Contents
Critical Hits
Corporeal undead are no longer immune to critical hits or precision-based damage, such as a rogue’s sneak attack.
Immunity to critical hits and precision-based damage is no longer a feature of the construct type. Constructs animated by magical rather than mechanical means (such as golems) retain this immunity.
Grapple Modifiers
Size modifiers to grapple checks are now as follows:
| Fine | −8 | Large | +1 | |
| Diminutive | −4 | Huge | +2 | |
| Tiny | −2 | Gargantuan | +4 | |
| Small | −1 | Colossal | +8 |
Monster Types
The following creatures are monstrous humanoids, not giants, in Beyond Ragnarok.
- ettin
- ogre
- troll
- hill giant
- stone giant
Liches
So in the original story, it's Koschei's "death" that is stored in an object.
Harkening back to that, Here Is How Liches Work™ in Beyond Ragnarok:
A lich's soul is in his body, same as anyone.
The phylactery serves these purposes:
- As long as it exists, the lich's body is maintained.
- If the body is destroyed while the phylactery is intact, the soul immediately transfers to the phylactery.
- As long as the phylactery is intact, the lich is warded against trap the soul, imprison soul, and the like.
Now, for the effects of smashing various components of this arrangement:
- If you kill a lich, his soul goes to the phylactery.
- If you smash a phylactery while a lich is walking around, his body immediately begins to deteriorate. And nothing can stop this deterioration except temporal stasis (or similar ways of arresting the flow of time). It can be slowed down by... some exertion of personal power... perhaps some sort of Fort saves, I dunno, TBD... but nonetheless the lich's body soon crumbles to dust.
- Should the lich fail to either craft another phylactery before this happens (unlikely), get himself T.Stasis'd, or get his soul somewhere else (e.g. via magic jar), when his body falls apart, his soul proceeds immediately to the requisite afterlife.
Of course, during this time, he is also vulnerable to all the usual or unusual methods of soul trapping.
If you kill a lich and then smash a phylactery before the lich can either possess a nearby creature or reform himself a body, the soul is likewise released to the afterlife. (At that precise moment (right after phylactery smashing), the soul can be soul binded as well.)