Unorthodox liches

We should all be familiar with D&D liches. They are high-level undead spellcasters that keep their soul in a phylactery that resurrects them upon death until destroyed.

There have been numerous lich variants over the years, though most have rarely received much attention. Death knights, mummy lords, and similar are often described as lich variants, and many undead have similar rejuvenation traits. Lich variants have included elemental flavors like fire or shadow, psychic liches, spectral liches, benevolent liches, new kinds of phylacteries such as familial possession or astral projections or swarms of worms, enhanced liches, servant liches, dismembered/weakened liches, lich variants for other classes like thief or bardic, failed lich transformations, etc.

Playable liches are almost unheard of, though third party supplements like The Complete Guide to Liches, Lords of the Night: Liches, and Dweomercraft: Lich have certainly tried. I admire that the way to distinguish good and evil liches is that, as typically enumerated by most sources, the former serve the source of creation whereas the latter are conduits to the void that eat souls.

The WIP 3pp supplement "Our Undying Neighbors" intends to provide a progression for undead monsters. Undead monsters would advance through the different ranks as their HD increased, such as a zombie evolving into a wight evolving into a lich evolving into a spectral lich. (An idea that I really like and intend to use myself in the future.) The prospective (as of this writing) progression table includes qualifiers for rank and physical quality, if not class. The "liche" only appears starting at the rank of "lord" and indicates a point at which several tracks merge together (thus removing the distinction between different levels of decomposition).

As I have mentioned before, the word lich is an archaic English word for "corpse". It was traditionally used in compounds including lich-stone, lich-gate, lich-yard, lich-field, lich-owl, lich-house, etc. The reason it appears in fantasy gaming as a highly specific monster is simple. Clark Ashton Smith used it in his Averoigne setting to refer to corpses, animated or not. In some stories, "Empire of the Necromancers" (1936) and "The Sword of the Sorcerer" (1969), it was used to described an undead necromancer. This was read by Gygax and co. Not knowing what the word lich actually meant since it was archaic, Gygax and co though it referred only to an undead necromancer. From there it was combined with the story of Koschei the Deathless to create the fantasy gaming monster.

In German translations of D&D, lich is translated as Leichnam rather than Leich, since the latter still means corpse in modern German. Leichnam is a respectful way to refer to corpses, analogous to the English phrase "the deceased." Its archaic English cognate is lichame, a combination of lich and hame ("afterbirth, covering, horse collar"). I don't understand why anyone would refer to vile undead monsters so respectfully, unless this is meant to either indicate their higher status relative to other undead (unlikely) or is a euphemism intended to avoid invoking them/their wrath a la referring to the fair folk as the "kindly ones."

Harry Potter has magical objects similar to phylacteries called "horcrux." The etymology of the word isn't clear (given Rowling's love of etymology and neologisms), but it might be a combination of the French hors ("outside") and English crux ("central or essential point"). In this sense, it would refer to how the soul (the essential point) is literally outside of its owner. I prefer this word over phylactery, as the latter is already a dictionary word referring to small leather boxes that hold Hebrew prayer texts.

Since being revived by Gygax, the word lich has gone on to gain old and new meanings due to natural linguistic drift. As tvtropes attests, various writers and commentators have used it to mean:

• anybody with a soul jar or similar means of immortality (e.g. has a horcrux, ring of power, bloodline possession, etc) even if they aren't undead, a la Koschei the Deathless, Dorian Grey, Voldemort, or Sauron and his ring-wraiths
• any manner of undead magic-user even without a soul jar (e.g. Afgorkon from "The Sword of the Sorcerer"), any undead in leadership (e.g. the Horned King in Disney’s The Black Cauldron), any intelligent undead (e.g. death knights and mummies are oft-described as variant liches), or any reanimated corpses (as in The Death of the Necromancer, Hawk And Fisher, Wise Phuul, Lord of the Isles, among others)

Given the existing diversity of liches within fantasy gaming, at least if you count all those obscure supplements, I see little reason why these lich variants could not be integrated into gaming too. Using lich in a general sense for reanimated corpses may give a faux Anglo-Saxon or pulp genre feel to a campaign, if desired. Although in that case you would need a new set of terminology to distinguish liches. You would need to make it clear to players that the word is being used in this way, to avoid confusing those who rely on metagame knowledge.

So we would need distinct terms to distinguish whether the "lich" in question was living, undead, mindless, intelligent, and/or soulless, as well as what class they had. The great thing about language is that meanings may be distinguished through context or by adding qualifiers, and lich in particular has a well-worn history as part of compounds.

A "lich" could refer to any reanimated corpse, like zombies controlled by necromancy. A living person with a horcrux would be a "lich" in a further generalized sense of a body rather than a specifically dead body. Although they are not clinically dead, their body is a soulless body.

Compound titles like lich-knight, lich-mage, lich-priest, etc would indicate the class of the undead creature in question. In the case of a lich-mage, lich-priest, or similar it may be ambiguous whether that named is itself a lich or a necromancer. English doesn't seem well-suited to distinguishing nuances like that, but I will try anyway. Perhaps, a "lich's mage" is a mage dealing with liches (i.e. a necromancer) whereas a "lichly mage" is an undead mage.

Distinguishing different ranks of undead could take the form of compound titles such as lich-slave (i.e. zombie), lich-squire, lich-lord, lich-beast, etc. Or however "Our Undying Neighbors" denotes its ranking progression table: e.g. rotting corpse, rotting wight, rotting master, liche lord, liche elder, liche ancient.

Distinguishing whether a creature has a horcrux or not could be distinguished by an adjective like "horcruxified." Although, as I said above, there are plenty of undead with a means of rejuvenation such as death knights, mummies, ghosts, etc. Horcruxes aren't especially unique. (Creature Collection Revised introduced an entire family of undead templates with class affinities whose shtick was that they kept rejuvenating, called the "Unhallowed.")

Long story short, the only "problem" here is using the word lich to exclusively refer to a high level undead wizard with a horcrux, as opposed to using it in a general faux Anglo-Saxon sense that could apply to any undead and soulless living people. If you are using it in that sense, then you have to both rename the standard D&D lich to something else and inform your players that your setting works this way. If you're just writing fantasy fiction without preconceived notions, then you don't need to make that provision.