Could a ghost possess a zombie created from its own body? Could this ghost-zombie hybrid, hypothetically, continue their career in law?
Dying is no excuse to stop working, after all.
But lawyers have no soul
Devils are LE, and work with lawyers frequently enough that they manage to buy their souls rather frequently. They had souls, they just have probably sold their soul. The lawyer one should be terrified of isn't the LE lawyer, it's the CG lawyer
Depends entirely on the limitations of the ghost's possession ability, but if the ghost can possess a living person and control them, then an animated corpse should work as well. The problem with continuing the career is that the body would continue to decay until the ghost wouldn't be able to move it any more.
Szeth-son-son-Vallano, truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to become a magical flying ghost cop possessing his own corpse
I'd watch it.
I like Pratchett's zombies. Where the force of will of the soul of the person is so strong that they refuse to dis-inhabit their body. But since the subconscious did so many things on autopilot, they now are forced to do every function of their body deliberately. That's why they move so stiffly and strangely.
You know what? Go read Reaper Man. It's great. And Windle Poons was never so alive until after he died
Gnu Sir Terry Pratchett ❤️
Any recommendations for a Pratchett audiobook? I’ve got like 6 audible credits I need to use.
What is your interests? Sir Terry was a consummate satirist, able to reach the heart without being too serious. Here's what I'd recommend off the top of my head:
Pure entertainment: Moving Pictures - an alchemist invents Film, and suddenly everyone is moving to Holy Wood. But as Moving Pictures blur the line between fantasy and reality, something Else wants to see reality as well
It Makes You Think: Small Gods - What is faith? What happens when people replace belief in their god with the institution that surrounds the god? What if the god in question is a bastard? What is worse, the god, or the holy wars that will be made by the next "prophet"? Religion and philosophy clash with the sound of lightening hitting a copper roof
You'll think, but with wordplay: The Truth - Dwarves have learned how to turn lead into gold. The hard way. The printing press has come to Anhk Morpork, and with it, the Press. A commentary on truth, journalism, and politics, with a healthy dose of classism and privilege
For the Feels: Feet of Clay - (this one drops you in the middle of the Watch series, but you won't be in the weeds for long. If you don't want mild spoilers from earlier in the series, save this for later) A priest and a baker are murdered, and the Tyrant of the city has been poisoned. It's up to Sam Vimes to find out what's at the bottom of this mystery. And he could probably do so if it weren't for all of the damned clues. And what do the Golems, those silent machines who toil in the worst places, have to do with any of this? When the servant class isn't considered living, who cares what happens to them?
More Feels: Reaper Man - Death has been fired. But he has been given a retirement gift: The Time of his Life. There's not much of it, because when the next Death is chosen the Reaper Man's time will have run out. A reflection on mortality, time, and the obligation of the Reaper to respect the Harvest. And who will care for the harvest, if not for the Reaper Man?
Can't remember the author or title.
Young American woman goes to London and gets invited to a wild party a a huge mansion. The first level is music, celebs, drugs, and sex. Slowly she realizes two things; she used to live in this mansion, and that her hostess is a vampire. She's the reincarnation of the soul that used to inhabit the vampire's body.
Duuuuuuuuuude. I want this movie.
A good short story keeps you amused for about a half hour.
A great one lingers in your mind forever.
Ok, I'd read that. Let me know if you ever remember the title!
Don't hold your breath. My brain is like Swiss cheese and there are more mice everyday
They definitely could in D&D lore. You die. Your soul goes to whatever plane of existence. Your body gets left behind and a necromancer raises it as a zombie for menial labor. Your soul comes back as a ghost to complain to a party of adventurers about how a necromancer has defiled your body and you wish to put an end to it. The bard says something stupid like "well it doesn't sound like you were using it anymore. You know what they say: one man's trash is another man's treasure."
If we're going by What We Do in the Shadows the show rules, I guess so.
Literally just watched that episode yesterday.
I want an anime of this. haha.
It'd be great; the main plot will be the ghost possessing his zombie body, so now he's the only intelligent, reasonable zombie in a zombie apocalypse world. Obviously the living are going to be skeptical, and there'll be issues with him occasionally losing control of the body...this has the makings of a great anime
Then eventually the original zombie body is too decayed and he's pissed he has to start switching bodies, probably because it takes so long to get used to each and get control
"The Unwanted Undead Adventurer" is a pretty close approximation of this.
I'm putting this in my next D&D campaign
Aw man this would be a great quest! My table would love it lol
Kingdom Hearts
Edit: looking at the other comments I'm glad I'm not the only one with that brainrot.
This is literally my experience of ADHD
If the zombie retains memory/personality, then I'd say that if a soul exists in the setting, that it is still in the body or has been returned to the body. Therefore no separate ghosts.
If the zombie exists only as a husk to be used as a puppet by some other intelligence or entity, then I'd say ghosts of those people make sense.
Why is the soul in the mind?
I recognize the weird state that would exist where the mind is fully copied into the ghost, having two entities with the same mind.
I still think that would be interesting fiction though.
Why is the soul in the mind?
Or the body. I think the main thing is that a single entity only has a single animus, another word for a soul.
So a necromancer may lend a body a "false" animus to animate it, while the "real" animus (or soul, if you will) is in a spirit form.
P-zombie-zombie
Shit, in NWoD you could have a ghost, an undead, and a trapped soul all of the same person at one time. The ghost and the undead could have the same mind while the soul could be sewed onto some other blighter and have a completely different mind.
The I, Zombie comic was so much weirder than the tv show.
Kingdom Hearts kinda had this with the Heartless (from a person’s heart) and the Nobodies (from a person’s body).
