Life is composed of three components. The mortal body, the life-force and the immortal soul. These are joined into a living creature. If this trinity is broken, life ceases, and the creature dies.
The body is made of physical matter. At creation it is linked to a specific soul, but these two can be separated at a later time. The personal attributes of strength, dexterity, constitution and appearance are determined by the body. Also dependent on the body are a creature's maximum & current hit points. The body can be changed during the creature's life by magical influences, physical damage, training and natural breakdown.
A creature's number of Hit Dice and used Hit Die are not mentioned here because they are actually just game technicalities to give a range of possible maximum hit point values. The Hit Die is determined by the body's species, the number of Hit Dice by it's resilience (which can be trained, thus enabling a larger amount of max hp).
The life-force of living creatures is made from energy from the positive energy plane. Life-force is the joining substance of the body and the soul and has nothing to do with the identity of a creature. The body's binding to the life-force is represented by the amount of hit points it has and the soul's binding by its experience level. Therefore, the strength of the body/soul connection can be indicated by two numbers, the number of hit points and the experience level, in a #/# notation. When the number of hit points is less than -9, the body loses its connection to the life-force, life ceases and the soul will leave for another plane together with the life-force. If the soul ever falls below 0 experience levels or the soul and the life-force become separated (by powerful magic), the life-force lingers with the body until this falls below -9 hp, then returns to the positive energy plane and the soul goes to its outer plane, totally unable to return. There is no known way to indicate an amount for the life-force a creature has. It is assumed it is equal for all creatures.
The soul isn't made of any imaginable substance. Souls are immortal, but not unique. Spells like clone create a duplicate body together with a soul, though the latter tends to be an unwanted side-effect. Because the soul is linked to the body, two identical souls can be in the same world. This is called dual existence and is unacceptable for any soul. The personal attributes of alignment, intelligence, wisdom and relative leadership are determined by the soul. Also determined by the soul are a creature's memories, knowledge and skills. The soul can be changed during the creature's life by magical influences or by wisdom of age.
In these documents, the term spirit is used for the combination of soul and life-force. This ofcourse is merely a matter of terminology, but important for the texts to be interpreted correctly.
Undead creatures are different in a couple of ways.
The body of undead creatures need not be a functioning thing. It is merely an anchor of physical matter that allows the undead to exist in this world. Undead can also be anchored to objects, such as the lich's phylactery, or to astral or ethereal matter, like incorporeal undead.
The life-force of undead creatures is made from energy from the negative energy plane. Positive energy can be substituted by negative energy to move a creature from life to unlife. The benefits of this are the lessened dependencies (sleep, food) and physical requirements of the undead status and the strong tie with the negative energy plane (regeneration, rejuvenation, chill touch, energy drain, etherealness, gaseous form).
The soul of undead creatures is just the same as that of living. The alignment of undead creatures tends toward (but is not restricted to) chaotic and evil. Note that mindless undead such as skeletons lack a complete soul and therefore don't possess intelligence or personality.
When a creature is first born, it's body and soul are bound together with life-force borrowed from the positive energy plane. The creature then has a certain amount of Hit Dice of the standard type for its race. With training, the creature can gain experience levels and hit dice and thus strengthen its body<>life-force<>soul connection. Most creatures die because of hit point shortage or a malfunctioning body. In this case, the soul and life-force depart together to the outer plane of the creature's alignment. A different situation arises when an existing soul enters an existing body. It will take it's attributes from both the body as the soul, as indicated above. The life-force will be that of the soul, and the (max) strength of the body<>life-force binding is set by the body's (maximum) hit point total.
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