SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following part of the post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this part of the post and join me in a future one.

Monday’s post about my preparing for the next D&D session, I spoke about having to adjust the Lich stats so it could be used as the boss in the Jim Murphy Undead Lair.

It is by chance also the boss he uses within the video as well. So in this post I’ll be making use of his advice, along with the advice of you guessed it Matt Colville.

Before I start these are the Lich stats:

I’ll cover the other bits like actions, spells, etc as and when needed.

Let’s look firstly at Jim Murphy’s advice. After all it’s his idea. Jim talks about taking the Lich down from an 18th level magic user to a 5th level one. So to do this he suggest scaling down everything to the appropriate level, including saving throws against any spells he throws, any special abilities are either not available or greatly diminished in power.

This advice from Jim leads nicely in to the adjusting monsters advice from Matt Colville. However Jim does let his Lich keep counter spell. He says that the Lich with it’s spells and what ever abilities it has cause a minor inconvenience.

With the basic stats above I’m leaning towards lowering the AC. At the moment by a single point. But that might get lowered on the day to 15.

The HP need reducing drastically. Saving throws have been halved and reduced by 1 or 2 points.

Skills I’m leaving, and will adjust on the fly if I need them.

AC: 16

HP: 54

saving throws: Con: +4, Int: +5, Wis: +4

So let’s look at these other things the Lich can do.

I don’t need to worry about the rejuvenation. But I want to keep the legendary resistance. However I’m going to dial it back and make it a once a day thing. Which in reality is for the one encounter I plan to use the Lich in.

So what spells will I give my Lich?

Firstly the spell save DC is too high. That needs to drop to something the group has a chance of meeting. And the to hit bonus is way way to powerful. For one or two of my group it’s an instant hit without rolling!

Spell save DC: 15

Spell attack bonus: +4

I’m only picking about two or three spells. This is mainly because I’m going to be making this an action oriented monster. Actions plus lots of spells would I feel make this too over powered for a low level “baby” Lich. Also because this is a boss monster, and you know from the undead liar video, lots of undead are being thrown at the party. I’m going with defensive spells for “baby” Lich.

I’m also going to give the “baby” Lich only 4 spell slots.

Spells: shield, counter spell, dispel magic and ray of frost

The Lich has the following legendary actions:

As has been pointed out previously this is a “baby” Lich. So I’m just going to drop these legendary actions.

Although technically my Lich could be argued as being in it’s liar and have access to the following lair actions:

The only one I will make available to this “baby” Lich is the regaining spell slots action. The others just seem too over powering at this lower level. And because there are only have 4 slots I’ll use 1d4.

So now onto the Matt Colville advice from his recent (at the time of writing) Running the Game video Action Oriented Monsters. Naturally I’m using “baby” Lich as a boss.

Actions: Cast a spell

Bonus Actions: raise the fallen dead – each round a fallen undead comes back.

Reactions: Cast counter spell

Villain Actions:

Round 1: “stay awhile, stay forever” – entrances and exits shut and become locked.

Round 2: “kill him!” – focuses the undead on a member of the party that has used magic.

Round 3: “I have you now” – a minotaur skeleton appears and attacks the party.

So that’s my modified “baby” Lich I plan to use. What do you think? What would you do differently?