On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Alexx S Kay wrote: @> > [3] Tangent four: how sure is it that souls consumed by Morganti weapons @> > are really gone forever? Could they be extracted from the weapon later by @> > some process? The Mysterious Case of Mr. Loraan makes me wonder, even @> > apart from Vlad's "Jewel of Judgement" experience in Issola. @> @> I would say "not remotely", since we have at least one clear @> counterexample. [interesting data and speculation] Actually, I'm going to argue for the destruction of souls being permenant, but in a different way. Viscerally, I'd prefer you to be right, because there's at least one character that's been Morgantied that I'd prefer could be brought back someday... but that's exactly why I think it isn't going to happen. In a world where people are reincarnated and resurrected on a routine basis, it's quite difficult to generate a story about genuine loss and grief. There's always going to be something in the back of the reader's head that's saying "well, he got hit in the face with an axe, but he'll be back in a couple of hundred years, so that isn't so bad". You almost /have/ to invent something like Morganti weapons so that you can have really terrible things done to your characters, and make them actually have to deal with the loss. To put it another way, _Dragon_ would have much less emotional impact if you found out later that everybody who was killed by Morganti weapons was really OK in some way and would be back later for another exciting episode. This is what I tend to think of as the "Comic Book Effect", although of course that's not fair to Moore or Gaiman.