Dwarves with No Spirits

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Mu

 

"Un-ask the question, please." ~translation

 

Don't pull your hair out, McCoy! Gingers only exist in fairy tales...

 

"If you see a ginger while walking on a middle-earth-path... kill it." ~a ginger

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Interestingly, Hero does have an "official" cosmology of sorts....described in the Transformation power of all places.

 

All characters by default have a physical, mental, and spiritual aspect, that is, body, mind, soul.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary recollects Andre Norton's words on the topic.

 

I wouldn't call this a cosmology... though it makes for one, sure. For lack of a better word, I'd call it an attempt at soul-making.

 

It's too bad the word 'psychology' has been so poorly wasted.

 

[edit]: alright... let's just call it a cosmology. =P

 

[edit]: so are you suggesting that Transformation should be employed somehow? e.g., that maybe dwaven souls can be *spiritually*Transformed into elven spirits? or that elves may be immune to mental transforms?

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

"I don't know but I been told' date=' a big-legged woman ain't got no soul."[/quote']

 

Everywhere we goooo

People want to knowwww

Whooo we areee

Whereee we come from

 

We're the fellows of the ring you've read so much a about

goblins lock their bugbears in whenever we go out

 

hobbits think we're crazy for the crazy things we do

we're the fellows of the ring, so who the heck are you?

 

[hm...]

 

see one eagle rolling down the strip

Fellows of the ring are going on a trip

 

stand up, armor up, shuffle to Mordor

jump in Doom and shout, "Hard corps!"

[Lucius]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

I wouldn't call this a cosmology... though it makes for one, sure. For lack of a better word, I'd call it an attempt at soul-making.

 

It's too bad the word 'psychology' has been so poorly wasted.

 

[edit]: alright... let's just call it a cosmology. =P

 

[edit]: so are you suggesting that Transformation should be employed somehow? e.g., that maybe dwaven souls can be *spiritually*Transformed into elven spirits? or that elves may be immune to mental transforms?

 

Well, I considered calling it a pneumology, but I think that already has a specialized meaning.

 

We could call it animology, but that sounds like the study of cartoons. Or another word for zoology.

 

As for Transformation, it's important in that by Mr. Long's ______ology, a given Transform only works on one aspect of reality, and in what it says about how to define the different Transforms.

 

The standard Transform is assumed to be Physical. It targets bodies, and BODy.

 

A Mental Transform is supposed to target EGO, which could be taken to imply that EGO defines "mind." Thus anything without EGO, like an Automaton or standard Computer, would have to be mindless.

 

An Automaton's immunity to Mental Powers implies a lack of mind. An unfocused AI or Computer obviously lacks a body (which is why I use that "template" for Gods and spirits) and it's hard to imagine targetting them with a Physical Transform at all. Where would you POINT it?

 

It seems to be assumed that most inanimate objects are both mindless and soulless.

 

The concept of Spiritual Transform is left very nebulous and vague. But it is suggested that, as an option, Spiritual Transform could target PREsence.

 

Curiously enough, Automatons also are immune to PREsence attacks, but can have PREsence and can make PREsence attacks. This raises the question of whether a robot for example could be a valid target of a Spiritual Transform. Is it possible that an Automaton lacks a mind, but has a soul? Or does the immunity to such attacks imply that there is no soul there, but that an impressive Automaton can have an impact on the souls of others? After all, a wizard crafting a golem, or an engineer designing a robot, could equip either with a mindfire spell, or a psionic blast, built as a Mental Blast, that targets the minds of others but does not mean the golem or robot has a mind. Indeed, such equipment could go on a Base or Vehicle or just simply lie around as a freestanding trap.

 

Computers and Artificial Intelligences completely lack PREsence. This was a stumbling block for me in using the AI template for Gods, actually. Hero Designer does not even support giving an AI PREsence as a Power, and I had to fake it with a Custom Power. One could infer from this that Computers and AIs are supposed to lack souls.

 

There's actually a lot in these default assumptions I find questionable, and I will post more later after organizing my thoughts.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary wants to help organize. Oh yes, this should be interesting.

[Zeropoint]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Curiously enough, Automatons also are immune to PREsence attacks, but can have PREsence and can make PREsence attacks.

 

Makes sense to me; a PRE attack is all about the effects on the "victim". Once, a lightning bolt struck "near" me and I broke and ran a few yards before my brain reminded me that it had already happened and missed. I got successfully presence attacked by something that doesn't even have a character sheet!

 

Regarding PREsence and souls, though: in my opinion, a soul is not needed to be affected by a presence attack. Animals are regarded by many as not having "souls" and they can certainly be affected by presence attacks. A computer program with enough intelligence to have a threat evaluation process could possibly be presence attacked despite not having either soul OR mind . . . although I'd expect its responses to be limited.

