Soul Trade
| Devil | Daemon | Demon |
| Archdevils | Soul Trade | Demon Lords |
| Binding Outsiders | ||
There are many different ways to capture souls. The most commonly used methods are spells like soul bind and trap the soul, with the former imprisoning the soul of a newly dead creature and the latter trapping the soul of someone still alive. Other creatures, such as the undead called devourers, have their own innate methods of trapping souls, and likewise night hags are capable of using a version of soul bind through their heartstones to capture the souls of those they torment, binding them in dark gems and selling them in planar markets. Still other creatures create magic items called soul jars, which mimic the effects of these spells.
All of these methods, however, pale in the face of daemons' industrialized harvesting of souls. Abaddon's fiends use virtually all known methods of collecting and storing souls, many of which are unique to themselves. Cacodaemons, the least caste of daemons, prove vital to this harvest, and represent the most common means of turning souls into trade goods. These ravenous fiends possess the unique ability to devour the souls of freshly killed creatures; transform their souls into small, jewel-like objects called soul gems; and spit them back up for collection. These gems each contain the basic essence of a soul, and daemons use them for various raw and refined purposes depending on the fiend in question, the quality and power of the soul, and the daemon's knowledge of soul-warping magic. Of course, many cacodaemons would prefer to consume the souls in their entirety, rather than passing the spirits on, but more powerful daemons rarely give them the option, bullying the cacodaemons into giving up their treasures, employing (or enslaving) a particular individual as a partner in the trade, or maintaining whole hunting packs as pets.
Most methods of using souls extinguish them completely, consigning them to oblivion. In these cases, only the direct intervention of a deity can return them to life - and sometimes not even then, such as when the soul is specifically devoured by one of the Horsemen. Other methods bleed a fraction of a soul's energies away, and while this method is far less powerful, some daemons capture other creatures for the sole purpose of entrapping them and milking their souls over a prolonged period of time, causing horrific agony for spans of months, years, or centuries before finally giving in to their own hunger and consuming what tattered fragments of soul remain.
Unconscionable as most of the universe considers these practices, trapped souls exist as a commodity replete with their own rampant underground economy, both within the evil-aligned planes and elsewhere. Most of these souls ultimately end up in Abaddon, though buyers and markets can also be found in Hell, the Abyss, Axis, and even the worlds of the Material Plane, as evil spellcasters and item crafters can make great use of powerful souls in their dark rites. The economy is complex, with prices determined not only by the strength and power inherent in a given soul, but also according to each soul's manner of death, alignment in life, and other criteria. These additional factors rarely influence their use in magical experiments unless a soul was particularly noteworthy, but as the daemons are happy to explain, the nature of a soul has everything to do with its unique flavor.
While the value of souls is as relative as any other commodity, and pricing can fluctuate wildly based on an endless parade of factors, presented here are some basic categories. With each of these, it's important to note that these are guidelines only, and individual spirits may fall lower (such as a dragon slain young, or a king whose general lack of ambition kept him from great deeds) or higher (a commoner of exceptional piety, or one who never had the chance to fully explore her exceptional abilities) than one might expect. These prices are based upon the supply and demand commonly faced by traders upon the planes where such commodities prove far less outlandish than on the Material Plane, where prices might increase by 10 times or more (though such has no effect on their value when put to use; see below). As with anything else, the exact value of a soul is ultimately up to GM discretion. It’s also worth noting that, while trading spirits may prove lucrative, the practice is undeniably evil and an affront to the natural order, and thus carries great consequences in the afterlife.
Mindless Spirits (10 gp): While it’s possible to capture the vital essences of vermin, basic oozes, and other such unthinking creatures, these paltry spirits are worth very little.
Animal Spirits (25 gp): This category contains creatures of animal-level intelligence, whose spirits - while presumably worth something to some deities, as reflected by the value of animal sacrifice - are rarely traded in the soul markets. In fact, though the existence of animal spirits is undeniably real, there’s rampant debate in many societies over whether such things truly count as "souls."
Basic Soul (100 gp): This is the soul of a standard intelligent creature—a commoner, a low-level adventurer, a sentient monster of low CR, or any of the other hordes of weak or mundane folk who live out their lives with a normal amount of pomp and excitement. This is the lowest category of souls which interests daemons, who see animals and other nonsentient creatures as hardly worth the time to destroy.
Noteworthy Soul (500 gp): The souls of mid-level characters, rulers, famous or influential people, and other powerful, accomplished, and otherwise important people draw greater attention than basic souls, and drive bidding higher accordingly.
Grand Soul (1000-5000 gp): High-level characters, great heroes, dragons, powerful aberrations, and other such spirits of fabulous power and forceful personalities offer equally significant rewards to those who manage to contain their essences.
Unique Soul (priceless): For the truly unique souls - those of legendary figures, epic heroes, and other massive presences - there can be no going price. The unique sparks that live within these creatures are valuable beyond compare, and the frantic bidding (and backstabbing) that arises when one of these trapped spirits comes up for sale is the sort of thing fiends and undead wait thousands of years for, paying nigh-unimaginable prices for the right to consume or display such an artifact.
Using Souls
In addition to consuming them for the sheer joy of destruction, daemons use souls to empower themselves, conduct strange experiments, construct their hideous domains, and more - and mortal spellcasters have followed their lead. of these varied uses, the most common is the creation or recharging of magic items, using the life force contained in soul gems and other such vessels—or drawn out of the victim directly at the moment of casting—to empower the magic being worked. In these cases, souls should be assigned values based on the categories presented here and then treated as material components, reducing the gold expenditure necessary to cast the spell according to the souls' value. (Thus a spell that requires 400 gp to cast might instead cost 300 gp and a basic-level soul.) Souls used in this manner are consumed and destroyed utterly.
Souls are especially useful in the creation of intelligent items. In these cases, usually only one soul crystallizes as the intelligence embedded into the item, though other souls may be cannibalized in the item's creation. Item alignment, item ability scores, and languages spoken by the item mirror those of the soul used to provide the item's intelligence. Scholars have long debated whether the intelligence in such an item is the soul used, or if the soul is destroyed and the intelligence is only patterned on it - the implication being that recovered intelligent objects (especially of daemonic origin) might be destroyed in order to liberate the souls used in their construction. As instances of both have been reported over the centuries, the question remains open, though few adventurers are willing to destroy their prized weapons based on conjecture.
Beyond the means described above, daemons have myriad additional means of trapping, keeping, and subsequently using souls for constructing permanent objects and effects, such as a liquid form of soul-stuff mixing multiple souls, a crystalline dust formed from soul gems, and even ink created from souls and used to write down the names of the doomed, imprisoning them in elaborate poems penned on the daemons' own flesh. Something intrinsic in daemonic nature allows for this flexibility, as some of the same methods they routinely use fail spectacularly when attempted by non-daemons, including such creatures as night hags, devourers, liches, and followers of some fiendish lords, who themselves possess a vested interest in exploiting some or all of these methods.
