Liches

A lich. The scourge of many a nation, they don't stay dead until after someone locates - and destroyes - their phylactery. A lich is an artificer type super that has given up on having a real body. They create a phylactery to house their soul, and use a summon - a strong minion - as a proxy. This proxy is commonly thought of as the lich, although the actual soul l, mind, and personality - the actual person - is in the phylactery.

This doesn't work out well. The sense-sharing the artificer relies on always feels off: The mapping is seldom quite right, and is commonly missing touch, taste, smell, and some of the less commonly recognized senses. Even when the mapping is right, the displacement of soul and body introduces slight communication delays that always make the lich feel disconnected from everything. Even in the event that the lich in question was not initially an evil person (the most common reason to become a lich is wanting to avoid death because the lich knows very well they're not going to a good place when they die...), the sensory issues drive most to a very bad place mentally.

The summon a lich uses as a proxy is rarely far from the phylactery: Summons have an attenuation issue with distance, and so the body must be close to the soul box to be at full strength; many liches have the summon wear the phylactery for this reason.

While many of the proxies used by liches are undead-themed, a lich is not technically an undead, as the soul is still present (just displaced).