What Do Souls Really Give You?

[amechra]

Looking at it from the opposite perspective of the Soulless condition, the following are the things having a soul gives you:

• A +2 bonus on rolls to resist possession, body jacking, and the like.
• The ability to use Abjuration, Binding, and Warding.
• The ability to recover Willpower from resting.
• The ability to recover Willpower from giving up and knuckling under.
• It inverts your Vice and Virtue - it makes your higher impulses something important, while dialling your lower impulses down to something more casual and mild.
• Most importantly, it heavily mitigates the corrosive effects of Vice on your identity - your Vice no longer provokes a Breaking Point on its own, and the penalty due to a Breaking Point coinciding with your Vice is reduced from -5 to -1.

In less mechanical terms, a soul does three things. Firstly, it grants you metaphysical weight - it repels possession, and lets you impose your will on the spiritual plane. Secondly, it heavily mitigates the steady corrosive influence of your lower nature. Your soul is what lets you catch a breather, and what prevents your base impulses from consuming you. Thirdly, it biases you towards your higher nature. Under the influence of a soul, you look past cut-throat desires to instead value your generosity, humility, or other, more communal "urge".

So...
1. Metaphysical heft.
2. Mitigates your lower nature.
3. Emphasizes your higher nature.

[Penta]

I really like this analysis. I never thought about it this way.

[Thorbes]

It also gives you drive and individuality, a souless person eventually becomes a holllow husk uninterested in anything, not even their own survival. Great anaysis by the way.

[amechra]

It also gives you drive and individuality, a souless person eventually becomes a holllow husk uninterested in anything, not even their own survival. Great anaysis by the way.

The way I interpret it, your soul isn't the seat of your drive and individuality - losing your soul does nothing to your Aspirations, after all, and it's not like getting another person's soul changes your Vice or Virtue. Judging by the fact that you rapidly regain lost Integrity and Willpower dots when you regain a soul, I'm assuming that the role the soul takes is more of a cleaner than an engine.

Tying it back to my musings above, you could interpret the eventual loss of self-preservation instinct (funnily enough, people with the Thrall condition still have Aspirations, and they still receive Beats for completing or working towards them - they just can't spend them.) as a side effect of letting Vice run rampant. I am assuming a bit when I say that Vice is ultra-corrosive, but...

If you look at the stuff your Vice interfaces with, you get some... interesting connections. Pretty much everything that works with a target's Vice uses it to penetrate their defenses somewhat, whether by giving them a penalty to their roll, removing Doors while going through Social Maneuvering, or handing them a condition. Your Vice is pretty much defined as being how you run and hide from your problems.

So when you hit Enervated, you quickly realize that running from your problems is the only thing that lets you marshal your strength so you can run from your future problems. By the time you hit Thrall, that doesn't work anymore. You've run out of reserves - you're going to desperately avoid conflict because nothing helps. You break, because that's the only option left to you.

[Vent0]

Souls also seem to be what allows Demon's to interface with facets of a being's existence. They can't Soul Pact a trash can, gerbil, or Spirit, for instance.

Souls also seem important/tied to Sekhem... somehow.

They also may be able to store memories (see Reborn in Immortals). But don't usually, since a person doesn't lose or gain memories when exchanging souls. So that might be a special case.

[malonkey1]

Souls also seem to be what allows Demon's to interface with facets of a being's existence. They can't Soul Pact a trash can, gerbil, or Spirit, for instance.

The souls that Demons buy are not the same kind of Souls that Mages deal with. That's just a little linguistic quirk of the gamelines.

A Demonic "soul" is the connections that a person has to the people, places and things around them, coalesced into an identity.

[GibberingEloquence]

I couldn't have summed it up better myself. Nice work, Amechra! Have a Like.

More information on the souls of both mortals and supernaturals:

