odd question
in stories where souls exist, what the hell happens when a soul is "eaten"?
is it like having that soul be completely destroyed or consigned into oblivion or something?
Does that mean souls can be completely exterminated from a setting, or are new souls "created"?
D E P E N D S O N T H E S E T T I N G
When does "depends on the setting" become so prevalent that normies take it for granted? I have tried to play games where elves aren't divided into subraces and it's getting more and more difficult.
Okay, pick a setting you like, or several, or make one up, and explain how it works there, and why you like the way it works.
How about you have a nice day, "LiteraryLord"?
Eaten soul gets digested and shat out, soulshit soil can then be used to grow new souls. That's why the universe never runs out of them.
I like to think souls are indestructible and eternal. So absorbing a soul means overwhelming another soul with your own and forcing it to give you energy. But if this state is broken the soul can return to it's original host or at least allow it to pass on to an after life of some sort. At least that's my take.
I like it, even if its just so I can describe cool visual detail as they kill a lich and are surrounded by whirlwind of freed souls
I always liked that picture, but it feels a bit funny that they're covered in gold and all sorts of elaborate trappings, but all have completely unadorned wooden staffs.
Like the scene we're looking at is three minutes after one of them popped in the door and said "Yo, Arrchred, get the sticks! Some fools want to fight us!"
the masculine desire to pick up a cool stick
This is my take too.
It also makes necromancy and related stuff more horrific.
If you can capture a soul, like as a ghost, you pull it out of the cycle of rebirth. It's warped into a horrific sort of slavery for untold ages.
In DnD outsiders (i.e. demons, devil, and their good-aligned counterparts) lack body/soul dualism, so their body is literally their soul given physical form. So if a demon consumes a soul the soul would be "digested" and become part of the demon's body/soul (hence the meme about getting turned into succubus assfat if it kills you with its draining kiss). The original soul might either get mixed up enough with the demon's soul that it effectively ceases to be (like pouring a glass of a water-soluble liquid into a bathtub full of water: technically the material is still there, but you aren't going to be able to separate it from the water anymore), or it might retain enough cohesion to still be conscious but unable to do anything. Demiliches on the other hand actually burn souls to sustain themselves, destroying the soul in the process.
DnD souls normally aren't eternal and immutable in general, anyway. When you die and end up in the afterlife over long enough time your soul will disperse into the essence of the plane itself, and similarly new souls are created from the same essence.
I like to think that eaten souls are just held against their will in the form that ate them, and in destroying them they are released.
Why was this deleted?
Nothing. Souls can't be eaten. Unless you accept soul trialism. Reality is often boring to the spiritual who aren't religious so they have to come up with scary things like ripping souls apart or eating them or somehow make oblivion mean destruction while it only means forgetting.
Soul trialism is a notion that's implied in Elder Scrolls to explain its enchantment system.
Religion belongs on >>/x/
Name one game without religious references, iconography, or use of phraseology.
Monopoly. Check & mate, I'll take my reward cheque in the snailmail at your earliest convenience.
Capitalism is a religion.
In all tabletop games I'm aware there is a reference to the date of production. A year expressed in a Gregorian calendar.
Sorry bro. ^_^
In Elder Scrolls, souls don't technically exist for most beings since every mortal entity is a puppet being handled by a single conscious entity. Whenever someone CHIMs wrong and zeroes out, said puppeteer loses the ability to stay in-character.
"Puppets" isn't quite right, they're dream figments but the dreamer is a being os powerful that the dreams are real.
Despite being hallucinations of God, people in elder scrolls have their own souls and the system is fairly self consistent, as that's the purpose of Nirn. They have souls, are taken to their respective afterlives of post-death and are slowly washed clean to be recycled back into the world. People have agency in TES but are limited by their own (and the Godhead's) conceptions of what is possible.
Zero-summing is the failure to establish your will as seperate from God once you realize what you are, CHIM and The Prisoner phenomena being possible at all demonstrates that people do exist independently of the Godhead to some degree.
Depends on the setting. What is a soul? Is it an organ that stores memories? Is it a power source for magic? Can it be bought and sold? Can you burn it for a final moment of true heroism or villainy?
Completely destroyed, like what atheists hope will happen to them when they die.
they're indestructible and immutable, so they're trapped until freed.
I haven't thought much about soul consciousness but I'd imagine it to be torturous if they did have it
if a soul gets eaten then it was always partially there to begin with, it's a consequence of linear time experienced by mortals
I also think Bakker is a genius
literally who
I mostly just base the concept of a soul in a game on the idea in the real world from Christianity.
>Soul is imbued in sapient creatures specifically created by the creator deity to have them
>Souls are the sort of immortal tether to the divine, the essence of a person beyond their physical form, their mind, etc.
