Author Topic: What is the Unlife?  (Read 3265 times)

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Offline Garnaal

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Re: What is the Unlife?
« Reply #20 on: November 12, 2020, 07:11:55 AM »
I just finished reading the Green Gryphon again.  The Unlife from that seems to be fed from the hopelessness or despair of dying, not from the death itself, that kind of ends the feeding.  The torturing of a soul or body with a lot of pain mixed in seems to be the favorite.   But in looking at Xaar, the unlife orb seemed to feed on death or destruction, I might be reading it wrong.

This makes Unlife sound like a living entity akin to the Horrors of Earthdawn. From my limited delving into Shadow World my understanding of this phenomenon is that it’s goal is the eradication of life, not so much existence itself. This could also be a reason for undead being among the tools.
If you mean living as in "seemingly mimicking actions of living beings" than I think you are right. Unlife is ofcourse not alive. Does the unlife/unessence have goals or is the eradication a mere consequence of the unlifes presence? In order to have goals, you'd need sentience. I doubt it has sentience.

So lets do a thought experiment. Lets assume we have a ferrous liquid that is highly acidic. If a magnet comes near, it will move to the magnet. If the magnet hovers over the liquid, the liquid will stretch and make shapes  and sometimes some part of the liquid might overcome gravity and cohesion, and jump to the magnet. Contact between liquid and magnet results in eradication of the magnet and more of the liquid. Without a magnet, the substance is inert.
 
Here's a substance that in the presence of magnetism and motion, mimics life and some of its behavior but has no sentience. It looks more like instinct (even that is not really true). The same analogy can be used for fire in the presence of something flammable, or electricity in the presence of ionisation.

The point of the god story above is to show that depending on who you are, the way one looks at unlife can be different. Through the interaction with life, the unlife can manifest itself as undead. The unlife by itself does not create. It needs the presence of life to manifest. You could even argue that the dark gods themselves are mere manifestations of unlife given shape by the negative emotions/thoughts of complex life. The Dark Gods themselves will ofcourse never look at it this way.

Edited for clarity