What Do Souls Really Give You?

[Menace]

I have a theory that souls are the thing that connects you to the rest of the world and the abillity to form connections and interact with the worlds inforcing your will upon it.

- People without start by becoming obnoxious so that social interaction becomes rly hard and end up as husks without the abillity do act.
- Prometheans lack souls and the world activelly rejects them

[malonkey1]

I have a theory that souls are the thing that connects you to the rest of the world and the abillity to form connections and interact with the worlds inforcing your will upon it.

- People without start by becoming obnoxious so that social interaction becomes rly hard and end up as husks without the abillity do act.
- Prometheans lack souls and the world activelly rejects them

That actually makes a fair bit of sense. It would also explain why taking somebody's identity entirely as a Demon is a Soul Pact: You're using the metaphysical connections to reality that the Soul provides to "plug in" to the world.

That theory also has some implications for other splats:

Awakened Souls are more potent because the connect with the world on a deeper, platonically symbolic level.
Changeling Souls are shredded and torn by the Thorns, leaving them with connections to Arcadia and the Hedge (as well as the possibility of becoming Gentry)
Ghosts can be made from Souls of Soul Stones, and they are demonstrably connected to things they associated with in life.

[Caitiff Primogen]

The bits about what a Vice is and what it does to you also raise some questions. Is a Soulless individual simply unable to make decisions based on an ethical framework and therefore more prone to indulging their Vice? Or is the Vice an in-built feature of the flesh?

To put it more simply, and to bring in jargon from outside the game, does losing one's soul make them Neutral? or do they automatically swing towards Evil?

Given the fact that one's Vice takes primacy in even of becoming Soulless, I would argue that Vice must be something that exists separately from the soul. Something attached to the body that the presence of soul acts to suppress.

[amechra]

I have a theory that souls are the thing that connects you to the rest of the world and the abillity to form connections and interact with the worlds inforcing your will upon it.

- People without start by becoming obnoxious so that social interaction becomes rly hard and end up as husks without the abillity do act.
- Prometheans lack souls and the world activelly rejects them

Funnily enough... you actually don't take any social penalties due to soul lossuntil you hit Thrall - at that point, you suffer the penalties due to the Broken condition, which seems to tie in with the loss of Willpower and the inability to grow that you also have when you're a Thrall. Vices are stuff that's bad for you, not necessarily something that rubs other people the wrong way (I can see someone with Overly Generous as a Vice, for example.)

Prometheans also have craptons of loose Divine Fire inside themselves. Their final rebirth thingy converts that into a soul - prior to that, the brunt of their template-based problems come from the fact that they are scorching the world around them with pure, uncut divine madness. I don't think we can lay this entirely on the fact that they don't have a soul (Demons don't have souls either, and they don't have anything like Disquiet or Wastelands).

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Awakened Souls actually aren't more powerful than normal people's souls; in 2e, shoving a Sleeper soul into your soul-hole fixes the Gnosis loss - an Awakened Soul does it faster, though. There has been talk from the devs (at least, I think it was devs) that stuff like Legacies affect the structure that holds the soul - it seems to imply that anyone's soul can be taught to contact the Supernal. It's more like an antenna than the radio, I think.

It would make sense that Awakened Souls work faster because the Mage's soul-hole doesn't have to scrub the Abyssal Shard out of it.

For Changelings... it would make some sense that souls have some ability to patch themselves up over time. I would imagine that doing so requires being in a place with a nice, open Twilight for you to recycle into soul-stuff. Of course, when you're in the Hedge or Arcadia... you don't have that. So your soul makes do - not its fault that the only raw materials are stories and Hedgestuff.

Ghosts... I think that's because they're essentially the Spirits of You and How You Died. They definitely aren't the whole soul (a soul is Rank 2, if you go by Werewolf 2e), but (to use Mage terms), I think they're the Death and Mind parts, with a little bit of Fate worked in for "unfinished business" purposes.

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It looks like Vice might be in-built - it's not really an ethical thing (see: dude with Overly Generous as a Vice). Which brings up the question:

Is the "native state" of a humanity sans soul Ennervation or Thralldom? In other words, if you could prevent babies from developing souls, would they ever develop a Willpower track or Vice in the first place? Now that I think about it, animals lack souls, can't use Abjuration, Binding, or Warding (I assume), don't have Virtues or Vices, and also can't spend Experience (again, I assume).

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Crazy idea:
At one point, humans were just smart animals; they lacked a Vice and a Virtue, couldn't do anything against Spirits or whatever (heck, there might've been Spirits of Humans back then). Then a freak mutation (or God, or a god, or whatever) gave some members of the species a small presence in Twilight - this is a massive bonus, since now there aren't any Spirits of them (avoiding that degree of fuckery), as well as giving them the ability to fight back against Spirit predators. What's more, it bred true - soon, whole populations of humans developed these proto-souls.

Similarly, another freak mutation developed into Vices and Virtues - this is another massive bonus, since it allows for much more efficient Willpower recovery. Originally, this was a bit of a lossy mutation; the Vice was more efficient for Willpower recovery, but would eventually break down your ability to deal with the outside world. It also bred true.

