@Shayuri regarding Mask and Thorn (note: these spoilers are not 'Keep Out' signs, they're only so folks don't see what they don't want to)
[sblock]Hmm...there's nothing wrong with that idea, but it feels...I dunno...it's not quite in tune with what I was thinking. Granted, you're the GM, so what you say goes...but let me posit an alternative. Perhaps somewhere betwixt the two, we can find a middle ground we both like equally.
Origin of Doppelgangers: In the beginning, when the world was young, the Old Gods decided to create life. In the Forge of Creation they concocted the Living Clay; the building material of all natural life. Each god then according to his or her purpose, molded and shaped the creatures that now inhabit the world. Then one god decided to try something, and in so doing changed the world forever. He shaped a creature that was much like his own form, then breathed into its mouth. A tiny fraction of his own power flowed into the new beast, making it a creature of both flesh and spirit. Granting these creations spirits cost the god, and he retreated to rest. He found though that these ensouled creatures could offer power to him by sincerely worshipping and honoring him...and even better, as they reproduced, they created more souls, each child taking a piece of their parents, and all of them growing back to full bloom later. Despite the early loss, his power grew as his 'children' flocked to him.
The other gods quickly began to follow suit...and a wealth of new people soon were being made. Evil gods crafted cruel and terrible creatures. Good gods made compassionate and benevolent ones. And all the spectrum in between. After these first races though, creation slowed down. The gods found that they had to ceaselessly compete to earn their followers' worship...the time and power needed to create more races meant that they might lose the worship they had. Eventually they settled into the new great game, competing for the power of the souls they had imbued, and their children's, forgetting about all else.
And somewhere hidden was the Forge of Creation, with the remaining Living Clay burbling and waiting for new hands to shape it.
It came to pass, on occasion, that an animal would venture too close to the Living Clay, and would be consumed. The Clay, though mindless and effectively immortal, was alive and knew the hungers of a living thing even if it couldn't die from lack of satisfying them. It came to know the flesh of what it devoured; returning that god shaped clay into itself and absorbing the potential for its form and mind. As it ate, it gained more potential. Strange and misshapen things were birthed from its mass, loosely based on what it had devoured, but always grotesquely deformed and often of a fluid, flexible shape. Finally, one day, one of the ensouled; intelligent though primitive, discovered the secret Forge and fell prey to the Clay.
The next creatures to be born of the Living Clay were able to think. The Clay could copy the mind of what it had eaten, but not the soul. These new people were intelligent but without spirit for they had not been formed by a god's hand and had never had the Breath of Life. They fled the ceaseless infanticidal hunger of their progenitor and escaped into the world. Their flesh was as plastic as their sire, but because they had minds they could control their appearance. They came to be known as doppelgangers.
Physiology of Doppelgangers: A doppelganger's body is always indistinguishable from the body of whatever race it is imitating. This includes internal organs, and so on. However, they do not take on special racial traits. These traits are most often the result of long adaptive processes, or special favors granted by the original divine shaping; things the doppelgangers cannot reproduce. Doppelgangers do not have a "natural" form that they revert to upon death. They remain in whatever shape they were in when they died.
Like most creatures, doppelgangers reproduce sexually, though they are themselves technically hermaphroditic; able to assume the form and function of either gender as desired. They can produce offspring with another doppelganger, in which case the result is always another doppelganger (born in the form of the race its mother is in at the time of birth), or they can produce offspring with another member of a race it is imitating, in which case the offspring is also a member of that race. The specifics of gestation and nursing are appropriate for whatever race the mother and child are imitating. Mother doppelgangers can only nurse their children when in the same form as them. Immature doppelgangers slowly learn to change shape as they learn other basic skills like walking and talking. Parents can influence this, encouraging a child by demonstrating form changes and helping him, or discouraging it. Doppelganger children up to their first year or two of age tend to instinctively mimic the features of whoever they're interacting with, which can threaten disguises for unwary parents.
