The Explicit Worldbuilding of Dungeons and Dragons or: Do Elves Have Souls???

    One of my longer-running side projects has been going through the ENWorld Gary Gygax Q&A. It ran for several years, up to Gygax's passing, and is the source for a lot of good and interesting information about the early days of Dungeons and Dragons buried under a not-insignificant amount of forum dross. Most of it's already been picked clean, but between yours truly being bored at work and it being really easy and fun to make fun of Gary Gygax, I decided to read through it for clout. One of the things that stuck with me isn't something obscure, but something that's been forgotten.

    A lot of digital ink has been spilled about implied worldbuilding in Dungeons and Dragons-the idea that things like mechanics, class choices, and so on can say about the setting of a roleplaying game. This ranged from stuff about the setting, to monster types, to my own work on clerics and hyperdiegesis. Today though, I want to talk about explicit worldbuilding, because on May 8, 2003, as part of a discussion on nonhuman undead, Gary Gygax casually said that drow didn't have souls. 

I should probably have put Jim Ward in this meme, for reasons we'll get to later, but Gary is more famous.

    Now at first I thought this was just Gary being racist because, you know, there's precedent for that. But then a few days later he's talking about other kinds of elves not having souls either, so maybe it's an elf racism thing? Now this kind of thing isn't unprecedented, I know Tolkien did something similar, but it just seemed so...weirdly out of left field? But I was at work and not really that good at blogging yet so I just sorta put it out of my mind. 

   

    A year and a half later, I'm reading Dragon #60 and get to Roger E. Moore's "The Elven Point of View." Most of it is pretty standard Elf Stuff (or rather, new Elf Stuff that has since become Pink Slime. Think "Elves don't really wanna own stuff, but they do want to own magical knowledge.") But, crucially, it linked to Deities and Demigods, which meant I could now figure out what the fuck this meant. And the answer is...actually pretty simple? 

    

    According to Deities and Demigods, there are two basic types of Anima: Souls and Spirits. Humans, Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, and Half-Elves have souls Everything else has spirits. What's the difference? While one is on the material plane, surprisingly little. However, while souls are permanent residents of their afterlife, spirits have more of a loyalty card, being more subject to the whims of the plane's master, who can send the erstwhile spirit back to the material plane in any form without their consent. 

    And so I satisfied myself, content in the knowledge I had figured out where some weird Dungeons and Dragons bullshit had come from. Sure, "It's from this famous book" isn't exactly going to set the world on fire, but I could rest easy. Then, one night, as I stood in front of my fridge eating a delicious hard-boiled egg at 1:32 in the morning, it hit me: Humans have souls. Elves have spirits. Orcs have spirits. Have-Elves have souls.

So how come Half-Orcs don't have souls?

    Normally this is the part of the blog post where the writer starts talking about and thinking through the implications. That's why Implied Worldbuilding posts are so fun, you get to take the bullshit and run with it. But this is an Explicit Worldbuilding Post: it is the laid-down law in the rules-elves and such are more difficult to resurrect-backed up by the narrative justification of They Don't Have Souls. So I...don't have much to add here besides more questions. For whatever reason, in the world of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the gods all got together and decreed only the blood of Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings, and Humans (but only sometimes humans) would be free of the cycle of Samsara. Everyone else could just go fuck themselves. 

    Is this why humans are the only ones who have kids outside of their species? Because otherwise you risk not sharing an afterlife with your children? Is there a finite amount of spirits compared to an infinite amount of souls? If so, where do Half-Orc souls come from? If not, where do new Spirits come from?

    I don't know. I just...don't know. I suppose, like so much of the Old D&D Milieu, it is simply assumed.