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Old 03-01-2019, 05:59 PM   #15
SolemnGolem
 
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: The Hall of Fallen Columns
Default Re: Lich in a dungeon

The lich character I liked the most in my RPG days was Azalin, the king of the realm of Darkon in the Ravenloft setting. He was run a few different ways in different campaigns, but generally he was presented as a distant aloof ruler who was concerned with obscure arcane things and resented being dragged into the campaign's petty squabbles.

1. Invasion by militant neighbor - Darkon is sort of a familiar fantasy nation, and to its south lies Falkovnia, a stand-in for a medieval sort of Nazi Germany. A few of my campaigns have focused on the dichotomy of whether you side with the lich, whose distant plans are likely horrendous to contemplate, or you side with the Falkovnian forces and their dictator, who are very immediate and very close and very violent.

2. Dungeons or strongholds. Azalin had his private castle far from civilization where he conducted his mystical experiments, and one official Ravenloft product (From the Shadows) featured that castle, which had a few neat magical themes.

I also set up a lower-level royal apartments, rarely occupied by the lich, and then only when he had to make occasional public appearances in the capital under guise of a mortal leader. (He had one Stalinesque appearance in the capital in a show of defiance, rallying the troops as the Falkovnian forces reached the outskirts.)

Finally, I had a dungeon complex set up essentially to house the magical stuff that Azalin couldn't find immediate uses for, but which he didn't want to discard or allow to pass freely around his nation. Physical items were housed on three or four levels of the "Black Vault" (quasi canonical) which could be accessed through a few secret surface installations, including the Royal Apartments. This was a fairly traditional dungeon crawl, although it was designed largely for functionality to separate and store dangerous artifacts rather than to "haha, challenge for you intruders!" style gameplay.

Azalin also had a more exotic containment system (called the "Shifter levels" after a Deus Ex mod I liked) for the really dangerous stuff, which was a more dispersed set of unconnected complexes ranging from a small room to a vast cavern in size. These could only be accessed by teleporting from one designated spot to another within them, and otherwise were separated by great distances. Some were airtight and deep underground or even underwater. (These complexes featured very esoteric clues to move around them, in the form of very complex puzzles. One might reasonably ask "why would the designer put these puzzles in when a simple yes/no access system would be better?" My response relied in part on a canonical feature of Darkon where newcomers lose their memories. Azalin feared the possibility of losing his memory - unlikely though it would be - and so designed a few workarounds that he himself could re-deduce painstakingly through clues if he ever got "locked out". One example of such a puzzle is to arrange stars in a starfield based on how it looked like, from Azalin's outworld home planet, at the time that Azalin himself was removed from that planet.)

The most dramatic portion of the Shifter levels was suspended above an ethereal void. Azalin had experimented with a false religion, and then discovered that something was actually granting the clergy their prayers. He found deep underground that the false prayers and religious energy was creating a monstrous dead god-fetus which grew in power at an alarming rate. He moved it to the observation complex above a void, with various failsafes built in so that if things really went awry, the entire complex would break away from the cliffside and fall into the ethereal void, taking the dead god-fetus with it.

One group of my PCs faced Azalin in combat at the end of From The Shadows, which was pretty much a magical shoot-em-up with no dash or panache. It was tough, and beating him in that fight was pretty memorable, but it wasn't really the fight that made him into a supervillain.

The real measure of his threat was the sheer scope of his plans and how many plots and crazy processes he had going on at once.

And, of course, the fact that a lich comes back after you kill it, dusting off its robes and muttering about getting back on schedule after that unpleasantness.

Edit: One campaign end plan for the lich (which the campaign ended early before we got there) was for the lich to seek to convert the entire realm into energy to power its transdimensional escape from Ravenloft. Obviously this was not great news for anybody other than the lich itself, but the sheer scope of its ambitious plan (and its bleak utilitarian nature) struck me as fun traits for a villain.

Last edited by SolemnGolem; 03-02-2019 at 06:04 AM.
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