What are souls?

The reason for this question:

And

Maybe they all have one, you just don't see them as they haven't been through the Portal of Fate.

In all my time as a Celestine, I never noted the death message from the symbols. Neat

They just fixed it.

This is sketchy proof, based on a skill's message HAVING to generalise a bit.

It's like doing the highfive emote on a pair of pants and then making a "do pants have arms?" thread.

Shards all have souls. Animals - some of them have collective souls, but I believe all of them have individual souls of a kind, they only do not form a greater entity in most cases. Gorgogs, elementals, artificial creations like that - I do not think they have souls of any kind. Same for astral creatures.

'cept the shards of lillith. Nasty soulless worm-things.

For all intents and purposes, their inner worms are "souls".

Or are they?

*insert sinister and yet dramatic music here*

Maybe they're like antisouls.

You know, a complete void in space and time where a normal soul would be, and if you mix a soul and an antisoul together in equal portions, you get a very large explosion. Much like anticheese or antipasta, really.

Of course, since the inner worm can't devour the entire soul from a corpse, all you get is a boost of psionic energy from the small bits of soul colliding with the large bit of antisoul.

According to the game, yes.

According to the players and their characters, they can be whatever anyone wants them to be, whether or not any of their thoughts are "true". :P

This is the first time I've ever wondered if we could make warp drives out of them.

There is no "according to the game". It remains to be seen if Illithoid have souls or not.

Of course they don't! They have a cool inner worm.

Login messages? Conglutinate messages? Mechanically, they have souls. (That is, "According to the game.")

We just don't "see" that exact wording as our characters, so it's less easy to tell ICly-- they may or may not. Xenthos believes they do, or they'd all "be like Serenwilde".

You just made my afternoon! I fully expect someone to build an aethership for that purpose, now.

What Xenthos said.

This is the same age-old argument of game mechanics vs background, not going to get my hands dirty on that old cow. I thought you were arguing that Illithoid do not possess souls because *insert supposedly irrefutable reason here*

Fixed.

I'm sure Estarra knows, but she's not confirming or denying.

There's a lot of mystery to the Soulless and to Lusternia in general. People should embrace that rather than arguing about the "one true Canon way", especially as this is an active game that's going on and nobody wants to spoil the mystery.

Amen