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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sejs" data-source="post: 1863439" data-attributes="member: 4910">In my games the way I handle things is pretty straightforward.  There are 3 components, the Body, the Spirit, and the Soul.The Body is pretty self-explainitory.  It's the physical you.  It eats, breathes, sweats, poops, gets hurt, grows old, dies - the whole ball of wax.  The body manages itself - the brain (or whatever is equivalent for critters with strange anatomies like oozes) regulates breathing, hunger, and any of the other basic, natural processes that are required for a living body to perpetuate itself.  The Body, and by extention, the brain, keeps house as it were.The Spirit is half of what makes up the non-physical you.  The Spirit represents (and in truth is) your animalistic self.  Hunting prey, fighting aggressors, establishing territory, mating - things that an animal does without any need to be sentient, these are the realm of the Spirit.  All living creatures have a Spirit, and while the Spirit is no more inseperable from the other components than the rest, the loss of the Spirit would prove fatal.  Without the Spirit, your Body would know that it is hungry, for example, but it would not know to eat, or how to acquire food.  Important to note also that the Spirit is selfish, in the purist sense of the word.  Higher ideals and abstractions such as mercy, faith, honor, morality and the like are all beyond the remit of the Spirit.  It simply doesn't understand those things, nor thinks about them.  The Spirit instead understands things like anger, love, joy, sorrow, contentment, fear, etc.  Base emotions.  For sentient beings, the Spirit would seem like your darker self to most, because it is so base.  The Spirit forms the foundation for the Soul.  Without the Spirit, there is no Soul; you cannot have a river with no bed, but you can have a riverbed with no water.The Soul is the other component of the non-physical you.  The Soul is the seat of higher ideals, abstractions and the like.  The mirror image of the Spirit.  All sentient beings are possessed of a Soul, though not at birth.  Infants are born with no Soul, and over the course of their growth as an individual, develop one.  Of course, how it develops varies from individual to individual.  Spells like Awaken germinate a soul where there wasn't one before, fueled by spark of their own energy that the caster provides in the form of xp.... at this point my mind is starting to wander, and I'm losing focus.  So uh yeah.  Pretty much, heh.  I'll post more later if it springs to mind.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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