Print Page

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Ring of Metempsychosis

Yesterday I came across the word metempsychosis. It's an ancient Greek concept of transmigration of the soul at death from one person or animal to another. It struck me immediately as a likely theme for a good magic item. A ring seems like the obvious candidate, but it might be an amulet or something else. I'm still mulling over how it ought to work mechanically, with an eye towards what makes for the most interesting situations. The wearer could be able to choose or it could be random. The pool of soul recipients could be in a radius around the wearer at time of death. Does the soul co-inhabit or replace the existing one (probably competing co-inhabitation is more interesting if the destination is a PC)? Does the ring move with the soul? Should it "Magic Jar" the soul and it moves to the next wearer or do an instant jump? And so on. There are a lot of possibilities to how the idea could play out.

No comments:

Post a Comment