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[7:01 PM] ZAVAZggg: What if I made a necromancer?

[7:08 PM] ZAVAZggg: If I did make one, I wouldn't go the Skyrim route

[7:08 PM] ZAVAZggg: Where he can just hippity hoppity, raise your dead body

[7:09 PM] ZAVAZggg: Until lichdom is achieved, I'd say he'd need to perform rituals to raise the dead, and even then he'd focus on like maybe one or two guardians at most since it would draw on his life force

[7:10 PM] ZAVAZggg: Other tactics would include him draining life and using frost based magic. But once he gets lichdom though, he can essentially raise dead without limit, spread pestilence, and cloak entire regions in unholy auras of darkness.

[7:11 PM] ZAVAZggg: My reasoning behind this is that, due to him cheating death via phylactery, the only lifeforce he'd have to draw from would be that in the world around him. Plants and microbes count in that too(edited)

[7:12 PM] ZAVAZggg: So in a sense he gets limitless necromantic power from life itself

[7:15 PM] ZAVAZggg: True, but his draining isn't something he can turn off at that point

[7:16 PM] ZAVAZggg: And it's not what sustains him as a lich, just his godlike necromantic powers

[7:16 PM] ZAVAZggg: In any case, for the sake of being fair and not ruining my own enjoyment via a mountain of questions, his drain will be a constant if ultimately small effect all things considered

[7:17 PM] ZAVAZggg: Enough to give him power, and if he needs more he can always manually do it to people en masse, but not enough to say depopulate an entire world.

Because then I have to explain how he doesn't become a necromantic Darth Nihilus, and that I do not want to do.

[7:18 PM] ZAVAZggg: Normal magic is different from necromancy in this sense, by letting you replenish your mana or life force naturally
[7:18 PM] ZAVAZggg: Through certain plants/herbs, rest, potions, etc.(edited)

[7:20 PM] ZAVAZggg: Necromancy is the opposite. Once that life force gets spent, it's gone and you don't get it back. You get weaker depending on how difficult the magic or ritual was to perform, allowing a sliding scale that doesn't force me to shoot myself in the foot but also not be an overly OP cuck, but no amount of rest gets it back to you.

[7:20 PM] ZAVAZggg: Now typically, since mana comes from and makes up the soul in this instance, this is a bad thing. And eventually lethal.(edited)

[7:21 PM] ZAVAZggg: But if you're a lich you have no soul, that's locked away in a phylactery somewhere. What you do have is other souls, other mana around you, though...(edited)

[7:24 PM] ZAVAZggg: Of course to become a lich you gotta perform a ritual to rend your soul from your body, after making the vessel of course and ensuring it's tied to your being.

[7:25 PM] ZAVAZggg: The rending requires an incantation, and near-death. So either get cutting or get drinking, because one way or the other you have to get close to deaths door. As for the tying, well that's simple. Necromancers carry objects with them, some of which they seem to be connected to on an almost metaphysical level. These are generally candidates for future phylacteries.
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[@Mae]