The Gaming Den

So, I've read the Tome of Fiends, and also Frank's review of the BoED where he complains quite a lot about redeeming enemies being pointless because souls are not permanent and both sides of the alignment fight use the souls of failures as street lamps and tea cups.

What I want to know is, where did this idea come from? Its not terribly obvious to me in any of the D&D game books I've read. Planescape?

Just different ways to thwart the True Resurrection spell?

I think it traces back ultimately to horror and fantasy fiction of the 1970s on, where the destruction and consumption of souls became a bit of a trope, and I'm not exactly sure where it really started in D&D terms but you can clearly see in Book of Vile Darkness that souls are used as items of trade, manufacture, and fuel for spells and evil artifacts, and way before that in Wraith they'd just turn your ass into an ashtray.

Hm.
Souls and theie place in a TTRPG rule and campaign setting is pretty interesting; primarily because it seems like their could be some serious conflicts in fluff you try to lay out some sort of system.

Is reincarnation a thing? If it is, what happens to being 'damned for eternity'?

If a person is Good in one life, then reincarnated and decides to be evil... how is that handled? What if they chose a different god? Or even a different belief system?

So really... what is a soul in an RPG?

A bit of nothing with your name on it.

codeGlaze wrote:If a person is Good in one life, then reincarnated and decides to be evil... how is that handled?

The same way as if he was good for 40 years and then decided to kill his wife.

Xaos wrote:What I want to know is, where did this idea come from?

How far down the anthropological rabbit hole do you want to go?
Trying to find the internal origins is kind of a moot point. Since D&D is a kitchen-sink amalgamation of almost every mythos in the history of man, it might be better to look there.
(btw -- soul-trapping magic waaaaaay predates Planescape. Also, while it does happen to thwart resurrection magic, that is not the end onto itself -- they're parts of a larger trope)

The concept of souls is (I'm guessing) probably as old as human sentience; because, instinctually, the brain can't actually understand the end of its own existence (basically, it's like dividing by zero) -- so we've built this psychological work-around. And different cultures have developed different ways to apply the mind-caulk.

Applying this to D&D ..... well, there's all kind of ways to do this.

Um .... what are you getting at?

D&D has gotten pretty messed up with its souls. Remember at this point that you can get killed, rise as a specter, get true resurrected elsewhere, and people can still grab the head of your corpse and cast speak with dead to get it to answer questions based on what it remembers. Which is totes different than what "you" or "your spirit" remember. Fuck.

And that still isn't as fucked up as Mage the Awakening.

D&D has had souls being made into stuff for a long time. Back in the seventies, we had a monster entry for Larva. They were evil souls that turned into grubs and later hatched into demons and devils and shit - or got eaten or used as a magical power source or whatever.



Eventually, great wheel bullshit decided that the same basic thing must logically be happening to Good, Chaotic, and Lawful souls. I'm not really sure when that happened exactly. Probably some time in the eighties.

-Username17

Ancient History wrote:I think it traces back ultimately to horror and fantasy fiction of the 1970s on, where the destruction and consumption of souls became a bit of a trope, and I'm not exactly sure where it really started in D&D terms but you can clearly see in Book of Vile Darkness that souls are used as items of trade, manufacture, and fuel for spells and evil artifacts, and way before that in Wraith they'd just turn your ass into an ashtray.

Yesss.... but that's the fiends.

Why is Frank so convinced that all outsiders, including Celestials, engage in this soul destroying? I mean, I've seen a few worldbooks with different afterlife ideas (including one where all non-worshippers souls are simply melted down for spare parts in the True Neutral Plane), but none that seem to qualify stuff like:

The only people who get screwed in the D&D afterlife are traitors and failures. A traitor gets a bad deal in the afterlife because whichever side of the fence they ended up on is going to remember their deeds on the other side of the fence. A failure gets a bad deal because they end up judged by gods who wanted them to succeed. As such, it is really hard to get people to change alignment in D&D. Unless you can otherwise assure that someone will die as a failure to their alignment, there's absolutely no incentive you could possibly give them that would entice them to betray it.

-Tome of Fiends, "There is no Salvation or Redemption in D&D"


Actually, part of the reason this is so strange is what it means for the good alignment.

Being a "successful" good guy implies saving large swaths of people- including nonheroes who are not equipped to mirror your success (at the end of the day, there are only so many crises to put people in danger. What happens to good aligned people in a genuinely peaceful period of time?), peasant farmers who have not been raised to amount to anything, and those aligned to neutral or even evil who are going to either be judged by other standards, or begin from an even lower position on the totem pole if they change alignments. What happens to them?

It seems kind of bipolar for the Good Gods to ask their champions and servitors to protect these people if when they are going to be consumed or turned into furniture for the heinous crime of being a normal person. Did we just save these people for the Fires of Hell Heaven?

Frank complains about applying the concepts of Mercy and Salvation in his review of the Book of Exalted Deeds, but it seems to me that if the forces of good don't have enough "Mercy" to cover helpless (good aligned) children being eaten by Manticores, it seems kind of silly that their primary complaint was that said child didn't save more helpless innocents from Manticores.

I mean, where'd this shit come from?

Project Eternity looks like it will focus quite a bit on the soul physics of the setting. It's D&D inspired, and I'm quite curious to see where things will end up.

FrankTrollman wrote:D&D has gotten pretty messed up with its souls. Remember at this point that you can get killed, rise as a specter, get true resurrected elsewhere, and people can still grab the head of your corpse and cast speak with dead to get it to answer questions based on what it remembers. Which is totes different than what "you" or "your spirit" remember. Fuck.