[Lucius]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Makes sense to me; a PRE attack is all about the effects on the "victim". Once, a lightning bolt struck "near" me and I broke and ran a few yards before my brain reminded me that it had already happened and missed. I got successfully presence attacked by something that doesn't even have a character sheet!

 

Regarding PREsence and souls, though: in my opinion, a soul is not needed to be affected by a presence attack. Animals are regarded by many as not having "souls" and they can certainly be affected by presence attacks. A computer program with enough intelligence to have a threat evaluation process could possibly be presence attacked despite not having either soul OR mind . . . although I'd expect its responses to be limited.

 

Which brings me to why I question some of these assumptions.

 

I could define "soul" as "essence" and the essence of something is "what it is." So I could argue that there should be nothing without soul, and nothing without PREsence - even though for many things the PREsence score would be zero.

 

After all, if something has no presence, it has absence - which means it's not there. And if something lacks a soul, it has no essence, which means it isn't anything.

 

And yes, I know that's confounding two different meanings of the word "presence."

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary wonders if the two meanings may be closer than is apparent.

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

A Mental Transform is supposed to target EGO, which could be taken to imply that EGO defines "mind." Thus anything without EGO, like an Automaton or standard Computer, would have to be mindless.

 

An Automaton's immunity to Mental Powers implies a lack of mind. An unfocused AI or Computer obviously lacks a body (which is why I use that "template" for Gods and spirits) and it's hard to imagine targetting them with a Physical Transform at all. Where would you POINT it?

 

It seems to be assumed that most inanimate objects are both mindless and soulless.

 

Automatons (like elves ought to be) are immune to sleep spells built as EGO attacks.

 

The concept of Spiritual Transform is left very nebulous and vague. But it is suggested that, as an option, Spiritual Transform could target PREsence.

 

Curiously enough, Automatons also are immune to PREsence attacks, but can have PREsence and can make PREsence attacks. This raises the question of whether a robot for example could be a valid target of a Spiritual Transform. Is it possible that an Automaton lacks a mind, but has a soul? Or does the immunity to such attacks imply that there is no soul there, but that an impressive Automaton can have an impact on the souls of others? After all, a wizard crafting a golem, or an engineer designing a robot, could equip either with a mindfire spell, or a psionic blast, built as a Mental Blast, that targets the minds of others but does not mean the golem or robot has a mind. Indeed, such equipment could go on a Base or Vehicle or just simply lie around as a freestanding trap.

 

Computers and Artificial Intelligences completely lack PREsence. This was a stumbling block for me in using the AI template for Gods, actually. Hero Designer does not even support giving an AI PREsence as a Power, and I had to fake it with a Custom Power. One could infer from this that Computers and AIs are supposed to lack souls.

 

There's actually a lot in these default assumptions I find questionable, and I will post more later after organizing my thoughts.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary wants to help organize. Oh yes, this should be interesting.

 

"I AM ROBOTO EL DIABLO. THE DEVIL'S ROBOT. ALL YOUR SOULS ARE BELONG TO US."

 

If there is no spiritual PRE to target, a Spiritual Transform should be able to conjure one out of thin air.

 

This could be used for cosmetic aura-treatments for fancy wizard parties.

 

"My left shoe is going to Hades. The right one has an old soul with a hole in it."

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Which brings me to why I question some of these assumptions.

 

This is all good fantasy work.

 

I could define "soul" as "essence" and the essence of something is "what it is." So I could argue that there should be nothing without soul' date=' and nothing without PREsence - even though for many things the PREsence score would be zero.[/quote']

 

As you set it down here above, it is valid... & true...

 

... but I'm in a little mood...so...

 

On the (soul = essence = what it is) equation... I would argue that there is a distinction between "something" & "its essence". This is not a simple tautology, or restatement of definition. An essence is an abstraction "of something"... and is not the "something itself" which is presumably what the soul is here.

 

Wait... what is the soul?

 

The elixir the Skeksis make out of other creatures in The Dark Crystal is not the soul. That elixir, from what I can tell, is an extract from the spirit/soul of the victom, but not the victom (nor the soul/spirit of the victom) itself.

 

words

 

It bugs me that EGO (the "I" in "I think") is so fully taken in HERO by virtually all mental activity. Not too bad, though. It works.

 

After all, if something has no presence, it has absence - which means it's not there. And if something lacks a soul, it has no essence, which means it isn't anything.

 

And yes, I know that's confounding two different meanings of the word "presence."

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary wonders if the two meanings may be closer than is apparent.

 

I suppose an absence is merely a kind of presence. The presence of absence.