• A strong soul (Integrity 8+) gives +1 to Abjurations, Wardings and Bindings for every dot of Integrity above 7. Likewise, a weak soul makes those practices more difficult (-1 for every dot of Integrity below 6).
• A high Integrity also denotes a soul with sturdy foundations against trauma: 6 or 7 dots gives +1 to Breaking Point rolls, while 8 to 10 dots gives +2. As can be expected, lower Integrity denotes a soul that is cracking or even crumbling away, allowing you to destroy the foundations to bring down the house (that is, the person). Three or two dots imposes a -1 penalty to Breaking Point rolls, while only 1 dot imposes -2.
• People with low Integrity are favored targets of certain supernatural phenomena: most Heroes have an Integrity of 4 or less. I'd say that Inferno demons would do the opposite: they get more satisfaction when they break a person of strong will and moral standards. Sometimes, your Integrity doesn't even have to be low or high, as DaveB has demonstrated.
• Souls can be used to power or otherwise benefit certain supernaturals, such as God-Machine Angels and Idigam. I won't be surprised if 2ED lets mortals sell dots of Integrity to hobgoblin merchants. Speaking of Changeling, the Thorns are said to rip away chunks of a person's soul as they escape from Arcadia. I vividly remember an insect-like hobgoblin from a 1ED supplement who was supposedly made from pieces of changeling souls. The Icons used by the Huntsmen to track down changelings are also made from pieces of souls that the Hedge ripped away, IIRC.
• The Integrity of ghosts does not change. I do not know if ghosts in 2ED will explicitly have to abandon or otherwise lose their Integrity to become Geister, but that seems likely. What else they will have to remove to become Kerberoi is anybody's guess.
• Mages have additional uses for souls beyond casting Supernal spells, such as crafting soul-stones and creating/joining Legacies.
• The Astral Realms are linked to souls, not brain activity. This is shown by the existence of the Anima Mundi AKA Dreamtime.

I really hope the second editions of Mage and Geist will go into further detail about the workings of souls. I know the ST is the final arbiter on these matters, but the information we have so far feels kinda sparse to me.

[Satchel]

A Demonic "soul" is the connections that a person has to the people, places and things around them, coalesced into an identity.

Much though I love that fact that demonic fuckaboutery re: souls is essentially various levels of identity fraud, you are disregarding the fact that demons literally cannot make a soul pact with something that does not have a soul.

[malonkey1]

Much though I love that fact that demonic fuckaboutery re: souls is essentially various levels of identity fraud, you are disregarding the fact that demons literally cannot make a soul pact with something that does not have a soul.

I don't recall that rule, but I don't have my Demon book on hand to check it.

That seems especially odd considering Demons can have animal and inanimate (usually building) Covers.

[nofather]

Plus they can do it to spirits and ghosts and maybe other ephemerals. But those aren't contracts, they're Exploits. At least the vehicle, building, ephemeral covers are. Amechra's pointing out that the human soul offers some 'metaphysical weight' might explain why contracts are necessary when they can just slip into other things.

Just to throw this out there. In first edition, which I realize amechra isn't speaking about but Mummy did come up and it's firmly a first edition game, there's a Mekhet who claims to have discovered the human soul, and that it is, 'in fact, a small organ vaguely resembling a six-inch-long spermatozoon encased within the breastbone.' It points out that he may have been making it up, but it doesn't matter because the Discipline this write-up is mentioned in 'makes it happen.' The soul is taken, sometimes preserved in formaldehyde. 'When the time comes, they transplant these "souls" into other mortals, or consume them, in order to gain moral strength.' That last part refers to one of the results of transplanting the soul into someone, that they receive the Morality rating of the 'donor' as well as their derangements, specifically they don't feel different, but what is acceptable to them is more in line with their new soul's Morality than their old soul. Also, dead bodies without these souls can receive the Embrace, but they're always a draugr with no Humanity.

[Satchel]

That seems especially odd considering Demons can have animal and inanimate (usually building) Covers.

You literally cannot get those as actual Covers without stealing them from an angel's assignment.

[amechra]

Demon definitely doesn't have the same look at souls that I got - which is probably because I'm thinking about this too hard.

Note, for example, that Soul Pacts actually delete people entirely from existence. As far as I can tell (since soul parts are used for building patchwork covers), they are using the soul as the Infrastructure to support that Cover.

Which brings up... questions.

[Acrozatarim]

Don't forget that some idigam are capable of more than just pulling souls out of people and shuffling them between recipients; there are some that can render them into soul slaves, entities that they can dispatch off as agents on tasks.

[amechra]

Much like Soulstones, that's less of a thing souls do, and more of a thing you do with souls.

If that makes any sense.

[Vent0]

Demon definitely doesn't have the same look at souls that I got - which is probably because I'm thinking about this too hard.

Note, for example, that Soul Pacts actually delete people entirely from existence. As far as I can tell (since soul parts are used for building patchwork covers), they are using the soul as the Infrastructure to support that Cover.

Which brings up... questions.

Demon doesn't interface with souls as they are commonly used. But there does seem to be some connection, so I brought it up.

Much like Soulstones, that's less of a thing souls do, and more of a thing you do with souls.

If that makes any sense.

Sure. Electricity doesn't heal damage, but Prometheans can use it to do so - because that's more about the Promethean than the electricity.