You can start when they’re as little as 4 and have decent results. I started with mine when they were 5 and 3 with Hero Kids and by the time they hit 6 and 8, they’d graduated to Pathfinder 2 (edit: albeit with a great deal of help/handholding)
10/10, would indoctrinate children with gateway drugs games again
It’s been a bit since I read The Book of the Dead, but isn’t there an ancestry option for skeletons to create something like a phylactery at higher levels?
Edit: or maybe even for wizards in general?
Edit 2: “Lich dedication” is an archetype feat with the prerequisites that the user be an expert in crafting, have the ability to cast 6th level spells, and spend 1,600gp to build the soul cage (which deprecated the term “phylactery,” since phylacteries are an active religious artifact in some sects of Judaism).
Power level and lore, mostly.
My brother in Christ, you’d best be playing Pathfinder 2. Gnolls are freaking badass PC ancestry (as are must of the other major “monstrous” races like kobolds, gobbos, orcs, and skeletons)
My list of “characters I long to play if ever I can find a group where I’m not a Forever GM” includes:
A radical leftist Redeemer paladin gnoll whose dream to is convince other gnolls that gnolls can show they are better than the rest of the world if they don’t use slavery, and so runs around organizing slave revolts and making dramatic speeches that often devolve into riots.
A goblin gunslinger that fights like he’s trying to earn a place in Tucker’s Kobolds
A skeleton wizard who’s convinced he’s a lich but really just fucked up the ritual and lost nearly all of his magical knowledge
A kobold sorcerer with an inferiority complex that keeps referring to themselves as “dragon born” (which don’t exist in Pathfinder), and thinks that one day their god will elevate them to being an actual dragon
Edit: some more I just remembered
A “poppet” ranger trying to find his lost child (aka The Velveteen Rabbit)
A Ratfolk assassin that lives in the sewers and claims they are trying to keep some “grimdank future-past” from happening and keeps muttering to themselves to “find-kill hammer-god”
A dhampir cavalier that rides a skeletal horse
Yeah, I know. It would probably take some help from the DM to homebrew a patron that has cleric-flavored cantrips, and even then it would likely only work for a few sessions at low levels, but I still like the idea
I’ve always loved the idea of playing a warlock that presents themselves to the party as a cleric (and then seeing how long it takes people to catch on, both in and out of character)
Nothing like driving the “cleric” deeper into debt to their patron for a little more healing and then getting the whole party committed to some insane quest at the demand of the patron.
7:7 All praise Yetsabu-Nech, the underworld’s nightmare, the black disk which stands before the sun! All praise Verhu, beaming with delight! All praise the fire which burns all! And the darkness shall swallow the darkness.
One of those must be some new way of spelling “Mörk Borg”…
Exactly. I think we actually “started” just by giving them coloring pages of cartoony fantasy creatures and characters and then making up stories about goblins and dragons on our morning walks, which in turn got them excited about their characters and miniatures and rolling dice