OG Nier took a slightly different twist on that. Mild spoilers ahead!
Somewhen in our lifetime the plague-like white virus destroyed human bodies turning them into ash, so there was a project of dividing the soul, the Gestalt, from the body, and then joining it with an autonomous Replicant android.
This project failed, and we, as a player, discover a curious consequence: Replicants conserved\built themselves a human-like society, the one we find ourself many replicant generations ago, not even knowing or caring if they are humans.
But at the same time these replicants are utterly afraid of catching a black scrawl - that's when Gestalts-souls, traversing the ground as black spectral beings, sometimes even agressive, consume the replicant as it was designed to, covering them in dark patterns, and slowly turning them under control of these stray souls, some of them even vile and powerful like demons.
You as Nier and the Shadowlord, your arch nemesis, are a Replicant and a Gestalt of one person, fighting to keep your transforming sister on your own side, while two of your worlds inescapably collide and destroy each other.
That's not the most dramatic reveal there, so you'd be fine playing it even after that.
Replicants aren't androids, they are just clones made using the DNA of the Gestalts. It's also not ash they turn into, but rather salt. Some of these salt creatures stay alive to form the Legion who fight against what's left of humanity.
You're also completely off with what black scrawl is. Black scrawl is what happens when a gestalt relapses losing consciousness and becoming aggressive. This causes the genetic material the cloned replicant is made from to break down. Once a gestalt relapses it can no longer inhabit a replicant and will eventually die. The scientists and androids were trying to prevent relapse, that's the entire fucking point of the original gestalt (Nier/Shadowlord).
Someone hasn't actually read any of the law, because almost all of this is wrong.
This is essentially one* of the Kingdom Hearts plot threads. Sora sacrifices himself and becomes a Heartless (ghost) in KH1, but since he has such a strong heart, the husk he leaves behind becomes the Nobody Roxas (zombie).
Running out of movie ideas? Just crowdsource from the public!
Yeah, that's what they do now. Adaptations and remakes, Hollywood's last resort.
Don't forget straight up sequels to 30-year old movies. Nostalgia grabs.
Love this idea.
If the zombie's body still has some link to the soul such that it could see and react to the ghost, they could make an extremely awkward yet dangerous team.
"Come over this way, buddy! Brains over here!"
"Brainsh?" Shuffle, shuffle.
"Yup, see?" The ghost points triumphantly at a hamster cage. "Lots of juicy little brains to eat!"
"Awww... Tired of mowsh brainsh! WANT HOOMAN BRAINSH!"
Zombie takes another vicious swipe at the ghost but finds only air.
"Why can no eat you brainsh again?"
"As I've explained all evening, I'm ethereal, not really here, sorry, friend. It's mouse or nothing."
The zombie's shoulders slump in disappointment, but he turns to the hamster cage. The hamsters peer back, vaguely uneasy.
"C'mere cute liddle mowshes..."
Clang, squeak, munch, munch, munch.
Does it count if the ghost is bound to a suit of armour and the zombie is animated by some random lab animal's soul..?
This honestly fits the prompt almost perfectly
One of the characters in the “what we do in the shadows” show is a vampire whose ghost inhabits a doll.
Only if the person had multiple-personality disorder. You need at least one consciousness per entity.
Depends on the zombie type - if it's raw instinct only, there is no higher level of consciousness required, right?
So your generic shambling, biting, non-speaking but still groaning zombie would work in this scenario I'd think.
Is a zombie considered conscious?
"ooooveerrruuuulllleeeed"
/eats brains
I'm going to say yes. In order to become a zombie a body must be dead, and generally the soul becomes a ghost after death. Zombies aren't related to the person they were, they're just a corpse that's been animated.
Unless they're the original Romero zombie, which are corpses animated by souls from an overflowing Hell, which might imply they went back to their original body.
I don't believe there is objective official lore on the cosmology of Romero. (Romero seems distinctly uninterested in that sort of approach to storytelling). I know it says so on the poster of Dawn Of The Dead, but that seems more like poetic ominous tone setting rather than a literal lore dump. Everything inside the movie is speculation by characters who don't have answers.
I don't think the above issue really matters too much, though. I'd say that if we accept that souls exist in the Romero zombie universe, then the fact that zombies can retain memories and habits from their lives shows the soul is retained.
I'd say, as a baseline, any setting where zombies can retain some of their personality/memories means that if a soul exists, it is in the body and shouldn't be able to become a ghost.
I can accept a setting where zombies only exist as reanimated husks being puppeted in some way as also having ghosts of those people.
For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereas in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering who have lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known that some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil altogether.
- Hali, the Philosopher, from "Can Such Things Be?" By Ambrose Bierce in "The Death of Halpin Frayser"
For there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the end, we say that man is lost, or gone on a long journey—which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in the sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.woops, wrong Hali QouteI'm going to say yes, they can.
There's a Wattpad Novel, "Running with Scissor", where the mc's body and soul are separated by some sort of spell and he has to recover his body before midnight or the spell becomes permanent. It's pretty good absurdist humour reminescent of The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
I love this idea.
Just make sure at least one member of the party is in a compromised position when they bite it. Example: not wearing any pants.
Orel! Think of the decency issue!
mc chris has an album about this
Yes. Depending on the fiction, if the ghost isn't a soul but instead a psychic/spiritual remnant, both can happen and the soul can have gone to the afterlife too. You can do a lot with fiction.
Story pitch: Soul gets to leave hell for one night to convince someone to put down their zombie corpse so their ghost will demanifest and they can finally go to a better afterlife.
