[hider=Disclaimer: Contained within are the opinions of BBeast alone. These opinions do not necessarily reflect the official stance of the GM team.]

[quote]We call these beings gods, they do not have souls as proposed by BB; however, they can.[/quote]
This appears to be a misrepresentation of my intent. I shall restate what I meant about gods and souls in a more clear manner.

There are two possibilities: All gods are made from a soul + divine essence, OR All gods are made from divine essence only. I did not mean to suggest that some gods may have a soul and some gods may not. I stated these two possibilities because we had no consensus as to what constituted a soul or divine essence.

In the former case, a god's soul functions like a normal soul, but it is strengthened by the divine essence which protects it against the entropy afflicting mortal souls. In the latter case, the divine essence is essentially a better soul. The possibility for heroes (who possess just a mortal soul) ascending to demigods by the consumption of divine essence proves that a god's soul in the former case or divine essence in the latter case is closely related to a mortal's soul.

Because of this similarity, it is meaningless to try to determine the function of a soul by subtracting a god's functions from a mortal's functions. The function of a soul is still poorly defined, though, I will grant you that, although consensus indicates that the function of a soul is much more than growing old. The potential existence of soulless entities is still debated and strongly resisted. However, by giving souls more function than 'growing old' and fraying, many of your arguments are left baseless. However, they do retain this value: a soul must have some function beyond growing old or else we find ourselves in a really tight spot metaphysically.

As for the Architect summoning souls from outside the Universe, I have a few comments.

It has been established that the creation of new souls is [i]hard[/i], although not impossible. The Architect is also only somewhat more powerful than the gods of this setting. When the Architect called in souls from past universes, he did it because it was [i]easy[/i], not because of any deeper metaphysical reason. He called in the souls/entities who would be gods, who either carried over some portion of their own power or were granted power by becoming bound to a Sphere or received divine essence from the Architect or some combination of the three. But the Architect also wanted to make it easy for these gods to create life (especially since they aren't as powerful as some of the gods in other Divinus universes who tended to be created/summoned by individuals more powerful than the Architect), so he also called in billions of other souls to be used in creating life.

You argue that because these souls have been imported from outside this Universe the kind of cycle seen here must be a universal one. This is not necessarily true. I shall cite the Mk 2 Divinus Universe as an example. In Mk 2, the supreme entity in that Universe was Fate. From what I understand, Fate is enormously more powerful than the Architect. The Mk 2 Universe was also much bigger, and the Mk 2 gods were more powerful. This is indicative of a general power nerf between Mk 2 and Mk 3 and that not all Universes are made equal. Like Mk 3, the gods (with one exception) and some other souls were drawn in from past universes, and there were also souls and a reincarnation cycle for mortals. However, the Mk 2 gods had no issue in creating life-forms or with souls - the reincarnation cycle appeared mostly there to ensure that the souls of those who had died didn't linger in the world of the living; we had one god create a type of pseudo-soul which spontaneously generated. This implies that sufficiently powerful entities [i]can[/i] create souls [i]ex nihilio[/i]. This in turn implies that the more powerful Universes (e.g. Mk 2) can become a source of souls for less powerful Universes (e.g. Mk 3). This doesn't answer where the first Universe and gods came from, but that question is beyond the scope of this discussion.

There is a point which is consistent between the two Universes, and that is that souls (in Divinus) are immortal, in the sense that they persist indefinitely in some state after the death of their bodies. Otherwise, barring some kind of intervention, souls would dissipate and vanish some point (possibly immediately) after death and not require an active reincarnation cycle. As you have observed, the 'decay' of souls observed in Mk 3 is not a loss of material but a loss of form.

But why do souls decay? The simplest explanation is, rather than it being an intentional design feature of a higher being, that souls aren't by default indestructible, but they wear from use unless properly maintained. It is a practical limitation rather than an intentional flaw.

Of course, you hit the true answer in saying that [i]all[/i] of this is the contrivance of some higher being, namely us players and GMs.

Further, it functions in this way because [i]that is how the Sphere which dictates the function of souls works[/i]. Before Cyclone had submitted Katharsos, it would have been perfectly valid for someone else to create a Sphere which had the effect of creating the souls of all living things. But Cyclone got there first, so he got the privilege of dictating how souls work in this setting.

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