Undead and Souls

[Xilodel]

So I'm trying to write up a cohesive setting for my ongoing campaign, partly for my own amusement and partly because it will make it easier to keep things homogenous from session to session. I was working on races and monsters, and I've made it to the session on undead.

Now, I hailed from a largely D&D 3.5 background before headed to GURPS, and my campaign setting was originally written for Iron Heroes, so the D&D influence is still pretty strong. I went back to a few of my old sourcebooks to see how they handled undead, and one of the books mentioned that undead Incarnists "cannot bind chakras to their soul", presumably because they don't have one.

Now, for mindless undead like zombies and vampiric spawn that are nothing more than extensions of their creators' wills, I can understand that logic. But what about intelligent undead that retain their personalities? Liches and vampire lords are the first things that come to mind, but even things like Wights and Mhorgs (sp?) retain their human intelligence and personas when they make the transition to unlife.

I'm thinking about making it so non-sapient undead are simply bodies animated by fell magic (no soul required), but any undead with an IQ of more than 6 and a definitive personality retains their soul until true death.

I understand this is mostly a matter of campaign flavor, but I'm curious to see how the rest of the forum deals with the issue (assuming you guys have given it any thought).

[Biker Matt]

Originally Posted by Xilodel

So I'm trying to write up a cohesive setting for my ongoing campaign, partly for my own amusement and partly because it will make it easier to keep things homogenous from session to session. I was working on races and monsters, and I've made it to the session on undead.

Now, I hailed from a largely D&D 3.5 background before headed to GURPS, and my campaign setting was originally written for Iron Heroes, so the D&D influence is still pretty strong. I went back to a few of my old sourcebooks to see how they handled undead, and one of the books mentioned that undead Incarnists "cannot bind chakras to their soul", presumably because they don't have one.

Now, for mindless undead like zombies and vampiric spawn that are nothing more than extensions of their creators' wills, I can understand that logic. But what about intelligent undead that retain their personalities? Liches and vampire lords are the first things that come to mind, but even things like Wights and Mhorgs (sp?) retain their human intelligence and personas when they make the transition to unlife.

I'm thinking about making it so non-sapient undead are simply bodies animated by fell magic (no soul required), but any undead with an IQ of more than 6 and a definitive personality retains their soul until true death.

I understand this is mostly a matter of campaign flavor, but I'm curious to see how the rest of the forum deals with the issue (assuming you guys have given it any thought).

My take on Chakras and undead it that the bodies are already bound to one chakra, either Mind, Soul, or, arguable for such as vampires and liches, the Totem chakra. Regardless of what kind they are, if they are sapient, they interact through this bond, forcing some kind of limitation based on how their condition came about.

As an aside, it seems to play well to use a bond DIFFERENT from the power origin, as counter-intuitive as it seems at first. a psionic creature would be bound to the Soul, allowing mental powers, whereas a divinely-powered one would use Mind, allowing the use of it's investiture.

[Dustin]

I sort of use the Egyptian idea that the soul is composed of pieces with different attributes, so undead of various types retain different portions of their old soul, perhaps with new summoned pieces grafted on.

Unintelligent corporeal undead are raised by reanimating the simple physically-motive essence of the soul, while leaving the personality and intellectual soul fragments untouched (wherever they ended up). Non-corporeal undead don't need the physically-motive soul fragment.

More intelligent undead either have returned some of the person's fragments, but without will (perhaps to make a skilled servant), or have grafted a demonic entity to the corpse (to make a ravening monster).

For now, it's mostly a handwave allowing me to say "it's complicated". Someday it might be fun to create spells that interact specifically with those pieces, esp. for necromancy.

[jason taylor]

I never use undead anyway-never really had the taste for them. But if I did give them souls I would make them be the souls of the evil serving their punishment. It would explain why they are doomed to be so creepy. That interestingly, would also if one has a mind, allow such things as a quest to free one from his curse, or a prophecy that he would be redeemed if he does a deed of love to someone. Or whatever.

[tantric]

I also use a simplified version of multiple souls. Living beings have a spirit, which is bound to the flesh and dies with the body, and a soul, which is immoral. Undead typically have one of these removed. Those with just souls always have Unhealing in some form if they retain their bodies - vampires need blood to heal, etc.

