Yes. Destruction of the lich's soul asylum without casting dispel magic and remove curse first summons a guardian spirit known as a runaway train, a large iron golem (AC 0, MV 500" on tracks, 120 hp, #AT 1, D 10-100, MR as iron golem, AL NE) that rams through the party once and disappears.
S'all good. This is Pathfinder 2E. I have a monk with the
Wrestler Archetype and
Titan Wrestler. I'll
suplex that motherf****r into the ground.
To my mind you don’t help prevent prejudice by removing references to a religion and cultures from the wider popular culture. You do it by educating people and exposing them to those cultures.
If the only phylacteries in the game were used by evil Liches then there might be a moral or social argument for renaming them. As has been said there are also phylacteries that heal wounds and help someone stay faithful. If the use in a game encourages a person to google phylactery and find out what they are in real life, all to the good I say.
I think you hit on a good idea that you should educate and expose people to different cultures. However, I think that's also why this is probably a good reason to take off-hand one-off references like phylactery out.
Like, "phylactery" doesn't really educate anyone or create a new understanding of the culture it came from or references. It was just sort of put there to be a bit exotic, as an offhand reference to a culture that is different from ours. There's a bunch of this in D&D, and while it's not necessarily
offensive it's probably better to have conversations about these things and avoiding it in the future.
Does that mean you can never use "phylactery"? No, but I think if you are using a term that is generally specific to a culture, it needs to be deliberate: if you are creating a religion or ethnic group based around Jews and their various branches, then it would make sense. That certainly has the possibility of being fraught, but that's going to be up to how you execute on that. But you can see with stuff like the recent Mwangi Expanse book that you can make referential cultures and be properly respectful while not just lifting them wholesale.
On the other hand, if you are just using it as a throwaway reference to a real-world culture and not actually something in your world, then you're just making the D&D lore equivalent of a Family Guy reference joke: it's not about actually fitting it into the story, but rather that you might know something about this outside of the game itself. Heck, even if you expand it out, just making an extended reference without putting thought into it will likely end up bad. Since this is Pathfinder, lemme go to a place that I think is conceptually interesting but is badly executed: Galt.
Galt is French Revolution land, a place that is continually stuck in the Terror. The entire thing is based off references, but not actually made into a living, breathing place: it's stuck in time like a theme park. I think there is actually really fertile ground there, but but we never get to any of it because the setting is based off reference and not with a coherent idea of how it is meant actually act.
And look: I don't really think Galt is
offensive, but it also shows the low ceiling for tossing out references. Phylactery fits closer to this, where the name is referential, but that's it. It doesn't educate or create a greater understanding. That's something we should be moving away from, and part of that requires analyzing what stuff is like that and whether or not it can/should be salvaged. There are plenty of other things that we can have that discussion
. And let me be clear: while I don't think everything discussed should be changed, at the same time
it deserves honest discussion. But we have to move away from reflexive sensitivity towards looking at these things.
