Mummies and Liches

Another type of actually Undead which habits the Necropolis are Mummies. There are very few of them, but they exist in their own borough and rarely roam elsewhere. They are not Necromancer work, rather they are magical creatures who inhabit the bodies they used to live in by force of Ritual magic performed on them either after they died, or shortly before. Some can re-form themselves if they’re cut into pieces or broken, but others will die – or more accurately, dissolve into dust – if they are hacked apart properly. Few stand the sun for very long, but not for the same biologically based reasons as the Vampires.

Mummies may be created in a number of ways, some related to the spells which Necromancers use, but most of that race would consider doing this an atrocity. Mummies have all the trappings of being prepped for their eternal rest, but then… don’t get to. Most of the time their internal organs have been removed and replaced, or preserved in some other location. Some Mummies might have been created by accident, a good number of them were high ranked in their society, rich, or otherwise important enough to have a lot of attention paid to their funerary services.

It’s a darn shame they didn’t hire a proper Necromancer to do it. That way, they’d have stopped moving. At this point, most of the Mummies around have been collected and remain in a decent sized section of the Necropolis. They tend not to bother any one else, they’re slow moving and not easy to communicate with. Those which have lost what little might have remained of their mind or spirit, have long since been re-committed to the ground. Once a Necromancer gets to them, they’re done. Necromancers, however, do study Mummies on a regular basis. Mostly to impress upon the next generation, how to do what they do properly and not muck it up.

Those who do not have to remain bound up with cloth or items are known as Liches, since they are truly masters of magic and need hardly worry for the state of their body. They have no life cycle, need no food, but often must prey on magic to sustain themselves. Liches comprise a remarkably low population compared to the Necromancers, to which they are typically compared. The biggest difference there, however, is that Necromancers are fine with being reanimated, in fact are well suited to it. Liches … are effectively highly powered individuals who just did not want to remain dead. Necromancers consider most Liches to be incredibly selfish and arrogant, and they would know. Liches are also, almost uniformly, extremely highly powered mages. Usually spell casters, rather than natural psionicists. They have put a huge amount of time and effort, and often a lot of resources, into making sure they last much longer than nature intended them to.

Because of that fact, they’re often quite insular, if not dangerous to encounter. While they aren’t generally considered ‘evil’ in the same way that many Daemons and Summoner’s servants can be, their selfish nature lends itself to arming traps, keeping people away from ‘their stuff’. Their stuff often is legendary in its hoarded coffers – Dragons might be jealous, in fact, of some Lich hoards. Magical items, books and scrolls, historical documents, armor and weapons, even whole mansions or townships have come under the dominion of a greedy Lich.

Very nearly all Mummies and Liches are male, but there have been cases of females – more often than not, they’re bound to a partner and are not exactly willing participants in this afterlife-denying mess.

Known Liches or Mummies of the Current Era

(… yeah, you don’t really even want to go there)