most exploitable sub-humans species for large-scale Rip Soul harvesting?

[Plane]

Soulmancy in World Book 35 (Megaverse in Flames) has higher level spells (such as Permanence) which require a harvested Life Essence as a component.

Far as I know the only way to procure those is via the spell Rip Soul (pg 102 spell for 300 PPE or more PPE as a ritual) where you have to use it immediately (within a melee per level) or otherwise using a CRYSTAL (created by Create Soul Crystal a 30 PPE ritual) and casting Suspend Soul (pg 103 ritual for 150 PPE) to store it long term for later use.

All soulmancers are capable of this - it's part of the initial spell knowledge on page 86.

Rip and Suspend soul are both 11th level and the 15 seconds per level duration of Rip is always going to be too short a window for the same Soulmancer to cast both of them together - even at 16th level you're only getting 4 minutes worth of Rip to cast Suspend and 11-15 rituals always take a minimum of 25 minutes to cast: originally in Rifts it was 1D6x10+15 and RUE 164 shortened it to 1D4x10+15

This would mean you'd have to work in pairs and explain why soulmancers would train apprentices and such things.

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Anyway what I'm getting to here is - what's the most economic way a pragmatic evil-but-not-diabolical-y'know guy could 'farm' life essences here?

IE think the opposite of harvesting elf souls - you don't want to destroy the souls of long-lived slow-reproducing high-IQ beautiful beings who do a lot of good. People would miss them! They'd have powerful allies seeking revenge...

What you want is low-IQ short-lived fast-reprodocing ugly creatures prone to evil... stuff like goblins or ratlings, etc. Minion fodder.

The question here is - how low can we go before it's not souly enough to fulfill the requirement of a life essence?

Rip Soul specifically targets a "living sentient being" so presumably you couldn't use it on the undead? This probably should rule out the "Death Demon" species which would create too easy an exploit since there are ways to turn basically ANY species into a death demon (including sub-sapient things like rats or dogs) and give them higher demon-tier IQ which would probably qualify as what Palladium calls "sentient".

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Palladium doesn't really go into a lot of detail of what 'sentient' is so it's difficult to know where to draw the line in terms of IQ, and it may not use sentient-vs-sapient semantics the way others like GURPS does (IQ 1 vs IQ 6 in that case) so it could require more speculation.

Basically you want to avoid "I steal the life essence of one of the worker bees from my apiary that I farm honey from" kind of silliness.

Not to be intelligence-biased but I was actually wondering if some kind of house rule to make it higher-risk for low-IQ beings would be a good idea. Something like "roll under the being's IQ on a D20 or Rip Soul fails" where there is an incentive to target more intelligent species of life for soul-harvesting and making it lower-reward to mass-cull the stupid.

I imagine overpopulated 'pest' species such as the T-Zee (dimension book 3) would be hard to miss if use this way... I'm not sure if the Xiticix could be used or if they're too alien to have a proper soul.

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Part of the problem is Palladium hasn't been entirely conssitent about what a soul is, or what missing a soul meals. These rules have shifted in many world books, including the Minion War books itself where you'd have hoped it would be more consistent.

Rip Soul explicitly puts a body into a coma for example, whereas Soul Catchers (DB10 pg 66) when they 'rip and capture' via their Soul Stealing ability, there doesn't seem to be any immediate effect at all. They can hold up to ten souls and must either "release or consume" one of the ten to free up room to do further soul-stealing. It is only the 'consuming' which causes negative effects - and it isn't even a coma then - the person just turns pale/sickly and the consumed-soul is in limbo 7-10 yrs before dying and only then does the body just drop dead a year later.

It could be easy to assume this is how all soul-harvesting works but I don't think it is, the Catchers seem to have a very 'lite' version of this which even if they use it up for a burst of PPE there's years to reverse the damage via higher-levels spells.

I'm thinking maybe there could've been a miswrite and "lost, but not destroyed" policy for retrieval is meant to apply to stolen/held souls rather than 'consumed' ones, despite it being written as if it applies to post-consumed ones.

If soul catchers can just release souls (or get exorcised) and this somehow un-consumes them, it creates some kind of infinite-PPE loop?

[ShadowLogan]

Anyway what I'm getting to here is - what's the most economic way a pragmatic evil-but-not-diabolical-y'know guy could 'farm' life essences here?

Without doing an indepth search the most economical way might be to buy a magic weapon (critical, you could use offensive magic spells but PPE) and then capture a Zavor. These guys duplicate when attacked by a magic spell or weapon and will continue to duplicate with each additional attack.

You just can not beat that kind of reproduction. Finding one, well...

Altara might given their reproduction method (see WB2).

Drizzit (WB30 pg79-6) produce 2d4+16 young every 6 months, and they can start at age 10 (40-50 year life span), obviously you need mating pairs.

Palladium doesn't really go into a lot of detail of what 'sentient' is so it's difficult to know where to draw the line in terms of IQ, and it may not use sentient-vs-sapient semantics the way others like GURPS does (IQ 1 vs IQ 6 in that case) so it could require more speculation.

IMHO if its a playable race it is sentient automatically. Races that aren't intended as playable is where it can get mucky, but if its capable of generating "complex" plans it likely is sentient (artificial life like AI or other "robot" constructs can be, but likely do not have a soul).

[implementor]

I think that Soulmancers are generally pragmatic and evil enough that they really don't care who they get the souls from. They're going to use whomever is close at hand. On Rifts Earth, that's humans, usually. It's also why Demons and Deevils tend to keep slaves around, it's not just to have someone around to do menial tasks, it's to have a ready supply of sentient beings to use to fuel Soulmancy spells and rituals.

[Plane]

I don't even know if it would be humans though, humans have various empires out willing to avenge their absence - who's going to avenge some missing ratlings?

Drizzit definitely sound promising. I haven't internalized D-Bees of North America yet.

[Prince Artemis]

Technically, on rifts earth, Xiticix would be the best for this by sheer numbers and rapid production. If one could capture a queen, you'd have a soul factory.

[Grazzik]

All good suggestions, but what about Kydians? Large families, lots of PPE, devout minions, gazillions throughout the megaverse, considered a disposable / renewable resource by their slave-trading Splugorth masters...

[Plane]

yeah that could work, we don't even know if they value their souls, maybe the'd consider it an honor if they're dying and can't be saved to be killed in a ritual that puts the last bit of their mind to use for their splugorth lords and to better their people ?