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#Vagrant story lich series#

He's an undead sorcerer, but he's pretty much the Only Sane Man for Team Evil.

In Greg Costikyan's Another Day, Another Dungeon, a send-up of D&D (although I didn't realize that for years and years) a lich functions as the main Big Bad's dragon.

All lazar seen were originally necromancers in life, but it's unclear if that's a requirement or not.

#Vagrant story lich series#

Their souls are not stored in Soul Jars but rather have partially separated from their bodies, an excruciatingly painful process that drives most lazar completely Ax Crazy, and the bonds between soul and body can only be severed by an immensely powerful spell that only three mages (in a series chock-full of magic users) were ever able to cast.

The lazar from The Death Gate Cycle are something of a cross between liches and zombies.

Eventually one of his followers helps him to create a new body, and he gets back in business. When his Killing Curse backfires and kills him, he remains stuck in the mortal world as "less than a ghost", yet unable to die. He split his soul into 7 pieces with successive murders, and stored each one inside a Horcrux.

Voldemort in Harry Potter is a pretty straightforward example.

However in the Disney adaptation, it's the Horned King that's a lich.

Thanks to the antics of a playful crow, who tried to stash some "treasure" of his own in said tree.

Guess which tree the party had previously rested at and searched.

In The Chronicles of Prydain, the party encounters a magician at one point who did the soul-transfer thing into his finger, which he then cut off and put in a coffer hidden in a tree in the middle of the forest.

(Equally, there are cases where the creature is called a lich but is just a walking corpse, if the author thinks that "zombie" sounds anachronistic or inaccurate.) The influence of D&D on fantasy literature and on Video Games has spread the term to some degree, although it's still not a standard term and there are plenty of undead sorcerers in media that are never called liches. Dungeons & Dragons, inspired by this, used the word specifically to mean an undead sorcerer with his soul stored away.

The word "lich" is an old word for "corpse" (in modern and slightly-archaic English, graveyards are still occasionally called "lichyards" and "lichfields") and was used in reference to (sometimes undead) corpses by Clark Ashton Smith in the 1930s. Basically, the only thing that distinguishes him from a lich is that he is very good at using his BFS. He was also an Evil Overlord, a powerful sorceror and a great fighter.

To kill him without him coming Back from the Dead, one must destroy the needle. He was a gaunt, skeletal villain whose "death" was hidden in a needle inside an egg. Something resembling the concept goes at least back to Koschei the Deathless from Russian Mythology and Tales. Because of their skill at magic, liches tend to be the most powerful and dangerous type of undead in settings where they exist. In other fiction, the Soul Jar is optional.Ī lich's physical appearance can range from near-normal, to zombie/corpse-like, to completely skeletal, which usually depends on the lich's age. Typically his soul is stored elsewhere in a Soul Jar, at times called a phylactery, which must be destroyed before he can be fully defeated. Even a dead guy can make it in the world if he's got himself a college education!Ī lich is an undead sorcerer, often one who seeks Immortality or power above anything else, and became undead as the price he had to pay.