Liches: Dance Macabre review

    I just finished reading this supplement and wanted to actually talk about it. So, if you don't want to hear me discuss a third party supplement about Voldemorts, Azalins, Vecnas, and Saurons then this is probably not the thread for you.

    First of all, I've never really thought much about liches in games. For whatever reason, I've never had much call for them and that might be because I tended to do lower level games. By the time the player characters were to the point they might be engaging with liches, I was usually plotting my next new campaign with lower stakes. 

    I think part of the issue was that liches all seemed sort of the same. They were a bunch of skeletal wizards with more power than the vast majority of adventuring parties and came in two varieties: 1. The Evil Overlord out to conquer the world with an army of the dead. 2. The guy just minding his business in his dungeon/tower who the PCs tried to murder for being "evil."

    I remember the original VAN RITCHEN'S GUIDE TO LICHES (I'm that old of a gamer) that usually brought vast amounts of character to monster types but couldn't make the lich more interesting. So, I was willing to give this one a shot but didn't expect much. I was very pleasantly surprised as Texas in August Stuido's have successfully brought the horror to liches and made them something that is both scary and roleplayable in fantasy.

    This book contains a lot of templates, psychological details, and ideas about how liches warp the very fabric of reality to them. If a lich sets up shop around a local village, it will start looking like Innsmouth and everyone either start becoming mutated fanatical cultists or die slowly out due to the presence of such a horrifying abomination. 

    We get a variety of lich from those who attempt to preserve their human-like appearance to those who fully do embrace the whole "Skeletor" thing and also various media incarnations of the liches that you can look to other than Dungeons and Dragons. They're also smart, like modern day D&D, to rename a liches' power object from its original culturally appropriated term.

    There's plenty of crunch in here too with new spells, minions, an entire sample liches' lair, and other stuff for both PATHFINDER as well as FIFTH EDITION. It's inspired me to try my first Ravenloft game in decades. I heartily recommend this and give kudos for the awesome art as well as layout too. It looks definitely on the high end of indie works, which is a bit snobby of me but what can I say.

9/10

Available here