I also use weird extra souls, like Twins, Shadows, Auras and the Animus, but those are likely irrelevant to your situation.

[Bruno]

The traditional eastern-european Christian interpretation of the Vampire is that a vampire is a dead body posessed by a demonic spirit. Like a posessed living body, the posessed dead bodies know everything the original person does, but are animated by a completely "unnatural" or unholy force, instead of by the original soul.

In a fantasy game, it doesn't necessarily have to be a demon animating the body of course, any sort of spirit, elemental, ghost, or even a magical or psionic energy pattern/program/whatever.

This is a very handy concept for the fantasy GM, especially one looking for the traditional "Undead are monsters, or at least dubious NPCs, and not PC fodder" approach.

I don't see a problem reconciling the ability to access the corpses memories despite the soul being gone - memories are physical structures in the brain, which depending on the setting may be "backed up" or "mirrored" or "echoed" in the soul, the akhashik record/racemind, or whatever, or may not. In a setting with physical memory storage, you just make a footnote that part of any mind-transfer magic/psionics/whatever includes "updating the psychic memory backup" before transferring the minds, and depending on the method used, the transferred mind may NOT automatically get the "decryption keys" necessary to access the stored copies found in the new brain.

[Exxar]

I use a treatment of undead and souls that is mostly based upon different iterations and settings for D&D.

A soul can either be living, undead, demonic or elemental - "powered" by positive, negative, demonic or elemental energy. Souls also come in different complexities (this is actually a specific term in one of my magic systems but I'm using it here because it illustrates the difference in "sophistication" between for example a human and animal soul quite nicely) - bacteria have complexity 2, bugs 6, reptiles 9, birds 10, average mammals 12, monkeys 14, humans 15, elves and dragons 16 or 17, while demons start from 18 and go to 20. 21+ is the province of demigods etc.

Natively, souls come in all four types. They can also change their type, but this doesn't work in all directions. A living soul bound to a dead body will gradually be inverted into an undead soul as it starts drawing nourishment from the ambient life forces since its body doesn't provide any. Undead souls could theoretically become living if bound to a living body, but being already accustomed to drawing nourishment from ambient life forces they have no reason to spontaneously convert. A conversion can be forced by magic, however, but any conversion whether forced or spontaneous will warp the soul so it may no longer resemble its original self. Any soul will slowly be converted into a demonic one when exposed to demonic energies of the lower planes for prolonged durations.

"Mindless" undead are dead organic bodies infused with summoned undead souls of bug to mammal complexity. They can obey simple instructions when commanded or behave with animal-level intelligence when unsupervised but not much more than that. The higher their complexity, the harder they are to create and more suitable they are for serving as minions, of course. But using complexity 14 souls for creation of mindless undead is not practiced by necromancers because such undead can come dangerously close to being "intelligent", and thus independent and dangerous.

"Intelligent" undead are dead organic bodies infused with undead souls of human or up to 17 complexity. They are fully independent - as they were in life. A body can be infused with a random summoned soul, or by its original one.

Undead that spontaneously arise in places of great death, places imbued with negative energy etc. can be of either type. That's mostly determined by the plot :)

A body infused with a demonic soul is simply a vessel for the demon. Demons (and any other complexity 18+ souls) may form their own physical bodies out of ambient energies, and are only truly "dead" when their soul is utterly destroyed.



I'll stop here since you've asked about undead and not the other creatures, but I can continue with the details if you have questions.

[Xilodel]

Originally Posted by Exxar

I use a treatment of undead and souls that is mostly based upon different iterations and settings for D&D.
...
I'll stop here since you've asked about undead and not the other creatures, but I can continue with the details if you have questions.

Actually, I like this idea. If you want to elaborate on it you're more than welcome. I may incorporate the "soul complexity" concept into my fantasy world. It sort of reminds me of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion where creatures had "least", "lesser", "greater", etc. soul classifications.

