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RPG Ideas — Souls

Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is souls, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST on Nerdarchy Live to talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of souls to celebrate International Tabletop Day 2018 we launched our revised Patreon rewards by sharing Empusia, Curator of Souls for free. We’re making some changes over at Nerdarchy the Store including a new category for our FREE material like this one. You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here. You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.

Nerdy News

Matriculate to the week that was! Experience everything fantasy college life has to offer (including new monsters!), change stuff into other stuff with the best homebrew transmutation spells, get a critical hit everytime and face the crying cryptid plus new live chats with industry pros and creative folks and live game plays round out this week’s Nerdy News. Check it out here.

Delving Dave’s Dungeon

Souls are the currency of the gods, demons, devils, hags and others in the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. In the lower planes they use souls as fodder in their endless Blood War. Many other creatures in D&D seek to corrupt mortal souls. Instantly I think of devils bargaining and offering deals to mortals for the low, low cost of their immortal soul.

Evil mortals who die have their souls sent to the Abyss or the Nine Hells become manes and lemures respectively. To me lore like this is great for inspiration when coming up with plots in my games. Imagine introducing these monsters in your game and describing their faces as former NPCs or villains the adventurers encountered in the past. What if it was a kind and well liked NPC? What happened to them to end up in the lower planes? Will the adventurers want to solve this mystery? Perhaps they’ll want to mount a rescue mission to the Abyss or the depths of hell.

I’ve recently started reading Blades in the Dark, another RPG. Blades in the Dark has a bunch of different elements. You are playing as criminals. There is an electric wall powered by demon blood to keep out ghosts. Outside the wall is considered The Wastes and not a nice place.

In the setting the dead don’t move on when they die. This causes their souls to be trapped as ghosts in this world and the electric wall keeps most of them out of the city. All of this makes for an interesting and off the wall setting and game you could turn into a great plot hook for a D&D adventure or campaign. Souls could get trapped as ghosts or spirits but they could just as easily become lemures or manes. Is it because of an evil cult, depraved wizard, dark priest or something else? How are they corrupting the souls? Can it be undone and the souls be uncorrupted?

Whether your villain is trying to become a lich, build an arcane engine, perform a dark ritual or any number of other unscrupulous acts then souls make the perfect fuel. Keeping the bad guys from stealing souls to power their evil plots is the stuff of heroes.

From Ted’s Head

The concept of the soul is a deep conversation often reserved for late nights when you are too tired to talk about anything else or when you have a desire to get into the serious metaphysical stuff. But when we start adding in fantasy and the celestial plane of existence the metaphysical becomes a serious reality.

If you know me you know I have a serious penchant for all kinds of shows and movies. Since the topic is souls how could I not go check out the Pixar movie Soul. While I did not love the movie it of course allows for inspiration for our roleplaying games. I could certainly see a game where you are playing a soul looking back on their life. As noted by the movie it is the opposite where you could be a soul getting ready for life, though I feel this has less appeal and not sure where the story would go.

Another soul related game was something I was super excited about back in 3.5 D&D. Ghostwalk was a campaign option book written by Monte Cook and Sean K. Reynolds. As the name implies this allows you to play a ghost character. I ran a campaign for a while with ghost characters. The idea was to set up an elaborate plan and get the group into a fight several sessions into the campaign and kill them as the adventurers were out classed. They would all die and I would then start them as ghosts. They would play and advance as ghost characters and find a way back to their own bodies at the time of their death and repeat the encounter and win this time.

I screwed it up. I tried to keep it as a secret. I even hid the Ghostwalk book from the players. When I rushed through combat dropping one character after another, they were too keen on my usual gaming style to be afraid for their lives as I intended. I should have started with them dead and guided them to discovering the story of their death through playing and try to return to life. As with everything else it was a learning moment. I am glad I tried.

The idea of playing a game as a ghost could be very interesting. While the mechanics will not apply the lore and concept are still able to be used. Feel free to grab a copy of Ghostwalk here.

From the Nerditor’s Desk

“Could it be it had a soul, Alfred? A soul of silicon, but a soul nonetheless.” — Batman, from Batman: The Animated Series S1E43 — His Silicon Soul

One of the most memorable episodes of an outstanding series, this quote refers to a robotic duplicate of the caped crusader created by H.A.R.D.A.C. (Holographic Analytical Reciprocating Digital Computer), itself created by computer genius Karl Rossum. The episode is very obviously inspired by Karel Čapek’s 1920 science fiction play R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots.

The concept of a machine soul has deep roots in our modern life and we’re still asking these questions today, which continues the legacy of R.U.R. through Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, themes explored in the Matrix franchise and real world discussions on the ethics and rights of artificial intelligence. This is a gold mine for RPG experiences!

I’ve been running a Cypher System campaign recently and one of the big themes of our science fiction story involves replicants. The setting is our own solar system 500 years in the future and one of the players wanted to play such a character to discover what it means to be an artificial lifeform. We had a fantastic session zero and it’s been exciting to explore this theme as a group. Through the lens of the replicant character but with a huge gulf of time and knowledge it’s brought a wonderfully deep philosophical component to the sci-fi action.

The concept of souls can translate across all genres too because as humans we all have our own ideas about what this means individually and generally. In fantasy, sci-fi, occult or anything incorporating fictional elements there’s no end to the exploration of what the concept of souls means. Do plants, rocks, animals and other natural things have souls? Do souls carry on after mortal life ends? If our own creations like robots and artificial intelligence demonstrate what we think of as souls — the principle of life, feeling, thought and action regarded as a distinct entity separate from the body — what does that mean about our own humanity and origins?

Heady stuff.

On a more practical level it can be exhilarating to play characters who claim the souls of their enemies for whatever reason. My favorite example of this is Elric of Melnibone, a protagonist of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series of books. Wielding the powerful sword Stormbringer (D&D’s Blackrazor is an obvious pastiche) Elric’s adventures appease a variety of Otherworldly Patrons while his sword sucks up the souls of those who stand is his way.

In fact Elric very clearly inspired our own Stealer of Souls Character Build Guide. If your next 5E D&D game needs a character who seeks souls for their thirsty patron — whether you’re the DM or a player — find out more about it on the website here.

*Featured image — When it comes to fantasy art there are few who’ve had the impact on and instant recognition from D&D nerds quite like Gerald Brom. His gorgeous paintings helped defined the Dark Sun setting. Among his many other incredible works he illustrated covers for several of author Michael Moorcock’s novels about Elric of Melnibone, the original bad ass dark hero with the soul stealing sword. This particular painting from 2017 is called quite fittingly Soul Stealer. [Art by Brom]

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