Goodman Games

One of the interesting details of DragonMech is the forced distance of the gods thanks to the war with the lunar deities. (I've come to calling this the Godswar). In their struggle to survive, the deities of Highpoint have come to drafting dead souls into their army, making resurrection magic less reliable on Highpoint. But what of these impressed souls? Surely a good deal of them don't want to fight and try to escape. Some might succeed. So what happens? I'd like to explore that idea here.

Ghosts may have be rising in prevalence on Highpoint - a reflection of an increased number of souls not going quietly into their afterlife. But the converse may appear to be true. Although ghosts are more common, haunting are becoming less common. Those lost souls are good fodder for the army - it's best not to draw attention to your hiding place. For a more humorous campaign, play a ghostbuster cleric (or paladin). Round up the ghosts and press them into service for your deity. I'd count that as one of those major services for a deity that gives you a bonus to gaining your spells. That might actually be an interesting prestige class to work on. Strange how necromancers and clerics alike would belong to this class. In fact, necromancers probably had to teach clerics the basic magic of trapping souls. Contemplate the moral ambiguity of a "good" cleric that trades in souls for power.

Perhaps the deserters find a very different escape - seeking shelter within mortals. That sounds oddly like the kalashtar of Eberron - spirits seeking from persecution by binding themselves tightly to living mortals. Now there's a good way to work in a kalashtar character into DragonMech.

But surely the gods won't take this in silence. They will hunt down the deserters. This seems like the perfect way to use devourers. Undead beings that steal your very soul and store it within. That sounds like a bounty hunter of souls to me. I really love that idea. In fact, I rarely use devourers in any other context. This is just too awesome.

A holy conscriptionist? Pressganging the dead for use in extra planar warfare? That's actually a REALLY cool idea. I could see them also agressively getting promisory notes like Organ donor cards. When you die you'll fight the good fight!

Not sure what "kalashtar" is...

Yes. And I find it particularly ironic that these are undead holy conscriptionists. If we use the original flavor text, these guys weren't made by the gods for this purpose - they're damned souls being given a job offer - even by the good deities. But I was actually talking more about a military police function. They track down conscripted spirits that went AWOL. And if they bring in a spirit that wasn't already impressed.... well, it is now. And yes, the gods do use such promissory notes - Tannan's already done just that. Too bad they didn't mention that the pact also causes him to age faster - insuring that the gods can collect that much sooner.

Kalashtar is a race from the Eberron campaign setting. What they are can't be explained quickly, but I'll try. One of the planes of existence is made up of dream stuff. When people dream, their minds go to this plane and shape it. But deeper in lie the plane's true denizens. The dream world is cyclical, going through millennia-long phases of nightmarish or peaceful forms. Currently the nightmare form predominates, and so most of the denizens are evil. But a few are different - predecessors of the next age, which may not be long off. The good beings are persecuted and murdered; being immortal beings, they are reborn afterward - but usually in keeping with the current nightmarish form. These good quori fled to our world, making pacts with a group of people, who chose to share their mind and body with the refugees. They are now utterly sealed off from the dreamworld, safe from the nightmares - except for the influence they have in our world. Being immortal creatures, the refugees did not die out when their hosts died. Instead, their soul was divided among ancestry. So all descendants of the original host have a portion of the quori.

You know what? Quicker version: kalashtar are descendants of humans who chose to harbor refugee psychic beings. The psychic being's soul pervades the collective group, but does not exist as a complete second mind in any individual.