Ghost Knights are a common theme in Medieval lore. They're in the monster section of Lion & Dragon.

Oh! I didn't think of this until I saw Pundit's post, but the Erlkonig could be good source material to adapt-steal for this kind of enemy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Erlk%C3%B6nig

The source legend is of an elven/fae type creature, but I think it would fit - especially for the Goethe version - to add undeath to the mix, including for the motivation to kill.

I don't have my 5e Monster Manual handy, is access to 9th level spells still a requirement for becoming a liche? That's why I have rarely used them. Our group tends towards mid level play and a liche will wipe the floor with most parties below a certain level.

Quote from: Dimitrios;1094341I don't have my 5e Monster Manual handy, is access to 9th level spells still a requirement for becoming a liche? That's why I have rarely used them. Our group tends towards mid level play and a liche will wipe the floor with most parties below a certain level.

Without looking it up, I think you have to be a 14th level spell caster, at minimum; so no, it doesn't require access to 9th level spells.

The term "lich" is too often misused to refer to a high-level undead wizard when semantically it simply means a corpse, animate or otherwise. The word was chiefly used in combination: lich field, lich gate, lich owl, lich stone, etc.

The high level trio of lich mages, death knights and mummy priests are arbitrary anyway. It makes as much or more sense to call the trio lich mage, lich knight and lich priest and scale them for any level. Maybe give them special titles to indicate level thresholds, like apprentice, journeyman, and master a la medieval trade guilds.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1094372The high level trio of lich mages, death knights and mummy priests are arbitrary anyway. It makes as much or more sense to call the trio lich mage, lich knight and lich priest and scale them for any level. Maybe give them special titles to indicate level thresholds, like apprentice, journeyman, and master a la medieval trade guilds.

   Not wholly arbitrary. The mummy priest has venerable precedent; I refer you to The Mummy, 1932, starring the incomparable Karloff.

   But in your favor, didn't the 1E Fiend Folio, which introduced the death knight, define it as a variant lich?

I think it is a pretty big stretch to try and lump Lichs, Death Kngihts and Mummy Priests all into the same category of "Lichs"  It would be like putting Fighters, Wizards and Priests all together in the same "Fighter" class differentiated from each other by their titles.

Quote from: Shasarak;1094409I think it is a pretty big stretch to try and lump Lichs, Death Kngihts and Mummy Priests all into the same category of "Lichs"  It would be like putting Fighters, Wizards and Priests all together in the same "Fighter" class differentiated from each other by their titles.

That is not my intent.

All undead can be defined as liches, because lich means "corpse." (Much like how D&D refers to what is technically a draug as a "wight" due to a misunderstanding of Tolkien.) We need a better name specifically for the high level immortal necromancer invented by Gygax based on Clark Ashton Smith, Koschei the Deathless, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. (And death knights for that matter, since they aren't necessarily knights. In fact, the term draug can apply here too.)

In German translations of D&D materials, lich seems to be translated as Leichnam rather than Leiche. The English cognate is lichame or lich-hame (hame meaning "covering"). Leichnam is a respectful way to refer to a corpse, which I suspect is due to influence from the practice of shrouding holy objects and corpses. Natural languages have all sorts of baggage like that.

Anyway... in the case of lich mages, death knights and mummy priests, they do all have soul jars in different editions. In fact, several undead have some kind of "rejuvenation" trait that lets them revive from apparent destruction. The lich mages have their phylacteries, the death knights have their panoplies, the mummies have their canopic jars, ghosts have their unfinished business, vampires have their graves, etc.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1094464That is not my intent.

All undead can be defined as liches, because lich means "corpse." (Much like how D&D refers to what is technically a draug as a "wight" due to a misunderstanding of Tolkien.).

A wight is NOT technically a draug (draugr more accurately) though unless your setting is explicitly Norse (in which case you should be insisting on Alfair instead of Elf, Duegar instead of Dwarf, Jotun instead of Giant, etc.).

Language marches on and whether Tolkien was misunderstood or not, the most watched television series in the last decade popularized Wight as a common term for corporeal undead just as countless games (computer and tabletop) have made Lich the go to word to use for "Undead Spellcaster."

