Select Concepts is a series of blog posts where I will describe concepts specific to my campaign, but which could be reused in other settings. Their point is to explain (lampshade) some RPG Tropes into believable occurrences, or offer alternative sources of conflict/help for our heroes to face/enjoy.
The River of Souls was described by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis in their War of Souls trilogy.
It does leave the universe of Krynn open-ended (the souls go somewhere beyond Krynn and its gods, in the end), which might be want you want. But for me, as a DM, it failed to explain a few basics of a D&D fantasy settings. Also, I don't like it.
So I devised an alternative version called the Cycle of Souls.
Inspiration
Andy Weir wrote in 2009 a small story called The Egg, which is a fascinating story about how every human alive is actually a reincarnation of the same soul, across time.
You can read it here: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
... and while I won't reuse it as-is, I find it a marvelous inspiration for a setting's creation myth.
Anyways...
The needs
These are my needs:
- I need to make "naturally occurring" reincarnation possible
- I need to make resurrection possible, up to a certain point (i.e. if too much time passed, then it becomes impossible
- I need mortals to be able to join their gods after their death, if they want it
- I need to explain why ghosts and revenant might linger beyond their "death"
- I need to explain how someone with an actual brain would prefer to serve Takhisis and end in some hellish forever, instead of giving flowers to widows and orphans, and join eternal bliss
- I need the gods to need to nurture souls, for some reason. Of course, each god might have their own definition of nurturing
- I need to have Raistlin wait for his twin, after death.
- I need to explain why souls are important for gods, all the while gods having a relative interest in any random mortal
- I need to explain why undeath might actually be a viable, if dreadful, alternative (instead of "how can you be so stupid to do the obvious wrong choice?")
- Fistandantilus
Also, bonus:
- No diabolic pact, no demon eating souls. Because, f*ck demons and devils up to Uranus.
So, with that, let's start...
Souls vs. Spirits
Souls
Souls are supposed to more or less come from the sparks of Reorx striking Chaos to slow it down and enable creation.
But, being free and unconcerned, souls do not "experience". So they evolve very, very slowly, if at all.
Also, souls may, or may not, experience time. It might even be possible they experience time in a distinct way than mortals.
The gods were tasked to nurture them, so they could grow (possibly into some kind of divinity?).
So the gods gave them gifts:
- Gods of Good gave them physical form, so they could affect and experience the physical universe around them
- Gods of Evil gave them suffering and mortality, so they could feel the consequences of their action, and/or need to react to external events, and then die.
- Gods of Balance gave them freedom to choose (and immunity to any kind of soul damage or coercicion)
By giving them these gifts, gods gave the souls a way to experience reality, through a spirit.
Spirit
When a mortal is born, lives and dies, their consciousness, memories, and experiences is the spirit, created mostly blank from a specific soul.
Upon death, as consciousness fades away, these memories and experiences, or variations, will be replayed, again and again in the fading spirit's mind, as if in a dream, to be slowly absorbed into the soul of that mortal.
The spirit thus fades away in a dream-like state, so the soul can grow.
This is the cycle of souls.
Souls vs. Spirits
The same soul can produce very different spirits. For example, the same soul could produce a Lawful Good paragon spirit, then a Chaotic Evil renegade spirit.
In the end, the whole point is for the eternal soul to learn and evolve by experiencing reality from different viewpoints and situations through transient spirits, each one with a distinct identity and personality.
Fun fact: There is an eerie, but coincidental, parallel between the relation soul/spirit in Krynn and the relation player/character in RPGs.
Can a Spirit endure?
Actually, yes, as during some time after its death, while the spirit is slowly fading away, it is still there.
Fading away...
For example, during this time, the spirit can still be brought back to life, in a way or another (e.g. Raise Dead). It can also be contacted, for example, through spells like Speak With the Dead. The "afterlife" so dear to mortals may be nothing more than the spirit blissfully (or not) fading away, perhaps in the home plane of their god, or some kind of demiplane of their own creation...
Undeath...
Also, the spirit can remain willful and/or powerful enough to remain part of the physical reality.
For example, ghosts, or revenants, whose emotional state either enables them to remain there voluntarily, or forces them to remain there despite a desire to move on. On the other hand, magic rituals might tie the spirit down. For example, mummification, or lichdom. Some accidents or contamination might also happen (e.g. ghouls, vampires). Last but not least, curses (mostly divine) can tie a mortal into the material plane as an undead monstrosity, forcing them into a seemingly neverending hellish existence.
In all cases, the spirit remains, albeit altered by the condition it is forced to remain as.
Ascending...
Last but not least, some spirits can endure longer, because their souls have grown enough (*). These might join their gods as agents, or remain outside observers, and free agents (think "ghost", but without the drama).
(*) This could be considered as a transitional state, where the soul has grown enough its spirits will start to share personality, moral and belief similarities... or even strange memories.
Some Caveats
Apart from what is described above, nothing can keep a dead spirit from fading away into its soul, not even divine intervention.
Also, there is no way, even for a god, to identify the soul of a specific spirit. For example, should the soul of Raistlin reincarnate, it could reincarnate as a tinker gnome spirit, with no memories whatsoever of their past lives, and Takhisis would not suspect a thing.
Last, but not least, souls are totally immune to gods, or any other creatures (like, demons, etc.). The only way to affect a soul would be through the experiences and memories of one of its spirits.
Bonus: Tenacious Souls
I don't really like that concept, and won't be using it personally in my campaign, but it remains compatible with what is written in this post.