 

The absence of presence is thus, to me, the presence of the absence of presence... and not some other such silliness (like the paradoxical "non-present presence").

 

It just occurred to me that the presence of the absence of a present absence is sad. It's like nobody cares to notice you are gone.

 

[Lucius]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

By the way, I think the distinction between soul and spirit in AD&D came from Tollkein, not that he used that terminology.

 

But in Middle Earth, Elves are immortal and if the body dies, the Elf goes into the West; and many Elves of course go into the West without physically dying. It's even possible (though kind of epic) to go back and forth.

 

But when Men die, they go "somewhere else" far beyond Middle Earth. No one knows where, and they never come back. The Elves actually refer to this as "the gift of death." There is no mystery to them about where they're going; but where Human souls go is a mystery that lies closed to Elves.

 

Gygax translated this into a distinction between beings who reincarnate endlessly, and beings with "souls" who only live once, and then go to an eternal reward or punishment. Thus, Elves could be Raised but not Resurrected; Raise brings back someone who was not yet to their "destination" (thus a time limit on it) but Resurrect can't retrieve someone who is already incarnated again.

 

Or at least, this is how I recall it, probably from Deities and Demigods and various issues of "The Dragon."

 

Lucius Alexander

 

A palindromedary has four soles

[Zedwimer]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

By the way, I think the distinction between soul and spirit in AD&D came from Tollkein, not that he used that terminology.

 

But in Middle Earth, Elves are immortal and if the body dies, the Elf goes into the West; and many Elves of course go into the West without physically dying. It's even possible (though kind of epic) to go back and forth.

 

But when Men die, they go "somewhere else" far beyond Middle Earth. No one knows where, and they never come back. The Elves actually refer to this as "the gift of death." There is no mystery to them about where they're going; but where Human souls go is a mystery that lies closed to Elves.

I haven't had the chance to read the Silmarillion (well, beyond the first chapter) or other books beyond The Hobbit / LOTR, but the way I understood it, elves were immortal because they were the physical embodiment of immortal spirits. If they wanted to pass on to Aman (Heaven), they had to actually go there physically, sailing "the Straight Way" across the ocean. If their physical bodies died, their immortality died with them; they were gone, end of story. This is why the elves always considered it such a massive, tragic loss when one of their own died... there was no afterlife for a dead elf, only for the living.

 

This was also why elves said that humans possessed "the gift of death"; when a human died, their immortal soul was freed from their body and passed on to the afterlife (somewhere beyond Aman?). So while humans lived terribly short lives (compared to elves), their immortal existence in one form or another was guaranteed.

 

As to how Tolkien perceived how these things worked for dwarves, hobbits and other races, however, I have no idea. Perhaps, since they were not mentioned in Eru's grand scheme (only Elves and Humans had a special place in Eru's creation), maybe they really did not embody immortal spirits or have immortal souls... so they lived short lives like humans but died without an afterlife like elves? Who knows...

 

Of course, in my own fantasy campaign world, I handle spirits/souls differently... (it's a bit complicated to describe here, but let's just say that all living things have immortal spirits, but what happens to them / where they go after death is dependent on which group they belong to: beings with human-level intelligence, all other thinking beings, and all other living beings... with a few exceptions.)

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Elves didn't have an afterlife, per se, in Tolkien's world. They had another life. If their physical body was destroyed, their spirit traveled to the Undying Lands. I think there are a few instances of elves coming back to Middle Earth after being killed.

 

http://tolkien.cro.net/elves/phylosop.html

[Zedwimer]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Ahhhh, that page was very enlightening. Thank you, Captain, much appreciated.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

No problem. I had to look up a decent source, because after I posted that, I wondered if I was remembering correctly or talking out of my ass.

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Elves didn't have an afterlife, per se, in Tolkien's world. They had another life. If their physical body was destroyed, their spirit traveled to the Undying Lands. I think there are a few instances of elves coming back to Middle Earth after being killed.

 

http://tolkien.cro.net/elves/phylosop.html

 

sweet. Thanks. =)

 

This was good, too: http://tolkien.cro.net/dwarves/origin.html

 

/quote

 

What were the origins of the Dwarves?

 

They were made by Aulë, the smith and craft master of the Valar. This was against Eru's Plan: Aulë had neither the authority nor indeed the power to create other souls (the result of his efforts was a group of what amounted to puppets). However, because he repented his folly at once and because his motives had been good (he desired children to teach, not slaves to command) Eru gave the Dwarves life and made them part of the Plan. The Elves were still to be the "Firstborn", though, so the Dwarves had to sleep until after the Elves awoke.

 

/end_quote

[Lucius]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Going far afield..