>During life, souls undergo a tempering and development based on events its been a part of
>At death, soul returns to the deity to be reunited to him
In these settings, soul destruction is hands down the worst thing that can happen to a creature. It eliminates the essence of a person and prevents it from returning "home", leaving it trapped in a state of nothingness.
The thing is though, soul destruction isn't something that any being can really do, even the most malicious of devils. The strongest creatures of the abyss can barely delay a soul released from its mortal coil, UNLESS that soul has suffered enough self-corruption where it prevents itself from returning.
If it were just a feat of strength to ensnare a soul, devils and demons wouldn't have to work very hard at it since they can overpower most mortals both physically and spiritually. The only way they can get what they want is to tempt and tamper with a person long enough that the soul no longer wishes to reunite with its creator, at which point the soul is in danger of being lost, blown around like a leaf on the wind without any final destination. This is when souls get devoured or trapped, because instead of slipping out of a devil's grasp, it just sort of sits there and lets whatever happens happen to it.
A devoured soul just sort of stays trapped in the devouring entity as if it was in a cage. Abyssal entities can draw strength from these souls, not by consuming them like humans do food, but as a trophy or triumph, emboldening them in the future. The soul usually never recovers from this because it's no longer an independent entity that can grow to desire a return to its deity again.
Sounds neat. How does thus work with evil gods? Would an orc be more likely lose their soul because it is a comparable fate to returning to their god?
I see it more as the soul being a fractured part of the divine, the extension of the deity out into the material plane. An evil god wants souls to return to him as much as a good one since from the point of view of gods it's just reconstituting their essence.
Gods create souls in the first place so that they can develop independently and then return to the whole with their growth. If things became stagnant, a deity would turn inward and cease to have a presence outside of itself; if souls stopped returning but were still sent into the material plane, the deity would slowly dissipate into nothing. For a deity in a D&D like game, this isn't a big deal since there's a lot of gods and new ones are formed and old ones die out over vast timespans. In a game where there's only a single, monolithic deity, creation itself would cease to be if the god did.
One of the corruptions of a soul that prevents it from returning is the hubristic desire to elevate oneself to a god, a turning away from the reunification of souls and remaining separate. This manifests as extreme pride, but for the vast majority of creatures that experience it, almost none ever succeed in sparking their own divine nature since what leads to the genesis of deities isn't understood by mortals.
Conservation laws arise from fundamental symmetries. When a symmetry is broken so is conservation laws unless there's a deeper symmetry involved. This is why energy is conserved in day to day activities but energy is not conserved when it comes to the expansion of the universe and dark energy.
Trapped by the eater until they die, which if said eater is immortal could effectively mean they're out of play until the end of the universe.
I literally can only answer this for my setting.
The being which created Hell took some time to figure out how to break souls, and it created undeath in the process. The whole "torturing souls" thing is to undo a soul's ego and make it a mess of spiritual energy to be manipulated as needed. The Nephillim just eat mortals, body and soul, because hunger and gluttony is all they feel. The lucky ones cease to exist. The unlucky become hosts for spawning more Nephillim. Both cases are cosmic parasites, but one takes care to not overdo it, the other doesn't care.
New souls are created when from bigger souls. In gameplay terms, each extra level means one more soul coming from yours after you die. The Lemurians didn't like learning that. That's why they rebelled against the Creator and sought to rule over Creation itself.
Btw, anything with enough individuality and spiritual energy transmitted through ley lines can acquire a soul. Boob-shaped rocks, cities, pets, children. The whole pregnancy thing is to make sure kids have a soul before their birth. Even an Orc could have a soul, if you could find a number of people willing to care about it for a couple months.
With soul economy like this no surprise Lemurians rebeled. But realy the solution should be to destroy all sentient beings, then souls no longer will have anything to inhabit, thus ending this terrible cycle
>But realy the solution should be to destroy all sentient beings, then souls no longer will have anything to inhabit, thus ending this terrible cycle
Remember the boob-shaped rock? Sentience is a consequence of having a soul. You have to destroy all mortals (which means everything with a soul here), to prevent ley lines from happening. If you like the moon, that's a ley line. Hate the shop clerk? Another ley line, and stronger because your feeling is greater. Someone died and the family can't let go? That means the ley lines are feeding a void. That's where ghosts come from.
Good luck trying to end the cycle. Creation and its Creator are one and the same. The cycle is how this metaphysical organism grows. It will try to stop you. Well, the leftovers will. It fragmented itself into the current divine archetypes after the Lemurian Rebellion, and everything went even less according to plan.
In my settings souls are immortal, they can get slowed down for a time but sooner or later the call of the afterlife is too strong and even the weakest captured soul can escape from the strongest prison after enough time has passed.