Soul

Example

## Common Knowledge

Many people believe in the existence of a soul, some immutable essence of the self that persists after death. Some people even believe in the existence of a life after death, where their soul continues to live. Powerful adventurers and scholars of Soul magic know that such a soul does, indeed, exist. Necromancers know that this essence of being is a little more malleable than others might think.

## Affected Regions

Nearly all living and undead things possess a soul of some sort, even down to plants and animals. As such, there are functionally no areas which are not affected in some way by souls.

The Soul Plane is the home realm of all souls.

## Related Groups and People

* Reapers are harbingers tasked by the god of Death to reap the souls of the living when their bodies expire. Some reapers, called Life Reapers, instead bestow new souls onto newborns.
* Soul magic users can affect the soul of themselves and others with magic.
	+ People who use soul magic to raise undead servants are called necromancers.
* Those whose souls are disconnected from their body are considered undead creatures. There are many different types of undead, which include:
	+ Ghosts, spectral visages of the deceased whose souls now linger for some unknown purpose. Some have a specific task they are compelled to fulfill, but others are just angry and violent. Ghosts come in many different subcategories, such as Banshee and Poltergeist.
	+ Liches, mages who have disconnected their soul on purpose to perpetuate their soul even after their original body is destroyed.
	+ Vampires, highly-intelligent cursed undead who feed upon the blood of the living to sustain immortality. In exchange, vampires are highly weakened by sunlight and flame. Vampires often gather into large groups, called covens.
	+ Wraithlords, even stronger mages who have bathed their being in the essence of a Reaper, in addition to being a lich.
	+ Zombies, a body with hardly any connection to its soul and turns both into mindless, lumbering, fleshy machines.
	+ Skeletons, a body animated in the same way as a zombie but without the limitations or advantages of flesh.

## Overview

### Anatomy of a Soul

The soul is a combination of equal parts essence and magic, coalescing into a form that can behave like one, the other, neither, or both, depending on the circumstances. A creature’s soul is a reflection of both its body and thoughts, which flow evenly throughout the body.

### Soul Size

Different creatures have different souls, which can be measured. In a broad sense, a creature’s physical mass, intellectual capacity, and natural magical affinity determine the size and complexity of their soul. These differences in quality and quantity are referred to be scholars as a soul’s “size”, simply in lieu of a more concise term.

For example, the soul of a flower would not be as large as, say, the soul of a common housecat. This would still hold true if we compared that flower to the soul of a bumblebee. Even though the bee is physically smaller than the flower, it can process more information and make more complicated decisions. We can expand this concept further, in that the souls of sapient creatures (e.g. humans, elves, dwarves, etc.) are generally larger than the souls of those of merely sentient creatures (e.g., wolves, cats, horses, owlbears, etc.), and the souls of those born with innate magical power (e.g. dragons, fae, greater spirits, reapers, etc.) are larger than the souls of mere sapient creatures.

An interesting property of creatures with extremely large souls is that they may gain a resistance to certain types of harmful spells and martial techniques which would wound, mortally wound, or outright kill them under normal circumstances. These abilities will certainly damage such a creature, but may not have the instantly harmful effect they ought to have.

Souls, especially the souls of non-mortals, grow more powerful and complex with time.

### Willpower

As is often the nature with a life lived, many creatures with souls are exposed to hardship and develop the courage and determination to overcome those hardships. The soul is an innately magical thing, however, and as a result that same determination can be applied in a number of different ways.

Creatures who develop enough internal determination can harness that power to force some outcome onto the real world, through a process called manifestation. Manifesting requires a great deal of willpower, and the average mortal cannot achieve feats of manifestation without training. A creature who is able can manifest many things, including restoring stamina to themselves or others, deflecting or purging effects from their souls, or even replicating the effects of casting certain spells.

#### Incarnation

A consequence of willpower and its capacity to be manifested is that some things can be manifested by large groups of people, if given sufficient time. If a large group of people believe in the existence of a deity, and that belief and worship persists for millennia, then that deity will simply begin to exist.

Deities created in this way, called progenitor deities, have the personality, capabilities, and powers that their believers attribute to them, and they acquire more power by increasing their number of worshippers, as well as a natural increase in power over time. It should be noted that deities created by willpower are seldom ever as strong as deities created by Elder Gods (such as Death, Polaris, etc.). This also works in the reverse, with progenitor deities weakening as their follower base decreases. Changes in the beliefs surrounding a progenitor deity that also exists can change the deity itself, if given enough time.

They also possess their own souls, which are inherently different from the souls of mortal creatures. As a result, a still-living creature cannot be raised to the status of a progenitor deity while they are alive. If a living creature is believed to be a deity, and they meet the prerequisites to become a progenitor deity, then when they die a progenitor deity will begin to exist which looks, behaves, and has the same powers as the living creature is believed to have. This deity is fundamentally a different creature with a different soul, though, and the fate of the soul upon which it was based is the same as that of any other creature.

Some examples of progenitor deities include the dark elven goddesses (Lolth/Maelstrom, Vague, Muse, The Masked Lady), Sol Invictus, and Equis.

The process of a progenitor deity coming to be is called incarnation.

### Cycle of a Soul

This section will describe the natural cycle a soul experiences. Though it describes this cycle in terms of a soul of a mortal born on the Material Plane, the same holds true for all creatures which possess a physical body (and many that do not) and for creatures born outside the Material Plane.

#### Sown into a New Creature

A creature’s soul is given to them shortly before birth by a Life Reaper, who invisibly travels through the Shroud to their destination. New souls are blank templates with no experience, personality, or knowledge. These are all developed as that soul lives their life, and are affected both by the effect their parents’ souls have on it and the experiences that their upbringing provides.

#### Death, and its Repercussions

Most creatures who are born eventually die. When this happens, the soul slowly drifts away from its body and becomes untethered over the course of a little less than eight and a half minutes (500 seconds, if you want to get technical), or seventeen minutes if the binds on the creature’s soul are particularly tight. During this window of time, and only during this window of time, the creature can be resurrected.

When a soul is finally disconnected from its body, it is collected by a Reaper. The Reaper collects the soul, regardless of any protest, and carries it and many others with it as it crosses the Shroud to its ultimate destination: the Soul Plane.

In rare cases where a Reaper reaps the soul of a creature whose true name has been altered, the Reaper will spend some time tracking down the creature responsible and force them to repair any damage done to it.

#### Beyond the Material Plane

Reapers use the Shroud, or simply walk through the Void, to reach the Soul Plane. Once there, souls are deposited. If a creature believes in any kind of life after death, then the consciousness of that soul is separated from the soul’s magic and essence, and placed within a demiplane within the Soul Plane that acts as an afterlife for all those who desire one.

#### Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

For those who do not believe in an afterlife, their souls and the remains of the former group are deposited into the sea of souls, a vast, endless expanse of essence and magic that wipes away any traces of individuality from souls. It is from this sea that Life Reapers draw in new souls to bring to those who need them.

## Importance

Nearly all life exists as a result of the existence of souls.

## Social and Cultural Impact

The presence of souls is widespread enough that each society and culture has a different way of interacting with them, assuming that culture acknowledges or believes they exist.

The fundamental nature of souls has led many cultures who discover them to consider them sacred, at least to some degree. Some societies assign a religious significance to them, while others insist that the dead remain dead.

## Origin and History

Nearly all souls, and the machinations behind the afterlife, were created by the Elder God of Life at the same time that life and the Soul Plane were created.

## Further Information

* Death
* Elder Gods
* Elu
* Equis
* Ghost
* Incarnation
* Lich
* Reaper
* The Sisters
* Sol Invictus
* True Names