The Law of the Preincarnate

Having outlined the cosmology and outlined every single thing that makes it up, I'm now immediately going to discuss one of the other places that is to be found. This one, like the Dreamlands, isn't a Transitive Plane, but neither is it really an Inner Plane, an Outer Plane, or whatever else. It just is, floating somewhere out there in the Astral Sea. (Whether it connects to the Great Web is much less clear. Since the latter is the work of mortals, and since almost no mortals are even aware it exists, that suggests perhaps not...)

The Hall of the Preincarnate

This is the realm of the Maybes and Not-Yets, the souls of the Unborn. It is a great hall, vast in size and filled with warmth and light, where the Preincarnate rest until such time as they are called into being. The Hall of the Preincarnate is not a place for mortals, or even the divine - it is guarded by the Neverwere, planar beings whose sole purpose is to protect the Unborn from being corrupted by the echoes of life. They seek any who venture into the Hall and eject them, and then sorrowfully cull any of the Unborn who might have been influenced by exposure.

Incidentally, the Hall of the Preincarnate also has an annex for those souls whose destiny is to be reincarnated across the ages - a place to retire from one life and rest while awaiting the next. But the Neverwere make sure to keep these souls strictly apart from the Unborn, in order to prevent corruption.

The Law of the Preincarnate

One of the great edicts of reality, on a par with Cavcari's Last Invocation, is the great Law of the Preincarnate, which states that all mortal souls must have free will.

The major consequence of this is that a god or demon lord can seek to influence mortals, and can even lay traps for them that ensnare them into acting in certain ways, but they cannot both have a soul and be denied free will. All compulsion effects must have a finite duration or a condition by which they end. And it also means that if a god or demon lord requires a servitor race that does not have free will, that race cannot be granted souls, or must have at least the potential for rebellion.

But there is another consequence of the Law of the Preincarnate, which concerns the use of magic around the birth of a mortal. Specifically, in the two days and nights immediately prior and immediately after the birth of a child, the use of magic to affect that child is strictly forbidden. In fact, magic of a divine, demonic, or primal origin simply will not affect a mother in labour or her newborn child.

Other forms of magic, notably the arcane and pact magic, will continue to function, but they run a terrible risk - the fusing of the Unborn soul with the child may be prevented or may be corrupted to terrible effect. Of course, this may be the intention of the caster, though they often live to regret their hubris.

It's worth noting that I don't expect this detail ever to come up in 'live' gameplay - I've written elsewhere about my general dislike of pregnancy as a plotline in storytelling (because it's always exactly the same story beats in exactly the same order), and so I'm hardly likely to include it in a game except as an incidental factor.

However, the Law of the Preincarnate is mostly about world-building. Specifically, I was involved in a discussion some years ago in which it was noted that the widespread use of divine magic would inevitably have a major effect on society and demographics - one of the obvious uses would be to eliminate infant mortality, amongst other things rendering the wicked stepmother an endangered species.

In amongst thinking about that, it also occurred to me that there were various possibilities that could be opened if that particular door was closed - in particular, since so much of gothic horror is about man meddling with forces beyond his comprehension, there's an easy story there about what happens if a desperate would-be father, denied help from a divine source, turns instead to a necromancer (vivomancer?) to save his wife and unborn child. Naturally, such a thing would work... sort of.

And, finally, there are the Neverborn, the key villains in another campaign I never quite got going. These were Unborn souls that Should Have Been but, for whatever reason, were denied. I haven't locked down exactly what these are as yet, and may never do so, but there's the core of an idea there.

(Lastly, a quick reminder: it's just a game. Nothing here should be taken as my opinion about anything outside of that context!)