ewancummins wrote:tomokaicho wrote:In 5E 9 out of 10 Barovians don't have souls?
I'm not sure about the numbers, bit the soulless Barovians are apparently a thing in Curse o' Strahd, yeah.
They really went grimdrak with it. Or such is my limited impression.
Alhoon could tell you much more.
This is one of the things that I like with CoS, as it explains why Tatyana (and others) keep returning.
As I understand it, when then Mists surrounded Barovia, they didn't just trap the immortal Strahd but also the immortal souls of everyone in Barovia at the time, death is no escape. When somebody dies, their soul wanders until they find a new life, assuming of course that they didn't die in a manner which made them undead. So, as both the population increased, and souls were removed from the "pool" by becoming trapped as undead, there developed a situation where there were more people being born than there were souls to fill them, so soulless people are born, lacking a souls drive, imagination, creativity, they lead dreary lives.
Those souls that do manage to stay on the cycle of rebirth though, are to some extent, doomed to keep repeating their stories over and over. Ever wonder why "Tatyana"'s father is often the burgormeister? This is why.
It's often been a point of debate whether the general populace of the demiplane are "real", and this answers it nicely I feel. However, this doesn't have to extend outside Barovia, while Barovia seems to have been ripped or copied from a "real" PM location, Darkon for example, was created as an entirely new land, and there is some indication in canon that it had no "native" population except the dead, relying on the memory rewriting properties of the domain to create a native population out of Outlanders and natives of other domains.