So, I'm gearing up for a mod that will, among other things, expand upon the economic role of some of the guilds upon the game. Now, this presents a problem for the College, because the economic activities of a wizarding school would obviously entail the creation and sale of enchanted items, among other things.

Now, with Skyrim, we actually have some confirmation of how you find soul gems - they grow in geode clusters. Presumably, this means that soul gems really are crystals that grow over time in specific conditions.

So then, my question is, how industrialized is this? Are the soul gems you purchase in stores the results of a mining expedition, or is it possible to just make a basemant in the local wizard's guild where you pour the right alchemical concoction on the right types of rocks in the right controlled atmosphere to "farm" some soul gems?

Are they supposed to take days to grow in the right circumstances? Years? Centuries?

Or else should I introduce mining companies that search for veins of naturally-occuring sources of the stuff? Considering that recharging already-existing magic items requires a ready supply of soul gems with a huge turnover rate, would that even be capable of supplying the rate of use that Tamriel has for soul gems?

Are they related at all to Welkynd stones, which apparently grow naturally, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:No_Stone_Unturned quest? If so, would it be feasible inside of the bounds of lore to have a mod where the College is actually working on trying to grow their own "farm" for soul gems and possibly even researching welkynd stones?

With these things, would it be lore-friendly to have an in-game industry selling magical fuel-less light sources based off of welkynd stones, or else simple Rods of Candlelight? I find it highly suspicious that the torches and braziers set in an ancient Nordic/Nedic ruin would still be burning if nobody has apparently been here to disturb those ruins in thousands of years, and a perma-magic lightsource would make much more plot sense.

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To take this onto a related subject of which I have an interest, I wonder about the mechanics of souls that are in soul gems, as well.

A huge number of contradictory things can happen to a soul of a dead creature in Nirn, but what part of a soul still exists when it is has been used as a battery for a sword with a fire enchantment, exactly?

When I read lore about souls being created out of a cosmic soul-stuff, and potentially even returning to that, it reminds me of some reincarnation concepts. I also wonder about the notion of some things like a difference between an "Immortal Soul" and a "Mortal Soul". Even in the Abrahamic tradition of religion and view on souls, there is an Immoral and mortal soul, where the immortal soul passes on, but the mortal soul will die with the body, and return to the Earth, where it can be made into another mortal soul at some other point in time.

In Touhou, for an extreme (and generally mostly comical) example, living in the Buddhist version of the Netherworld, there is a girl named Youmu Konpaku who comes from a family of half-human, half-ghosts. Her regular physical form contains only her mortal soul, while she also has a "ghost" half of herself that flies around beside her with semi-autonomy that is actually her immortal soul. The two are separable enough that her immortal soul ghost half is capable of attacking or casting spells on its own, and Youmu can even use a higher-level power that lets her soul substantiate into another physical form so that she can team up with her own ghost.

What is the possibility of there being this mortal/immortal dichotomy in TES lore, and would that potentially mean that a soul gem fills only with the mortal soul, while the immortal soul still passes on? For example, when I play Oblivion, they talk about the immortality of a daedra, where their immortal soul causes them to keep being reborn (but temporarily weakened, as though they are an immortal soul that needs to re-accumulate something else to be respawned) but then, I frequently summoned daedra to soul trap and kill at my own convenience whenever I needed to fill up my soul gems for some enchanting. Is a Xivlai that I summon, soul trap, kill, and use in an enchantment actually permanently dead for my having done that, or have I simply taken a more-than-usual portion of its mortal soul, while its immortal soul goes back to Oblivion?

If this is the case, where normal soul use and enchantment actually only consumes the portion of the soul that would die and return to the great lifestream or whatever, then it substantially changes the narrative on how moral or immoral the use of soul gems are. Even if we set aside the notion of black soul gems, in a world where you are permanently destroying the immortal soul of a bunny rabbit because you wanted to recharge your sword's fire bits, you're a horrible monster. Conversely, a mortal/immortal soul idea would mean that you are only delaying the dissolusion of a portion of the soul that does not entirely contain the true nature of a being. It would be like eating an animal's corpse and then letting it decay, or taxidermy for more permanent enchantments, rather than simply letting an animal's body decay and return to soil to re-enter the material cycle of life and death.

*sigh* I suppose this is a bit too much of a rambling series of questions for my own good, but I hope some people could help point me to some good answers on these questions.

Actually, something to add to this:

I remember reading parts of the lore talking about how almost anything can contain a soul.

This, in turn, leads me to animism, which is a form of religious belief held by various religions in the world (just not the most prominent ones) that everything has a soul. Not just people or animals, but even plants, rocks, and manufactured goods. To reference concepts like Japan again, you see many references in their folklore and Shinto religion to the notion that an object, even a manufactured object, can obtain a soul of its own simply by being near humans or bathing in moonlight (a source of magic), and gradually accumulating enough "soul stuff" to gain a fully-formed soul of its own. Then, you can see things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsukumogami, a living object. They possess magical abilities through their souls that let them think, speak, or even change their own form to something that is ambulatory or even take on a full disguise as a human being. This includes man-made objects, such as karakasa obake, which are made from umbrellas, but it also leads people in modern times to talk about notions like a "personification" of an object like a computer as if they have souls, as well. This is why you see things like the "OS-tans", which are the personifications of all the windows/linux/mac operating systems, including even Microsoft official personifications of Silverlight as a way to sell to the Japanese market.

