So a co-worker and I have been having an ongoing debate about an NPC in my GURPS:TRAVELLERcampaign.

 The pilot character of the IMS Margaret Thatcheris a full body cyborg. In other words - the only thing in her that is still "human" is her brain. From the outside she looks completely human, but her body is actually completely artificial...synthetic skin and all.

Anyway.....my co-worker says that sahe can't be thought of as "Human"  since she has no endocrine system.  (THREE Roleplaying GMS working at a game store - yeah we have some interesting very informed geeky debates on various topics) I counter with "Well she believes that she is alive and human....even tho she now knows that only her brain was salvaged from original body". I also told her this would be more interesting to me if she had this discussion in-character as a guest star character in one of my game sessions.

 While discussing this whole debate with one of my players - I realized that implied in my game is the idea that this NPC  has a soul or spirit. I've never come right out and said it - but apparently in my campaign people, Vargr, Aslan, Newts, Virushi,  ...even Androids and Cyborgs have SOULS.

 Even with the BANESTORM mini-campaign I ran - I never declared which religion was "Correct" - I left that up for the players to decide for their characters.  They have to figure out...on their own what to believe or NOT believe about God, Souls, religion and all that stuff in my game worlds.

 Doc Rotwang's Pantheons thread got me thinking about all of this.

 How does everyone else handle the idea of Souls and Religion in their campaign worlds?

 Oh - and I don't care if in real life you believe in God or not. I'm just talking about game worlds that we run our campaigns in.

 - Ed C.

My campaigns? Tend to assume the existence of a soul. Ideally as something that can be useful, or attacked and broken... like the mind and body.

For gods/God of the typical stripe, I try not to confirm or deny. I do tend to include malevolent divinities, as I'm a fan of Evangelion, HP Lovecraft's stuff, King in Yellow, and a bunch of similar stuff.

In Praedor, a high fantasy setting -- the existence of gods and spirits is just as unverifiable as it is in the real world, and the power of priests and monks consists of social and political influence rather than divine gifts. No one knows for certain what lies beyond death, if anything, and no deity appears to his worshippers save in visions that probably have more to do with dubious mushrooms than metaphysics.

In Nobilis, a modern fantasy setting -- the existence of gods and spirits is an objective fact, although the views of various religions on the matter tend to be misguided at best: all souls drift about in the spiritual gravitation between Heaven and Hell, reincarnating over and over again until they enter either of those realms or are destroyed by some higher force. (As an alternative, the PCs could easily set up an afterlife of their own.)

In other words, it varies wildly from one game to the next.

Like GrimGent said, depends on the setting...

In most D&D settings, other planes are clearly defined and when you die, you get there, quickly forgetting it once you return.

In Midnight? You're fucked. You die, your soul stays here 'til the stars loose their light.

This is heavily dependent on the mythology. Personally, I'd rather avoid the subject. The afterlife shouldn't be clear fact, even in a highly magical society.

In most sci-fi games? There's no soul, no god, no destiny.

Star Wars? There is no soul, there are just midichlorians.

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

Basically, IIRC, what I did was try to work out a justification for why ghosts and spirits existed that would allow PCs to continue playing after physical character death.  Though, for the most part it, rarely ever came.

The one setting where I did try to work out the relationships between religion, spirit/soul, and character's life/death was a fantasy setting.  I had a (roughly) Greco-Roman pantheon in place and, of course ,there were ghosts, spirits, vampires, et al. So I tried to work out a rationale for how this all fits together.  Of course at the time I also had a dream plane populated by vampire carrots, werecabbages, and nutty mad gonzo stuff that some might say was utterly juvenille. But then, at the time, I was.  :rolleyes:

If I remember correctly souls were part of a ethereal trinity of Mind, Body, Spirit.  Mind was more or less the center of a characters physical identity, spirit was their physcical lifeforce echo, and their body was what everything was anchored to.  The soul was that essence or divine spark that more or less made life possible.

A body could be destroyed but the spirit (which could manifest as a ghost) would survive.  However if a spirit was snared, then the body would sort of either slip into a zombie like coma or wither and die.  Or something like that.

In your example you have the brain, which is the center of identity, but doese your character have soul/spirit?

I'd say that depends on her body.  Did they design it to mimic her physical body as close as possible so that her spirit would feel comfortable in the new physical shell?  As for the question of soul, that's a tough one, yet an interesting question. . .

Does a cyborg have a soul?

In fantasy games, I use the term "soul" to refer to everything inside the character that isn't their reason. So their conscience, their experience, their virtues and vices, etc. I do it for mood reasons. On a game-mechanical level, I find it easiest to refer to the positive-energy matrix inside living things (I play D&D mostly) as the "soul" rather than "Your positive energy matrix."

In science fiction games, I treat cyborg and android characters as humanlike unless I've got a reason in the story not to.

Quote from: Kester PelagiusI'd say that depends on her body.  Did they design it to mimic her physical body as close as possible so that her spirit would feel comfortable in the new physical shell?  As for the question of soul, that's a tough one, yet an interesting question. . .

Does a cyborg have a soul?  

In my game universe version of TRAVELLER they apparently do have souls.

 As to her body - through the course of the story the players have figured out that she thinks she had a stalker at the company she worked for. The character is portrayed as having been a designer and technician that worked for Naasirka. Naasirka is known for making robots and other machnes....but nothing as complex as androids before.
This "stalker" probably took pictures and video of her secretly over months and months, because she swears that in exterior looks this new body of her is almost a perfect duplicate - except for the fact that she no longer needs to wear  glasses.  (helpful having a built in HUD in one of her eyes)

Funny thing is even the player that has mentioned she is an atheist in real life , in-game she  treats this character as being human or having a "Soul"/Spirit.

