Monday, August 11, 2008

What do you mean, "Do they have souls"?

Last night we had another gaming session. The main encounter was with roper. That's a creature about four times as powerful as our entire party combined. It captured and was prepared to eat two of our party, but Thistle convinced it to trade them for meat we'd bring it (horses, mules, and orcs). While the four of us were out looking for meat, the captives persuaded this powerful evil creature to reform, and from now on eat only non-sentient creatures (or things that attacked it, in classic Malcolm Reynolds morality). All unknowing, the rest of us returned with some deer, horses, and orcs, hoping that would be enough. Gridley had gone so far as to pray that if the creature would not negotiate, that Pelor would grant him the strength to vanquish it and save his companions even if it cost his own life. The roper demanded to know if the deer had souls.

Setmose deserves all the kudos I can give for convincing the roper to tread the path of good.

We also now know that dwarves taste better than humans. Who knew?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

As the GM of this , I feel compelled to point out that when I split the party, I had the players who were not playing do other stuff that kept them from listening to what the other half was doing. This is important, because Setmose successfully convinced the roper(by good role-playing and good dice rolls) that eating living things with souls was bad,
(Roper "so I should kill them first?"
Bast !!!!!!
Setmose "It's a baby-step in the right direction")
and that killing sentient things was bad unless they attacked first, and that only intelligent things had souls. So when the other half of the party returned, It asked if the deer were intelligent, and Gridley said no. Then, just to be sure, it asked if they had souls. Gridley, for reasons that I will leave to him to explain, hastily reassured the Roper that YES the deer did indeed have souls. Hilarity ensued, and I was unable to keep my seat from laughing so hard.
P.S. Since I was forced to decide,in my world, animals have spirits, which are enough like souls that the two terms get used for each other, but different in a way that only an expert(or someone arguing for his life) would care about. I never expected to have to make a ruling on something like this, so it's no surprise that Roger's spur-of-the-moment answer was..... not the one needed at that time.
P.P.S.
They let the orcs go. Intelligent y'know.

Gridley said...

Well, Gridley said that both because he believed they did have souls, and also because he thought that the roper might only be interested in food with souls (HE didn't know the Roper had been persuaded by the two party fighters to reform).

Anonymous said...

The second is what I thought, and was why I couldn't stop laughing, but I didn't want to put words in your mouth. And yes, it was a perfectly reasonable assumption, it just happened to be dead wrong.