Never forget that the purpose of language is to be understood by others. The very fact that you felt the need to use "Wight" in terms of explaining what a "Draug" is makes it self-evident that, at least in modern English, "Wight" is the clearest word to describe an animated corpse.

I bet if you quizzed the general English-speaking population ten times as many would be familiar with "Wight" as had any idea what the heck a "Draug" was. I'd bet a similar ratio would identify Lich as an undead spellcaster vs. identify it as a generic word for corpse.

That may not have been the original meaning of those words, but English is extremely adept at adapting words to mean things other than their proper definition; ex. cool, hot, gay, dope, car (vs. automobile), chopper (vs. helicopter or motorcycle... which if we used your requirements should also be applied to cars since "motorized wheels" is the literal meaning if you ignore that it's a contraction of "motorized bicycle" which is why "motorbike" is also valid), etc.

Hell, why aren't you similarly incensed by "wizard" since it means "wiseman" and Wisdom can easily be a dump stat for D&D wizards? Shouldn't the wiseman be the class that uses Wisdom? Likewise, Cleric derives from the same root as Clerk, a reminder of the time when only clergy could reliably read and write and so did work as scribes... reading, writing and scribing are the roots of magic used by Intelligence-based casters.

Why aren't you complaining that the D&D Clerics should actually be called Wizards and D&D Wizards should actually be called Clerics? Probably because you realize that language has marched on in those cases, even as you insist on ignoring similar shifts in other areas.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1094464That is not my intent.

All undead can be defined as liches, because lich means "corpse."

Sure, and all characters can be defined as fighters, because fighter means "one who fights". Wizards are magic fighters, warriors are sword fighters. But playing semantic games with literalism doesn't advance the discussion or provide any benefit in my experience. At the table, it just winds up confusing players.

Quote from: Chris24601;1094506A wight is NOT technically a draug (draugr more accurately) though unless your setting is explicitly Norse (in which case you should be insisting on Alfair instead of Elf, Duegar instead of Dwarf, Jotun instead of Giant, etc.).

Language marches on and whether Tolkien was misunderstood or not, the most watched television series in the last decade popularized Wight as a common term for corporeal undead just as countless games (computer and tabletop) have made Lich the go to word to use for "Undead Spellcaster."

Never forget that the purpose of language is to be understood by others. The very fact that you felt the need to use "Wight" in terms of explaining what a "Draug" is makes it self-evident that, at least in modern English, "Wight" is the clearest word to describe an animated corpse.

I bet if you quizzed the general English-speaking population ten times as many would be familiar with "Wight" as had any idea what the heck a "Draug" was. I'd bet a similar ratio would identify Lich as an undead spellcaster vs. identify it as a generic word for corpse.

That may not have been the original meaning of those words, but English is extremely adept at adapting words to mean things other than their proper definition; ex. cool, hot, gay, dope, car (vs. automobile), chopper (vs. helicopter or motorcycle... which if we used your requirements should also be applied to cars since "motorized wheels" is the literal meaning if you ignore that it's a contraction of "motorized bicycle" which is why "motorbike" is also valid), etc.

Hell, why aren't you similarly incensed by "wizard" since it means "wiseman" and Wisdom can easily be a dump stat for D&D wizards? Shouldn't the wiseman be the class that uses Wisdom? Likewise, Cleric derives from the same root as Clerk, a reminder of the time when only clergy could reliably read and write and so did work as scribes... reading, writing and scribing are the roots of magic used by Intelligence-based casters.

Why aren't you complaining that the D&D Clerics should actually be called Wizards and D&D Wizards should actually be called Clerics? Probably because you realize that language has marched on in those cases, even as you insist on ignoring similar shifts in other areas.

Quote from: Zalman;1094597Sure, and all characters can be defined as fighters, because fighter means "one who fights". Wizards are magic fighters, warriors are sword fighters. But playing semantic games with literalism doesn't advance the discussion or provide any benefit in my experience. At the table, it just winds up confusing players.

