Here we talk about the alchemical properties of the physical residue of souls and how they react with magic. Imagine them like heavy metals, accreting in the bones, or like prions contaminating the meat. Imagine them like the seeds of crystallisation, attracting more like it where one first forms.
Soulstuff, left alone in a respectably buried dead will eventually sublime away. It can be sustained by the memories of the living who recall the deceased and persist for a while.
Magic attracts magic, the workings of the divine or infernal draws the soul-stuff of their worshipers, the influence of the outer planes remains where connections were made and severed. Plants too can soak up this influence. In the living, we see all this in the abilities of sorcerers and wizards, in the heritage of tieflings and genasi, in the miracles wrought by clerics and paladins and these traces do not vanish when any of them die.
Battlefields, sacrificial cults, disasters and other events creating large amounts of the dead in a short time can give rise to more potent varieties of these residues, ones which draw more and more energies to themselves. Crystallised energies to be harvested from these sites by the desperate or foolhardy. Highly magical creatures like mindflayers and such that had little interaction with the natural world typically contain little but magedust. For very large or long-lived magical creatures such as dragons or giants there are often large enough to seed ironsoul crystals just with their own corpse but also recalled by enough that those crystals will grow.
Ghouls become prey to powerful wizards and cults who seek them for the concentration of energies they gain from devouring corpses. Ghouls learn to avoid battlefields.
Unscrupulous magic users and cultists use all these substances in rituals to harvest the power within. Those with a high tolerance for risk are also known to ingest them to boost spell-casting abilities substantially. This is an especially terrible idea with any type of banestone which can lead to immediate and permanent posession.
Elemental varieties of banestone are greatly prized for their ease of working and the powerful, pure effects that can be achieved.
Magical beasts need to consume soul-stuff as part of their diet which drives many of their traits perceived as monstrous - they hunt and consume sentients and will delve into tombs and catacombs looking for the recently dead if they must. A bear may dwell in the woods and be content with deer and honey but a manticore, while it will eat those things, needs the nutritional inputs of hunting people. Sufficiently aware that it could pay homage to the gods appears to be the lower threshold for what will serve. The ancient tradition of dragons seeking virgin sacrifices is indeed because they taste different. The prevalence of monsters around old battlefields and wizards towers is also because of this, although magical beasts that sate themselves with warpflint licks because stranger and even more dangerous.
d12 crystallised residues of the dead
1. Soul-stuff - miniscule amounts that can be processed out of any given corpse. Varies with the type of creature, from rich and crude for near sapient animals through to highly tuned for those steeped in a particular faith. Weakened by contact with outer planes that align with the owner
2. Heartsdrop – the crystallised proto-soul stuff found in things that perished through petrification or in magical isolation and where their energies fossilised within their frame
3. Magedust - the soulstuff of a sufficiently powerful mage becomes blasted through with magic so often it becomes something else. For a wizard left unsuitably buried, the magedust will absorb leylines, nearby spell-casting and other magical sources and spread like a lichen. Incredibly valuable as a magical reagent but left untended can lead to dangerous magical amplification effects in the vicinity - causing mutations, weakening the veil between worlds and attracting monsters
4. Corpseflowers - fungal blooms that only fruit when sprouted on certain dead - incredibly sensitve to alignment and soul energies and so come in a wide variety.
5. Angels Tears – similar to Banestone but only found where connections directly to divine realms have been formed or where particularly powerful agents of the divine have perished or exercised their powers
6. Banestone - when extra-planar creatures transit between worlds the tracks of their passing can seed this substance, typically attuned to the creatures home plane. Fed with emotions appropriate to their originators they can absorb soul energies and become conduits for divine and arcane power. Known for its darker variety as these are the ones that are most often seeded and grow catastrophically on battlefields.
7. Veilrent – residue formed over prolonged forced contact between planes, summonings, portals or similar. Typically seeded by dust tracked in through portals from other places then drawing more to it.
8. Gatebloom – also known as faeirie circles plants steeped in the energies of nearby planes that reflect the nature of those planes. Very diffuse compared to other substances
9. Martyrs blood – where a great deal of soul-stuff is created in a short time in a place aligned to a divine entity, it can run together and congeal into this stuff Most typically from horrific acts of mass slaying but occasionally through willing sacrifice
10. Ironsoul crystals - so named because they are most often found mixed with chainmail on battlefields where many corpses are thrown together. Here the violently attuned soul-stuff of the many battle-dead can accrete together and eventually begin to absorb energies from the environment. A bad sign - bodies where all the soul-dust has left are prone to arise as the restless dead
11. Warpflint - a variety of ironsoul crystals where magic has been used in mass slayings causing accretions of soulstuff and magical energies. Dangerous and unstable, sufficient that it can be used raw as an explosive
12. Goblin Fruits – similar to ironsoul but where the energies accrete in local large plants – leading to puissant fruit and seeds that are highly prized among fey
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