Notes on Spirit, Experience, and Liches

 These are a semi-organized series of notes I made while laying down some of the basic principals of my spiritual framework for the world of Tél, my on-going table-top gaming system and campaign setting I've been crafting for several years. More details will be posted elsewhere, and additional information can be found later on. Getting these ideas out now, with the intent to shape them into a legible post down the line

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- Aging is the process of accumulating experience. Suspending aging typically means also suspending the ability to acquire new experiences. Reversing aging necessarily also removes ones experiences, abilities, memories etc.

- the process of aging (and every other biological process) is halted by "pickling" where an alchemical solution preserves the body, but maintains the souls attachment to it. Many cultures will pickle their elders near the end of their lives, and keep their heads in jars, where they may be spoken to. The heads can't make new memories, but can recount old ones, and may sometimes even recognize people known in life. (Furring this process, only a portion of the soul may be retained, and reincarnation is typically possible, while leaving the previous life pickled.

- fae live indefinitely, but do not retain memories and experiences indefinitely- and thus do not meaningfully age. Dragons and other titans have a high but finite capacity for potential experience (potentia), but slow down their accumulation of experiences over time, slowly becoming more and more sessile untill they turn to stone completely.

- elephants seem to have longer lifespans than men, but they simply lead slower loves, spreading out their experience

- vampires still decay very slowly as they gain unnatural amounts of experience, and will spend longer and longer periods of time "sleeping" as they wither. Like dragons, most do not live long enough to experience this for long.

- new experiences are usually not gained in the afterlife. Most non-physical spiritual entities either cannot gain new experiences and memories (a spectre, barrow-wight, etc.), or lose them over time like fae (a poltergeist, or other fully conscious phantoms/apparitions).

- this could be said to be a result of souls on their own lacking the ability to allocate new experiences into the self-concept, and have only a small capacity on their own. A brain of some sort is needed to "compute" new experiences

- a brain grows alongside a soul, and another person's brain (and thus, the rest of the body) are not directly compatable with another soul. As a result, most types of possession involve dominating and suppressing the active spirit, while the invading consciousness directs and puppets the body through it. This requires effort to maintain, though many types of non-human spirits are more adept at this by their nature.

- similarly, if one made a perfect clone of their body and preserved it from decay, there would be only a short window (a handful of days perhaps) before the body would become incompatable with your current soul, as the identity changes over time. Re-entering the "back-up" body may require most memories and experience from the intervening time to be cleaned off and lost (only echos, or bits of short-term memory may remain).

- spirit and potentia are separate "humours", and one can lack one without it affecting the other. Just as spirit is connected to willpower and aura, potentia is tied to the blood (or hæmolymph). Loosing all of ones blood results in life ending for biological reasons, but blood drained with intent is different than blood lost from injury. Drained blood carries away potentia with it. This may be temporary or permanent. Drained blood will decay, but may be preserved with alchemy. Blood elixers, or fresh blood may be drunk. This temporarily boosts potentia, which is experienced as a boost in vigor (a temporary increase of HP) and a slight reduction in the effects of ageing. However, continuous usage of blood to increase vigor/hit-points will result in the body loosing it's natural ability to refresh its own blood. This results in death if the individual stops drinking blood, and thus results in vampirism to maintain life as the need for blood increases.

- the potentia contained in drained blood is proportional to the potentia of the creature it came from. Most animals have very little potentia- thus having either short lives, or low intelligence, which results in animals being more easily traumatized to death. Health potions are made from animal blood. Drinking health potions in excess in a short time frame can cause addiction (vampirism) but cannot sustain a vampire meaningfully. Potions made from human blood are sometimes made by/for vampires, but are very illegal, and have a foul aura, identifiable even by laypeople.

- the increasing dependence on blood (and the typical associated curses) makes vampirism unappealing to most seekers of extended life, though it is arguably the most easily accessible. The loss of capacity to gain experience makes pickling, age reversal, and post-physical existence similarly unappealing. The goal is to preserve as many of the usual features of ordinary life as possible, though most will concede the loss of flesh and creature comforts if it means the mind may continue on unimpeded.
- the effects of experience gain may be mitigated slightly. Like elephants, monks may extend their life by leading ascetic lives, and spending long periods of time in meditation (though spiritual exploration will involve a cost in potentia just as physical adventure does) Similarly, kings who rule peacefully uneventful times live longer than Ings who rule during high strife, aged quickly by their office. Experience my be offloaded by storing memories externally, but the ability for a mind to function meaningfully with distributed memories is limited. Often, however, experiences that are heavily taxing are offloaded by wizards, stored like memorabilia without an impact on lifespan.