 

In Glorantha, "demons," far from being evil spirits, were specifically non-spirits. They were the only physical beings (as I recall) that did not have a spiritual component and therefore lacked a "POW" or Power score (the characteristic that measured a character's magical strength)

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The Palindromedary Institute of Comparative Metaphysics

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Glorantha wiki: "Dwarves are literally made of stone and exist as manifest rigid inflexible laws of creation, while elves are intelligent, mobile plants."

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Back to Transforms:

 

The (physical/mental/spiritual) breakdown implies that, when performing a Transform on something spirit-related (e.g., a soul), PRE is the goto characteristic.

 

However, if the soul is EGO based (as it is with "spiritless" dwarves w/o PRE), then... though spirit-related... Transforms for souls are more properly thought of as mental Transforms.

[Narf the Mouse]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Interesting. "Spirit" being generally equated with passion, and the pre-stated sociopathy of not having a "higher self" of Elves, it would explain Elves' light-hearted, cheerful demeanor, no matter how grim the situation and Dwarves' dour disposition, no matter how light-hearted the situation.

 

* Except for fictions in which they do not fit this paradigm, which is something of a "Definition by definition", but works here, I think.

[dmjalund]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

I keep thinking of a short guy with a very uninteresting liquor cabinet.

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Interesting. "Spirit" being generally equated with passion' date=' and the pre-stated sociopathy of not having a "higher self" of Elves, it would explain Elves' light-hearted, cheerful demeanor, no matter how grim the situation and Dwarves' dour disposition, no matter how light-hearted the situation.[/quote']

 

Exactly.

 

About spirited (yet soulless) elves...

 

I am toying with the idea of giving them the Takes No STUN automaton power to represent their lack of inner consciousness & immunity to "sleep spells".

 

* Except for fictions in which they do not fit this paradigm' date=' which is something of a "Definition by definition", but works here, I think.[/quote']

 

Yes. I'm more interested in making distinctions right now.

 

Pointy-eared humans belong in another thread. ;P

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

I keep thinking of a short guy with a very uninteresting liquor cabinet.

 

"Liquor in the front. Poker in the rear."

[Lucius]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

Exactly.

 

About spirited (yet soulless) elves...

 

I am toying with the idea of giving them the Takes No STUN automaton power to represent their lack of inner consciousness & immunity to "sleep spells".

 

That would fit Pratchett's Elves perfectly.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

House of the Palindromedary

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

That would fit Pratchett's Elves perfectly.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

House of the Palindromedary

 

Diskworld! Diskworld! Party time! Excellent!

 

[edit]:

 

wiki on Pratchett's elves...

 

/quote

 

Though elves lack the ability to procreate within their own species, they are capable of breeding with humans, resulting in offspring with superficially elvish characteristics - skinny, pointy ears, a tendency to giggle and burn easily in the sun - but fundamentally human traits i.e. empathy. As mentioned above, creatures from the elves' universe often go hunting when they manage to enter a 'real' universe, one of the things they hunt being people. Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists. Because they cannot have children they steal children from the Disc to be their toys. Because they cannot feel empathy they enjoy the suffering of others. In Lords and Ladies, Pratchett states that elves would smash the world if they thought it would make a pretty sound. Pratchett also compares the elves to cats, both being extremely stylish and excessively cruel.

 

Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans means that there is always something "off" about it. Mostly they get away with this, due to the illusion-creating glamour they cast. While elves are, as mentioned above, not musical, elfsong is perceived as beautiful by humans, and is highly hypnotic. When the Queen of Lancre, Magrat Garlick is released from its hypnotic effects, she realises that elven music really sounds like a saw being played. Elves are generally seen as innately beautiful and stylish, but this is just another aspect of the glamour. Some of them are only vaguely humanoid.

 

The glamour does not seem to have as much effect on trolls and dwarfs, partly because they lack the romantic imagination to let it work and partly because of their connection to iron.

 

Elves have copper-based, blue-green blood, and are extremely vulnerable to iron. This is partly because there is no way of magicking iron, and partly that they have the ability to detect magnetic fields, and use them to navigate (as pigeons are thought to do) and even sense the thoughts of others from short distances. The presence of iron disrupts this and sends them into a panic. The main gateway to the world of Elves in Lancre is surrounded by several large boulders of naturally magnetised meteoric iron. When there is no iron around they have the absolute confidence of beings who know exactly where they are.

 

Rational thought and the absence of superstition, which makes the glamour easier to resist, is referred to by Nanny Ogg as "iron in the head".

 

/end_quote

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

So, here...basically...

 

"Soulful" Dwarves: zero-PRE & zero-END.

 

"Spirited" Elves: zero-EGO & zero-STUN.

[Mister E]

Re: Dwarves with No Spirits

 

There ought to be a Turing test to distinguish elves (superficial life forms) from dwarves (& humans).