As a bit of inspiration, look up the lore to just about every humanoid Dark Souls boss. Indeed, as Chris Perkins pointed out in an episode of Know Your Lore, while a Lich needs their phylactery to come back from the dead, a Death Knight sort of just can, regardless of what the party does. While you'll probably run into Death Knights working for Liches (they're pretty choice elite minions for them, in fact,) a Death Knight doesn't need a Lich to be what they are. While not a legendary creature, Death Knights have some interesting lore to them. Still, I think the general vibe of this patron is that you're looking for something undead.įirst thing I'd look at is the Death Knight. That usually means necromancy, but you could come up with beings who have manipulated time or life magic in order to preserve themselves in a different way. Technically, Undying patrons are anyone who has cheated death. That being said, while Liches are certainly cool, what other options are there? And given that the very most powerful demons, like Demogorgon and Orcus, also have stat blocks, it doesn't really rule much out. So the fact that a Lich is killable does not exclude them from the potential to be a patron. In Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Solars, Ki-rin, and Empyreans are all explicitly suggested as potential Celestial patrons, and these all, notably do have stat blocks. Hexblade's a bit odd, as it sort of implies that it's all the Raven Queen ultimately, though it's vague enough to let you decide with your DM (Fjord's patron in Critical Role is clearly a Great Old One working through a Hexblade.) Asmodeus is theoretically an archdevil, but we don't see his stats in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (though there are actually a lot of missing archdevils.) Given that my Warlock has a Great Old One patron, I tend to think of his patron as being in a similar tier of beings - the Great Old Ones might be fundamentally distinct from Gods, but if they aren't as powerful, they're probably more so.īut does that hold true for other patrons? 5E has six officially sanctioned patron types - the Archfey, Fiend, Great Old One, Undying, Celestial, and Hexblade. Generally, when a being is godlike enough to grant divine power to a Cleric or Paladin, we tend to think of them as being outside of the "killable" range. One question that you often have to think about with Warlocks is exactly how powerful one's patron is. Granted, Liches have precedence in legends like Koschei the Immortal or the quintessential "dark lord" of fantasy fiction, Sauron (though, as essentially a fallen angel I'd make Sauron's creature type fiend.) Indeed, the fact that the One Ring both keeps Sauron present on the material plane (Middle Earth) and can only be destroyed in a special way makes him the prototypical Lich (I'm sure he was in mind when they first came up with the idea.) Of course, more recently (younger than D&D) you had Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, whose Horcruxes are just a phylactery in seven parts. The latter is particularly interesting to me in that Nightwalkers are not, if I recall correctly, actually formerly living things - they're just manifestations of darkness.Īlong with the Beholder, the Lich is one of the most iconic and famous monsters to come out of D&D. Few beings, I think even fiends, can survive going to the Negative plane, but the few entities that can, like Atropals and Nightwalkers, have the Undead creature type. On one hand, the "Negative Plane" that sits below the lower planes and is a sort of undifferentiated expanse of the very essence of evil manifests typically as necromantic, undead magic. The Undead in general are in sort of a weird place in D&D lore. While she has a good feel for the basic personality of her character, she's been trying to figure out exactly who her patron should be. In a newer (three sessions in) campaign I'm playing in (playing a Dragonborn Eldrtich Knight fighter,) one of my friends is playing a Tiefling Warlock with an Undying patron. But I tend not to see a ton of people playing them. Indeed, I think that there might only be exceptions for Wizards and maybe Druids. It's sometimes easy to forget that the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide has a ton of sub-class options.
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