The Soul

A truth of the world of Goblin is that there is such a thing as Soul/Self/Essential Spark that all living creatures possess¹⁾. What exactly this is, is delightfully ambiguous, but it is a commonly known and accepted fact among the denizens of the world that it exists and is discernibly interwoven throughout many different aspects of everyday life.

The mapping of the Soul predates modern recorded history, but general consensus is that some order or other of ancient wizards managed to identify it through studying the source of their magic. Since its discovery, much blood has been spilled in the name of devising ever more efficient ways to control and decipher the Soul.

Since the founding of the Empire, accessing and interacting with the Soul has been very strictly controlled and different bureaus within the Empire has had very specific modes of access assigned under their purview.

Citizens of the Empire are all registered and identified by within a vast network of catalogs managed by The Perlustration Office.²⁾ No one truly knows the full scope of this operation, but it is at once incredibly vast and complex and also full of holes that bleed into every other facet of society, creating weeks, sometimes years long logistical nightmares for the denizens of the Empire.

All operations and services, from jobs and housing to security and food distribution, flow from these records.

A soul can allegedly³⁾ measure such information as merit and honor, allowing the various bureaus to assign the right jobs for the right people.

The Soul is largely held by practitioners of most religions, faiths, or spiritual paths to have some form of connection to the Divine. The exact manifestation of its divine nature varies. Some consider the Soul to be a conduit of Divine energy, treating it interchangeably with magic. Others consider it a reflection of mirror aspect of one or more divine entities. Others again have deeply complex esoteric interpretations of the Soul and what it means in relation to the Divine and their practices mostly revolve around the elevation and pursuit of this knowledge for its own sake.

Practitioners of Magic channel their arts through the Soul. There are different ways of manifesting it, but all forms of magic in the world can essentially be summararized as doing the same thing: drawing upon latent energies in the world and focusing them through the Soul to create a desired effect. There are no other known forms of practicing magic.⁴⁾