Liches

It's taken you and your companions days to fight your way through the evil sorcerer's

layer, slaughtering his pet monsters and avoiding his deadly traps.

You finally made it to his inner sanctum and find the sorcerer himself with a dreadful, undead appearance.

Nevertheless, through furious and intense combat, you finally best to the mighty foe and leave the dungeon with your heads held high.

What you don't know, however, is that miles away, in a hidden location, the sorcerer rises again in a fresh body, because he has transcended death and become a litch.

Preachers using magic to extend their lives is not an uncommon concept in fantasy material,

but individuals that become liches do so in the pursuit of immortality, for various reasons.

We'll look at what some of those reasons might be,

as well as what makes a lich such a deadly and terrifying enemy to put down for good.

In D&D terms, the lich was first introduced in the Greyhawk supplement for original D&D in 1975, the term originating

from an old English word meaning corpse.

Gygax's creation of the Lich was influenced by past fantasy representations of powerful

magic users that use magic to triumph over death, such as works by Clark Ashton Smith and

Gardner Fox. The Greyhawk supplement describes liches as skeletal monsters of magical origin,

each formerly being a very powerful magic user or magic user slash cleric, now alive only by means of great spells and will, because of being,

in some way, disturbed.

Liches were immediately popular, being presented in every edition's monster manual, as well as a

great number of adventures and supplements.

Lich variants would crop up over the years as well, including

the demi-litch, the psionic lich, the elemental lich, and the good lich. There isn't really a

single large supplement devoted to liches, so I'll be drawing information from a number of different

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