So then, I'm wondering if such a mechanic works in Nirn? Do soul gems simply form where people die an awful lot, or their souls become trapped and crystalized, like some sort of spiritual coal deposit? Or is it possible for enchanted items to actually gain sentience when they have enough soul?

We have no clue.

I think this is a rather unexplored area of ES, and thus it will be hard to find answers. The only thing I've heard about the soul trapping experience from the eyes of the trapped is a quote from that dude who says he's my grandson in Skyrim: "M'aiq was soul trapped once. Not very pleasant. You should think about that once in a while."
What I can say, though, is that when someone puts this much research into an economy mod, he has a guaranteed download from me

Ditto.

I think the bottom line is we don't know/ can't say for sure.

This is a curse and a blessing though, because where the lore lacks, it gives a modder like yourself free reign.

Soul Gems are morpholiths, the same substance that Sigil Stones are made of, only of a much lesser and more common variety. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Liminal_Bridges states that they are found in nature, although I've never heard of a soul gem mine. Perhaps they do not occur in mass in certain locations, like ore, but are more spread out.

I'm not sure how soul trapping works, but I imagine most soul gems are manufactured by mages, since they're essentially crystals, and http://chemistry.about.com/cs/growingcrystals/a/aa012604.htm with little to no effort.

But that doesn't mean there's not mines to dig out the naturally-occuring ones, of course. In fact, I've always wanted to see a soul gem mine.

They appear as ore veins in Blackreach. I guess minerals can gain the ability to absorb magic or something if they're left alone in a magic-heavy place for a long long time.

This hasn't achieved consensus, so you can do whatever you want, really. The only comments I have are from non-final sources: theres only one kind of souls, trapping a soul is temporary, when you use an enchanted object, the soul slowly slips out, and human souls are different from animal souls in some way. As for the soul gem issue, I'd say that there are probably multiple kinds - to explain the differrent models, and to avoid any conflicts with future lore.

Sounds like a great mod!

Hmm... Thanks, I read Liminal Bridges back in Oblivion, although it is presumably purposefully filled with technobabble (magibabble?) so that people don't figure out the answers to questions like mine.

Dwemer and Aylied "technology" is rooted in understanding of magic down to the point where it is used as though it were science. In the same fashion, I'm interested in the lore aspects of how magic actually operates in this world, so that I could see how to apply it in practical fashion beyond "fireball".

Soul gems are traded around as commonly as steel in this game, but soul gems are used at a prodigious rate by any mage, especially since you see mages in the game go to their staff which must be recharged by soul gem before even considering to use their own magic, which regenerates quickly. Soul gems must enter the economy at a fairly quick rate to be used this much.

Meanwhile, is it truly only in one place in the entire history of gamelore that you could mine soul gems yourself? How on Nirn could such a scarcity of supply be reconciled with the tremendous turnover of magical items in the game?

Its also the first time we've been able to mine iron. Things can get rather silly when you primarily focus on the way things work in the vanilla games.

You have a good point. Mining Iron wasn't possible in the previous games either. I don't see why not when it comes to adding crystal growths as the source of soul gems. They can be natural and farmed.

No, but there were mines for the iron. Just because the player didn't do it didn't mean there wasn't the implication that the ore came from mines. (Although all the mines seemed to be abandoned and overrun by vampires or goblins or whatever in Oblivion. At least Morrowind had slaves that were in mines, so there was an explanation for where that ore was coming from, and Bloodmoon had that ebony mine.)

Before Skyrim, there was no particular explanation for where soul gems came from at all, except for that bit in Liminal Bridges where it talks about finding the "super soul gems" to make sigil stones only in void planes of Oblivion, which functionally means they apparently just exist floating around in "outer space". To actually mine some from a geode is an indirect confirmation that soul gems really are physical crystals that form as real crystals do, (as opposed to something like solidified magic that is conjured out of thin air, for example,) and as such, we can understand a little more about how they actually are formed, if not how they work.

However, again, without understanding more, it's hard to tell if this is something that could be industrialized, or if it just happens naturally, and miners simply have to find the places where the soul gems happened to form.

I don't suppose someone could cite the source where the line about how "souls seep out over time" from enchantments came from?

Also, is there anything really solid known about how Dwemer or Ayleid power sources actually function? I know Dwemer have steam-powered pneumatics, but I'm talking about how that water actually gets boiled with no conventional fuel source. Do dwemer use soul gems, or some other way to enchant their works?

There are Geode veins in Blackreach that can be mined for all types of soul gems, including black.

Including black? Huh. Sometimes I wonder why people worship Arkay at all.

Just a side note about Liminal Bridges: It's not actually technobabble, it makes sense. You need a theasarus to translate it back. However what it is saying is rather limited.

They worship Arkay because he stops this kind of crap from happening to you.

The unfortunate truth is that the deck is kind of stacked against Arkay and in favor of the necromancers - your body is only protected from becoming undead if a priest of Arkay properly performs the proper rituals (or other religious rituals in other cultures that perform similar functions).

In Whiterun in Skyrim, there's even the Hall of the Dead where the stupid priest dropped his amulet of Arkay at the back of the catacombs for a while, and now there are a half-dozen skeletons that rose from the dead all on their own just because the dope didn't perform the proper rituals, no necromancers required.

There's a practical reason why the bosmer eat the dead - no more zombies.

Soul-trapping is not like catching a Pokemon in a Pokeball. Your consciousness doesn't get trapped in there.

Actually, one of the lorebooks I remember reading rather recently while researching this said that being caught in a soul gem and used in an enchantment would almost always drive your spirit insane...

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Ancestors_and_the_Dunmer



To be able to go insane, it would imply that consciousness does indeed go with the spirit. Hence, a "I have no mouth, and I must scream" fate for people in black soul gems who get stuck as some necromancer's enchanted boots for a few centuries.

Haha, that would explain a few things considering that quote I posted;

I wonder if that description you posted is what they are referring to. It would be impressive, to say the least :happy:

Sorry for double post, but there's http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:The_Black_Star to this topic in Skyrim.
You basically go inside Azura's Star and kill the soul that inhabits it. It seems like the inside of a soulgem is like an imaginary/mental world that works just as usual. I suspect the "going insane" part might be because you're trapped all alone in there... Except if you summon company, which is pretty interesting. Inside the star, the current soul was able to summon Dremora companions. I guess he simply brought their souls in from Oblivion, and they manifested as their usual shapes.

Which is quite weird... And it seems mostly just as a stunt because it would be too much programming trouble to handle the situation in any other way, so it may not necessarily be the best kind of lore canon.

However, I think it specifically refers to enchanting in that quote I had. There's no saying whether it's different once you actually get made into a -25% destruction magic cost enchantment on a necromancer's boot, and have to suffer someone wearing you and stepping on you everywhere.

Well, the danger about discrediting lore is that you pick and choose to create a view of the universe that isn't complete. This interpretation of what a soulgem is was implemented as an official quest in an official game, and as far as lore for a game-based universe goes, that's as official as it gets. But yeah, it doesn't say what happens when your soul is actually used.

Another interesting thing about the quest is that he used the soulgem to somehow gain eternal life in there. People were sent in so that he could kill them to feed his own soul in some way or another. It's an interesting parallel to the Dragonborn, maybe he can absorb dragon souls because he is actually Lorkhan and is in Lorkhan's realm? Eh?
Or... maybe not. :confused:

I'm not saying I'm discrediting it, just that changes happen from game to game, and that tends to mess with lore. All of a sudden, we have no Mysticism school of magic - where did it go? Where are all those levitation spells in the lorebooks I read in Skyrim? What happened to those racial bonuses that changed?

Because of that, I just prefer the lore in the lorebooks more than what was done because of programming restraints.

As for a soul being immortal, well, yes, the soul is immortal already, but I wonder if you can necessarily call that "living"?

Of course, if we go back to my earlier theory, the one about a mortal and immortal soul being two splittable things, one part of that sort of theory is that the moral soul is sort of the bridge that connects the physical body and the immortal soul, and that death destroys that ability to bind oneself to a physical form. If you were careful and separated your soul from your physical form in a way that did not damage your mortal soul, you could theoretically attach yourself to a new body. You could do something like Divayth Fyr, and make yourself some (empty, soulless) spare bodies to inhabit for some "insurance" against the aging process.

There's a difference between conflicting accounts/removal of game-play mechanics and inserting a new bit of lore, though. The experience of being in a soulgem is completely new and there's not a single thing to refute it - that's the thing. There's even an additional (if easter-eggy) account of surviving a soultrap just fine, which I posted before.

About it being 'living'; well, he still had his own identity, the ability to use magic and his ordinary visual shape, so presumably you do actually live as usual in there. But the standard of living are obviously pathetic and not something to aim for. And there's no telling what happens when being used for an enchantment.

As for your theory, I see it more like your soul always being immortal, but it's your body that makes the individual. I think the reason to why he needed new souls to bolster his own is that when in a soulgem or an enchantment, your soul slowly slips away into the Dreamsleeve. The "amount" of soul you have is what's important, not "whose soul" it is. if you refill your body with somebody else's soul, you'll still be you, because it's the body that makes you you. At least that's the conclusion I can draw from the dude in the soulgem being the same guy as he was before. He seemed to remember everything he'd done on the outside of the soulgem, the process of getting in there, even though he had used up I-don't-know-how-many other souls to keep "alive". But it's obviously speculation.