Hello,

I recently thought up what I find to be a pretty neat game concept. The backstory of the game is that once a person dies, their soul (and with it, all of their magical energy), goes into another plane called the Abyss. In the Abyss, souls are devoured by god-like beings called the Damned. Obviously, getting devoured is pretty painful, so souls constantly try to escape the Abyss, but loose souls are drawn back to the Abyss as if magnetically.
So, what souls do is use people called Husks. Husks are unlucky saps whose souls were eaten by a Damned before they died, so their body is, well, an empty husk. Souls race for these Husks to inhabit them and live out the rest of the Husk's life, buying them another 40-80 years safe from the Damned.
The catch is that, since souls flock to Husks for salvation, Husks are usually host to 2-8 souls, all trying to escape. These souls all have their own individual personality they bring to the table, as well as their own stats. Each soul takes turns controlling the Husk, like a puppet being passed from one soul to another. Souls can trade control willingly to another soul, or control can be forcefully taken from them.
Husks have their own stats, called Husk Traits, that whatever soul currently in control can draw upon: the Husk's Strength, Speed, Durability, and Arcana (how much magical energy the Husk can manage at one time). Also, each Soul has their own Traits that are exclusive to them: Intelligence, Charisma, Perception, and Control. Each soul also brings different skills to the table (in a fairly generic skills mechanic. The soul of a mechanic has a high Mechanic skill, the soul of a con man has a good Speech skill, etc.).
Basically, adventures can go from the mundane to the fantastic. If the players want, they can just play out the life of a one dude, and how each soul works together to control this one person throughout their life. Basically just playing "Multiple Personality Disorder: The Game". Or, if they want, they can deal with other supernatural entities, mainly the Damned and their agents, who are hunting down the refugee souls to devour them. They can go on adventures to find other Husks and to fins ways to fight the Damned, or investigate the rumored "Rapture", a land that used to be the paradise of the souls until the Damned conquered the border between our world and Rapture.

So, any thoughts, questions, or ideas about this? Any gaping holes to plug? Any ideas or constructive criticisms are welcome.

That sounds AWESOME. I was working with a similar game idea with mortal bodies being co-opted by gods. The mortal and god vie for control of the body, but each have their own traits and failings, forcing some level of cooperation -- but I like your model better, and may end up borrowing significant portions of it, with your permission.

What does Control do? If it does what I think it does -- determine how well you can control the husk, and grab control from other souls -- it may need some significant regulation to avoid messy situations like one soul controlling / grabbing control all the time.

I enjoy the separation of stats between the husk and soul, and the idea of many players sharing a good portion of their character sheet. I also enjoy the idea of switching bodies -- say your husk is wounded in battle, but a hard hit to the head has robbed a nearby body of its soul, or maybe some kind of soul magic allows the party to eject souls from other bodies.

Actually, on that note, how do you imagine magic working? Or soul/husk advancement, for that matter?

Feel free to take ideas. I don't mind. Just tack on a little note or something saying "If you like this, try 'Whatever I Decide To Name This Game'!"

Control was meant to be as you described, but that does bring up some problems. I could easily see someone with a high Control just pushing everyone out of the way as they do what they want. Ugh, that leads to problems. Maybe Control is more like a sanity stat, for souls to maintain their previous personalities through the torment of being ripped from body to body. High Control means that you act and think just like you used to. Low Control means that you're prone to picking up small fragments of other souls that inhabited that husk, from it's original soul to your husk-mates.

As for how magic works, umm, I haven't quite pieced that together. My fluff thought was that each soul has some sort of magical aptitude. It's just that there isn't enough magic to actually use within one human soul. Thus, when you throw 2-5 together, you get enough magic to cast spells. Perhaps the 'schools' of magic that are available to the souls depends on their experiences throughout life. A soul that live a painful and torturous life gets access to Pain Magic, a soul that lived a happy and peaceful life gets Radiance Magic, a soul that lived a sad and lonely life gets Grief Magic, and so on. These schools wouldn't exclusively do those things (Grief magic causing Grief, Radiance magic being bright, etc.), but different emotions in intense amounts trigger different parts of the souls magical power, like how different types of thought trigger specific parts of the brain.

Soul/husk advancement, hmm? That thought hasn't crossed my mind yet. A few ideas:

• Souls seem to gain there powers through life experience, so whenever they do something major, they get points in a related stat. If a soul, in it's off hours, takes a college course in mechanics, they get a bonus to their mechanics stat. This is vanilla, but it's also low-risk. It would probably require some time though,
• Or, as a quicker method, perhaps souls can leave behind fragments of their former life experiences. Thus, if you kill a husk, or a Damned who has eaten a lot of souls, you might pick up some of those soul's skills as it flies back to the Abyss. If you kill the husk of a soul that's good at, say, judo, you might pick up some fragments of judo skill. But if you have a low control, you also risk picking up some of that soul's persona. Thus, while this method is quicker, it's also more dangerous and random

So, I started working on a parallel game I'm calling Soulbound. The early designs imagine the game focuses on the party dynamics of sharing a body, like some kind of roommate situation from hell, and are accordingly pretty minimalistic, presuming that mechanics like Control will provide the party enough of a medium for chaos that it won't need much extra pushing.

Control as you imagined it works just fine, we just need to cover some potential problems, such as a single soul controlling the husk for too long. Perhaps commanding a husk is stressful, especially with so many extra souls on board, so that over time the current soul accrues a penalty to control, until the others can wrest control from him/her more easily. Likewise, not being in control is like grabbing a free ride, and undoes the penalty by letting the soul rest. I'm personally more fond of this method because I have a feeling that forcing character changes on the players in the form of "fragments" will cause problems, and that I REALLY like the dynamic of players wrestling control from each other.

I like the emotional magic and how it relates back to the soul's life before death. I'd like to see more of it. For my part, I'm playing with a dream-like magic system, where casting in the abyss is like lucid dreaming. Souls can carry over casting abilities into the real world, but they're crippled for the most part. Spells include basic things like making, morphing, and "melting" objects -- though things with souls (e.g. living things) can only be "shunted", where a soul attempts to shove them into the abyss. Aside from putting people in comas, this is the principle method of acquiring new bodies. Within the abyss, all of these are more effective. Shunting becomes one of the only ways to fight the damned while in the abyss, as it attempts to shove them or their agents through the abyss' warped physics to some other part of the plane.

As for advancement, the realism of "when you do things, you get better at them" has an unfortunate tendency of slowing down gameplay, as players decide to go to school instead of advancing the plot, endlessly improving their skills for the day they might need them. Additionally, the likelihood of one soul wresting control from another in the middle of class would seem to make getting an education in a husk difficult, although I'd love to see the game where one soul grabs control and starts a riot in class, forever ruining another soul's dreams of becoming a mechanic.

Typical alternatives include gaining experience as the plot advances, so that players are rewarded for plot advancement with character advancement. Games like GURPS and WoD do it this way, and it works pretty well most of the time.

For Soulbound, I'm playing with a minimalistic leveling system, where your stats can morph but never improve, while your level influences how much your skills add as bonuses, how well you can control husks, and the power of your magic. The idea is to make the numerical, mechanical side of the system as sleek as possible, so the players can focus on the world instead of their numbers -- and to experiment with an idea a friend gave me a while back about modelling how real people improve at things. Do you ever really become more intelligent, or just learn how to better leverage that intelligence?

That's where I stand for now. I can only hope it's useful for your ideas. Thanks again for the inspiration!