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Our next Hangout Club is Friday, June 11th @ 8:30pm CDT! Mark your calendars now!

UPCOMING STREAMS @ Twitch
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TUESDAY, JUNE 1st @ 6:30pm CDT: Let's Read OD&D!

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D&D: The Path of the Soul - Part 3: On the Use of Souls

Let's consider the Nine Hells as an exemplar and object lesson in how the Outer Planes make use of mortal souls. Asmodeus is the original architect of Hell's soul engines, having constructed a massive engine for waging the Blood War and containing the existential threat of the tanar'ri.

Comments

Anonymous

Where do vampires fall in this hierarchy - presumably they are sort of like liches and retain what is left of their souls? Would a citizen of Elturel who has sworn the Creed Resolute be incapable of being turned into a vampire, as his soul has already been promised to a devil? Do either infernal deals or vampirehood supersede the other?

justinalexander

This is usually rather vague, has varied over time, and is generally self-contradicted. In 1st Edition, for example, vampires were explicitly soulless: The undead body possessed the memories of that body's life, but the soul was supposed to be absent. Except, of course, characters like Strahd or Jandar Sunstar featured the "damned soul" mythology drawn from vampire fiction, which only really makes sense if you assume the vampire is, in fact, the person. (In some cases you can see a distinction between "true" vampires who are transformed into such as a form of damnation and "created" vampires or vampire spawn who are soulless undead, but this distinction is even more tattered in practice.) If undead don't have the soul, then the soul probably goes into the afterlife. Which creates the possibility of, for example, a vampire encountering the afterlife form of its soul. But, AFAIK, this has never actually happened in an official book.