And that still isn't as fucked up as Mage the Awakening.

D&D has had souls being made into stuff for a long time. Back in the seventies, we had a monster entry for Larva. They were evil souls that turned into grubs and later hatched into demons and devils and shit - or got eaten or used as a magical power source or whatever.



Eventually, great wheel bullshit decided that the same basic thing must logically be happening to Good, Chaotic, and Lawful souls. I'm not really sure when that happened exactly. Probably some time in the eighties.

-Username17

Huh. Wow.

First of all, thanks for showing up.

Now, I went to the SRD, and actually, the spells don't seem quite as contradictory as that. "Speak with Dead" uses some language about it using an "imprint" of your soul, but perhaps it would make more sense to say that it creates a short-lived mindless undead (or perhaps flesh golem, for reasons I'll get into in the Next paragraph.) from the head that answers questions based on the knowledge in its brain. Its using the hardware that's still there, doesn't bother your actual consciousness with needed to be part of anything. Actually, its amazing you can't do the same thing with mindless zombies...

You can't True Resurrect somebody until after you have destroyed any undead version of them lurking around out there, including Spectres (and mindless zombies? What about Speak with Dead that admits it doesn't actually speak with the individual? I mean, they will stop "Speaking with dead" after a while, but what if they cast it on a head of somebody who has already been revived? Does this "cancel" the TR and kill the revivee? Probably not, hence the idea of it being closer to a flesh golem.)

Anyway, about the Great Wheel and not being sure when the Law/Good/Chaos soul economy started, can you point me to the source material where YOU first heard about it? Even if its not the original? Also, have you ever found anything trying to defend the logic all outsiders doing the same thing?

If everyone is doing the same thing, then Celestials just are monsters with golden energy attacks instead of red ones. (And also, turning against outsiders and by association, gods, isn't a solidly neutral choice. Its hard to argue that its anything but the only real Good guy side there is in this conflict.) This seems to be the big thing that the Celestials are supposedly fighting about, so no, ....Mr. Random 80's Writer Guy, it isn't the logical extension.

Xaos wrote:Anyway, about the Great Wheel and not being sure when the Law/Good/Chaos soul economy started, can you point me to the source material where YOU first heard about it? Even if its not the original? Also, have you ever found anything trying to defend the logic all outsiders doing the same thing?

This is covered in great detail in the Manual of the Plains. I remember it from the 3rd ed one, but the 2nd ed version probably has the same thing.

Judgment: Dead characters pass through the Outer Planes, where they are judged by their deities. Those who fail are retained on the Outer Planes (in which case they are called petitioners) or returned to the Material Plane for reincarnation. Those who are judged worthy join with the essence of the plane itself, transform into servants of their deity, or pass onto a new level of reality unknown to even the deities themselves.

Most petitioners of Celestia are lantern archons. More so than most petitioners on other planes, they are graced with both knowledge and power. Every petitioner's goal is to ascend through the layers of Mount Celestia and evolve into a more glorious archon type. Other archons treat lantern archons like children, forgiving their errors and guiding them onto paths of virtue.

Several kinds of petitioners are found in the Nine Hells. Evil, proud, ambitious souls unconcerned with others and bereft of empathy find their way there. Most of those souls take the form of ghost-white shades, shells of their mortal forms, which devils cruelly mold and shape into twisted, agonized forms of horror. Only when the soul is so twisted and molded that it is truly, finally slain does its essence merge with that of the Nine Hells itself. Often, devils or deities of a particular hellish realm molds petitioners in their realm to conform to a specific, macabre aesthetic.
...
Particularly vile petitioners become lemures. Only the most evil of mortals can achieve status as lemures, and
they usually end up here regardless of the deity they worshiped in life. Lemures, of course, are despised by all
other devils, and they serve the most base duties in any devilish group they are part of. In any initial Blood War
confrontation, the lemures are the shock troops that draw the enemy's fire.

If everyone is doing the same thing, then Celestials just are monsters with golden energy attacks instead of red ones. (And also, turning against outsiders and by association, gods, isn't a solidly neutral choice. Its hard to argue that its anything but the only real Good guy side there is in this conflict.) This seems to be the big thing that the Celestials are supposedly fighting about, so no, ....Mr. Random 80's Writer Guy, it isn't the logical extension.

Well ... yes. There's not actually that much procedurally different between a Balor and a Solar. They both started as particularly {alignment} mortals who's souls traveled to {plain} where they became petitioners and performed particularly well in acts in service to {alignment/planar philosophy} until they were rewarded with promotion to {powerful outsider}. It's not particularly different from having a cleric of Nerull and a cleric of Pelor: same chassis, different goals.

The great wheel cosmology and two axis alignment system are pretty fucked. But there is kind of a charming Karmic sensibility to the idea that your "reward" is an afterlife made up entirely of people like you.

codeGlaze wrote: So really... what is a soul in an RPG?

A miserable pile of secrets.

Koumei wrote: A miserable pile of secrets.

echo

^ That is a great joke

I finally understand that joke.

Sigh, references. Thankfully reverse image search solves the problem of smug exclusivity.

Yeah, it was a mystery for me since I never played Castlevania during my deprived childhood.

Thankfully with the image I was able to find the comments section on that webcomic I was able to find a "What is a man?" Castlevania youtube video which splained all.

I asked pretty much the same question a while back. Here's the thread:

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51 ... sc&start=0