[Exxar]

Well let me see... here's some more info on stuff that's at least tangentially connected to this, in no particular order:

When a demon's body is destroyed on the material plane, the spirit (unless trapped by magic) returns to its native plane (Baator, Gehenna or Abyss). There it must regain its energies for a certain time (hunders of years for lesser demons, a year for greatest ones) before it can form a new body. Without a body, the spirit is unable to leave the plane unless summoned. If a demon is killed on its native plain, the soul survives but it is much easier to trap and destroy it there than on the material plane. These rules also apply to SC (short for Spirit Complexity) 18+ creatures native to other planes, including the material (obviously they don't end up in hell but on their respective native planes).

Regarding binding of souls to bodies by magic: the higher the soul's SC, the harder it is to bind it. In my magic system this is directly represented by a penalty equal to the SC in question, but the system is not based on any in GURPS so the scales of bonuses are not quite right. The conversion ratio could perhaps be 2:1 from my system to GURPS. A nice thing is that a mage gets a bonus to affect his creations with mind-affecting magic. The bonus starts high at the time of creation but fades as time passes, although it never goes below +1 or so. Thus, mages creating constructs/undead cast the spells binding their creations to their will just after they have bound them to a body. "Creation" here means any creature or construct created by binding the soul to a body and letting it adapt to it. The mage can forbid this adaptation and the result is a soul simply trapped within a receptacle; in order to gain control over the body, the soul must adapt to it. The mage's biological children are also considered his creations; evil wizards often ensorcell their offspring at birth so that they do not turn against them.

All souls have auras; these auras are imperceptible to men but animals can sometimes feel them instinctively, and creatures of SC higher than 15 can sometimes perceive them just as they perceive everything else within the scope of their senses. A creature's aura is like a protective energy field; it wards off hostile magic (it's the source of many resistance rolls) and also nourishes the souls with available life force. Auras of living creatures (positive auras) provide this nourishment via the output of the body's biological functions, while undead (negative) auras provide this nourishment from ambient life force. Demonic auras can draw upon both, while elemental auras draw upon the surrounding elemental energies. All auras also shed a bit of this sustaining energy into their surroundings - positive auras "leak" positive energy, negative auras negative energy, and so forth. Auras are rated in strength similar to souls in complexity. A strong positive aura can have an effect on undead creatures and souls similar to turning; it causes strong discomfort and fear, with the undead being unable to approach or being compelled to run away. Negative auras can have the same effect on living beings. Auras can be temporarily strengthened or dampened by magic... they can even be reversed (positive into negative and vice versa). Which brings me to the next topic.

That of the creation of intelligent undead. Just as midless undead, they can come into being through magic, "spontaneously" as a result of background negative energy, or as a result of certain types of undead spreading their "curse" (such as vampires). In the vast majority of cases, intelligent undead on the material plane were once living creatures. Whatever happened to them, their living souls were bound to dead bodies. Unable to draw sustenance from non-existing biological functions, the aura starts to draw upon the ambient life force, gradually inverting itself into a negative aura. The rate at which this happens varies greatly. Side note: inverting one's aura by magic can be a good way of passing among mindless undead without being noticed or sustaining oneself without food. But if you keep your aura inverted for too long... it will start to invert itself for good. In any case, once the aura is completely inverted, the creature awakens as an undead. The inverting process is traumatic to the soul; its personality is inevitably warped, but the degree of this varies on a case by case basis. One thing is certain: it will regard living creatures with hatred or as something to be consumed - the degree of this also varies. Creatures with SC lower than 15 will suffer stronger from this (and that's the reason why mindless undead just wanna eat your brains). Anyway, undead created in this way (without their soul spending prolonged periods of time on any of the non-material planes) will retain their full memories from life, and and even most of their personalities if they don't warp too much. They also retain all of the skills/knowledge they had in life, and that's the reason why powerful necromancers opt to create intelligent undead (heavily bound to their will) as servants.



Well, that's it for now. I'll write some more when I get the chance, and will answer any questions you may have :)

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by Xilodel

(...) I'm thinking about making it so non-sapient undead are simply bodies animated by fell magic (no soul required), but any undead with an IQ of more than 6 and a definitive personality retains their soul until true death.

I understand this is mostly a matter of campaign flavor, but I'm curious to see how the rest of the forum deals with the issue (assuming you guys have given it any thought).

This thread has some posts dealing with things like these.