What happens to a character with no soul?

[Siege Tower]

I'm currently making a character that had previously had their soul completely removed by an incubus. I'm wondering what consequences this character would have from the lack of a soul. Despite the obvious things that happen (or don't happen) when they die.

I'm wondering if things like divine magic would be extra effective on them or possibly do nothing at all. Maybe animals naturally dislike this character? I usually play 3.5 so do any gods ever interact with these kinds of characters in a specific way?

I'm thinking of making this character as lecherous and sinful as possible. Since they have no soul they have nothing to taint.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Originally Posted by Siege Tower

I'm thinking of making this character as lecherous and sinful as possible. Since they have no soul they have nothing to taint.

Actually, I wouldn't go this route. Because they have no soul, they have no real reason to amp their wickedness.

Instead, I'd play them as detached, even Faerie-like, with heapings of "Blue and Orange Morality" (as opposed to Black and White Morality). They don't relate to the world in terms of good and evil as we understand it, so their actions won't necessarily make sense from that axis.

Instead, find one that they do make sense from. Maybe they operate according to a specific set of protocols?

[the clumsy bard]

It might sound weird and it also might sound like it is supporting the wicked route, but I would say act with no conscience.

[Siege Tower]

I was planning for the character to have full knowledge that they have no soul so they would understand morality from when they did have one. The character would end up being freed of consequence since they lost it which is what would lead them to behave improperly. The character's ultimate goal would be to live forever since there's nothing good waiting for them in death but they can't be punished by the gods in life.

[kieza]

I introduced soullessness into my campaign as a very rare congenital defect; affected people behaved much like psychopaths, being incapable of empathy or guilt. They also lacked real capacity for creativity, learning tasks simply by rote, and often seemed "machine-like" in their movements.

[Water_Bear]

What happens should depend on how souls work in your game (Captain Obvious to the rescue!).

If it's more of a Western cosmology with a one-to-one soul:body ratio, souls retaining personality and memories, and reward/punishement of the soul after death, then there are several issues. If you can have a mind without a soul, what is the soul doing? Is it just a backup, or is it providing some other part of your personality, like a conscience? Are there physical/magical abilities which depend on souls, and if so how does not having a soul affect them?

If it's an Eastern cosmology with reincarnation, then not having a soul might actually be a good thing; you don't have to deal with Karma from past lives and you don't have any means of accruing more in your lifetime. Plus, seeing as their versions of the soul don't act as personality or memory it means there's relatively little to lose. Then again, losing your soul has got to mess up your Ki something awful, so good luck trying to win any martial-arts tournaments or defeat opposing Magical Girls.

Also, if this is 3.5 specific you should ask the mods to move the thread to the appropriate sub-forum.

[KillianHawkeye]

If I had a character with no soul, my first line of thinking would be to ask what kind of spiritual entity has moved in to take its place. An empty human being has got to be an awfully tempting living space for spirits, and a character with no soul should be doubly easy to possess.

[Guigarci]

How concerned would your character be with getting their soul back?
Is it possible to regrow a soul?
What'd happen if your character got a "raise dead" or "reincarnate" used on them?
These sort of things are what ya've gotta talk to your DM about

[Sidmen]

If you have the time and some money, I'd suggest picking up and watching Season 6 of Supernatural (you might also find it on some online streaming sites, I've never used them but my boss watches stuff online).

Anyway, one of the main characters in that season runs around without a soul. That's the best suggestion I can give for how I'd imagine someone without a soul acting.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Originally Posted by Water_Bear

What happens should depend on how souls work in your game (Captain Obvious to the rescue!).

If it's more of a Western cosmology with a one-to-one soul:body ratio, souls retaining personality and memories, and reward/punishement of the soul after death, then there are several issues. If you can have a mind without a soul, what is the soul doing? Is it just a backup, or is it providing some other part of your personality, like a conscience? Are there physical/magical abilities which depend on souls, and if so how does not having a soul affect them?

If it's an Eastern cosmology with reincarnation, then not having a soul might actually be a good thing; you don't have to deal with Karma from past lives and you don't have any means of accruing more in your lifetime. Plus, seeing as their versions of the soul don't act as personality or memory it means there's relatively little to lose. Then again, losing your soul has got to mess up your Ki something awful, so good luck trying to win any martial-arts tournaments or defeat opposing Magical Girls.

Also, if this is 3.5 specific you should ask the mods to move the thread to the appropriate sub-forum.

Other religions also have souls consisting of multiple parts, with complicated interactions between them. Traditional tengerists, for example, believe that a person needs 3 different souls to function normally, but depending on the circumstances you can house as many as 5. Their beliefs go into great detail on the different kinds of damages to your souls that are possible, the effect they have on the body, and what rites need to be performed and what medicines need to be taken to fix them.

So yeah, it's pretty much anything goes.

[invinible]

So something from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus?

[holywhippet]

I'd say the character would be much like a roughly intelligent zombie. Able to follow instructions but with no will power or wisdom behind their actions.

