Death, Souls and the Afterlife

Just a rambling post on metaphysics in my Planescape.

Death

Is much the same.

Musket shot, sword stab, dragon fangs, purple worm venom. The degradation or destruction of the fleshy prison causes the soul to abandon it’s hiding place below the heart.

Legally and metaphysically, death only occurs when the soul leaves the body, and does not return. Then, it travels on towards its final rest.

Undeath is an entirely different matter.

Souls

A small orb of raw magic. The cause and effect of a being’s personality. Souls are linked to cognition – Animals have souls, but they’re a different species of soul to thinking mortals, like Flumphs, Orcs, Halflings and Dragons.

It’s a broad category.

Souls are formed in one of the two ‘planes’ that border the outside of reality – called the Positive Energy Plane, to be plain, but also called fancy things like the Radiance, Great Gleam, Doors of Guf, the Beginning Path, the Origin, the Song of Worlds, the White Eel, all that, depending on your local lore of choice.

Magic coursing through the Positive Energy Plane forms together, creating a soul, a mote of potential, a space for dreams to grow in. These travel across the Multiverse (often passing through Elysium and the Feywild, the planes metaphysically ‘closest’ to the Radiance) and join a creature at the moment of it’s birth, or shortly after. From there, the soul is the ground upon which personality, cognition and magic grows.

The Guardinals of Elysium consider shepherding souls-to-be their most sacred duty. The Fey usually try and eat them or catch them in nets.

The souls, which are metaphysical more than physical, heed neither protection nor hindrance, not even from the Gods. The Gods take this as something of an insult from a Multiverse larger even than them.

It is only once a soul’s been loaded down with the baggage of a life lived that things like Fiends, Liches and Gods can actually get their arcano-physical mitts on it.

It has been said that, before the Gods, souls simply continued on their way after death, and returned to the other ‘plane’, the End, the Great Void, the Black Eel, the…

You get the idea. The Negative Energy Plane. There, they dissolved quietly back into raw magic, to flow slowly back round to the Positive Energy Plane, and to once again re-join the original Great Wheel, the Wheel of Reincarnation.

Souls retain some memories of past jaunts through the multiverse, woven into the fabric of the thing, when parts of old souls are bundled together into new.

The ‘Negative Energy’ which is supposedly responsible for necromancy is actually a sort of dissolved soul-slurry drawn from that Plane. 

Actual Negative Energy is raw entropy, which doesn’t exactly start making a corpse shamble around, now does it.

Afterlives

Of course, no system exists without flaw.

Souls slipped, quite often, ‘through the cracks’, as it were, on their way out of Reality. Some got stuck in certain planes, and changed irreparably: to the Elemental Planes, the oldest Genies, to the Upper Planes, souls became Lanterns, and eventually Azata, Guardinals and Lammasu. 

On the Lower Planes, souls became Larvae, and slowly grew, like a potato rolled under the sink, into Baatorians, Baernaloths and Obyriths.

Some say the eldest of these ancient creatures can still remember the lives they led as Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Who can say for sure?

Pazuzu the Obyrith may look scary now, but his original death was due to eating a weird mushroom he found in a swamp. He's still insecure about it.

This was all before the ascension of the Gods, of course. The Gods arose, from their obscure origins, and decided a few factors:

1. The Outer Planes are to be divided among the Gods. Leave the Elemental Planes to the remaining Primordials and those strange Genies we’ve been hearing about.
2. We all need an incentive for people to worship us, since we’re Gods and belief is akin to food and water, to us.
3. We all need big armies of followers because we’re going to kick the fuck out of each other, at some point soon.

So, the Outer Planes became Afterlives. 

The Gods, assigning (honestly kind of arbitrary) moral categories, began to capture souls heading for the Negative Energy Plane and shunting them off to whatever noodly little afterlife the Gods agree they deserved.

With the new influx of souls, the Gods of the Upper Planes began ascending worthy ‘Lanterns’ into Aasimon (or Archons or Angels, whatever floats your taxonomic water-craft).

Down in the Lower Planes, souls were being used as fertile grounds for the creation of armies. 