Real souls only developed when these populations interbred - a full soul made Vices and Virtues much better than they were alone. As such, natural selection (and trait dominance) means that only people with a very specific injury or congenital condition lack a soul. Unfortunately, much like how our diet of cooked foods have led to an increasing inability to digest raw food... humans can't function properly without souls anymore.

It runs out that the soul-hole (the highly scientific term for where the soul slots into the body) is also a great place for Ephemeral Beings to tie themselves to. Also, we now need a soul to recover Willpower through rest or surrender. Good thing souls come standard nowadays!

[Vent0]

That "history" seems like it has some holes in it (but I'll need more time to really identify the source of that feeling). Makes for many great plot hooks, though.

[amechra]

That "history" seems like it has some holes in it (but I'll need more time to really identify the source of that feeling). Makes for many great plot hooks, though.

That's the entire point of it - it's basically just me making stuff up.

[ElvesofZion]

As an interesting twist to that, maybe the Spirits of Humans ARE the proto-souls. At some point the Human spirits claimed all of the humans and now humans are actually a special kind of claimed with a spirit-like being that only exists in claimed form and new ones are only made at human birth/conception.

[LostLight]

As an interesting twist to that, maybe the Spirits of Humans ARE the proto-souls. At some point the Human spirits claimed all of the humans and now humans are actually a special kind of claimed with a spirit-like being that only exists in claimed form and new ones are only made at human birth/conception.

I once wrote in the old forums a theory about that the origin of "souls" come from former human spirits- that they were among the weakest of their kind in the shadow, and during that time man was no different than any other animal. It all changed when they all gathered together and ate each other up, merging into a colossal being which was the greatest representation of humanity in the Shadow. Then, Father Wolf saw it as a threat, fought against it and killed it- only for it to scatter its Essence through the world, where it merged with every living human being, turning the entire race of humanity into what now is known as an "Host". That means that humanity is just what happens when an all race turns into a Shartha (and they were the first to do so) and all of our "inner wars" and "desire for conquest" comes from the simple wish of the Shard in each and every one of us to unite and re-create the glory of the former spirit.

Never meant for it to be a "head canon", though- just a mad blasphemy used to taunt players during a Werewolf game.

[Vent0]

Are there spirits of Pangaeans? Perhaps humanity originated in the Border Marches and migrated to the material world and adapted long before the Border Marches fell.

Although... the coincidence of Humanity's ascent (and the rise of agriculture) and Father Wolf's weakening does raise some interesting questions on the relation between the two. (correlation or causation?)

Maybe souls are the result of the first bits of Pyros refining into something more? Which really came first: the Promethean or the Human(w/soul)? At least as of 1ed, why do even Unfleshed become more human as they progress along the Pilgrimage?

[Dreaminggod]

If we're all Claimed, we got a pretty crap deal out of it. No superhuman attributes or Numina (Or... are psychic merits actually the Dread Powers developing for our Claimed status?)

[amechra]

If we're all Claimed, we got a pretty crap deal out of it. No superhuman attributes or Numina (Or... are psychic merits actually the Dread Powers developing for our Claimed status?)

Oh, but we do have super-animal stats!

Mainly our stupidly high Intelligence. And not only Supernatural Merits - most merits are arguably not things that animals can take (Professional Training? Mystery Cult? Status?). And, arguably, Integrity could be considered a supernatural advantage that you get due to being "claimed".

I like the Shartha idea, though - could be... interesting.

[wyrdhamster]

We cannot be Claimed - as humans can be Claimed in games. The being cannot be twice Claimed, can it?

[Melange_Thief]

Unless the human body can hold up to two spirits, in which case it just looks like only one spirit can Claim someone at a time because basically everyone has souls (i.e. human spirits). The obvious way to test this, then, is to gather up a bunch of people, take their souls, attract spirits interested in Claiming victims, and hope the local Uratha packs don't find out about this.

EDIT: Alternatively, Claiming is separate from the soul-hole that the human spirit inhabits. In this case, presumably other spirits could be put into the soul-hole, meaning that the obvious experiment is to steal a bunch of souls and shove various non-human spirits into their soul-holes to see what happens.

[Vent0]

We cannot be Claimed - as humans can be Claimed in games. The being cannot be twice Claimed, can it?

Hive-Claimed?

[LostLight]

Unless the human body can hold up to two spirits, in which case it just looks like only one spirit can Claim someone at a time because basically everyone has souls (i.e. human spirits). The obvious way to test this, then, is to gather up a bunch of people, take their souls, attract spirits interested in Claiming victims, and hope the local Uratha packs don't find out about this.

EDIT: Alternatively, Claiming is separate from the soul-hole that the human spirit inhabits. In this case, presumably other spirits could be put into the soul-hole, meaning that the obvious experiment is to steal a bunch of souls and shove various non-human spirits into their soul-holes to see what happens.

I'm starting to see a Thyrsus Reaper Legacy coming out of this thread :P