Either that or the character should be emotionally numb. They might see an murder and know intellectually they should do something but not feel any rage against the perpertrator or sympathy for the victim.

[Ravens_cry]

What is a soul in your universe?
Is it the person themselves, riding the body in life?
Then the body is now comatose, autonomous functions like breathing and heartbeat only.
Is it a sense of ethics and morals, right and wrong?
Than they are now amoral. Not necessarily bad, but with a child's ignorant innocence.
Is it the vehicle consciousness rides into whatever passes for an afterlife?
Well, then things get interesting, as for most purposes it makes no difference. But spells like Soul Jar or Trap the Soul might have no effect, but death might leave them trapped in their body, dead but unable to pass on.

[Grimsage Matt]

How did they lose it? And, if needs be, they can always win a new soul in a poker game.

[Jay R]

You don't have a soul; you are a soul. You have a body. Losing your soul means losing your self.

So if the PC's soul has been lost, you aren't playing the soulless body; you are playing the body-less soul, trapped and in the keeping of the incubus.

(If the DM goes with it, that could be an extremely cool game.)

[tuggyne]

Originally Posted by Jay R

You don't have a soul; you are a soul. You have a body. Losing your soul means losing your self.

Heartily seconded, and literature points for the quote.

[Ravens_cry]

Originally Posted by tuggyne

Heartily seconded, and literature points for the quote.

A good book, though the ending made me cry both times I read it.

[Driderman]

What is a soul anyway? What does it do?
You need to answer these question before you can answer "what does missing a soul do to me", as far as I'm concerned.
I personally like the idea that missing a soul somehow detaches you and prevents from "connecting" with other beings and the world around you. Giving you a jarring sense of "wrongness" deep in your being, a sense that you are at all times alone, wrong.
I'm also very fond of the idea that having no soul makes room for something else to occupy that space and that even if that something is something horrible, having it will alleviate the sense of wrongness you suffer from.

[Xuc Xac]

You could also go the other way with it:

"I feel fine, actually. Turns out the soul is a lot like the appendix: you don't even use it."

[Absol197]

Originally Posted by Jay R

You don't have a soul; you are a soul. You have a body. Losing your soul means losing your self.

Okay, what is this line from? I know I've read it in its original context before, but I can't remember what it was.

I keep thinking Dresden Files, but I'm not sure...


~Phoenix~

[Ravens_cry]

Originally Posted by Absol197

Okay, what is this line from? I know I've read it in its original context before, but I can't remember what it was.

I keep thinking Dresden Files, but I'm not sure...


~Phoenix~

A Canticle for Leibowitz, a science fiction novel about a post-nuclear holocaust order of monks who sought to preserve pre-apocalypse knowledge and the consequences thereof.

[Incom]

I had the idea that the body actually regrows a new soul over time, as the soul has an important function: it is a backup personality in case something happens to the mind (such as death, insanity [magical insanity cures act by basically reloading the soul], mind control [the soul can reassert itself], whatever else). Normally this means that having the soul removed is relatively unproblematic--it might lead to being susceptible to long-term mind control, reduced will saves, or similar effects, but it's not a permanent effect (although expect at least some personality changes--someone whose soul is normally good at controlling emotions may replace it with one that isn't, etc.--but since personality is already filtered through body chemistry it likely won't be as extreme as one might expect).

However, what happens when the old soul returns? Do they merge? This would be a neat way to handle memory (the soulless character knows intellectually things that happened to them before the soul was removed but they can't remember) but does that mean that two different people's souls can also merge? And what happens then? Alternatively, do they stay separate? Maybe it manifests as a pseudo-split-personality. If so, is it antagonistic (ie. they're fighting for control over one body), or symbiotic (ie. they switch off with each other because they're better at different tasks)?

And of course, how do you crunch all of this? Is the soul responsible for, say, spell slots (as OOTS seems to imply with the soul splice thing)?

This sounds like the kind of thing you could build a system on, actually.

[RedWarlock]

Originally Posted by Absol197

Okay, what is this line from? I know I've read it in its original context before, but I can't remember what it was.

I keep thinking Dresden Files, but I'm not sure...


~Phoenix~

I think it was said in Dresden Files, Ghost Story as I recall, but I think even there it was phrased as a quote rather than an original line.

[NichG]

Since you want a character at the end of the day, lets exclude all the various interpretations that would make the character unplayable. As others have said, it comes down to what a soul means after that is said and done. It can't be persona and memory, because then you don't have a character, but the following ideas might be interesting:

- The soul is a vote. Each person gets one say as to what cosmic forces win the day at the end of time, as well as the current disposition of things in the universe. If there are more evil people, their souls make evil stronger. Because this character lacks a soul, the divine are completely unconcerned with them (and perhaps cannot even see them) - their vote has already been cast and there's no taking it back. This could also have implications for fate, if such a thing is important in the campaign: no soul means no fated role left to play, so anything they do 'breaks' the divine plan somehow. The character's personality might not be strongly affected by this, but there could be subtle things: they are incapable of faith, lack a visceral moral response (all their morality is intellectual, not based on feeling), etc.

