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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 7880922" data-attributes="member: 42856">With 27 INT and 21 WIS, Acerak is one of the smartest guy around. His goal is to protect his phylactery at all cost. Electing to make it sit in an inhabitated area, even by monsters or by Strahd, is not smart. A wandering party of adventurers could stumble upon it while on the plane of Dread and say "hum it's a phylactery, let's destroy it because no good think can come out of that thing..." Or allow the Dark Powers of Ravenloft to take it and use it as leverage against him. Putting the phylactery in a place where geological hasard can destroy it is not smart as well (OK, there is a chance in a million of an earthquake of huge magnitude, but if you're playing the eternity game you know that with enough time, it is absolutely certain that a very improbable event will come to pass). Placing his phylactery in an interesting demiplane would be a mistake.So, even if it is not conducive to an heroic adventure, Acerak should probably have cast demiplane to create an empty 30x30x30 room, protect its phylactery against heat and pour molten lead through the door to fill most of the demiplane with it (with just enough space for his body to reappear and for an interloper to stand right on the zone when the glyphs of warding are taking effect.. Most spells (scrying, find the path...) don't work to access extraplanar locations. Access will be extremely restricted. Even if Acerak was magically compelled (or tricked) to divulgue the location of the demi-plane, the amount of lead to search for would give him some time to react. Of course, Acerak would have created over time 83 identical lead-filled demiplanes in case someone tried to get information on this plane thorugh yes/no answers through a Contact Outer Planes spells and get enough information to become familiar enough with the plane to attempt to demiplane into the correct one. And on the other hand, he would have publicly created 7 uber-phylacteries of insurmountable power that would be sent on Ravenloft, the plane of Shadow and so on, just to act as decoy (simply enchanted with a spell of alarm to know when and adventuring party is determined enough to kill him to enter Ravenloft just for this task, so he can preemptively scry over them and murder them by attempting an alpha strike).Fortunately, Acererak turns to dust and leaves no body behind that could be interrogated through Speak with Dead. He can't be charmed. The forked tuning key to the demiplane could be acquired by a third-party through a wish spell outside of the normal range, but then, such a spell could also be worded to acquire the phylactery directly... If he was truly paranoid, he could forego his single, regular contingency (woe 5e) to have an obscure spell like Shadow of Moil cast on himself with the contingency condition being "a being that is not me enters the demiplane of the phylactery". So if he suddenly finds himself wreathed in shadowflames, he would know it's time to act with decisiveness. Poor Acererak doesn't usually prepare drawmij's instant summon but he could have pre-attuned a sapphire to its phylactery to retrieve it "across any distance and plane" should such a dire event occur...Due to mebeing a simple level-1 Commoner with average stat, I can't really envision all the step a 27 INT creature could imagine, but it would certainly be along those lines (and taking the time and discipline to actually rotate the phylactery among the 83 demiplanes of lead with some regularity). So the only way to get rid of him would be the 1d10 days between killing Acererak and the reformation of his body.To make it fun for the players, find a way to impart the knowledge of the epic preparations the lich took with his phylactery, investigate some red herring (like the faux horcruxes) and so on until they cana devise a suitable plan to execute. Maybe involving tricking Acererak into actually Drawmijing his phylactery into his hands just before attacking him.</blockquote>

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