D&D 3.5e – Do Intelligent Undead Have a Soul?

dnd-3.5eundead

This is a question that arose when an evil cleric PC cast Create Undead on someone (who was dead at the time and was never an undead before) and then commanded (as in, he used his Command Undead class feature) it to tell him all the information he needed, thus rendering Speak With Dead useless.

Does an intelligent undead creature (e.g., a Mummy) have the soul of the original creature that inhabited the body in the first place? Even if not, would it have the original's memories? Should his approach have worked? Would the answer change if, in reward for a particularly big favor, Doresain granted him the ability to create Gravetouched undead?

I know that Liches and such would have the original's soul (or else the Baelnorn wouldn't exist), but is that true for other kinds of intelligent undead like mummies and gravetouched ghouls?

Edit: I'm not sure if the intent of my question is coming across correctly (whether the newly undead would be able to give information only the person who inhabited the corpse had, and whether it would have the same or any soul), so I added more text (in bold above).

Best Answer

Create undead does not specifically state that the soul/undead/etc is of the original creature; it just states that a dead body is required.

This leaves it a little open to interpretation as to where that hapless soul is going to come from to fill that corpse that's being filled.

However, more powerful undead, eg Mohrg are the "animated bodies of mass murderers", so although you can create a Mohrg at a suitable high enough level the component is still "a body". So this would imply (to me) that when an undead is created a suitably evil soul is dragged into the corpse. Otherwise if they're trying to animate the corpse of a pub landlord or something into a Mohrg then there is a disparity between monster description and the soul of the person being "used" as a component.

My personal take would be that either the soul of the prior unfortunate person who was living is dragged screaming back into the body when the undead is created (if they are "evil" enough and not protected somehow) otherwise a malign spirit is instead called into the corpse of the undead; once killed the spirit is destroyed and banished from the plane for the atypical 101 days/moon phase/etc and re-raising it (if allowed) would summon another spirit instead with it's own memories and whatnot.

As a footnote, the advantage of speak with dead is that it's a non-evil spell; so granted summon undead could get you the same result, but you'd have to be cackling and stroking your white cat and so on if you wanted to do it.

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