- Ed C.

StarCluster may be unique in SF games because souls are scientifically verified. In fact, souls are used all the time - as unique identifiers for security, for Jump Travel, for matter transport, for testing for sentience, for soul relocation (swapping bodies, putting several souls in one body, etc.) - as one of the base technologies on which many derivative technologies are based. Nothing is given about religion - there are hundreds of them, most the ones we have now, some evolved from those, and others which are new. I wrote a whole supplement about religions, actually.  

What is known about souls in SC - they are unique, one is associated with every sentient, including robots, aliens, and bioroids, and they go away at death.

Blood Games II is intimately bound up with religions of all sorts, thus souls are a given there too. It's also set in the real world, despite there being Magic.

Book of Jalan and Sweet Chariot are settings for SC developed into full stand-alone games.

The rest of my games are historical, and thus souls may or may not exist.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceStarCluster may be unique in SF games because souls are scientifically verified.

In Babylon 5, advanced technology can analyze and store souls. I'm not sure how much of that was included in the RPG version, though.

Man you don't to have this thread in GURPS Transhuman Space. That would get complicated. Having a brain in a robot body is probably the least of their issues.

Quote from: GrimGentIn Babylon 5, advanced technology can analyze and store souls. I'm not sure how much of that was included in the RPG version, though.

That's right.  They had an entire episode dealing with, what were they called, Soul Hunters?

Souls were depicted, more or less, as energy forms held/transfered into small spheres.  Which, now that I think about it, is also reminiscent of an ST:TOS episode in which the Enterprise encounters the remnants of a race of ancient beings.  Only their it's unclear if their souls were kept in large spheres or merely their "minds", either way they were able to transfer their mind/souls into Enterprise crew (temporarily) in order to build new robot bodies to house their mind/soul.

(Though I always wondered why such an advanced race would need robots when they should be able to create perfect clones/biological simulcrums.)

Quote from: Kester PelagiusThey had an entire episode dealing with, what were they called, Soul Hunters?

One of the movies revolved around a Soul Hunter artifact that contained an entire civilization. Also, the Earth was saved during the Battle of the Line only because the Minbari realized that their souls were being reborn into human bodies.

Quote from: KoltarSo a co-worker and I have been having an ongoing debate about an NPC in my GURPS:TRAVELLERcampaign.

 How does everyone else handle the idea of Souls and Religion in their campaign worlds?

 - Ed C.

To me it boils down to the copy question. You start with mind X in its body and it winds up elsewhere.

So what is the mind? It is just data housed in the flesh of the brain? If so then you can be copied. Every copy essentially a new soul with all the same experience, knowledge, characteristics, and feeling of the original.

However switch to a new media then the copied mind would change as any person does when switched to a new environment.

If the mind is the result of the unique structure of the brain then the best that can happened that the brain can be transferred to a new type of body. The person would change because of the new environment.

If you go with a mind body theory then even the transfer of a physical brain won't cut it. You will get something else that has the knowledge and experience (if that) of the person transferred.

From a metaphysical standpoint.

For the first one means every time a copy is made a new soul created. It is released when the medium it is housed is no longers maintaining it.

The second the soul is transfer ad-infinitum until the physical destruction of the brain.

The third one the act of transferring the brain may mean its alive but the person is dead.

To summarize do you want the soul to be housed in

the data contained within the brain
the brain itself
the entire body.

In AD&D, didn't humans have souls, but elves and dwarves have spirits? What was up with that?

For sci-fantasy, I'd say that robots should not have souls, but cyborgs should, at least as long as they have a human brain. I don't think an artificial mind/artificial intelligence should have a soul. But, spirits (I think disembodied souls should be considered a type of spirit) should be able to inhabit objects or possess people.  If a spirit was inhabiting an android, I don't think it would be right to call that spirit the android's soul, even if they were working together collaboratively. If a spirit takes up residence inside of a body that already has a soul, it's probably time to call an exorcist, a good medium, or a member of the psi-police.

In "hard" sci-fi, discussing the soul is meaningless, since it has no operational definition to distinguish it from the mind. Of course, I don't play "pure" sci-fi games, so that's moot for me.

On the other hand, in fantasy (including science-fantasy) and horror of all sorts, the soul can be a very compelling idea and the source of all sorts of fears, tensions, motivations, etc., even without being defined strictly. Indeed, the fuzziness of it all fits right in with the otherworldly feeling that's desirable in those genres. What does it mean to have your soul stolen/fractured/tainted? Search me, but it sure is scary. If something eats your soul, what effect will it have on you? I don't know, but I'm gonna go ahead and run now, 'cause it can't be good.

And if someone wants to hearken back to pre-Christian ideas of "the soul," there are generally multiple "souls" coexisting simultaneously, which separate at death. There's the Chinese hun and po, the Latin anima/animus/genius (something like "animating spirit/consciousness/guardian angel")--while a Greek person might possess all manner of things, including psyche, nous, pneuma, daemon, tyche, etc. And that's not to mention the Egyptian ka, ba, and whatever else there was, all of which performed their disparate functions both during life and after death. So what would happen if one of these elements were out of whack--or simply missing?

It also makes it possible for one aspect of an individual's "soul" to have moved on to its proper place after death, while another part remains as a ghost. Of course, the ghost might be utterly lacking a rational mind for this reason, since that element has separated and is gone. I know that I, for one, prefer my ghosts to be fragmentary beings who lack a complete ego/personality and therefore can't be understood or reasoned with in the usual manner. Of course, they likely don't realize that's what they are... Yep, scary.