Phylacteries are antisemitic now

Apparently D&D's phylactery is now recognized as anti-Semitic.

Paizo has renamed theirs to "soul cage" and ThinkDM.org invented this handy rename table:

I would've renamed it to horcrux. It's a neologism invented specifically to refer to that concept, not that I mind the rename table because I imagine everyone would want to invent their own flowery name for it.

Now all we need to do is rename the lich to a koschie and we're golden. Which publishers will probably need to do soon anyway since Hasbro has gone full Games Workshop with its new OGL. Oh well.

Horcruxes and voldemorts

In past posts I lamented how archaic words like lich and phylactery have had their previously versatile meanings changed and shrunk by the vagaries of Gygax and his imitators. This means that I can no longer use them in their original meanings without confusing people who grew up on a diet of iterative fantasy. Not that it will actually stop me from using those words in their original capacities, as other authors have done before me, but it is annoying that my readers won't understand my meaning.

I recently discovered that voldemort is now a word. It derives from French vol de mort, meaning (roughly) "flight/theft of/from death." According to French speakers, this is grammatically sound but more appropriate for the technical speech of a police report (e.g. "theft of corpse"). A less stilted phrase would be Le Vol de la Mort, meaning either "the theft of death" or "the flight of death." Flight as in the flight of a bird or plane, not fleeing.

I would like to thank J.K. Rowling for coining this word. Prior to this, the fantasy genre didn't actually have a word for an evil wizard who cheats death. The word lich was used for this purpose due to Gygax's popularization, but as I have said before I consider that usage to be clunky and parochial. The benefit of voldemort is that its literal meaning relates to cheating death, and it's a well known fantasy word in the popular imagination.

The same goes for horcrux, also coined by Rowling. I've seen it used in NOS4A2 to refer to objects created to contain souls other than those of evil wizards, so its meaning is thankfully versatile. Prior to this, we only had phrases like "soul jar" and "zombie bottle" that weren't well known in the popular imagination.

These new words, voldemort and horcrux, are versatile. They can refer to Koschei and his hidden heart, Sauron and his cursed ring, Voldemort and his horcruxes, Arthas and his vampiric runeblade, etc. I should like to use them in my own writings from now on.

Mummy lords and horcruxes

The mummy lord, among other names, is a fairly common archetype in fantasy gaming (not as common as others, but nobody's perfect). Whereas the standard mummy is a mindless shambling tomb guardian, the mummy lord and its ilk are intelligent, remember their mortal lives, and typically have a number of additional powers such as spellcasting.

Particularly, they often have a rejuvenation power of some kind. This is typically tied to some kind of horcrux with an appropriate mummy theme, such as the mummy's tomb, the mummy's heart, and/or the mummy's canopic jars. (Obviously Egyptian-styled mummies are being used as the point of reference here, but feel free to devise ideas for non-Egyptian mummies.)

Below are a few examples of mummy lords and similar variants I've seen in both official books and 3pp, as well as some of my own commentary.

