D&D General Souls and Spirits - are they necessary in order to exist?

[the Jester]

Would you allow a PC to lose its soul or spirit like this and yet still remain alive and playable?

There is a soulless pc in my game, as a matter of fact.

If yes, what would you have as the ramifications of having no soul?

It's not fully clear, but he has no remorse or compunctions about hanging out with liches, necromancers, and other unsavory creatures. He's also immune to things that directly affect the soul, such as magic jar.

Unfortunately, the pc is from the 2e days, and I moved several hundred miles from the player not long after the pc lost his soul, so we've never had much chance to explore it. He has been played only a few times since then, though he hangs out with an evil cabal on the Astral Plane, so he's still alive. I should probably convert him to some kind of custom monster stats for 5e in case he ever comes up again.

 

[Zardnaar]

Was kinda thinking about this in regards to selling your soul. Different scenario.

I would consider game effects. For a start no resurrection type magic unless the doll is on its relevant plane.

You would be immune to dome things but essentially a meat puppet. Probably consider disadvantage on death saves, possession possibly vulnerability to necrotic damage.

Or the body is in a condition. It's alive but nothing there no personality nada zip.

 

[Lanefan]

I make no assumptions about the science of my fantasy world. I wouldn't even assume neurons necessarily exist.

I would; and I do.

The science of my fantasy world is the same as the real world, only with magic overlaid and its underlying physics explained as to how they relate to our known physics.

Neurons don't need magic to work, therefore they function the same as ours do. It's just simpler that way.

Applying real world science to a fantasy world invariably leads to major contradictions.

Only if you let it.

 

[Lanefan]

There is a soulless pc in my game, as a matter of fact.

It's not fully clear, but he has no remorse or compunctions about hanging out with liches, necromancers, and other unsavory creatures. He's also immune to things that directly affect the soul, such as magic jar.

Magic Jar was one of those rare spirit-targeting effects I was thinking of. In the as-written game there's not many others; we have a very nasty high-level homebrew spell (and Mind-Flayer psionic effect) called Spirit Blast, which targets the spirit of a single creature and, on a failed save, both kills the creature and disintegrates its spirit.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

In some versions of the lore, mind flayers don't have souls, so they don't seem to be strictly necessary for all living creatures.

For ordinary mortals, the soul is the vessel for the personality, so a person without a soul is just a catatonic body, an empty shell. They may respond to basic stimuli but nothing more than that. Putting a new soul in a body results in a different person.

The spirit is the life force that animates a creature, both living and undead. If you don't have a spirit, you're dead, an unmoving corpse. Unless you're a construct, those are animated by magic rather than spirit.

 

[Vork_Hammerfist]

In my games a soul and spirit are the same thing, and both are a living beings breath, or life force. Things that breath are alive, things that don't, aren't. In a scenario like like the OP describes I would say the PC is a kind of undead. Not necessarily evil*, but certainly not an normal living being.

*I don't think that undead have to be evil, but they do tend to be evil due to the usual ways they come about. Generally in my world the undead fall into one of a few groups;

• Exceptionally evil people that don't move on after they die.
• Incorporeal beings that possess a dead body (this can included things like demons/devils, ect, and disembodied souls.
• Living things that are being actively prevented from moving on after death by some outside force.
• Botched attempts to achieve apotheosis.
• And lastly, beings that are unable to move on due to great emotional upset revolving around failing to do something, i.e. unfinished business.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It hasn't ever come up IMC that I can recall.

I kind of like the idea that a person could continue to function without a soul. If I allowed something like that they'd probably lose their ability to feel empathy. Hormones and brain chemistry would still exist, but without a soul to regulate these, the soulless one's emotions would be of the more negative variety. They'd be incapable of feeling certain emotions like real love, though they could still experience lust or recognize that a person is useful to them. They'd be incapable of feeling guilt or shame, though they could still be embarrassed (say, they face planted in a mud puddle). Losing their soul wouldn't necessarily make someone evil, but they'd certainly be unfettered from going down that route.

However, if a body can function without the soul, that begs the question of why you would need the soul in order to resurrect a person? It seems reasonable to me, along these lines, that it should be easier to resurrect someone in body and mind alone, than recalling a soul from the afterlife as well as restoring the body and mind.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I wouldn't even assume neurons necessarily exist.

That's basically my philosophy. Physical stuff you can see with the naked eye follows a baseline of cinematic physics (I don't go for making it all mythic, due to D&D tradition) but when you get into the microscopic realm, this is a fantasy world, and I don't assume the same stuff is necessarily going on.

 

[Umbran]

And so, my question to you all:

Would you allow a PC to lose its soul or spirit like this and yet still remain alive and playable?

Sure. Because being dead is pretty much the least interesting result the game can produce. Living with complications is more interesting.

If yes, what would you have as the ramifications of having no soul?

That if they die, there is no form of raise or resurrection that will work seems the most basic thing. Other magic that interacts with the spirit/soul may have limited or altered functionality. If a necromancer finds out the character is in this state, for example, that could be interesting. Maybe planar travel will no longer work the same way for this character, etc...

I like the invisibility to undead thing, but might modify it somewhat - some undead have working eyes. But there are other spiritual entities who might not perceive the character as well.

On a case-by-case basis I might want to consider the character's relationship with their deity or other magics, to see if there's cool stuff to be done there, that might need to be discussed with the player. Like... your god forces you to be a Grave Domain cleric until you get this fixed, or whatever....

 

[TwoSix]

To my mind, if a world exists in which complete physical transformation of the brain is possible via magic (wild shape, polymorph, etc.), then it doesn't make sense that memories, personality, and identity are encoded only physically within the brain.

Most aspects of fantasy, particularly high fantasy, don't work with a purely materialistic universe like our own. Most fantasy generally requires that identity is housed in a metaphysical container (soul, spirit, etc.).