Quote from: KoltarHow does everyone else handle the idea of Souls and Religion in their campaign worlds?

 - Ed C.

It depends entirely on the game system and the particular campaign. There are just too many variables involved to pin it down any more than that for me.

My default assumption is that either there are no souls and there is no afterlife or that souls and afterlife are undiscoverable to the living which is much the same thing.

When I include souls it is generally an intentional choice because a given setting benefits from it, for example fantasy games with ghosts and spells for contacting the dead.

Although even then not always, I had a long running fantasy campaign where a major issue being investigated by magi was whether when you contacted the dead you really were talking to dead people or just somehow accessing memories associated with a somehow recorded or conjured personality, the dead remembered nothing post death which led many to wonder exactly how those spells worked...

Rolemaster (1e, IIRC -- the black box set with the Vog Mur module, anyhow) had specific rules for the soul and death thereof, though they weren't linked to any religion that I can recall. Said rules treated the soul more like a generic animating energy than a specific religious tenet. It also served to explain resurrection better (in my opinion) than most other fantasy games.

Quote from: jdrakehRolemaster (1e, IIRC -- the black box set with the Vog Mur module, anyhow) had specific rules for the soul and death thereof, though they weren't linked to any religion that I can recall. Said rules treated the soul more like a generic animating energy than a specific religious tenet.

That's closer to the concept of the soul that the Greeks and Romans held.  The soul was literally your breath; when your soul leaves your body, you stop breathing.

Quote from: hgjsThat's closer to the concept of the soul that the Greeks and Romans held.  The soul was literally your breath; when your soul leaves your body, you stop breathing.

That's also one of the three human spirits in the old Finnish beliefs: henki, which enters the body with the first breath and disperses with the last. The other two are haltija, the "keeper" that guards you throughout life and lingers by your bones until they have rotted away, and haamu, the shade that carries the memory of you into the cold villages of the underworld. (There are of course many local variants for those names, but hey, alliteration is part of the traditions, too.)

Quote from: GrimGentThat's also one of the three human spirits in the old Finnish beliefs: henki, which enters the body with the first breath and disperses with the last. The other two are haltija, the "keeper" that guards you throughout life and lingers by your bones until they have rotted away, and haamu, the shade that carries the memory of you into the cold villages of the underworld. (There are of course many local variants for those names, but hey, alliteration is part of the traditions, too.)

Very cool. And strikingly similar to other ancient traditions.

The ancient Finnish traditions are very interesting in general, since they originate way back in (pre)history, yet we outsiders know very little about them because we seldom hear about them.