# Talk:Lich
I think all Liches could be on a same page, as they share most of their properties with themselves. I'd love to read about tactics against liches as well. Progo 10:25, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Contents

1 Huh?
2 How not to kill a lich
3 Confusion?
4 Random Lich Pet
5 Best time to Genocide L
6 Death magic resistance
7 Explaining my edits
8 Lichgate, Churchyard

Huh?
A lich:

   * does not breathe.
   * has a head, a couple of arms, and a torso.
   * can regenerate hit points.
   * is poisonous to eat.
   * is undead.
   * always starts as hostile.
   * can pick up magical items.
   * has infravision.
   * never leaves a corpse. 

How can both be true?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.181.14.252 (talk • contribs) 

You don't have to kill something to eat it, if you're, say, a purple worm.--Ray Chason 18:56, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
How not to kill a lich
Don't wield a 'trice corpse if you don't have magic resistance. A gnome on level 8 of the Gnomish Mines deliberately jumped on to a polymorph trap, turned into a lich and destroyed my gloves. Not nice...

Confusion?
In a little wizard mode testing, I #polyself'ed in to an arch-lich to do some scroll of gold detection testing while confused. I noticed that I could move in any direction without the normal confused randomisation. I was level 25 at the time, but moved hundreds of squares without randomisation. Is this a symptom of Wizard mode, the monster itself, my high level, was I just lucky or something else entirely? -- Kalon 05:33, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Random Lich Pet
Has this come up for anyone before?
I was wandering through the dungeon digging up walls with a pickaxe when I looked and there was a Master Lich following me...as a pet.  I thought it may have been my kitten morphed, but kitten appeared a few turns later.
Is it possible a lich might just randomly take a liking to a character?

I bet you stepped on a magic trap and got the "charm monster" effect.  I once tamed the Titan on the Medusa level that way.  He killed an aligned priest at a temple I was frequenting (bad Titan!  no biscuit), then ate a chameleon corpse and followed me around for a while as "George the invisible flying shark" before he finally contrived to get himself killed.  It was a weird game.--65.81.9.240 03:07, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
Are you sure the lich wasn't a shape changer? -Tjr 12:44, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
No, he was a Master Lich until he grew up.  I can't remember how we died there...The trap sounds plausible, though I can't remember it.  It was kinda weird, though.
i had my large dog turn up as idefix the invisible level 37 lich. whether it jumped into a polytrap or ate a shapeshifter i will  never know. it's sort of cool to have around, as long as i remember not to hang around too long in temples. two annoyances, though. firstly, it'll never teleport between me and the nasties, so i'm not protected in the way i would be by a gray dragon, say. how do i keep it by me without a magic whistle? nextly it doesn't seem to want to put on better armour. Ac -14 is pretty good, but i have a spare +1 gdsm i want it to wear but it just won't. what can a boy do? --86.144.114.167 22:00, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
I don't believe liches normally wear any armor. They can, but don't. Liches will start teleporting next to you once they grow up and become master liches, and then become arch liches. Most players consider it to be an annoyance, however. A lich is definitely more useful as a pet than a dog, but they're completely useless against cold resistant monsters. They also like to teleport away to heal, rather than stick around and help you out. -- Qazmlpok 22:54, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Best time to Genocide L
Is there a most opportune time to genocide the lich class? E.g. a level where a large number of liches are generated?
Examples from elsewhere- saving a&nbsp;; genocide for the Plane of Water leaves a very quiet level.

Seems like a good idea. Personally, I genocide when I recognize I can't handle the guy normally. --Tjr 22:01, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
Death magic resistance
I reverted the addition of death magic to the resistances of arch-liches: all undead and demons naturally resist death rays.  The "death magic" resistance is SLASH'EM-specific: it makes some monsters (notably angelic beings) which would otherwise be vulnerable to death rays resist them.  Possibly, though, it might be a good idea to put a link in the monster template for the undead or demonic property, as the food property is linked now.  Maybe all the attributes ultimately be linked to appropriate pages. -Ion frigate 00:43, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

If nothing else, it shouldn't be mentioned solely on the arch lich, as all liches inherently resist death magic. I personally disagree on only listing "death magic" if they are a SLASH'EM monster that is immune to death magic explicitly because of the MR flag and not a result of being undead/demonic. If the monster would not be affected by a death ray (other than because they are reflecting/magic resistant, as that is a separate intrinsic/resistance) then I'd argue that the article should state that. Similarly, there is no MR flag for magic resistance, but I believe that it should be included in the template when applicable under resistances. However, as just changing it on the lich page would be inconsistent with every other undead/demon page, I'm not going to change anything any time soon. -- Qazmlpok 04:16, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Explaining my edits
I thought I should explain my edits to this article. Say the Castle is on level 29, and you reach it at level 14 or lower.
Then, the monster levels for the various types of liches will be:

Lich: 11 (base level) + 3 (adjustment for level depth) = 14 (enough to cast aggravate)
Demilich: 14 (base level) + 3 (adjustment for level depth) = 17 (more than enough to cast summon nasties)
Master lich: 17 (base level) + 2 (adjustment for level depth) = 19 (not enough for touch of death)
Arch-lich: 25 (base level) (enough for touch of death).
Since the Castle is the one place where you are the most likely to meet liches (unless you've already genocided them), I think it makes sense to use it as a reference point when describing which spells each type of lich can typically cast. If you don't genocide L and meet them in Gehennom, then they'll be able to cast even higher spells—but by then you should have the items you need to deal with the spells. --Erica 07:53, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Lichgate, Churchyard
"Churchyard" is simply English English for "cemetery", since the tradition in England is to bury people around the church. So it really doesn't matter if you say "cemetery" or "churchyard" in the definition of "lichgate". This said, of course, you don't need a lichgate at all if your churchyard does not serve as a cemetery, because the lichgate is only there to keep the rain off the corpse while the officiating cleric determines that the dear departed is sufficiently "aligned" to be buried in hallowed ground. Etc. etc. Lovely word, though, isn't it? "Lich" is also related to the word "like" and to the adverbial suffix "-ly", but do we want to put that in the article? Naaaahhh ... this is Nethackwiki, not English-Language-Wiki. 91.22.144.8 23:31, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

"Cemetery" in British English refers specifically to a graveyard without a church. Lichgates pre-date the idea of doing that. (They also remain where the graveyard has been cleared of graves.) If you can find one that is the gate to a cemetery (in Britain) which isn't a 19th Century or later anachronism, then I'd be delighted to change the wording back again. NetHack is for nerds. Nerds love precision. If you're going to get picky about vocabulary and/or grammar, you had better do the research. --195.2.244.193 13:11, 15 January 2015 (UTC)