• Book of Templates - Deluxe Edition 3.5 (2005) presents us with the "true mummy." This is similar to the 5e mummy lord but not quite the same thing, namely in that they aren't necessarily evil and their touch doesn't curse foes with mummy rot. Unlike the 5e mummy lord, their rejuvenation and mental faculties are linked to their three "sacred vessels" (i.e. canopic jars, one for each mental ability score). If any of the jars are destroyed, then the true mummy will lose their immortality and will slowly mentally deteriorate into a "desecrated true mummy" that is more or less the same as the mindless shambling curse-spreading mummy in the MM (which is contrasted from the true mummy as a "lesser mummy"). The mummy has a sympathetic tie to the sacred vessels that aids in locating them and using magic to view or visit them, and the vessels may be drained of their spiritual energy reserves by thieves to power necromancy spells (which is labeled an evil act). The true mummy's rejuvenation is technically a fast healing power that works even if the body is destroyed, which is stated to function only if the true mummy is in possession of its sacred vessels. This implies that the mummy doesn't heal if they're stolen but still intact, opening the possibility for the mummy's to be destroyed and its sacred vessels stolen, leaving it in limbo where it isn't actually gone for good but can't restore its body until the sacred vessels are returned (nor is it specified if all the sacred vessels need to be stolen or only one does to halt the fast healing). I'm not sure if this implication was intended by the writer or not, as "possession" maybe was supposed to mean that the vessels were intact rather than physically present with the mummy. That said, a seemingly destroyed mummy being revived by the return of its sacred vessels is an interesting plot hook by itself, a possibility not offered by the other variations on rejuvenation.
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 4 (2013) presents us with the "mummified creature," which is basically a more intelligent mummy created to serve more complicated purposes than simply guarding a tomb. It doesn't spread mummy rot and the mere sight it doesn't scare the living. Aside from the lack of any rejuvenation power, it is comparable to the true mummy above. It's basically just a middle rank between the standard mummy and the mummy lord below.
• Advanced Bestiary (2014) presents us with the "dread mummy." It's comparable to other takes on the mummy lord, with the notable exception that it is able to raise its slain foes as zombies and/or mummies themselves and that it lacks any kind of rejuvenation power.
• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 5 (2015) presents us with that game's take on the "mummy lord." It is more or less the same thing as the 5e mummy lord, aside from a few minor differences in powers such as being able to take control of nearby undead. If destroyed, then the mummy lord's body will be rejuvenated within its tomb unless its remains are purified with specified magic. The text doesn't specify what happens to a rejuvenating lord if its tomb is destroyed. Does the rejuvenation fail? Does the rejuvenation restart if the tomb is rebuilt?
• The 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual (2016) presents us with the mummy lord, which most should be familiar with. Its rejuvenation is tied to its heart. As long as the heart is not destroyed, the mummy lord's body will rejuvenate next to it. The rules don't specify if the heart needs to be inside the body or not, though the implication is that you can store it inside a canopic jar or something.
• Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars (2020) presents us with mummies based more closely on The Mummy movies and derivatives than the standard D&D mummy. These mummies are normally intelligent (albeit typically evil and/or insane) and drain life from the living to assume a living form. Its rejuvenation is tied to its 2d6 (average 4) canopic jars (the heart is always inside the mummy's body). Unless all the jars are destroyed, a slain mummy will reform over 2d10 months within its original sarcophagus or place of burial if the sarcophagus was destroyed. Furthermore, destroying a canopic jar will permanently weaken the mummy; if all the jars are destroyed, then it is restored to full power but will not longer rejuvenate if destroyed. It is explicitly compared to the D&D-derived lich included in the same book. This variation essentially combines the rejuvenation powers of the true mummy and the Pathfinder mummy lord.
• Addendum 10/6/2022: A blog post on OSR mummy rules that covers the basics and so forth. I don't know how I missed this!

I like the idea that maybe different mummies may have different horcruxes based on the nature of the mummification ritual that created them, so that defeating one's rejuvenation requires either research or trial-and-error. I also like the possibility of a seemingly destroyed mummy being revived by the return of its missing canopic jars.

Signing off...

Names for soul jars

I’m currently on a kick where I think of multiple aliases for a concept such as a monster or magic item. In this post, the phylactery of the lich.

The word “phylactery” has several meanings according to wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/phylactery

Here are some other names for the same concept: soul jar (used by tv tropes), horcrux (coined by J.K. Rowling from random syllables, though that hasn’t stopped fans from inventing their own etymology), animarium (coined by myself from Latin anima and -arium), secret heart (used by Palladium), spirit jar, soul gem, etc.

The basic concept of a soul jar is simple: it contains someone’s soul. Why it does is, of course, highly variable. It might be a funerary object as with the mid-Eastern Han Dynasty. It might be a prison. It might be a means of enslaving the soul’s owner as with Afro-Caribbean zombies. It might be a way to cheat death as with Koschei the Deathless, Voldemort, and the D&D lich.

And that’s basically everything I can think of right now. 

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.

Classifying undead: the dread lords

The "undead lords", also known by many other names like "dread undead", are the upper tier of undead monsters. They are often legendary monsters, more powerful variations of the more generic undead monsters.

The Nazgûl’s influence on fantasy gaming

Tolkien’s Nazgûl have influenced several fantasy monsters. That is undeniable.

• The wraith in the monster manual takes cues from the ring-wraiths. The web show Standard Action even parodies this by depicting wraiths as wearing rings of power.
• The death knight, and to some degree the lich mage, channels the same idea as the ring-wraiths. Just substitute ring of power for whatever their soul jar is.
• Orcus has servants known as “demonic knights,” of which there are rumored to be nine. Obviously a reference to Sauron’s Nazgûl.
• Pathfinder introduces a grim reaper monster at some point, in at least three different variants. There are rumored to be nine of them, another clear reference to the ring-wraiths.

Soul magic

Souls and corpses are not really given much thought in the rules. Do undead have souls? Do celestials or fiends? Do they leave corpses behind? How do they interact with animate dead, magic jar, raise dead, speak with dead, etc?