The City of Dohle, or Why Jackdaws Always Look So Harrassed

Everyone knows that all your memories and personality are stored in your soul. Otherwise, how do you remember who you are if you’ve been polymorphed? Obviously the brain is important, but presumably it’s only where the soul is housed. That’s why bigger or more complex animals need larger brains; their souls need a bigger “interface” to interact with the whole body. Obviously.

Which of course means you can move souls about. When you die they go off to be sorted into one of the thousands of afterlives, based on your beliefs, actions, what the gods think of you and a certain amount of luck. The Jackdaw Queen oversees the whole thing, which is actually carried out by an uncountable number of jackdaws. Ever wondered why jackdaws look a bit like harassed bureaucrats? Now you know.

They do their best, but mistakes happen fairly often. Don’t get too comfortable in your afterlife until a few centuries have passed, incidentally. Souls get moved around all the time, but the backlog of errors to fix is pretty long. You can probably relax after half a millennium at least.

To the right kind of rather odd person, that’s all very interesting, because it means anyone could move souls around if they wanted to, and knew how. It can’t be that complicated if jackdaws can manage it.

Many people have tried, and some have succeeded, but none have been as successful as the residents of Dohle.

The City of Dohle

Dohle is a city to the south west, nestled in the mountains above the desert. It was originally a monastery dedicated to the Jackdaw Queen, and high up in the mountains it still is. Natural cave formations have been artfully carved into a beautiful, sprawling network of rooms and balconies, perforated with uncountable openings for the jackdaws to come and go.

If you want to find out where someone’s soul is, there’s a good chance they have it recorded somewhere in the reams and reams of parchment, neatly rolled and stored in the coolness of the catacombs. Good luck persuading them to let you check though, or finding anything if you do.

That’s not what they’re famous for, however, impressive as it is. The city grew up around the monastery because they’re also extremely skilled at moving souls between bodies. Now, after centuries of them doing so, it’s a way of life for the residents.

Your Body Isn’t a Temple, it’s a Holiday Home

To the Dohlians, your body is a bit like a house. You own the one you were born in, but it’s not who you are. Also, if you stay inside it too long, your friends will start coming by to check if everything’s okay. Swapping bodies with people is normal and healthy and good for you! It broadens your perspective and makes you understand others better.

It’s so commonplace that much of their economy is built around it. There are people who make their livelihood by being fit and gorgeous, so they can rent out their body for a day or a week. Literally. Doctors can pop into their patient’s body for five minutes to feel what’s wrong. Close friends and married couples will swap bodies just for fun, although it’s generally considered incestuous and weird to inhabit the body of someone you’re closely related to.

The whole thing is governed by an incredibly complex series of laws, contracts and something akin to insurance policies. Generally speaking, though, don’t do anything to yourself that wouldn’t want done to yourself and it’ll be fine. Also, never pretend to be someone you’re not. This is drilled into children from a young age, and the priests come down HARD on anyone who doesn’t respect this rule. More on that later.

The prostitution scene is, as you might suspect, absolutely wild and will not be discussed further here. Use your imagination.

Pronouns are generally not used. Everyone refers to themselves and everyone else by their name. It’s just less confusing all round.

Permanent moves are rare, but not unheard of. There’s yet another complex series of contracts and rules and such that govern them (you might be seeing a theme here) but they are allowed, so long as everyone involved is fully on board and understands what they’re doing. The ritual is expensive and takes a while; the move is straightforward and the same as any other, but reassigning the soul so that the person shows up as the correct owner of the body is tricky and only conducted by high priests.

Unsurprisingly, Dohle draws a lot of trans people from all over the world. The Dohlians are well aware that sometimes you get a male soul in a female body or vice versa. Those jackdaws do their best, bless them, but even the most devoted worshipper of the Jackdaw Queen would happily admit that they screw up now and then. If you’re not a resident, you’ll need to find someone to swap with and you’ll have to go through a lot of paperwork to convince them that you’re sincere, but they’ll happily make the switch for you. A donation to the temple based on how wealthy you look is optional, but in a very pointed way.

Sometimes, however, someone wants a new body without having one to trade. The cough went to your lungs and you haven’t got long left, or the rope snapped and the rock crushed your legs, or similar. If you’re lucky, there might be a spare body for you.

Which leads us to the jars.

The Jars

The temptation is obvious. Maybe you’re old and getting a bit creaky or you really don’t like how you look or you’re just sick of your life and responsibilities. Maybe you got into a body and got really drunk and messed it up bad. Maybe you think you can live forever by possessing one of your grandchildren every time you get old (gross, by the way, and it’s much easier to accomplish immortality in other ways).

You broke the rules, deliberately and badly, and that was a very, very bad choice.

The priests are pretty tolerant of the shenanigans the general population get up to, but they enforce the law mercilessly too. They’re also quite capable of removing a soul and placing it in a specially prepared container, in a similar way to the magic jar spell.

When this happens, the body doesn’t die, it just stops doing anything. The heart keeps beating and the lungs keep breathing, and it’ll keep doing that until a soul is restored to it to pilot it.

The soul in the jar experiences nothing. Not even darkness and silence, because you can’t even feel the absence of sensation.

A day of that is usually enough to convince someone to never, ever do anything wrong again. A week may be used for serious crimes. You’ll know the people who’ve spent time in the jars, because they’re extremely careful to make sure they’re doing nothing wrong all the time. They also have a slightly unsettling hunger for life and sensation, and may cry if left alone in the dark.

For the worst crimes, however, the soul is simply removed and discarded. You absolutely can forfeit your right to corporeal existence, because someone else could really use it. Your soul is given to a jackdaw to be taken to wherever it should go, and your body is stored until someone needs it.

There aren’t generally many unused bodies on hand as most are restored to their original owners fairly quickly, and demand for unused bodies greatly outstrips supply. Nevertheless, there are novice priests whose job it is to keep both the temporary and permanent “residents” healthy. They move through the storage halls, possessing each body in turn, having a meal and something to drink, performing some light exercise to prevent muscle wastage, then emptying its bowels and bladder to keep things tidy.

If they get bored and decide to muck about with the bodies, well, no one’s checking that closely. So long as they stay in good condition.

There are rumours of souls permanently confined to jars, but if they exist, they’re very well hidden. Such a punishment might be considered the worst thing you could do to someone. Removing a soul from the natural s cycle would definitely be considered a terrible sin against the Jackdaw Queen too. Still…the rumours never quite die.

How to Use This in Your Game

If you want to use this in your game, the first thing to do is check if you have trans people in your group and if so, check how they’d feel about it. They might enjoy a bit of fantasy wish fulfillment or you might hit a nerve if they’re struggling with all the various setbacks, problems and frustrations trans people have to deal with on a regular basis.

If that’s all good, then it can just be a weird place to walk through. A hoary old man you’ve never met before walks up to you in the street, greets you like you’re acquaintances and carries on the conversation you had yesterday with a cute woman in her twenties. The shopkeeper is in a different body every day you go to get supplies but always knows what your usual order is. People at the inn start asking gently if you’re doing okay, you’ve been in that body a while and maybe it’s time to go out for a bit?

If a party member has some longstanding issue like a missing arm, maybe they can get a replacement body. It should definitely come with a tough quest and an adjustment period with a dexterity penalty if so. Also maybe some existential confusion if that’s your jam. Alternatively, maybe someone would like to borrow one of the party to go dungeon delving. They’ll pay handsomely, of course.

What if they don’t come back?