Weird Game Rule / Golarion Fluff interactions and their implications

[Mavrickindigo]

So, I was going to make a tread specifically for this one little hiccup I thought about, but I figured if it would be fun if other people share somethings they thought about based on how the Pathfinder rules and Golarion's lore/special rules work together.

I present to you: How to kill a ghost for 25gp/HD

In Golarion, undead hold the souls of the beings they once were, which explains why animating dead is an evil act. Meanwhile, ghosts, which are undead creatures, do not use the body. You can take their corpse and turn it into a zombie, and since the zombie holds the soul in it, the ghost will be sucked into its corpse and lose its rejuvenation ability. You can then kill the zombie and send the soul on to the afterlife!

This works, doesn't it? Either way, what other interesting little things can you come up with base don the rules meshing well/not well with the Golarion lore?

[The Doomkitten]

I'm fairly certain that's not how it works. I'm not huge into Golarion lore, but here's how I understand it:

Mindless undead don't actually contain the souls of a creature. They are the vessel for a spark of intense negative energy. Negative energy is pretty much always evil, as it is a) also the driving force behind intelligent undead, which it twists into evil reflections of their former selves, or magnifies the evil, and b) is used by evil deities.

So, by reanimating the corpse, now you've got the problem of both a zombie and a ghost.

[MMCJawa]

Mavrickindigo wrote:

So, I was going to make a tread specifically for this one little hiccup I thought about, but I figured if it would be fun if other people share somethings they thought about based on how the Pathfinder rules and Golarion's lore/special rules work together.

I present to you: How to kill a ghost for 25gp/HD

In Golarion, undead hold the souls of the beings they once were, which explains why animating dead is an evil act. Meanwhile, ghosts, which are undead creatures, do not use the body. You can take their corpse and turn it into a zombie, and since the zombie holds the soul in it, the ghost will be sucked into its corpse and lose its rejuvenation ability. You can then kill the zombie and send the soul on to the afterlife!

This works, doesn't it? Either way, what other interesting little things can you come up with base don the rules meshing well/not well with the Golarion lore?

IIRC, and I think this might come from James Jacobs ask question thread, only a teensy bit of soul is used to animate a corpse, not enough to pull a soul from the afterlife, and presumably not enough to get rid of a ghost.

At best you are only annoying/aggravating the ghost.

[James Jacobs]

Correct. Zombies, skeletons, and other mindless undead don't actually use a whole soul to "power" the undead; it's just a fragment. That's why they're mindless.

There could be other situations where you can make multiple undead from a single body too, but doing so won't destroy current undead that already exist. It splits the soul up among the various undead as needed, with no loss of power to any one undead creature. It's rare, but you can't really destroy one undead creature by turning part of its remains into another undead creature.

That just gives you more undead to fight, as mentioned above.