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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 1798815" data-attributes="member: 13966">By the text as written, Tyre's Fleshpuppet doesn't create an intelligent, sentient creature, it merley creates a living creature.  There's a great deal of difference.  Plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses are all living creatures, but they have no distinguishable sentience or thought processes; they're unintelligent, unthinking, unfeeling lifeforms.  Like a golem or undead skeleton, only alive.  So the Fleshpuppet spell itself shouldn't have the Evil descriptor, any moreso than a spell that creates fruit to be eaten or a spell such as Cure Disease.  Within the confines of D&D, this spell wouldn't be capital-E Evil.  Sacrificing the fleshpuppet afterward might be a minor evil act (again, no moreso than casting Cure Disease or killing a normal plant), as would simply letting the fleshpuppet die otherwise after creating it in the form of a defenseless fleshbag. The fleshpuppet could be animated by positive energy, making it alive without giving it a soul, but it couldn't gain intelligence or awareness without being given a soul first.  Nothing in the RAW says that it takes a soul to make something living.  Making a corpse undead through Animate Dead or whatnot does not bind a soul to it, only negative energy.  Unintelligent undead are only able to do what they are commanded to, because the command 'programs' them with the commander's intent; they don't 'understand' the command, as they're mindless, but the person controlling them uses his or her link to them (through rebuking/commanding or through animating spells) to imprint the 'program' of the intended actions, programming triggered responses in the undead's animating negative energy, in order to make them move as intended by the commander....  Intelligent undead either still have their soul, or at least have a magical imprint of their mind, but it is still the negative energy that animates and moves them. Remember, spells like True Resurrection can bring someone back to life even if their corpse was animated as an undead, though weaker spells like Raise Dead cannot.  This is likely because the soul retains some link to its former body (otherwise Raise Dead wouldn't require the original corpse), and it takes more powerful magic to sever that link and allow a soul to be True Resurrected; T.R. doesn't destroy the undead corpse, but it severs whatever soul-link had been restricting the soul's freedom from the old body.</blockquote>

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