First, the Baernaloths, ancient kings of Hades, undertook an uncontrolled spree of creation - the most famous result being the Legion of Hell, or Yugoloths, a vast alliance of all the weird bespoke fiend-species that the Baernaloths cranked out. Others include Barghests, Oni, Night Hags, and all those charming denizens of All Hell. 

A Baernaloth, seen here considering The Hubris of Flesh

And second, Asmodeus, God of Oaths and Cruelty, created the vicious hive of bug-fascists that refer to themselves as the Baatezu. About one century into their existence, the Baatezu declared war on every other Fiend in existence, sparking the largest war to ever exist, the Blood War. 

The Obyriths used the souls they could steal to make sentient bioweapons, primarily to use on each other, then those bioweapons started calling themselves ‘Tanar’ri’ and overthrew the Obyriths. Now only a few Obyriths remain to lurk in dark spaces and abyssal spheres. 

An Obyrith, frankly embarrased about this whole Tanar'ric Uprising business.

The Baernaloths were killed by their rebellious creations (mostly), and the Baatorians were wiped out (with the exception of the Kytons) to get access to the green steel that grew in their bones, to feed the Baatezu warmachine.

A Kyton - likely thinking 'We really shouldn't have trusted that Asmodeus guy.' 

Eventually, a Petitioner, a soul construct held in an afterlife, will degrade and fade into the planes after millennia, re-joining the cycle. The main upshots are:

1. Very Powerful Dead Mortals, whose long-lived souls have accumulated a lot of magic. 
2. And a much slower cycle of reincarnation.

(Some people, such as the Believers of the Source in Sigil, have figured out a way to dodge the Gods, somehow, and reincarnate relatively rapidly– usually with about half of their memories intact.)

Driggins

 

“Dragons are Chaos. The scaled terrors represent all in the world that is arrogant, destructive, pagan, primordial, uncontrolled, and detrimental to society and life. All kin to the World Serpent are the same.”

-        Dano Zintana, Cleric of the Triumvirate

Put simply, Dano Zintana is an idiot.

To explain more thoroughly, all Draconic creatures share one origin: the blood of a murdered god called the World Serpent, which spilled across the face of Aclas when the Maker struck him down at the dawn of history.

Those that supped on the heaving rivers of godblood found themselves changed – whales into sea-serpents, songbirds into pseudodragons, and folk into dragonborn - or thus go the myths.

The five eldest True Dragons supposedly pulled themselves free from the Serpent’s corpse, full grown – ravenous Skaelir from the gut, two headed Kythmalus from the eyes, wise Zalarys from the brain, vicious Dastokkar from the liver, and proud, violent Yxamor from the heart.

And surely, all these creatures and more – the drake, the wyvern, every nonsense creature with scales and fiery breath, is chaotic. But dangerous?

Look at the Driggin.

Art by Iguanamouth

Dangerous is, obviously, a stretch.

Nobody can agree on the origins of the Driggin. Most will say dogs, due to the Driggins matching their natural enthusiasm, lovable nature and tendency to get really excited about nothing.

But, the jaw. The massive, impractical mouth. Perhaps the most dangerous looking part, although the lack of leverage or manoeuvrability massive decreases the danger it poses.

Whence doth the Stupid Fucking Jaw originate?

It has no analogue in nature. Thus, the inevitable question arises:

Are the Driggins spontaneous creations, like the great Dragons?

It would certainly be embarrassing for the Dragons. By virtue of size, and, for lack of a better term, originality, they reign supreme over the myriad descendants of the World Serpent. To be upstaged by such a small, stupid, adorable thing would be… unacceptable.

Whichever wizard or naturalist proved it would find themselves firmly on the shit-list of every dragon ever.

As such, research into the Driggin remains a niche topic, to say the least.

Anarchia

I made this hellish mess of a map for a one-shot i played with my regular D&D group (the main game being on break due to The Extenuating Circumstances).

The plan for the oneshot was to play characters from d-and-wiki's much maligned 5th Edition homebrew section.

(https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/5e_Homebrew - Enter at your own risk)

It was, in my opinion, a success.

