Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Beoric Jun 06, 2015 20:13:39	So, my players recently killed off a major NPC who was a mind seed (my escape plan didn't work so well, oops).  They pretty effectively hid the body, enough that they will call foul if I miraculously have someone find it.  I have trying to think of a plausible way to bring the villain back, or at least have the other quori realize what happened to her, which got me to thinking about some questions realted to mind seed.    I am assuming that, since a mind seed is not possessed, the quori spirit that seeded her will not be aware of the fate of the mind seed, particularly since there are rogue mind seeds that escape the grasp of their creators.  However:   1.  Do mind seeds dream, and if they do, can the original quori spirit find their dreams and communicate with them, and how does that conversation go?  Can a mind seed be possessed by the quori spirit, and how would she feel about that?   2.  When a creature is mind seeded, does it die?  Does its spirit go to Dolurrh?   3.  When a mind seed dies, does it have a spirit which is capable of becoming incorporeal undead, or of passing to Dolurrh?  If so, does it have the original personality or the mind seed personality?   4.  If a mind seed dies, and is turned into intelligent undead, is it an undead version of the original personality or the mind seed personality?
#2 Hellcow Jun 07, 2015 21:30:14	In my opinion, mind seed is about rewriting memories. It turns the victim into a mental duplicate of the manifester, with the personality and memories of that manifester. But it doesn't replace the soul. A human seeded by a quori is still a human... who thinks like a quori. So in MY opinion...   1. If the original species can dream, then yes, a mind seed should be able to dream. Any quori could locate a dream-seed and communicate with it; at the most basic level, this is what the standard quori abilities of dream and nightmare represent, the ability to find a mortal dreamer and interact with it. In the case of a seed that has both quori memories and levels in psionic classes, I'd consider it to be a lucid dreamer capable of having deeper conversations. How would that conversation go? It would depend on the seed. The seeder has no inherent control over the seed, but the reason it's such an effective tool for the Dreaming Dark is because most quori are devoted to their cause and content to be cogs in a big machine. So TYPICALLY the new seed is equally dedicated to the cause and ready to help however it can... though as noted in Secrets of Sarlona, there can always be exceptions who turn their backs on the Quori agenda.   Assuming the seed is a willing operative, I would expect the Dreaming Dark to assign a quori handler to it, who would be stationed in Dal Quor ready to relay messages and instructions. This would be a lesser quori - so NOT the seeder, as a quori powerful enough to seed is an important operative. This is one of the major strengths of the Dreaming Dark - through Dal Quor, they have an incredible communication network, and the Dreaming Dark can be kept up to date on events going on across the world.   Can a mind seed be possessed by the quori spirit? They could CHOOSE to be possessed, like any other mortal. But it's not the automatic right-of-possession a quori has over its vessel. So a seed working with the Dark would probably trust that there's a good reason and allow possession; while a rebel such as Keshraa the Fallen isn't vulnerable to possession by seeder Sharadhuna.   2. In my opinion, no. Mind seed destroys the original personality, but not the soul. And thus you can't speak with dead or raise dead. The victim isn't dead, they are simply changed.   3 & 4. There's no difference between the soul of a human and the soul of a human that's been mind seed; what's changed is the memories and personality. When a seed dies, the soul goes to Dolurrh complete with the seeded personality. It can be raised or become undead, and will still have the seeded personality. Which admittedly makes mind seed a truly horrific thing.   Again, all of this is just my opinion, and certainly falls into the category of "Whatever best suits your story"... but that's how I'd do at my table.
#3 Beoric Jun 08, 2015 6:13:45	Thanks, Keith, that is helpful.  It looks like the ghost of Lalia d'Deneith may still have a role to play.   It does raise an interesting nature vs. nurture issue, because if a person's brain is hard wired for compassion, for example, it could conceivably have an impact on how the mind seed personality is expressed.  Maybe that could be the explanation for rogue mind seeds.
#4 Hellcow Jun 08, 2015 10:24:58	As I recall, that's the basic idea behind Keshraa the Fallen... that the original personality was so fluid and slippery that the seed couldn't overwrite it completely, and thus you ended up with someone with the memories and cunning of Lady Sharadhuna but without her loyalty to the Quori cause. I'd expect this sort of thing to be rare and only a danger when dealing with truly remarkable individuals (such as, say, PCs)... but it is the reason the Quori DON'T simply mind seed every important individual in Khorvaire. The more remarkable the subject, the greater the risk that the new seed my retain something of the old and develop its own desires.