Psychology of Doppelgangers: Doppelgangers don't have a coherent society of their own, in general. Rather they assimilate into other communities and blend in. Most cities and large towns have at least a handful of doppelgangers in them, and a large city could have hundreds. Despite fears, doppelgangers don't show much racial solidarity and aren't given to conspiracy with one another very often. While doppelgangers are fond of having secret lives and multiple identities, they are independent by nature and usually keep the 'real' them safely hidden away from everyone. Fellow doppelgangers, being in on the secret, are harder to fool and therefore harder to trust. This has the side effect of keeping doppelganger birth rates low, which keeps their population under control.
Doppelgangers are plagued by the constant awareness that they do not have souls. When they die, nothing of them will persist and they will pass into oblivion forever. This removes one of the large motivators towards ethical behavior...fear of retribution in the afterlife...and it gives doppelgangers a reason to feel great jealousy towards other races. Many doppelgangers despise other races and act out against them, earning their races' sinister reputation. In particular acts of petty, disproportionate vengeance and theft (through deception and con artistry more often than literal physical theft) are common. Doppelgangers typically want to live for the moment, with as much luxury as possible. Mitigating this though is the fact that doppelgangers are at loathe to risk death. They are often very conservative, much preferring to manipulate others into taking risks on their behalf than actually taking the risk themselves. This tendency towards manipulation of others is re-expressed in non-fatal situations too.
This represents doppelgangers as they were, in the time of Thorn.
Thorn learned of the long-forgotten origin of her kind, and while most of her life was spent in pursuit of an anarchist agenda and personal comfort, a near death experience shocked her to the core when she confronted for the first time, the certainty that she would die. No amount of wit or speed or prowess could stop the remorseless ticking of time, and when she died she would be gone. Forever. Thus Thorn set out to gain a soul...and ideally souls for all her kind.
In the end, she got what she wanted, but it didn't work exactly as she intended.
I won't say exactly what happened, because it seems clear that the events around the final battle of the Egg are things that we may want to discover IC. I do see some possibilities...none of which would necessarily be known IC and therefore which don't need to be publicly revealed, even to me.
Basically, doppelgangers either have souls or they don't as a result of Thorn's actions. If they have souls, I think there's two unusual twists. One, they don't have an afterlife. Two, they can't create more souls by having babies. As a result, all doppelganger souls are reborn into new doppelgangers, and there are a fixed number of doppelganger souls. If the number of doppelgangers exceeds the number of souls...the 'excess' do not have souls. If there are fewer doppelgangers, then some souls have to wait in line.
If they don't, things are much simpler...and things for them are much like they were in Thorn's age, except more dangerous due to the lingering hostilities and suspicions from the dark ages. Their attitude towards Thorn will be a lot worse, since they got nothing to compensate them for years of genocidal ill-will from so many other people...not to mention they can be jealous and pissed because she got what they didn't. What's worse, Thorn can only reincarnate into a doppelganger baby...which basically means she's possessing an infant in the mother's body, replacing its potential with her own. Doppels are not keen on this, though it may not be known by most.
Ramifications for ensouling doppelgangers include:
1) Doppelgangers can be raised from the dead, but only if it's done before their soul reincarnates. Given the low number of doppelgangers and their low birth rates, that usually means you have plenty of time.
2) Newly incarnated doppelgangers don't have memories of their earlier lives, however, it's not uncommon for doppelgangers to have very similar personalities, likes and dislikes, and personal preferences to their past selves. As they get older, or have experiences similar to intense experiences of past selves, they can experience flashbacks sometimes.
3) Doppelgangers with souls CAN have doppelganger babies with non-doppelganger races...which could lead to the myth/rumor that doppelganger spirits can "infect" the children of ordinary folk...stealing their bodies and making them doppelgangers. This may, in fact, be a myth created BY doppelgangers trying to save themselves when their kids blew their cover by changing at the wrong moment.
4) Thorn is a figure viewed with some ambivalence by most doppelgangers. While they recognize that she won their souls...and she is respected for that...they also believe she brought the horrible years of genocide down on their heads. Note too that they'd be well aware that Thorn's out there somewhere, serially reincarnating like the rest of them...though there's no way to tell who it is.
What do you think of that?[/sblock]