- this direct relationship between experience and soul means that when a soul is fragmented, the fragments necessarily carry off experiences with them.

- speaking hypothetically, the problem could be attacked piecewise. The brain is the organ that stitches new experiences into the soul, but it is known that this may be accomplished by other means. The soul becomes incompatable with the body as the biology fails, but the more experience has been worked into a soul, the more unwieldily it becomes, more difficult to bind to a simple meat and bone body. Basic means of extending life address this. Magic is used to prolong health of, at the very least, the brain, even as the body withers. More invasive magic may attempt to supplant or enhance the functions of the mind. Spiritual techniques keep a soul anchored in the body, and tightly wound to keep the spiritual extremities secure (dementia). Additional anchor points may also be acquired. In theory, a soul may be wound with another, supporting it. This practice may even allow some of the mind's duties to be offloaded onto other minds. There are cases of ancient sages, mentally supported by their students, becoming more and more dependant on their aid in mental function untill the sage ceases to exist physically, or singularly, the soul becoming a simulation maintained by several whole souls working in tandem. The soul of the sage may live on indefinitely in this way, passed from one disciple to another down generations. At this stage, the soul may become piecemeal, brought together in simulation only when participants meet to do so.

- the next stage is more complicated. We can imagine our potential lich. Their body is likely gone or nearly so. A skeleton, or perhaps a brain in a jar. They have offloaded as many mental duties to magical accessories as they can-- the brain is adorned with enchanted needles, or blessed inscriptions ring the skull, or small accessories spirits orbit the mind, etc. but even still the brain is failing. The soul is so large that it likely must be bound to a single location. Loss of anchor points could mean a catastrophic spiritual collapse, shattering into a hundred broken ghosts of the wizards mind. This is a dangerous state to be in. Should the brain perish at this point, the soul may be functionally trapped, with no means to escape it's bindings but to limply puppet a corpse arround it's prison (spiritual energy is at this point likely supplied as well from some limitless source).

Here are potential solutions:

- 1. Distribution. As the safes mentioned above, offload the processes of the mind onto the minds of others. In this case they must be bound or persuaded to maintain the mind constantly, and must be plentiful, or thought will only be able to progress glacially (this may be acceptable). This solution relies on complex social machinations, and results in no meaningful physical manifestation, and typically roots one to a specific headquarters. This solution is however the best route towards deification, as it necessitates a large group of people with a common concept of your self, that self imagined as something great, powerful, and intangible.

- 2. Artifice. If done slowly and carefully, the physical organic brain may be replaced by roughly equitable mechanical components. The end result is a (usually inelegant) clockwork brain, one that carries the stream of consciousness of the lich. A mechanical mind is free from the decay of flesh, but it is limited on other ways. Clockwork is far less mutable than flesh,and allows little growth of identity beyond preset bounds. Growth of potentia is limited by the physical requirements of tangible memory storage. This can be expanded, but will require greater and greater space requirements. The larger a mind becomes, the slower it's processing power. This step often accompanies a great deal of paring down memories and personality aspects-- typically untill nothing remains but a calculating machine wizard with arbitrary goals. This inevitability does not stop potential lichs from trying to find a way arround it every few generations, and these ancient, evil machines are still sometimes encountered deep in forgotten dungeons, their endless rooms of cogs and gears still churning away at some arcane problem.

- (it is important to note- traditional clockwork machine men solve the problem of experiential growth by creating new machine men, dividing themselves like cells do. Lich machines are unlikely to do this, unless they are able to somehow maintain a hive-like singular will, which is rare. This could be considered a fusion of method 1 and 2)

- 3. Self-mnemergy. When creating a constructed soul, a mnemergeon weaves spiritual energy into complex knots and flows that perform the same functions of an organic brain, or mechanical clockwork mind. Constructs are this able to theoretically gain experience indefinitely, limited only by the artistry of their construction. Through great care and patience, a lich may weave their own mental processes into these knots and flows, transcending the need for flesh or artifice to perform the processes of experientalization and thought. Much is often lost in the process, so it is not undertaken lightly. The mind will also no-longer be compatable with organic senses, and may only puppet a form it is bound to (though there are magical supplements for some sense organs). Certain mental functions will also no-longer occur automatically. Connections and alterations may only be integrated with effort during long meditation.

