again and continue picking up the players and whipping them into their prismatic wall meanwhile the party healer you should probably drop feeble mind on them uh rendering them pretty much useless until they figure out how to deal with that because the lich is a brilliant mastermind as a dungeon master you have the license to meta game with your lich assume that the lich has been watching the party knows all of their abilities knows what their best savings throws are knows everything about their defenses and knows everything about their tactics the lich does not go blind into a fight with the party they know everything they are capable of and in specifically your lich should have developed specific countermeasures to defeat whatever your party's number one tactic is so if you do have a group of player characters who work together really well as a team and perhaps they have their own one-two punch or combo that they're using over and over again give the lich some way of basically dismantling that effortlessly and forcing the party to rethink their plans an obvious spell that we should mention here with all of these tactics in play one thing that might get in the way of the lich's victory is successful saving throws but don't worry that's why we gave him silvery barbs so that's in your back pocket so that when you are trying to flick creatures into your prismatic wall or vortex warp them back into your force cage you can use silvery barbs as an insurance policy to make sure the lich is succeeding at their tactics this is a very brutal tactic so again this is something to whip out if you really need to challenge a party that has got a little bit too overconfident in their ability to deal with the lich one other thing that you can do with a lich that is really nasty is by giving them chill touch something that people forget that chill touch has as an attribute is that a creature that has been damaged by it cannot regain hit points and a lich can use a legendary action to cast a cantrip so one of the greatest things that you can do with a lich in their legendary action is simply spam chill touch against a single player character this over the course of the lich's three legendary actions their chill touch will do 12 d8 points of damage to them and prevent them from being healed and so my favorite tactic to do with this is if i have a player character that's low on hit points or perhaps even dying on the ground the lich can just hit them with a chill touch and prevent them from joining the fight again and while all this is going on if your characters do decide to bust out healing word revivify cure wounds or any of those other great healing spells that's the perfect time to use counterspell now again with these tactics keep in mind that we are advertising difficult play for tier 4 of dungeons and dragons use these as you see fit to challenge your party appropriately with the tactics we've given you it is possible that if you are going up against an inexperienced lower level party that this could be pretty devastating what we're hoping this says is that there are tactics here and ways to kind of recreate the lich as an appropriate challenge rating 21 monster that the party has to face at the end of an epic campaign and just by doing a few extra spells a few ideas on their tactics and some really cool minions on the battlefield you can turn this into an extremely memorable battle that your player characters are going to have to think outside the box to deal with furthermore you if you if you really want to spice things up a little bit more consider giving your lich some powerful legendary magic items like robes of the archmage a staff of the magi a carpet of flying or any other of those things that wizards wish they could have giving a magic item like this to the lich can also get improve their defenses just a little bit can give them more access to a wider range of spells to use in combat and in particular case of the staff of the magi can give them a wonderful final goodbye so now you have your final boss ready but let's talk about inspiring adventures based on a lich we have a few core ideas here first of all let's talk about the most obvious trope and that is that your lich is the lord of an undead army who is seeking power and wants to bring undeath to the world this is a classic trope and sometimes there's nothing wrong with digging into the classic trope this is where you could have your skeletor lich who just raises an army of all the coolest undead minions and is marching from the north towards the cities while they bicker sounds a little bit like game of thrones but it works it works super well and it can be like almost like a spreading plague of undeaths and the player characters learning that the lich has a phylactery simply must go on a great quest to find the lich's phylactery and destroy it and of course the phylactery is very much inspired by even the older trope in the book of the lord of the rings in that phylacteries are artifacts that can only be destroyed in specific ways so not only do the player characters have to get the phylactery they have to whip it into the volcano amount to them to destroy it or whatever specific destruction method that you've decided on for this phylactery if we want to draw inspiration from other literature and uh concepts there is also voldemort and his horocruxes which he had multiple of and there's no reason why we can't take the licheous phylactery and divide it into multiple pieces and of course it makes sense that the lich would then hide these pieces in the most dangerous places it could find give it to its greatest lieutenants maybe it made a deal with a great ancient red dragon in a volcano to have it as part of its treasure horde and so you divvy these pieces up put them in great locations great adventure sites with great monsters protecting it you now have a great campaign where the characters need to uncover the locations of the multiple pieces of the phylactery find the means to destroy them and destroy all of them before finally confronting the lich itself now there's actually another place where we can actually combine sauron and voldemort a little bit and explore the idea that maybe the lich breaks their phylactery into pieces and gives the phylactery as a gift maybe the lich's phylactery is actually the crowns of several uh realms or that are worn by the monarchs or rings that are worn by a council of powerful archmages and so many there may be the liches phylactery is hiding in plain sight as a treasure of a human society and they don't even realize this and the lich is actually able to use that artifact to manipulate those kingdoms this could also be where you add a curse element to owning the phylactery where maybe it curses the people who have held them for a long time with undeath so upon the death of the king suddenly the king rises again as a skeleton king and now they are completely warped by their undeath and have turned into a horrible villain that in my opinion is a great classic lich tale you got an entire campaign and of course we can also do the inversion of that which also follows along with the voldemort sort of example where the lich's phylactery has been shattered and the lich has minions that want to rebuild the phylactery to summon the lich back again so its phylactery was not properly destroyed by the last group of adventurers and now the lich's minions can reassemble it to bring that lich back gives you great arcs if you kind of want to play it straight with the lich you want to embrace those things but what if we wanted to do something a little bit different well let's go back to some of our role playing ideas for the lich and expand on those one that i absolutely love is the lich with noble intentions perhaps the curse of undead was starting to spread without the help of the lich the lich was a great necromancer who saw this coming and decided that they needed more power and more time to deal with it and i actually think what you have here is instead of posing the lich as the main antagonist they are a chess piece in the puzzle of your campaign along the way of trying to deal with the curse of undeath the player characters discover this cult of necromancers and the lich and either have to decide if they can rehabilitate the lich and get the lich to step out of its madness and actually help the party deal with the undeath or if it's better to just destroy them i love this idea that the lich has foreseen a future threat that is decades perhaps centuries in the future and they're using their long view to change history now it's almost kind of like an inverse of the terminator the lich in the present day has seen their future where a band of adventurers will eventually rise and destroy them so the lich has decided to destroy the bloodline of those who will eventually cause those who will defeat them to emerge counterpoint to this maybe the lich has seen a future threat and is trying to prepare the world to meet that future threat and so the lich has started a mage school or a guild of adventurers and is training all of the future generations and is trying to raise up not an army of undead but an army of great and powerful heroes but in the meantime all the wizards that are part of our heroes that are part of this guild are given an amulet or a ring upon their graduation this ring is tied to the lich's phylactery and so when these heroes do die the lich absorbs their souls so with all of this in mind we hope that this gives you enough inspiration to look at more than just the stat block of a lich think about who your lich is what sort of adventures might encompass a lich being involved and what their tactics might be if they end up being the prominent villain of your campaign there are lots of great ways to bring this extremely famous and well-known monster to life in really meaningful ways in your games of dungeons and dragons hopefully this inspires you to take it a bit further in your games so this has been a look at running liches in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about some of the great stories you've had running a lich in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters we regularly meet with our patrons in our discord server for our monthly writers room where our patrons help us develop scripts for new episodes or give us topic suggestions and ideas and we want to thank all the patrons that asked us to revisit the idea of looking at monsters in dnd 5e if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube you can become a patron of our show by following the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim which is tuesday nights at 6pm eastern on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got plenty more great advice for dungeon masters running games d5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

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Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

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Length: 34min 14sec (2054 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022