Undying Warlock Patrons That Aren't Just Liches

It's sometimes easy to forget that the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide has a ton of sub-class options. Indeed, I think that there might only be exceptions for Wizards and maybe Druids. But I tend not to see a ton of people playing them.

In a newer (three sessions in) campaign I'm playing in (playing a Dragonborn Eldrtich Knight fighter,) one of my friends is playing a Tiefling Warlock with an Undying patron. While she has a good feel for the basic personality of her character, she's been trying to figure out exactly who her patron should be.

The Undead in general are in sort of a weird place in D&D lore. On one hand, the "Negative Plane" that sits below the lower planes and is a sort of undifferentiated expanse of the very essence of evil manifests typically as necromantic, undead magic. Few beings, I think even fiends, can survive going to the Negative plane, but the few entities that can, like Atropals and Nightwalkers, have the Undead creature type. The latter is particularly interesting to me in that Nightwalkers are not, if I recall correctly, actually formerly living things - they're just manifestations of darkness.

Along with the Beholder, the Lich is one of the most iconic and famous monsters to come out of D&D. Granted, Liches have precedence in legends like Koschei the Immortal or the quintessential "dark lord" of fantasy fiction, Sauron (though, as essentially a fallen angel I'd make Sauron's creature type fiend.) Indeed, the fact that the One Ring both keeps Sauron present on the material plane (Middle Earth) and can only be destroyed in a special way makes him the prototypical Lich (I'm sure he was in mind when they first came up with the idea.) Of course, more recently (younger than D&D) you had Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, whose Horcruxes are just a phylactery in seven parts.

One question that you often have to think about with Warlocks is exactly how powerful one's patron is. Generally, when a being is godlike enough to grant divine power to a Cleric or Paladin, we tend to think of them as being outside of the "killable" range. Asmodeus is theoretically an archdevil, but we don't see his stats in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (though there are actually a lot of missing archdevils.) Given that my Warlock has a Great Old One patron, I tend to think of his patron as being in a similar tier of beings - the Great Old Ones might be fundamentally distinct from Gods, but if they aren't as powerful, they're probably more so.

But does that hold true for other patrons? 5E has six officially sanctioned patron types - the Archfey, Fiend, Great Old One, Undying, Celestial, and Hexblade.

Hexblade's a bit odd, as it sort of implies that it's all the Raven Queen ultimately, though it's vague enough to let you decide with your DM (Fjord's patron in Critical Role is clearly a Great Old One working through a Hexblade.)

In Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Solars, Ki-rin, and Empyreans are all explicitly suggested as potential Celestial patrons, and these all, notably do have stat blocks.

So the fact that a Lich is killable does not exclude them from the potential to be a patron. And given that the very most powerful demons, like Demogorgon and Orcus, also have stat blocks, it doesn't really rule much out.

That being said, while Liches are certainly cool, what other options are there?

Technically, Undying patrons are anyone who has cheated death. That usually means necromancy, but you could come up with beings who have manipulated time or life magic in order to preserve themselves in a different way.

Still, I think the general vibe of this patron is that you're looking for something undead.

First thing I'd look at is the Death Knight. While not a legendary creature, Death Knights have some interesting lore to them. While you'll probably run into Death Knights working for Liches (they're pretty choice elite minions for them, in fact,) a Death Knight doesn't need a Lich to be what they are. Indeed, as Chris Perkins pointed out in an episode of Know Your Lore, while a Lich needs their phylactery to come back from the dead, a Death Knight sort of just can, regardless of what the party does. As a bit of inspiration, look up the lore to just about every humanoid Dark Souls boss.

One Undying Patron I think is screaming to be represented came out with Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. The Obzedat Ghost Council, leaders of the Orzhov Syndicate, is an oligarchy of greedy rich specters. You might consider just one of them as your patron (they could be using you to get a leg up on the others) but A: each ghost is only CR 8, which feels a bit low for a patron and B: I think it's way more interesting if the entire council is your patron - all squabbling over whose turn it is to use you and what cross-purposes they can set you upon.

Incorporeal undead are often portrayed as less powerful - or at least less aware of their situation. But this idea of ghosts who make fine use of their state (at least until some ghost-hunting assassin shows up) and actually wind up as powerful as Liches is a pretty cool idea.

You could also go for more cosmic-level powers. In my homebrew setting, the Lawful Evil plane was, many ages ago, conquered by the Angel of Death, turning burning hells into the frozen Necropolis. A being like the Angel of Death could make for a very powerful Undying Patron. Likewise, if you wanted to give your Undying patron a bit of the Great Old One-style inscrutable horror, you could go with something like an Atropal - which is technically an undead failed god-fetus, really straddling the line between GOO and Undying - or take the aforementioned Nightwalker - a being of pure negative energy, which means it's technically undead, even if it never lived.

As I've said before, I adore the lore surrounding Warlocks in D&D, even if their power level in-game is heavily dependent on the style of campaign you run (they seem built for dungeon crawls with multiple short rests per day, whereas my games tend to be much more story-driven and thus the "get all your very small number of spell slots back on a short rest" bonus is often devalued when we tend to only have one or maybe two combats between long rests.) Warlocks automatically come with an extra bond and the potential for some really interesting moral conundrums or challenges if the patron is still demanding something of you or if the consequences of the thing you did for your patron are coming for you.