- The soul is a connection to something. This idea would have souls being like some sort of link to a collective (and ancestral) consciousness of the world. Hunches, intuition, coincidence, premonitions, and so on all stem from people subtly learning from the soul-link. The character sometimes is just blank on things that people normally are very intuitive about. They can't tell when people are looking at them, their long-term memory is more limited (because everyone else can lean on ancestral memory), etc.

- The soul is the creative part. This person need not be robotic per-se, but they have trouble with any truly creative endeavors. Research, art, poetry, and such are beyond them. Furthermore, they absolutely cannot get innuendo (e.g. creative interpretations).

- The soul connects mind and body. This one is a little weird - the modifiers to RP are sort of physical ticks rather than mental changes. This person has to control every muscle individually when they move, rather than just naturally moving by instinct. So when they move they are concentrating very hard and can easily be distracted. Every thing they do would be painstaking, and would use as few muscles as possible at any given time.

- The soul is hope. A bit of a darker one - the soul acts as protection against every bad thing in the world, because everyone at a deep level has an instinctual understanding that no matter what happens they can eventually live on and escape it in the afterlife. For this character, they are living in an endlessly decaying body - every minor cosmetic change is just a reminder of the inevitable destruction of their self and all that makes them up.

- The soul as social reality. Another kind of weird one. If you've ever read Neverwhere, that's a good inspiration for this. Basically, people only remember you if you have a soul. Otherwise, things you do tend to fade from memory and importance. The character is used to being ignored, used to being immune to the consequences of social misbehavior (at least the long term ones), and may be somewhat jaded and self-centered because of it.

[Slipperychicken]

Well, look at the bright side: You don't need to worry about demons or church-recruiters anymore.

[White_Drake]

Originally Posted by NichG

- The soul is hope. A bit of a darker one - the soul acts as protection against every bad thing in the world, because everyone at a deep level has an instinctual understanding that no matter what happens they can eventually live on and escape it in the afterlife. For this character, they are living in an endlessly decaying body - every minor cosmetic change is just a reminder of the inevitable destruction of their self and all that makes them up.

This reminds me of Raistlin, which means it automatically gets my vote; after all, he wasn't so bad, right?

[Anxe]

Isn't a person without a soul dead within D&D? That's by RAW though, so who cares.

For your character, you might want to read A Modest Destiny. It covers what someone without a soul would act like. It's rather long, but the best webcomic I've ever read. Have fun reading it!

[Ravens_cry]

Well, in D&D, you can raise a dead person as a mindless undead, awaken that undead to sentience, then kill them and cast resurrection on the corpse. Now for the fun part, just who gets raised, exactly?
It's a similar question to what Incom asked.

[tuggyne]

Originally Posted by Ravens_cry

A Canticle for Leibowitz, a science fiction novel about a post-nuclear holocaust order of monks who sought to preserve pre-apocalypse knowledge and the consequences thereof.

Huh. I was referring to what I believe(d) to be its original source: C.S. Lewis, specifically his Mere Christianity.

I haven't actually read A Canticle for Leibowitz, so uh, mutual agreement to expand our repertoire?

[Alaris]

I'll echo what many people have said. It depends on your game world. As far as I know, there isn't 'much' concrete evidence in regards to souls in 3.5.

Nonetheless, as far as I'm concerned, and I think for my world (though I'm still fine-tuning things), a soul is the embodiment of who you are. It is your mind, your sentience, etc.

Most living creatures that have achieved certain levels of sentience have a soul. The basic humanoid races. Animals. Hell, even plants have souls. For many Outsiders, their body IS their soul; it is one and the same. Ghosts are a manifestation of the soul. Certain undead (Vampires, Lich's) retain their soul, though in the latter case, they hide it in a safe place.

So for my world, to not have a soul at all, is to not be sentient, to not be. Unless something strange was at work, where your soul is connected to your body, but from the outside, then you could not live without a soul. You are the soul.

Again, this is the opinion of Alaris, mostly for his world. I'm not saying you should necessarily use it, especially since it does not work for your idea, but I figured I would give you my perspective.

Originally Posted by Ravens_cry

Well, in D&D, you can raise a dead person as a mindless undead, awaken that undead to sentience, then kill them and cast resurrection on the corpse. Now for the fun part, just who gets raised, exactly?
It's a similar question to what Incom asked.

Ooh, an interesting question. And one I think I want to answer. At least, in theory.

In my opinion, it essentially would go like this (for my world anyway):

• Dead Human is raised as a Zombie!
• Awaken [Undead?] is cast on him, giving him mental scores!
• Either a soul is bestowed upon him (by a Deity, or something), one is reincarnated into him (not standard rules), or a new soul is born.
• The now sentient Zombie is killed!
• The new soul, being the last resident of that body, is called back into it, if he so chooses to come.

Naturally, if some wizard started to abuse this to "create souls," the Deities may step in, as 'the soul' is not a domain for mortals to be toying with.

At least, that's my interpretation. ^_^