Wandering Monsters: The Ancient Dead

Wandering Monsters continues its undead theme, this time with mummies and liches.

MUMMIES

Right off the bat I am not liking that they serve as guardians of eeevil. What if someone volunteers? What if an entire culture is actually okay with this? What if being turned into a mummy to protect something (or someone) is considered an honor? Does undead really need to be automatically evil (until I guess Eberron brings back good-aligned, positive energy-charged undead)? I do like the curse aspect. I do not recall if 2nd Edition mummies rolled like that, but this provides some easy adventure hooks.

I like everything about the mummy lord-especially being able to mummify those that they kill--except for the 9th-level cleric prereq. Why even have a prereq at all? In 3rd Edition the mummy lord was simply a mummy with 10 cleric levels, but I do not see why we need to stick to that. Just make the mummy a template and let us give them as many levels as we want, from whatever we want. This way we could have super tough guardian mummies with fighter levels, or specially trained mummy assassins (for those that served Zehir).

What about a mummy wizard whose linen is a bunch of scrolls?

LICHES 

As with the mummy lord, I do not like the minimum wizard level to get the ball rolling. It works out fine for a sample lich or recommendation, but not as a hard prereq. Again, this would work better as a kind of template, preferably with a variety of powers so we can avoid supplements with alternative liches (or make them easier to incorporate).

While I am fine with the classic stuff regarding the phylactery, I do like the ability to possess over creatures and the flavor on memories (especially the bit on using them against it). Both have the potential to add in some good adventure hooks and interesting twists. 

In both cases the good outweighs the bad, I would just prefer to see templates and the level restriction removed.