We had a small horse armed with various magicks and the ineffable power of Dad (wielding a blade which says World's ---- Dad).

A blind, deaf pile of dirt, who rode around on a magic horse and was in service to the Chromatic Lords, the icons of chaos.

An illithid ninja so edgy one could cut themselves by looking at them - who also had a thrillingly abysmal Strength and Charisma score.

And then, an immortal martial-arts demigod who used Demogorgon as a butler.

He was phased out around halfway through for a variety of reasons, replaced by a suit of armour containing a hungover ghost, with a melee range gun.

The 'setting', for lack of a better word, was Anarchia, a hellish hex-crawl through these psychedelic danger-zones. I enjoyed it immensely. Probably would work best in Troika! Who knows?

The idea was that Anarchia was once Aleria, an entirely ordinary and pleasant fantasy setting, perhaps of the Dragonlance variety, that got neatly and thoroughly explodafucked, into a region of unreality called the Void of Chaos.

Every person became an immortal, nutty mutant with a wide variety of goofy powers - hence, the oneshot. 

Monster Munch: Planescape Outsiders

Perhaps Monster Munch will become a series where i ramble non-comittally about creatures.

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Is Outsider still accurate in 5e? I've never played any other edition, but i tend not to confer with 5e sourcebooks too much, when writing for my fantasy elf-game.

I personally like using the term Outsider to encompass anything weird and non-mortal in Planescape. It's such a broad, useless, and material-plane-centric term, that it really fits with the philosophical and... perspectival (?) themes of Planescape. 

Charming denizens of the Abyss - all smiles!

The issue with the Outsiders is, DMs tend to run them exactly the same. 

Modrons, Slaad, Fiends, Celestials, and everything else, get played as mindless drones that attack your (probably 'Chaotic Neutral') party on sight and fight to the death. Occasionally they proclaim whichever planar bigshot they serve in a snarly monster voice (or robot voice, or angel voice, you get the idea.) 

What a waste! 

I think the reason that Devils/Baatezu and Demons/Tanar'ri work is that they've got an alien mindset. 

Baatezu only respect Writ and Wit, so to speak - sure, you're mighty, but do you have any legal authority? Everything is based on how the current situation relates to The Law, and how far those rules can be bent and broken.  Even defecting Baatezu consider things in relation to systems - Baateu don't age, and most of them are many thousands of years old. Defectors have been having Asmodean propaganda drilled into their heads for millenia. Pretty hard to escape that. 

Tanar'ri respect only power - or the illusion thereof. Theirs is a 'society' which utterly lacks the bonds of love, mercy, identity, currency, law - fuck, the Abyss doesn't even have a flag! Ironically, I tend to find that the ordered Baatezu make more sense as individuals that work together, whereas the chaotic Tanar'ri make me think more as, while creatures in their own right, parts of the greater Abyssal consciousness. All Planes have a sense of aliveness to them, but the Abyss is the most 'awake', so to speak. 

These mindsets work because they are divorced from the human mindset - which could probably be defined as being equal parts fear, greed and love, to make a truly staggering generalisation. 

The alien mindsets really put the Out in Outsider. 

This is also why, on the whole, the Yugoloths don't work. What do they want? Good question! It's entirely hazy, and has been, since it was decided that there needed to be 'Neutral Evil' fiends, for the purpose of grid filling. 

Do the Yugoloths want wealth? They seem to, yes, but that's not exactly alien. Humans do evil for money all the time. It ends up making the Yugoloths seem like people, which isn't the idea at all. 

'Nobody knows' is not a helpful answer for DMs - to translate that, 'the designers couldn't think of anything.' This contributes precisely dick to anything. 

In my own Planescape games, I usually fall back on the idea that Yugolothic culture encourages the Mercenary Fiends to be just that - disloyal and utterly, all-consumingly narcissistic. Selflessness is completely alien to the Yugoloths. Everything is adjudicated in how it relates to the Yugoloths' own personal gain, down to the inanimate. 

To summarise

If you create a weird, magical monster with entirely human goals, it may as well be a human with weird, magical powers. Make alien creatures think in alien ways. It makes them more interesting.