How do you view souls in your setting?
Are they core objects to a creatures being? or simply variable forms of energy
does a negative creature benefit from consuming a positive energy soul?
Or is it some flim flam organ that has no purpose other than "X has had their soul taken" and nothing more
Human Souls are a hole in the Field, an ethereal plane full of energy.
Human Souls leak this energy around them, and use this to power their life. Humans can also manipulate this flow of energy to use certain abilities, either direct energy attacks, enhancements, or more complex manipulations based on their personal training or quirks.
Magus Souls instead are a clump of solid energy from the field, that never changes. They're the mass of an entire human soul's lifetime. They use magic by using their effective gravitational pull on the Field to rip pieces from it to shape.
Biotech Souls are microscopic organisms that are the smallest possible size to draw from the field. They aren't capable of doing anything but altering their own atomic structure. En masse, these make for programmable biotech.
Shadow Souls are purely soul-based beings that exist to keep the field running smoothly. They're animalistic in nature, seeking only to feed on larger clumps of field, breaking them up and consuming them. Constant streams of field break them apart, so they only exist when the field is not in a state of flux.
Souls are like distilled ethereal energy in my setting. They can be harnessed as components for powerful spells/enchantments. One of the BBEG wizards my party encountered created an orb that acted as a sort of unlimited energy source by sacrificing several thousand sentient souls to tap into the positive plane. They used it to power their airship until a dragon crashed it and they blew it up to kill the dragon.
holy shit, thats some description I'll keep that in mind for my campaign
However in raw amounts would you say it's detrimental to be in bathed in something like that?
I don't like attaching an elemental feature like being burned or chilled but I can't think of something that describes being hit by a bolt of, well souls?
And having one's soul "ripped" out doesn't exactly sound like it would be tearing or shredding but rather emotionless and bland like changing the temperature rapidly
Spoilered because my players frequent Veeky Forums and I couldn't resist (looking at you, Paul):
Souls are the essence of being. Without it, bodies wither away as if they didn't even exist--even undead retain their soul, though in a flawed state. In my setting, ANYTHING can have a soul, and removing them through a certain means causes grim effects in large amounts.
"The Ultimate Weapon" is fueled by souls--the most powerful weapon is existence all but requires the utmost life force. Only one "god" ever devoured souls, which caused apocalpytic damage in the past--but he's dead now. Hopefully it sticks.
Doesn't matter to the plot so it never comes up
Very Dark Souls-esque, I assume that was your inspiration?
Consumable tangible life force, tied to a living thing. Consumed by extra planar beings who only tangentially interact with our plane. As they live off pure energies, on our realm, that often means eating the living.
Souls are the part of you that determines how you interact with magic. Having one gives you a resistance to magical effects proportionate to its size, and allows you to use a certain kind of magic intuitively, albiet at low power, and not always a useful kind. Constant use and study of intuitive magic can make your soul bigger and grant access to a greater variety or power level of magic. A soul does contain the memories and personality of its user, but it's an impression, not the point of origin. A sudden change in personality can leave you clumsy with your intuitive magic, although it can also cause it to branch out.
They're necessary for a magical beast, angel, or fairy to "work", but a human can live without one. They can be removed, transplanted, or placed into objects, which can be used by anyone as they would a normal soul, without any ease-of-use benefits you'd get from having it inside you. Having someone else's soul inside you leaves you with intrusive thoughts and habits until it's been moulded enough by use. Deities can tinker with souls in ways limited by their nature, most often to reward loyal followers with divine powers.
Upon death, souls are stripped of accumulated mass (which is expended to maintain the plane) and then recycled. They have a natural gravity towards the plane of their origin, and will pull their vessel along if not properly bound. Two souls from opposite planes can act as counterweights for each other, meaning that worshippers whose souls are taken up in their deity's afterlife allow said deity to deploy their agents onto the plane.
in my setting(s), souls are a currency used by the divine for some mysterious purpose. The divine beings share some small responsibility for creating life on the material plane by investing souls into it. As these lives live and experience their existence they nurture and grow their souls until old age when they die and their soul comes back to the celestial realm larger than when it went in. In these divine beings' eyes, this is Good and as intended. But their adversaries, those of the fiendish realms, have desire for this soul power too. So they constantly try to bargain, trick, or steal premature souls from the living by deceit or brute force. The divine can not stop every fiend that threatens the material realm, so they grant divine powers to the beings they are trying to protect and in some cases they grant immortality to the most devout or worthy. After the long wars between these two forces, the natural world evolved and granted longer lives to beings in the material realm who were found worthy of protecting nature. When the concept of immortality got more wide-spread, magic users caught on and devised their own methods for keeping their souls, prolonging their lives, or otherwise locking themselves to the material world. When Necromancers raise the dead they steal back what's left of the departed's soul to fuel the automata made from their corpse. When someone sells their soul they usually sell only part of it, granting them whatever bargain the fiend agreed to but negatively effecting the seller in subtle ways. Some of the most devious fiends will trick mortals into selling their whole soul, killing them instantly.
