What are you doing with Wights and Liches?

[Shostak]

Bear in mind that one needs cadavers from which to make zombies.

[hcobb]

Originally Posted by Shostak

Bear in mind that one needs cadavers from which to make zombies.

Hence the PCs need to stomp on the lich the first day that people start vanishing before the situation snowballs out of control.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

You might have noticed we now have 2 different versions, each, of the Wight and the Lich (the Wight appears in Legacy Edition core rules and the Book of Unlife; the Lich in Adventures and Unlife). They are basically the same idea, but differ markedly in capabilities. E.g., core rules Wight is hurt only by magic items and spells and heals itself using Drain Strength; Unlife Wight doesn't have these qualities. The two Liches have similar differences.

What are you doing about this in your campaign? Are you using one version and not the other? Using both as different 'varieties'? Neither?

Since 1980, I have never had Liches exist in TFT, and no PC has has never had any interactions or information about Wights.

Supernatural creatures in my campaigns tend to be rare, and accurate information about them may be hard to come by. I don't like out-of-character knowledge coming from the players reading the books, and after my first few years GMing most things straight by the book, I now tend to re-work the abilities of things, especially rare supernatural creatures, then note what scholars and others might think they know about them, and require PCs to go talk to such people to find out what's thought to be true, and/or learn from actual experience.

But I tend to think that TFT makes a fight with humans with various weapons, tactics, ST/DX, and situations, plenty interesting, and I tend to be more interested in that than in supernatural creatures with invulnerabilities or other special powers to learn about and figure out what to do about.

[hcobb]

If you ain't going to put your PCs through endless labyrinths full of slimes and traps and creatures only vulnerable to magic then why do they need an IQ 17 goblin with Alertness?

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by hcobb

If you ain't going to put your PCs through endless labyrinths full of slimes and traps and creatures only vulnerable to magic then why do they need an IQ 17 goblin with Alertness?

It seems like I've seen scores of IQ 17 goblins with Alertness... but I think all of them were on the Internet and created by you.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Hence the PCs need to stomp on the lich the first day that people start vanishing before the situation snowballs out of control.

Reminds me of the one or two times PCs in my campaigns actually encountered a vampire or werewolf stalking them, and I was wondering if the PCs were going to get mysteriously killed off one at a time without being about to deal with it... and then the PCs easily detected, defeated, suspected, dismembered, and utterly destroyed the villain.

[larsdangly]

Well; horses for courses, as they say. One of the PC's in my campaign currently IS a werewolf!

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

What are you doing about this in your campaign? Are you using one version and not the other? Using both as different 'varieties'? Neither?

At this point in my current campaigns, though I have not ruled out the existence of traditional liches, the only kind that the PCs have encountered is a thaumamechanical type which I have roughly outlined here. These beings are a departure from the traditional lich, in that they have found a less unsavory way to prolong their lives. I have not needed to get any more specific about the Argent, since the only one the PCs have encountered is an NPC and an ally; his abilities are what I need them to be.

[Shadekeep]

With regards to Liches, I came up with mine and submitted the original book long before any of the adventures were released. So there was no pre-existing TFT Lich for me to conflict with or base my own on. If there are differences now then the GM is free to pick and choose, or declare them variants, as they see fit.

Any differences between my Wights and the ones in ITL are inadvertent, as I consider creatures defined in ITL to be canonical. If any difference exists between their definitions, it's because I overlooked something, and the ITL definitions should prevail. This is one of the reasons as added traditional (undead) vampires as Nosferatu, instead of changing the already-defined (living) ITL Vampire. In gaming terms I prefer to be an expansionist rather than a revisionist.

[larsdangly]

Thanks for the comments; I too have been treating the Liches as two variants of a related concept, but produced through different spells. Surely many magicians have tried to extend their lives through necromantic enchantments, so we shouldn't be surprised to find a variety of different outcomes that (sort of) worked. In this sense it is a bit like your treatment of the vampires.