Prestige Ancestry: Lich
Liches are magic users that have cheated death using dark, secret rituals to unnaturally extend their life. They do so by placing their soul inside an object- a cage, lantern, religious object, or some other item, and then feed their soul the souls of others to artificially keep it alive.
As the Lich ages, their appearance becomes progressively more skeletal and rotted, but never enough to fully kill them. They also become more and more paranoid that the artifact holding their soul will be destroyed to the point of insanity, and often hide their soul artifact in increasingly secure dungeon complexes.
Prestige
The Lich is a the Prestige Ancestry. It can be taken after character creation at any point when you would receive a Feat in place of taking a regular Feat. A character must meet the following prerequisites to do so:
- You must have a Constitution score of 18 or higher.
- You must have at least 60 hit points.
- You can't already have a Prestige Ancestry.
Your DM might allow you to ignore one or more of these prerequisites, and may allow you to take this Prestige ancestry at 1st level.
Regardless of when you gain this ancestry, its features modify or add onto your base ancestry's. If a feature is present on both the prestige ancestry and the base ancestry, you take the version of the feature in the prestige ancestry unless specified otherwise. If your DM allows you to gain more than one prestige ancestry, you use the newest version of any feature it has that you previously gained.
Lich Traits
Creature Type. You count as an Undead in addition to any other creature types you gained from your base ancestry.
Deathless. You have escaped death, a fact represented by the following benefits:
- You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
- You don’t need to sleep, and magic can’t put you to sleep. To gain the benefits of a long rest, you must spend 4 hours in an inactive, motionless state, rather than sleeping. In this state, you appear inert, but it doesn’t render you Unconscious, and you can see and hear as normal.
Soul Artifact. You have a soul artifact which contains your soul. If you are killed while your soul artifact exists, the artifact creates a new body in 1d10 days, resurrecting with all your hit points. The new body appears within 5 feet of your soul artifact.
Soul Drain. Over the course of a minute, you can drain the soul of a Restrained creature within 15ft of you. You must concentrate on this effect as if concentrating on a spell. Unless you take damage or are otherwise interrupted, you absorb the soul of that creature after a minute passes. The creature immediately dies, and your total lifespan increases by 1 month. A creature killed in this way can't be revived by anything less than a Wish Scroll, as its soul is fed to your soul artifact.
Disrupt Life. As an action, you can unleash a wave of pure negative energy. Each non-Undead creature within 20 feet of you must make a DC 16 Constitution saving throw, taking 5d6 Necrotic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
Once you use this trait, you must complete a long rest to do so again.