Kingsouls

Grey

Grey

Dialectical Hermeticist
Just barfing this idea out so I can leave it alone for a while.


So I watched the incredibly unnecessary Hobbit trilogy recently, and in tandem with ideas about deeds corrupting the soul (and possibly a dash of Pillars of Eternity) I had an idea for the underlying conceit of a setting.


To kill with your heart is a corrupting act. Whether you swing the sword or give the order, it blackens your soul.


The soul, the animating essence, is immortal - you are not. Souls bear the stains of misdeeds or shine brighter from righteous acts across many lives.


A soul which has passed through many great lives skews in a particular direction, and attains great power.


These are called Kingsouls, and tend to go one of two ways.


Heroic Souls are righteous Kingsouls. They do little to their latest host but push them towards good deeds, great or small, and when faced with evil empower them to fight it. Many Heroic Souls pass through humble, unremarkable lives between more impressive incarnations.


Villainous Souls are a gestalt, of sorts. The last few incarnations that utterly corrupted them define the personality of every future incarnation, and they often never truly die - a slain incarnation might take centuries to recover, but they will return more wicked and powerful each time.


True Kingsouls are Heroic Souls which have triumphed over evil many times, and similar to Villainous Souls they are persistent - but rather than by retaining personality and memory between incarnations, they keep their bearer alive for centuries until slain by a Villainous Soul.


Obviously this is all incredibly rough, and a lot of the those Proper Nouns are placeholders.


Equally obvious is that this lends itself to Tolkienesque settings, but I'd rather do something different.


If anyone has ideas for other cultural inspirations I'd be glad to hear them.
 
Sort of sounds like The Wheel of Time (from my understanding) where these two characters are reincarnated and fight over several Ages.


Along those lines, it would be cool to have characters be in a endless war where they are being constantly reincarnated. Could span over many different historical eras.
 
Ancient Mesopotamian pastiche where the theme of the sun-through-the-underworld and yearly flooding cycles is a little more than myth. Now tech it forward to the crusades, with HRE-inspired villainous factions in the metaplot.


Alternatively, Sufi-Zen pidgin in a game about finding all 108,000 names of G*d and using them to hold her hostage.


 
Or rip off Versus, but with extra Ninja Scroll. Blend Shinto and Theravada to make a religion where people seek out the reincarnations of particularly honored ancestors to take care of their next lives, instead of sacrificing to their afterlives.
 
This is kind of what happens with souls in the world I made up for my novel series :)


Although there nobdy, not even the gods, know where the corruption comes from. I like your idea thuogh, it gives a proper explanation to how souls work, so to speak. Still, I would prefer the evilness to be from an unknown source even the gods can't stop or trace.


It's fun to read others play with the same idea.
 
You could always go full 80s and have it be like Highlander. The reasons these souls are connecting together throughout the lifetimes is towards some convergence of biblical proportions, one that approaches rapidly. You know, so that "THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE", or something along those lines, though for what reason this is occurring might be occluded by the metaplot.


It's also vaguely reminiscent of Dark Souls, for obvious reasons.


That said, the most obvious connection is Tibetan and Buddhist mythology, considering their karmic cycles of rebirth and whatnot, based on the deeds of the soul.


Lovercaft and some of Robert E. Howard's work also reflect upon this, how one's soul and lineage can affect the way one interacts with the world around them. For example, I remember one character going on about "I am born of mortal men, of a line of mortal men. There is only so deeply I can sin. But he, he is a wizard from a lineage of wizards, of a people seeped in wizardry. Three thousand years of blasphemy corrupt his black soul, giving him strength in these foul arts that one such as I cannot hope to reach,".
 
Rather than a tolkenese setting you could somehow try to do this across two time eras, for example, you could have one tab that is for a past incarnation of the soul each RPer takes and another tab for a future incarnation in a more modern setting, perhaps. You don't often see this type of spiritual idea done in a more modern era.


I'm not sure how well that set up would work, but it may be interesting, and it would certainly be different.
 
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