#5 Tempest_Stormwind Jun 09, 2015 19:39:00	We've been running Mind Seed the same way since before Eberron, and it's never proven an issue. Keith's gone into excellent detail for Quori dominators' use of the power, too, so I have very little to add on that subject.   In the time between the Expanded Psionics Handbook and Eberron's publication, I once wrote up an extended treatise on a hypothetical psionics-heavy tyrant nation and the use of literal thought police therein. It was entirely based on the Material Plane, so the use of Mind Seed was different from the quori, but it was still present, and were that treatise not eaten by the internets, I'd link it. But relevant to Mind Seed, here are two situations where things might get complicated. The first is also a good source of rogue mind seeds, and it may even work in Eberron. The second is more to the point of how PCs might choose to use it, and of the unintended consequences when employed in that way.   Seeds are used to create copies of high-ranking and loyal leaders, ensuring that the chain of command is cohesive and uniform throughout the state. (This is similar in spirit to the use of Mind Seed by quori - your material operatives behave entirely in sync with their extraplanar progenitors.) The twist is, what if the progenitor had some latent psychology that made him likely to rebel, but his life circumstances didn't cause that to come to the surface - but the new life of one of his seeds does have such an experience? All of a sudden you have two "copies" of the "same" person but with shifting loyalties - and it's a situation where the seed himself can keep the masters in the dark. (In an Eberron context, the original kalashtar spirits came from quori who had sympathetic beliefs; it's implied that these were the only such quori, and the modern quori are unified in their darkness. But what if one of them could have been the sixty-eighth kalashtar spirit, but wasn't, due to an existence of darkness? Would some of his seeds encounter something on Eberron that stirs that latent light within them? How would that change those seeds' interactions with their masters?). This would strongly imply that any society capable of bestowing Mind Seed on some of its subjects (i.e. through telepath levels) would want to invest in incredibly good quality control before doing so. Mind Seed is a high-level power; the characters capable of manifesting it are extremely knowledgable about the properties of magic. They would know, in-character, that a successful seed is basically irreversable, and the subject's original personality is completely irretrievable short of something like a Wish. As such, you might find certain "by any means necessary" characters - including PCs - who would employ the power not as a way of copying onesself, but rather as a way of erasing a target from existence in a way that realistically could not be undone. (This is actually hard to do, since Mind Seed is not employable in combat and it has the [Mind-Affecting] descriptor, so most of the really high-end foes would be immune to it anyway (i.e. it won't be possible to do this to alter a Daelkyr, and trying it on an Overlord is right out), but for more down-to-earth campaigns, it can be one amazingly hard-to-beat GTFO against recurring villains. However, it's an [Evil] power (actually the only [Evil] power in the entire XPH), so even if PCs try this with the best of intentions, it might have consequences on the PC himself, especially if he does this more than once. Which leads to the interesting case where the PC might eventually find his earlier seeds being more moral than he's becoming... ...I know I mentioned two, but a third just occurred to me. Kalashtar's dual spirits make them unusually interesting on both ends of the Seed. A kalashtar who Seeds someone else would produce someone who is mentally a kalashtar, who spend their whole lives with a symbiotic soul and deal with the madness that this provides and develop the psychic coping mechanisms involved in handling its influence. Except in this case, the seeded victim has all of the memories of that... but no new signals from the spirit (since the Mind Seed would copy the personality of the kalashtar, including the bits influenced by the quori spirit, but wouldn't forge a new spirit bond nor would it copy the spirit itself). That's a kalashtar whose quori spirit has been removed, more or less - which is terra incognita in Eberron lore, as far as I'm aware. .... On the flipside, a similar story happens if a kalashtar should be Seeded, since it overrides the personality but the link to the quori spirit (spread out across the entire lineage) remains. How would you react to suddenly having thought processes that would be more at home in a lucid dream than in reality, possibly having memories that are not your own, and suddenly you're completely unable to dream to stabilize your subconscious to this new mindset? A kalashtar grows up knowing and learning mechanisms to deal with this, but a seeded kalashtar has had those mechanisms overwritten. In both cases, no one can predict how these characters would act - and since Mind Seed is a high-level power, the resulting seed is a mid-to-high-level telepath in Eberron, a world full of lower-level characters. I expect havoc. (And am simultaneously quite glad that these are all extremely rare situations.) Mind Seed is a wonderful power narratively, and utterly terrifying. Wield it in your story like you would a Great Old One, and I don't think any of your choices would be wrong.