Undead: is the person's soul trapped?

[Shemeska]

Consider:

• A creature who has been turned into an undead creature can't be raised by raise dead and cannot be the subject of reincarnate.

• 
  
  The Raise Dead makes sense because the body is in a state not receptive to letting the soul come back to occupy it. Reincarnate is just a case of the game mechanics not taking a particular situation fully into regard, or rather being contrary to the evidence that the soul isn't affected at all.
  
  

  [*]Speak with dead does not affect a corpse that has been turned into an undead creature.

The spell works on the dead, and it won't work on an undead corpse for the same reason it won't make a living person start talking: neither are dead.


In theory you could find the corpse of the mortal who later became a larvae, then a dretch, and ultimately became Orcus. If you animate the corpse into a skeleton it's not going to rip Orcus screaming from his throne in Thanatos to be bound against his will to a mindless skeleton. The spell simply isn't that powerful, nor is the soul involved when we're talking about animated puppets and nothing really more.

 

[GreatLemur]

Well, and those [Evil] descriptors on the spells. I do think it's a pretty minor change to remove those for a given campaign, though.

True, but I'd argue that the literal meaning of "Evil" as a spell descriptor or creature subtype is extremely debatable (and it certainly has been debated here!). When you go and make "Good", "Evil", "Law", and "Chaos" into objective qualities that have physical meaning in the world at large, maybe those objective qualities aren't the same thing as actual moral and philosophical assessments. Which is to say, maybe Evil is a supernatural energy type or vibrational frequency (hell, you can apparently imbue a sword with the stuff, after all), so you can theoretically use it for things that aren't evil (difference in capitalizations deliberate) in a moral sense. Animating a horde of zombies to defend a town from bandits, for example.

 

[IcyCool]

In theory you could find the corpse of the mortal who later became a larvae, then a dretch, and ultimately became Orcus. If you animate the corpse into a skeleton it's not going to rip Orcus screaming from his throne in Thanatos to be bound against his will to a mindless skeleton. The spell simply isn't that powerful, nor is the soul involved when we're talking about animated puppets and nothing really more.

See, I always figured that a small bit of the beings essence (soul, kool-aid, whatever) was bound into the undead creature (barring raising and reincarnating). I also figured this wasn't noticeable or harmful to the being as a whole, or there would be a huge stink about it in the various afterlife planes. It makes for some interesting ideas.

Alternatively, I've also just made creating non-intelligent undead and the various animate spells non-evil.

 

[GreatLemur]

See, I always figured that a small bit of the beings essence (soul, kool-aid, whatever) was bound into the undead creature (barring raising and reincarnating). I also figured this wasn't noticeable or harmful to the being as a whole, or there would be a huge stink about it in the various afterlife planes.

The idea does work. As EricNoah pointed out, there's plenty of precendent in real-world religions of multi-component souls. The Egyptians believed in five such parts, for example.

 

[zen_hydra]

I personally like the higher and lower souls concept.
In my opinion, only undead beings like liches would have both souls bound to them.
I see most undead (even some "free-willed" undead) being ruled by the passions and hungers of the lower soul.
These beings would be without the higher soul to moderate and mitigate the desires and actions of the lower soul; which is very fitting for the hungry-dead, like vampires, ghouls, wights, etc...

 

[Someone]

In theory you could find the corpse of the mortal who later became a larvae, then a dretch, and ultimately became Orcus. If you animate the corpse into a skeleton it's not going to rip Orcus screaming from his throne in Thanatos to be bound against his will to a mindless skeleton. The spell simply isn't that powerful, nor is the soul involved when we're talking about animated puppets and nothing really more.

Dude, that's an awesome adventure (even campaing) idea.

 

[kenobi65]

• Speak with dead does not affect a corpse that has been turned into an undead creature.

Keep in mind that, in 3E, speak with dead does not actually contact the soul of the deceased; you're interrogating "imprinted memories" left in the brain of the deceased -- fundamentally "reading the hard drive".

As others have noted, both raise dead and speak with dead may fail solely because a zombie or skeleton is no longer a dead body (the legitimate target of the spell), but is now a creature (undead type). Not sure about reincarnate; that one's weird...

 

[Roger]

Hmmm. As far as the targeting issue goes:

* I'd always thought (without any good evidence, I now realize) that if you, say, got turned into a zombie, and then destroyed, you still couldn't be raised. I'm not sure that's the case, though.

* Consider the situation in which your dead body gets hit with an animate object spell. Now your body is no longer an object but an animate creature, but there doesn't seem to be any specific prohibition against you being raised.

I agree the evidence from the rules doesn't really provide a smoking gun either way when it comes to the soul, but I think it does provide some clues.

 

[Bad Paper]

Speak with dead does not affect a corpse that has been turned into an undead creature.

yeah, but that's because speak with dead only works on a certain kind of object, like stone tell.

 

[Shemeska]

* Consider the situation in which your dead body gets hit with an animate object spell. Now your body is no longer an object but an animate creature, but there doesn't seem to be any specific prohibition against you being raised.

I agree the evidence from the rules doesn't really provide a smoking gun either way when it comes to the soul, but I think it does provide some clues.

The game mechanics don't take everything into account really, so it's no surprise that not all situations pertaining to this agree one way or the other.

But the flavor text over the years would suggest that non-intelligent undead don't have a connection to the petitioners who vacated them. It might be icky, might be a social taboo, might not be a social taboo, but the soul out on the planes isn't really going to care at that point, and there's no notion that it hinders their progress towards one-ness with a plane or deity in any way.

But of course if people want a different flavor in their games, go for it. I can see some fiendish glee in a necromancer raising a dozen skeletons whose souls in the eons since they died had become various greater or true Tanar'ri. Funny when the non-intelligent skeletons suddenly surround the wizard that raised them and start to chuckle.