I like studying etymology. I like playing word games. Since fantasy concepts are fictional, I don't really care about language drift in those cases. Especially not if the drift is a direct result of inadequate research by Gygax and co. That's not how language drifts in any other context outside of fantasy gaming. Indeed, a lot of weird spellings in the English language are a direct result of the people writing the dictionaries deciding to change the previously accepted spelling to better reflect its Latin etymology (even if those scribes are wrong).

I don't get upset. I get mildly peeved at worst. I don't get incensed about wizard and cleric because their meanings haven't changed outside of fantasy gaming. Literate people still think a wizard is a wise person, whether this wisdom be in magic or tech wizardry. Literate people can still see the clear relation between cleric, clerk, clergy, clerical services, etc. Lich and wight are archaic in most dialects of English, and only fantasy gaming uses them anymore. Their fantasy gaming usages may be traced directly to D&D and this is recorded only in wiktionary. Formal dictionaries don't include the fantasy gaming definitions and you can verify this will a Google search. The wikipedia pages recount the etymologies. The existence of the internet, standardized spelling, etc has resulted in language drift dramatically slowing as well as providing better access to research into etymology.

Even then, fantasy gaming relies on extremely anal-retentive usages that are not found in natural languages. D&D often exhibits an absurd tendency to give a unique short name to every monster they devise, as opposed to something sensible like compound words (e.g. black dragon, death knight, winged unicorn). No natural language has a one-syllable word for the concepts represented by D&D liches and wights. Even the Old Norse word draugr technically refers to ghosts and undead in general, not specifically a reanimated corpse. The undead taxonomy is needlessly convoluted with special snowflake names. Speaking of which, D&D often exhibits an absurd tendency to invent arbitrary taxonomy distinctions like "true" versus "false" dragons, elementals, and giants. No natural mythology creates a distinction between true and false dragons, true and false elementals, or true and false giants. A dragon is a dragon, an elemental is an elemental, and a giant is a giant. They might differ in size, age, power, etc but the taxonomies are simple common sense.

The usages of lich and wight are changing outside of fantasy gaming, specifically as a result of people reading dictionaries and wanting to feel more medieval or Latin or something. Neo-paganism uses the concept of wights to refer to supernatural phenomena, such as "house wights." The video game code named "Project Wight" is another example, as it used the term in the original Norse sense. There are quite a few books, like The Death of the Necromancer, Hawk And Fisher, and Wise Phuul, use lich to refer to reanimated corpses in general. The popular D&D-based anime Overlord never uses the word "lich" outside of the compounds like "elder lich" and "night lich," which is similar to its original living English usage.

The word taurus or taur is another example. As a morpheme meaning "bull" it is still used in English, such as the constellation Taurus. It still appears in words like centaur and minotaur, even if a lot of possible don't realize it and mistakenly use "taur" to refer to any centaur-like creature. D&D did this when it invented the tauric creature template. This usage doesn't appear in any dictionary, and I wonder what they must think that the cen- and mino- parts mean. If you look up the actual Greek (or even a lot of non-Greek contexts), the word "centaur" is used to mean any centaur-like creature. The horse-centaurs are... horse-centaurs. It's that simple. (The etymology of centaur is disputed. It might mean something like "bull-slayer" or "toreador," or it might be related to Latin centum, or even a pun of some kind. This makes the phrase "a century of centaur cowboys" particularly entertaining as wordplay goes.)

Another example would how D&D misuses "gorgon" and "medusa." This is clearly incorrect usage and pretty much everybody aware of the error acknowledges it as an error that shouldn't be repeated. (Although to be entirely fair, the word gorgon means "terrible" and was used in the compound Gorgon Aex, a pun meaning both "terrible goat" and "fierce storm." It seems entirely reasonable to refer to the D&D monster as a gorgon taurus or "terrible bull." At least if it wasn't already clearly a catoblepas! That's what I mean when I complain about D&D naming scheme being anal-retentive.) Would you argue that D&D's usage is a natural language drift? By what criteria would you say we should argue that a word for a fictional concept is or isn't being misused?