I haven't though about what the Outsiders use soul currency for yet, but you have to wonder, if fiends are able to grant anything near tempting for soul fractions, it has got to be something powerful.
You don't 'have' a soul, you 'are' a soul.
It's a mass of semi-regenerating spiritual matter latched onto the indestructible spark of creation in the middle.
Depends on my setting, but in the 5e game I'm running, souls are 'born' blank, along with their bearer, and colored by a lifetime of experience. On death, they are collected by their respective god and kept about, with the respective afterlives being akin to museums.
When a god tires of a 'piece,' they send it to limbo, or hell. If it survives hell, the process scours it clean and the soul is reborn. Good aligned gods tend to treasure their pieces, while evil gods tend to be very mercurial in their tastes, hence why hell is always full.
Everyone and everything has a soul. It's the way reality keeps track of it all, like a metaphysical sort of ID number. A person's soul continues to exist past death but remains mostly unnoticed. If someone were to replace a person's soul with somebody else's, they would act more in line with how that person would've acted, as they function like a record of a person that no longer is once they're gone. The soul of an object in addition to it's experiences also often represents a larger population of souls, such as a playground that was demolished may represent the childhoods of the local community members. Mashing two souls into one body tends to be very, very bad for mental health.
Without a soul, you have no aspirations. You become a sort of fleshy golem, or, if removing your soul didn't preserve your animus, a corpse.
Usually when something is said to damage a soul, it actually means that the soul is knocked loose a bit. The less sturdily attached a soul is to it's body, the worse off the creature is.
Currency. Strength. Sorrow.
A soul is a seed that has fallen from its origin. Each soul has the potential to break out of its husk of its existence, to breach the ground of the realm it is born, the grow up in what darkness it finds in the wide universe and maybe one day to flower and become one who makes souls themselves.
The Ultimate Warrior had better be who I think it is.
I leave it a complete mystery whether there even is a "soul." Death is permanent in my setting so yeah it doesn't matter.
Excellent. I approve.
The soul is an animating energy force which is usually stored in living things but can with magical manipulation be stored in pretty much anything. When creatures are born there is a god whose job it is to measure out how much soul they get from a great pool in the sky with a magic spoon and pour it into them. When they die the god of death takes their soul and returns it to the pool.
The soul is an energy source which is actually slowly expended as creatures live, though a soul can burn for thousands of years so without immortality it's always the body which gives out first.
Various undead are what you get when souls aren't collected by the gods and if you want to create a golem or something of the sort you'll need to extract souls from creatures to do it.
The pool in the sky is large but it's technically not infinite. The legend which I don't plan to use as a story point is that when the soul energy finally runs out and is used up that will be the end of the world. For now though there is plenty for millions and millions of years.
There are three types of metaphysical anatomies.
The first is that of True Spirits - angels, demons, and the like. These beings consist of a body made entirely of soul - whether it is a single soul that was previously a mortal, a gestalt of soul consisting of multiple deceased mortals, or even an entity made of the same "stuff," spontaneously generated from a spiritual plane.
The second type is True Mortals. Everything from humans and mundane animals to trolls and ogres to giants and dragons fits in this category, and consists of three parts - an immortal soul, a physical body, and an animating force. The body houses the soul, the soul acts as the seat of identity, memory, and emotion, and the animating force provides the body mobility and vitality.
Finally, there are the Unplanned, of which the Elementals were the first - but this category also includes animate constructs and mindless "undead" which are themselves more like animated objects. These beings consist of a physical body and an animating force - but these are never the same animating force that True Mortals use.
Elementals are given animating force and physical body by the primal element they represent. Animated skeletons and other mindless corpses are animated by an energy antithetical to True Mortals' animating force, with the corpse itself serving as the body. A golem or animated object follows a similar principle - arcane energies provide the animating force for a physical body consisting of the object in question.
Those Unplanned which are provably sapient are noted as seating memory, identity, and emotion within their physical bodies - which means that upon death or destruction, every trace of what made them "them" ceases to exist. This leaves most with a grim disposition, knowing that True Mortals can reincarnate or become True Spirits and they cannot. (cont.)
What is worse, hitting an Unplanned directly with soul can have one of two effects.
Hitting it with an experienced soul or with pure soul (i.e. if an angel were to strike it, or pure soul-stuff were to pour directly into it) will react badly with its soulless nature, thus immediatelty scouring it from existence without the proper protections.
Hitting it with a blank-but-formatted soul (i.e. a soul shaped for an infant but not yet given to it) can instead produce... well, things that should not be.
Unplanned were not only never meant to be in the first place, but they were never meant to have souls - and a being that stores its personality in its physical body has no need for a soul to hold those.
So obviously it mutates horribly and the best-case scenario is that you get something hideous and uncontrollable but that has at least benign intentions.
The worst-case scenario is you get something that breaks down reality in the local area and never stops moving, leaving scars across the entirety of the physical plane.