Gods and Souls
Unless exception, beyond curiosity, gods care little for spirits, for the same reason someone usually care little for most characters of a fiction (even a RPG or LARP one): Most of them are, in the grand scheme of things, interchangeable, forgettable people.
Gods only really care about nurturing souls, i.e. educating them into becoming,
potentially, divine servants, or even gods, of similar moral outlooks.
But, as noted above, the only way to affect a soul is through their spirits, which means creating societies and civilizations to educate them en masse. This explains why the gods of Krynn are warring over mortals: Mortal spirits living in the middle of a civilization that follow that god's teaching is a good way for converting souls into their ways: If Takhisis succeeds in conquering Ansalon, then every mortal on Ansalon will only thrive by becoming more like Takhisis herself (the others will be dealt with later, and serve as fodder in the mean time).
Some spirits, though, might be noteworthy (usually because of their capacity to have faith), and gods sometimes enjoy observing their existence, possibly even discreetly affect it. Sometimes, a god might suspect and interesting spirit might be from the same soul that spawned an interesting spirit in the past, and might see it as a recurring investment (or danger).
Gods of Good
The gods of Good are mostly concerned with nurturing souls into communities of equals, where everyone is caring for everyone else. In this, "together we are stronger" might be their motto.
Of course, for all their care and loving, like overbearing parents, Gods of Good are convinced they know much better than the souls and mortals they are nurturing about what is good for them, which sometimes lead them to be overly possessive of their flocks, sometimes even against their flocks' wishes.
Gods of Evil
The Gods of Evil believe that not all souls are equals, and that some will ascend much faster than others, if correctly nurtured. They favor ambition over everything else, and see caring as something that should not be overly sanctified, as it inevitably leads to the weakening of the souls, as well as squandering resources over many unworthy souls, while they could have been focused on worthier ones.
In other worlds, war and challenges are there to help the best of the souls to ascend, usually by exploiting others, less talented ones, or at the very least, by not being weighed down by them.
Gods of Balance
The gods of Balance have always worked to let souls grow at their natural speed, trying to not affect them too much, to avoid biasing them in any way of another, and working to make sure the influence of the other gods does not smother down the souls into a mold.
This, until the Age of Despair, have led them to some kind of balancing-through-alliance, joining one or another side to keep everyone from becoming too powerful. As this has not prevented the causes for the Cataclysm, some of the gods of Balance are now arguing against that doctrine.
Cheating The Cycle of Souls
The Cycle of Souls is a tedious, but necessary step for the souls to evolve into a higher divine form.
Chemosh
One god, though, believes the process is flawed and inefficient: Too much time is spent by the soul "absorbing" the spirit, and even this "absorption" loses too much information.
This is why Chemosh had been researching, and sponsoring research on necromancy and undeath. In theory, every lich, every mummy, every vampire, has the potential to grow ten times faster than regular souls in the same time frame. In practice, this doesn't happens enough, which means more research is needed.
The Bloodstone Pendant
The bloodstone pendant enables its wielder to absorb al the experiences of the victim into the wielder. In addition to the life span increase of the wielder, its practical effect is that the victim's experience is absorbed and digested by the wielder's.
Thus, the victim's soul lost an opportunity to grow, while the wielder's spirit instantly accumulates experience by absorbing the victim's soul, which, in the end, will be absorbed back by the wielder's soul.
As Raistlin was the last one to use the pendant, absorbing Fistandantilus in the process, one might say Fistandantilus soul lost the potential of thousands of years of experience. Raistlin's soul, on the other hand...
What about Raistlin and Fistandantilus challenging the gods?
By trying to become gods, Raistlin and Fistandantilus weren't just challenging gods. They were challenging some very fundamental laws of creation.
As spiritss, they had tried to circumvent the Cycle of Souls, and ascend by themselves. In some way, it's like a character taking over their actor, and suddenly controlling their destiny. This was, at best, madness, an aberration.
Why weren't they stopped? For many reasons, but the main ones being gods being divided, even within the same pantheon. The points of discussions go from the necessity or even legitimacy of such an intervention, to what to do exactly to solve the problem, all the while taking each god's personal interest in these specific spirits' growing power.
And, as in the end, Fistandantilus simply screwed up, and Raistlin sacrificed himself, the non-intervention angle seems to have been the right one...In game terms, how does all of this changes everything so far?
That's the beauty of it: It doesn't change anything in any measurable way.
In the original setting, each soul passes the Gate of Souls and is out of reach for all concerned in Krynn.
In this variant, the spirit is dissolved into the soul, and is out of reach for all concerned in Krynn.
The important difference is one I wanted from the start: Every god has a vested interest in nurturing eternal souls, and yet, remains aloof of transient spirits.
What about Crysania's Death and Resurrection?
The only problem might be Crysania, who died in the present, to be raised back to life in the past by the Kingpriest. The relation of the gods and characters of Krynn with time is strange indeed, and the same goes for souls. In the books, it was as if the soul of Crysania remained attached to her body, and thus, was sent back in time with it. Weird, but why not?
The devil is in the details: I wrote above:
"Also, souls may, or may not, experience time. It might even be possible they experience time in a distinct way than mortals."And by distinct, I really mean distinct.
Having gods and souls experience time in a distinct way than mortals/spirits enables such time-traveling events. This might be the subject for another post...
Conclusion
By defining souls and spirits, as done here, we can explain a lot of what seems illogical: How resurrection really works, how undeath relate to souls, and why gods can seem detached from mortals, all the while caring about their souls.
P.S.: Test of the Twins
What if Caramon and Raistlin were actually two spirits of the same soul?..
🤯Food for thoughts...
😋
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