If people can accept the existence of at least four wildly different "unicorns" (European unicorn, Arabic almiraj and karkadann, Chinese qilin), or a bazillion varieties of "vampire," then I doubt using words like wight, lich, centaur, and so forth in much broader contexts than fantasy gaming does is a stretch. I see nothing wrong with using qualifiers in compounds like house-wight, forge-wight, barrow-wight, lich-wight, lich-owl, lich-field, lich-gate, lich-stone, lich-mage, lich-knight, horse-centaur, ox-centaur, fish-centaur, and so forth. Nuances like that are the reason why learnéd people appreciate wordplay. I certainly do.

EDIT: Or boast-wight, my translation of German Bösewicht.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1094680Speaking of which, D&D often exhibits an absurd tendency to invent arbitrary taxonomy distinctions like "true" versus "false" dragons, elementals, and giants. No natural mythology creates a distinction between true and false dragons, true and false elementals, or true and false giants. A dragon is a dragon, an elemental is an elemental, and a giant is a giant. They might differ in size, age, power, etc but the taxonomies are simple common sense.

That's true, the taxonomies in mythology are limited. That's because storytelling elements are continually repurposed and often lack any clear meaning outside the context of a particular story. The categories are loose, imprecise, and constantly evolve based on a continual series of subjective reinterpretations.

But the taxonomies in natural science are extensive, detailed, and often very precise because they categorize things whose variations can be objectively established. In the worlds of D&D, the animate dead, dragons, and elementals are part of objective reality. It wouldn't make sense for the natural historians of those worlds would use the foggy, imprecise definitions of our literature, they'd instead develop a fantastic version of our traditions of natural history and eventually the natural sciences to classify the monsters they hit with swords and spells.

Quote from: Pat;1094684But the taxonomies in natural science are extensive, detailed, and often very precise because they categorize things whose variations can be objectively established. In the worlds of D&D, the animate dead, dragons, and elementals are part of objective reality. It wouldn't make sense for the natural historians of those worlds would use the foggy, imprecise definitions of our literature, they'd instead develop a fantastic version of our traditions of natural history and eventually the natural sciences to classify the monsters they hit with swords and spells.

This is a VERY good point.

In the world of D&D your life can hinge on whether the corporeal undead you're facing is a zombie (tough, but nothing special), a ghoul (put the elf warriors up front since they're immune to its paralyzing touch) or a wight (Gah!!! kill it fast!!! It can life/level drain you with just a touch!). You need to know exactly what type of undead it is ASAP and vague descriptors are no one's friend.

If you're bitten by a snake it makes a huge difference whether its a kingsnake (non-venomous) or a coral snake (extremely venomous).

Can you tell the difference? Would you try to learn if your life depended on it?





This is why having in-universe distinctions between zombies, ghouls, wights, etc. makes sense. Because if you picked up the first snake thinking it was a Kingsnake then you'd be on your way to the ER as what is actually a coral snake's neurotoxin causes your lungs to shut down. If your livelihood was clearing out snakes for a living you'd take the time to learn this. If your livelihood is clearing out old tombs, you'd take the time to learn that there's a meaningful difference between a wight and a zombie.

Quote from: Chris24601;1094691This is why having in-universe distinctions between zombies, ghouls, wights, etc. makes sense. Because if you picked up the first snake thinking it was a Kingsnake then you'd be on your way to the ER as what is actually a coral snake's neurotoxin causes your lungs to shut down. If your livelihood was clearing out snakes for a living you'd take the time to learn this. If your livelihood is clearing out old tombs, you'd take the time to learn that there's a meaningful difference between a wight and a zombie.

Personally I like the old saying "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" so it would be no point in labeling all undead as "Liches" because that is too simple.  You could perahps create some kind of quasi-scientific naming system calling Lichs "Lich Magicus", Death Knights "Lich Mighticus" and Mummys "Lich Bandagus"

It could be quite fun if you liked categorising creatures, like a fantasy butterfly collector.

Red touch yellow, kill a fellow...

Huh, now that I think about it, that's a pretty awesome RPG gaming tidbit. There should be some neat rhymes with DnD monsters, especially undead, so as to sprinkle in NPC rumors. Maybe use them as children nursery rhymes so as to foreshadow a region's dangers! :eek: