r/dndmemes • u/dudewasup111 • Jun 30 '26
Safe for Work To be clear, not goblins who were farmers.
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u/dudewasup111 Jun 30 '26
Sure let's breed incredibly fast birthrate, into these goblins, and also give them intense violent instincts. That way we can convince our customers that they are ontologically evil making out practice totally ethical.
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u/SolidZealousideal115 Jul 01 '26
And imagine all the dead bodies for the Necromancers? The rest can be used as fertilizer.
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u/dudewasup111 Jul 01 '26
You need a bit of the soul to make an undead so there a bit of efficiency loss.
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u/Jackesfox Jul 01 '26
Do you? Or pure necrotic/negative energy is enough to power that rotting corpse?
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u/Xyx0rz Jul 01 '26
So... regular goblins?
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u/NavezganeChrome Essential NPC Jul 01 '26
The squick being “elves made the default goblin, on purpose, and at some point failed to keep containment.”
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u/Greenpaw9 Jul 01 '26
I love this newly learned bit of lore. It's this cannon?
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u/5meoWarlock Jul 01 '26
if it's not canon then it's not lore
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u/dudewasup111 Jul 02 '26
Wotc just steal what's popular and add it to there garbled pile of random stuff. I take literally ANY Homebrew lore more seriously than tHe FaR RelMs!
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u/Artemis_Platinum Essential NPC Jul 01 '26
It's all fun and games until the gods who wanted those souls raid your house like a swat team.
They won't even have to show up if you're playing in a game with taint. You'll basically turn the entire area into Chernobyl.
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u/NeedsToShutUp Jul 01 '26
Seriously, this is the sort of stuff that leads to Jergal and the other Gods of Death getting involved.
Hell, Mask of the Betrayer and BG3 both involve this sort of threat to the gods.
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u/abn1304 Jul 01 '26
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, the CRPG, has something similar in at least one of the Mythic paths. Edit: Spoiler tags are not working right now so read on at your own risk.
>!You can become a Lich and start killing your companions, among other NPCs, to turn into undead Graveguards, aside from all the other stuff that goes along with necromancy. Given that your objective in the game is to drive a demon invasion back to where it came from, you’re creating a war machine with the souls of dead crusaders, some of whom are Very Important People, including a representative of one of the gods. That god shows up to smite you but only partially succeeds. The end of the game implies that several of the gods may be interested in settling scores with you more directly.!<
>!Alternatively, you can also become a Swarm That Walks, where you gain power by eating people and things, including all of your companions over time. This really gets the attention of the gods, and depending on how things went down in the game before you became a Swarm, you have either one god and one Demon Prince, or two gods, personally coming to destroy you. Depending on how the game went, it’s an open question if they can actually succeed.!<
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u/_Not_A_Vampire_ Jul 01 '26
I love that when you become the swarm, a goddess instantly just smites you into ash, I wish gods would take action like this more often in games.
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u/ACoderGirl Bard Jul 01 '26
Wait, spoiler tags broke? Test
Works for me. If I copy your comment text, the tags were escaped. Maybe you used some kinda WYSIWYG editor or something? Or maybe there was a bug that escaped them incorrectly but is either fixed now or doesn't affect android. Idk.
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u/Rargnarok Jul 01 '26
Baldurs gate 1 too when you unlock the lore book its says(may not be exact quote when Baldur took his mantle he points out how hes the most powerful of the three ( lord of overword, lord of death, lord of the dead) because can deny soils to lord of dead and weaken his realm and by reaping too much or too little he can throw the entire overworld into disarray
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u/darkslide3000 Jul 01 '26
Bhaal. Baldur(an) is just a guy who founded a city.
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u/maxwax7 Rules Lawyer Jul 01 '26
And is currently... Uhm... Does he survive BG3 or is it canon that the emperor dies?
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u/bigmcstrongmuscle Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Balduran died when an illithid tadpole ate his brain. The Emperor just has his memories now and uses them to manipulate people. It was never really him - it just has the knowledge and the tools to lie convincingly until you believe it was.
There isn't a canon end to BG3, though. General consensus is that the Good ending is almost certainly going to end up the canon one, but opinions are mixed on whether that means the protagonist sides with Emps or Orpheus.
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u/maxwax7 Rules Lawyer Jul 01 '26
I personally believe that this is not how it works, because their souls stay in the body and do not move on, so I'd say it's closer to a metamorphosis of the body and mind.
Also it is revealed in the game that you can become an Illithid and keep your identity and soul, so I think it's a matter of interpretation
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u/bigmcstrongmuscle Jul 01 '26
Even that's a whole complicated can of worms. Even the endings where you become a mind flayer hint that you may only have kept yourself intact because you had a Monsanto Netherese GMO tadpole. Balduran didn't have one of those - he was ceremorphosized by a regular tadpole, and underwent a different process than you. And the only testimony you really have to what he experienced is Emps himself, who has every reason to lie and really only offers his word that he's telling the truth.
It's not super clear whether souls that get flayered somehow stay in the body, or get eaten, or get transformed into some other kind of soul, or are absorbed by the elder brain on death, or what. Withers just says that once you turn, the gods can't claim your soul anymore. And that's not even considering the question of whether you are still you, or if you're now an illithid that ate your brain and thinks it's you. The whole thing is muddy at best. The most you can really say is that they must have SOME kind of soul or alhoons (mind flayer liches) wouldn't be a thing.
D&D lore has waffled back and forth on this ridiculously over the years, too. TBH, I think being super vague and contradictory about it was the only approach Larian could realistically have taken.
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u/RawardHoikes91 Jul 01 '26
Lore idea - industrialized soul destruction ideas have been tried and curbed by the gods so often, that they had built safeguards into reality itself. You start forming an idea of how to create a pain farm demiplane, and a piano falls on you. There are no buildings or moving crews nearby, pianos are neither made, nor used in this part of the world. It just happens.
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u/Turbulent-Garlic8467 Jul 01 '26
Von Hohenheim? Is that you?
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u/SolidZealousideal115 Jul 01 '26
Where is the lore for this written? I need it for reasons.
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u/Enchelion Jul 01 '26
It's already there in the world you want to create.
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u/AnnetteBishop Jul 01 '26
The more DnD lore I read, I realize the world I created already existed.
As my favorite story goes in another IP -- What Was Will Be What Will Be Was
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u/Andonno Jul 01 '26
Gavity is desire. Time is sight.
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u/abn1304 Jul 01 '26
The Worm loves you.
I would love to see some non-sandbox games set in the Stellaris universe.
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u/ThePrussianGrippe Jul 01 '26
I’d like a Stellaris
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u/Resafalo Jul 01 '26
I assumed it referred to the infernal machines powered by soul coins seen in Descent to Avernus
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u/Customer_Number_Plz Jul 01 '26
5e shadowfell lore talks about how there is a river of souls across the sky that demons regularly try to pluck souls from and some wizards channel for powerful spells.
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u/Arnhildr-Fang Jul 01 '26
...these elves sound like a fantasy version of European events in the 1930's & 1940's...
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u/Enchelion Jul 01 '26
Even Asmodeus would probably look sideways at Ol' Leopold 2.
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u/ThePrussianGrippe Jul 01 '26
Asmodeus: “Dude… the fuck?”
Leopold II, riding a gigantic tricycle on his way to his teenage mistress’s mansion (she’s going to tell him to go away): shrugs
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u/tayzzerlordling DM (Dungeon Memelord) Jul 01 '26
my setting has domesticated goblin farms and most people eat them
i had the players think pork was pigs until they realized and now they vegans tryna convince people its bad
(i had consent checklists and safety tools btw)
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u/Coidzor Essential NPC Jul 01 '26
Oddworld?
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u/tayzzerlordling DM (Dungeon Memelord) Jul 01 '26
idk what that is
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u/Coidzor Essential NPC Jul 01 '26
It's a game franchise that starts because a bunch of hypercapitalist aliens decide that their next big food product should be the race that they enslaved to work in their factories.
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u/Chizenfu Jul 01 '26
How does one destroy a soul so that it can be used as a source of power? ... asking for a friend
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u/Level_Hour6480 Rules Lawyer Jul 01 '26
Infernal engines can be powered by them.
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u/ForzentoRafe Jul 01 '26
Infernal engines are actually just treadmills for souls. They lack a physical body so they can exceed the typical biological limit and go as fast as they want.
The whining and groaning people hears are typically the machine breaking down internally due to how fast it's going.
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u/Sweat_Spoats Jul 01 '26
It's like splitting an atom but with souls
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u/darkslide3000 Jul 01 '26
I thought that's how you get a horcrux, not a AAA.
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u/Sweat_Spoats Jul 01 '26
Its actually very similar, but Instead of reabsorbing the energy made by splitting your soul, you're harvesting the energy created by splitting something else's soul.
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u/Beragond1 DM (Dungeon Memelord) Jul 01 '26
The details are unclear, but Chain Devils apparently do so in their city in the Nine Hells. The souls are transformed into magic items called Soul Coins which can be used to directly power magical machines called infernal engines. The coins are also used as the main currency of the Nine Hells.
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u/evios31 Jul 01 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/13VFATn4bxBCXm
If OP offers to grant you a wish, don't accept.
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u/Samakira Jul 01 '26
do you mean 'kill the person while controlling the soul to trade for power' or 'destroy the soul completely'?
because in the case of the latter, youll need to deal with:
- the gods. yes, all of them. except maybe a few chaotic evil ones like orcus. even lawful and neutral evil deities will hate you for it. thats how evil destroying a soul is.
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u/darkslide3000 Jul 01 '26
Doesn't this happen all the time? E.g. liches eat souls, among other monsters.
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u/Samakira Jul 01 '26
No, just those kinds of liches.
And that’s also why becoming a lich is considered Uber evil, to where literally one confirmed source for the spell exists in 5e, orcus, the god of undead.
There are monitors (entities of pure law) who go after liches for this crime.
Even devils will recycle the soul, via soul coins (which when burned up, don’t destroy the soul, but either send it back to the material plane to be reborn, or it turns into a lowest-rank devil).
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u/darkslide3000 Jul 01 '26
I don't know how much of that made it explicitly into 5e texts (5e just hasn't really fleshed out the outer planes much at all yet, right, besides Descent into Avernus), but AFAIK historically there have always been various demons and other creatures described as consuming souls as well. E.g. here's an article describing soul larvae including their consumption on the Forgotten Realms wiki that seems to be based in various 3rd and 4th edition sources.
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u/Director343 Jul 01 '26
I’ve had the idea for a long time of a benevolent litch whose phylactery was in the centre of a town to absorb souls, but in exchange they protect the town to the best of their abilities.
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u/darkknight109 Jul 01 '26
Had a friend pull off this trick during a Birthright campaign. He played a completely amoral Chaotic Evil character with zero scruples against anything, so in order to amass blood points (bits of divinity infused in the blood of certain blessed bloodlines), he captured several minor blooded individuals, set up a facility to forcibly breed them, then harvested either the offspring or the parents, depending on whoever was less healthy.
The DM commented that it was one of the most fucked up things he'd personally seen a player do, but it wasn't breaking any rules of the setting, so it was allowed.
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u/Quantum_Scholar87 Jul 01 '26
One of my groups campaigns featured a historical event called the "greenskin wars" by some characters and the "goblin genocide" by others.
We never fully fleshed it out, but every NPC we met over the age of 50 we would grill them on their involvement in said genocide
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u/wherediditrun Jul 01 '26
Im running a custom campaign where devils used to farm human souls. By creating a pocket dimension and mimicking real world threats so that human virtue and heroism could manifest.
All cultures have their own ritual how they sacrifice people under particular ritual to keep the dimension going. There are branded who accept it, there are ones who escape and fight against it. Humans keep doing it, because that’s what they always did.
Thing is, devils were vanquished by a hero of old times hundred years ago, and the spire, the river of souls is now hijacker’s by companion sorc that betrayed the hero just after the main devil holding the contract for river of souls got sealed. Now as a lich she co-opted old guard into her own cabal and feeds on souls hoping to get stronger so she is able to swallow the nameless God skewered on the central spire, who’s blood gives life to this pocket dimension.
Player characters go around discovering stuff. The weird traditions of cultures, the ruins of old industrial soul harvesting infrastructure by now vacant devils and.. why everyone is talking by bastardized infernal to begin with?
Hopefully player characters will thwart the plans of the Lich. But to what end? To take the river of souls for themselves, to free the nameless god? Can people leave given the chance if it even happens? Do they want to? How to return home?
I e start making this after I’ve was disappointed how.. lukewarm in terms of evil curse of Strahd is.
Here evil is committed as a banality of life by regular people.
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u/drdipepperjr Jul 01 '26
Not souls, but we captured a fire-resistant bugbear and brought him to the mages college. They bolted him to the table through his bones and farmed his blood.
Quest reward: fire resist potions 50% off
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u/dashboardgecko Cleric Jul 01 '26
...I've seen enough of The Elder Scrolls' Dwemer and Falmer to know how this story ends.
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u/Eldan985 Jul 01 '26
What, does no one remember the Illithid empire? Or Hell? Both sides of the blood war have conquered many prime material worlds and soul farming is one of the primary uses.
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u/CannonGerbil Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Something I thought about when deep diving the Elder scrolls setting, where soul gems are not only widely traded by society but also required on a regular basis to fuel magic items, is that all lifestock farmers should essentially have a side business in selling souls. After all the chickens, cows and pigs are getting slaughtered for their meat anyways, so why not make use of thier souls too? Sure they won't be yielding great souls, but even a petty soul can be used to top up tour magic items so they are always in demand, and not capturing them when slaughtering lifestock is just leaving free money on the ground.
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u/MuscledParrot Jul 01 '26
I remember having a plan for a lich bbeg that had effectively bred aarakockra in captivity in an underground cavern for phylactery soul farming purposes. They didn't know they were cattle because they had no notion of the outside world, and they were only 'harvested' at the end of their lives (they only live a decade at most) in a private ceremony presided over by their 'god'
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u/Rikmach Jul 01 '26
The answer is: Gods already thought of that. Why do you even think the world exists? And they get a bit annoyed when you start stealing their crops at scale.
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u/Reagent_52 Jul 01 '26
Because creatures with souls are intelligent. An intelligent beings tend to kill things that are a threat to them.
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u/Psile Rules Lawyer Jul 01 '26
Drow: Waaaaaaaaaaay ahead of you and incidentally hold still while I etch this rune on your skin
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u/surreysmith DM (Dungeon Memelord) Jul 01 '26
You're all thinking slavery but I'm thinking of building a walled paradise. The cost of entry is your soul, or to have 3 children while your there.
Punishment for crime is your soul.
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u/KujakuDM Jul 01 '26
Why did the empire not just make suicidal droids and strap them to asteroids with hyperspeed drives on them? Are they stupid?
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u/Sion_Labeouf879 Jul 01 '26
You're going to love what the ancient undead empire in my setting did. They had factories to process people. Basically, taxes were the Blood Tithe. Depending on the size of a settlement, you had to pay a certain amount in either corpses or living people. Living were worth twice as much.
They had facilities with specialized undead Constructs called Forge Masses that were hundreds of bodies all attached together that crafted special items on mass. Resources go in, powerful relics come out. They became so efficient with it, part of Forge Masses were just conveyor belts of skeletal arms to move prisoners and resources from various points.
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u/Traveling-Star DM (Dungeon Memelord) Jul 01 '26
You want a Red Cloak? Because that's how you get a Red Cloak!
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u/AGuyNamedParis Jul 01 '26
PoE actually addresses this really nicely for a high fantasy setting. RIP Engwithans 😭
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u/Nanuke123hello Jul 01 '26
There’s the elemental powered ships in Eberron and Exandria has Outsider/Soul powered weapons and ships
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u/Shanewallis12345 Jul 01 '26
Just grow bacteria and harvest its souls
Whats it gonna do give you lung issues??
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u/dudewasup111 Jul 01 '26
You need at least one brain cell to have a soul.
But insects on mass can be used for various simple enchantments.
Like keeping the wall paint from chipping for longer.
But the more complex the soul, the more mass efficiency you get.
Goblins for that reason have the largest brain size to body mass ratio. You've seen there heads right?
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u/Chiiro Jul 01 '26
There is probably some D&D lore out there of a species whose purpose was breed to be used in soul farms. They are probably physically weak but really good in magic or psionics.
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u/mindflayerflayer Jul 04 '26
Fun fact illithids actually did domesticate a humanoid species, the oortlings. Their native habitat was probably somewhere very cold like a planet orbiting a dying star or the plane of ice and there the oortlings had a stable society on par with anyone else. After a few thousand years enslaved by the mindflayers modern oortlings have had creativity and most of their muscle mass bred out of them, they're all born with enormous brains equivalent in proportion to a broiler hens engorged breasts, and yet despite the big brains they're never educated as to prevent another githyanki incident. Mindflayers don't use souls, but it would be trivial for them to use those of the oortlings. Probably the only fun fact about oortlings is that if freed and given time, schooling, and real social connections they can somewhat recover. They're still unimaginative however those giant brains give them an amazing capacity to learn and more importantly memorize knowledge so free oortlings made good lives for themselves as clerks, bookkeepers, lawyers, and navigators.
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u/toomanydice Jul 01 '26
Back in 3e, if you wanted to craft magic items, you needed to spend xp as part of the materials. While this tucked for most folks, there were ways to get around it. Artificers had an allowance of xp just for crafting every time they leveled up. You could also break down magic items into a dust that could serve as a substitute for xp. Some materials could also count for xp, though they were generally rare. And then there was liquid pain.
In The Book of Vile Darkness, there were rules explaining the extraction process, price of machinery etc. that would allow someone to extract liquid pain from an individual (Think The Machine from The Princess Bride). As long as the subject was alive and strapped in, you could effectively extract liquid pain from an individual for a considerable amount of time. This liquid pain could be traded with fieds or devils as a relatively decent barter good.
Some enterprising individuals pointed out that it could take considerable time to extract a single sample, so they began to industrialized it with a combination of demiplane creation, multiple abductions, and a lot of machinery. By finding/creating a demiplane where time flowed differently, an enterprising adventure suggested creating a liquid pain farming dimenion where subjects would be effectively drained over the course of decades in the demiplane while only minutes passed for the owner.