- (an alternative methodology involves constructing a complex web of artificial conscious spirit patterns arround the existing mind, such that all the functions of the brain are simulated by it, keeping the original spiritual conglomerate sequestered at the core of an expanding cocoon of artificial consciousness. The end result is indistinguishable from the former method, asside from posing a much smaller risk of identity loss/corruption. The capacity for emotions are also much more maintained, as it is still an organic brain that is being emulated. However, this organic core leaves the lich vulnerable to a variety of psychological attacks that completely fabricated/restructured minds are safe from. It is also a lynch-pin for the lich's identity, making it likely to unravel the whole mind should it be damaged)

- 4. Dissociation. This is something of an incomplete method, but requires very little convolution as the other methods do. The mind, if properly managed, possesses a nearly endless ability to recall narratives, absent of personal context that might imply a substantiation of identity. So, if ones experiences can be offloaded onto dissociated memories from an "outside" perspective, one could maintain a present, adaptable conscious mind that may learn and display the effects of it's history, without actually being connected to that history. Careful maintenance and magic may keep the body youthful indefinitely, if biological memory storage methods can be circumvented. This method has unpredictable results, because the identity is untethered from it's past selves, subject to evolution beyond recognition, but without the loss of memory of usual youth magic, nor the haphazard identity mutability of fae. Certain spiritual figures are said to have attained this "natural" lich-hood. They are like children, with an endless library of stories to draw upon for inspiration, and do resemble fae in many ways on the surface, particularly how their self-concept may grow and change over time. They rarely learn from their mistakes, but may remember them as parables later on. This lack of personal relevance means that, whatever personal goals held by the lich during it's mortal life, they rarely remain important for very long. That makes this option one rarely considered by those wishing to escape death, but occasionally obtained by those that love life.

- What is the ideal solution? We may imagine that the perfect solution turns the mind into something like a sewing machine, sticking endlessly along a cloth that may billow away to an unrestricted size. The mind would be tightly woven to maintain integrity at any far off extremity. The whole of this "cloth" would be equally readily accessible, indexed. And the sewing machine mind must remain as plastic and capable of growth and innovation as a normal brain. We may imagine in this scenario that the external fleshy body is either of no concern, or may be swapped out as one pleases like clothing.

- so the brain would need to be organic, or organic-compatable. However, it would need to be immune to decay from age or rot. If organics are not important, then a way to immitate a living brain perfectly with inorganic substances. Either way, the brain must be able to offload finished identity augmentations to a background mnemegicaly constructed spirit extension of the mind. This system would act as a go-between for the organic, or pseudo-organic thought system and the spiritual architecture that maintains soul integrity through careful interweaving of new components.

- 5. Substitution. we could achieve this one of two ways: A-1, a method of transmuting the brain matter of other organisms into replacement material for one's own brain (we might imagine a monster like a illithid or intellect devourer functioning this way), A-2, a method of reformatting another brain to fit one's soul, or B, creating an artificial (pseudo-organic) brain, in a method similar to the cyclopean meta-minds. (The assumption is that it is impractical to keep an organic mind alive outside of a living body, but it isn't impossible. We could imagine an otherwise skeletal lich with a living brain maintained in a jar of alchemic solutions jutting from it's crown. This would still require the maintenance of 5a, however) Either way, the second step would be fabricating the spiritual framework to support the rest of the tethered soul, as described above. We may imagine that a physical artifact could be used to aid in this process (a circlet, perhaps, with a complex enchantment), or assistance in the process from a devine, or otherwise supernatural patron.

- Solution 5b results in a lich archetype that most closely reflects the lich imagined in most stories portraying them. That of a (usually mad) wizard, their body withered away, but with a mind fully capable of continued growth, learning, adaption, etc., and which may move about freely, not trapped in a specific location. This also represents the most dangerous type of lich, because it would be immune to any organic malady. With an inorganic mind, replacement brains could be endlessly fabricated. And the soul could be easily linked to other conceptual tethers. The right magic could reanimate the lich in a new body elsewhere if the old were destroyed. This type of lich would still be susceptible to psychic attack, but with it's organic-like portions an aspect of the fully conscious mind, it would not be as defenceless to these attacks as solution 3b. In this solution, the organic brain is a tool of the greater whole, not the other way around. In dire circumstances, a 3b-like thought emulation could be built on a 5b substrate, perhaps as an interim solution between manifestations. Like a 2/1 solution, a 5b/3b would be less common due to the secondary layer of complexity involved, but potentially a much more significant threat. An untethered 5b lich is in a very vulnerable state between manifestations, because without a thought-engine, it would have little defence against it's tethers (phylacteries) being destroyed or dissociated from it. Untethered, it would be only able to result to haunting, like a common if bloated ghost, and would have significant difficulty recovering. Fully dispelling or deconstructing it's soul would still be an undertaking, but not one of urgency.