Souls

Forgotten Runes Souls
Forgotten Runes Souls
	A Forgotten Runes soul

The Souls are the second collection in the Runiverse and are created by turning Wizards into Souls. They are considered equivalent to Wizards, if not more prestigious due to rarity. They are defined to hold the same rights and priorities as the main Wizards collection. Currently, 642 souls exist (from a possible total of 1,112) in total. Each Soul has a head and a body and may have one of these traits: a familiar, a prop, and a rune. The original blog post outlines the intention of the Souls collection.

Mechanic

A Soul is acquired by submitting a Forgotten Wizard into the Sacred Flame, burning the Wizard (and the Flame token) in exchange for the Soul. The Soul is often, but not always, a transposition of the original Wizard's traits into an undead form. The transmutation of the original trait into a Soul trait is never guaranteed. There are also several other potential outcomes: (i) the Wizard is transmuted into a Unique Soul wholly independent of its traits, often considered a 1/1 Soul, and (ii) the Wizard is transmuted into one of the Undesirables (for example, a coffin, an urn or a tulip). The resulting Forgotten Soul will retain the same token ID as the original Wizard that was burned to create it.

Upon burning, a blockchain transaction is initiated in which both the Wizard and Sacred Flame tokens used are sent to the Ethereum burn address where they are forever irretrievable. On completion, one final entry for the sacrificed Wizard is automatically uploaded into the Book of Lore. The final entry includes a record of the Ethereum block number in which the Wizard was sacrificed, an image of the Soul they have transmuted into, and a link to the Soul's Book of Lore page. Any Wizard burned will no longer be able to create future entries into the Book of Lore as their original self. However, they can create Book of Lore entries as the Soul they have become.

Burn Order

Aside from the token ID inherited from the original Wizard, each Soul has a Burn Order property denoting the order in which it was burned within the Souls collection (starting at 0 with Lich Marquis Lumos (8500)). The Decoder Crystal, accessed from the doorway on the bottom right of the Secret Tower on the Forgotten Runes website, keeps track of the current Burn Order.

Trait Transmutations

In the event that a burned Wizard does not result in a Legendary Soul or Undesirable, each trait is transmuted into one of several possible Soul traits drawn from an eligible pool of possible transmutations for the given Wizard trait. It is possible for a trait to be transmuted into no trait. While the collection remains incomplete, knowledge of all possible outcomes for each individual trait is still not fully known. ElfJTrul and Dotta have stated that there are no plans to reveal unrevealed or unused Soul assets even if all Sacred Flames have been used. The Burn Log created by community member TV keeps track of the outcome of every Wizard burn and allows Wizard owners to view the possible pool of known outcomes for each trait for their Burn candidate.

Familiars that pass through the Sacred Flame seem to have 3 possible outcomes; becoming either a zombie, ghost, or skeleton version of what they previously were. An exception to this is the Ember Frog, which seems to always become a Blaze Frog upon successful burn. There are still rare familiars such as the Astral Snail who haven't been successfully burned enough times to know whether or not more permutations of them exist in the Souls collection. Wizards without a Familiar have a chance of gaining a Thylacine,Resurrected Dodo, or Resurrected Smilodon Kitten. Wizards without a Rune have a chance to gain the collection exclusive Rune of Souls.

Legendary Souls

Legendary Souls are special 1/1 Souls that are summoned based on Burn Order. A Legendary Soul will override all of the traits and rarities of the preceding Wizard as the complement of the Soul's traits are pre-generated.

Starting on October 19th, the official Forgotten Runes Twitter used silhouettes of Legendary Souls as teasers. All but one of these silhouettes have been minted and revealed.

There are currently 14 Legendary Souls revealed, and according to Dotta there are more than 2 left uncovered. All Legendary Souls can be easily viewed on the Forgotten Market here.

Burning Special Wizards

Warning has been given by Magic Machine of the risks involved with burning Wizards, especially in regards to those with rare traits or perfect affinity. Burning a rare or special Wizard does not guarantee a rare outcome, and some one of a kind traits have transmuted into traits found elsewhere in the Soul's collection. However, there have been two cases in which burning of Honorary Wizards had resulted in special souls adorned with halos; The Great and Magical UserGnome (28) and Hedge Wizard Dotta of the Carnival (6044). It is worth noting that most Honorary Wizards burned have received no special transmutation when converted into a Soul.

Undesirables

Each burn has an approximate 10 percent chance of returning an Undesirable rather than a Soul. An Undesirable transmutes the Wizard in entirety into a single object, for example, a Tulip on a Grave or the famed Jelly Donut. The Undesirable NFT then is comprised of the object and a background, instead of having a prototypical head, body, and other traits of a typical Soul. The transmutation of a Wizard into an Undesirable rather than a Soul is considered a risk mechanic; for example, the burning of a Wizard with rare components carries expectation of a rare Souls counterpart - if the Wizard becomes an Undesirable, that rarity is not realized.

These undesirables range from common results such as Ashpiles, and rarer outcomes that are seemingly one of a kind such as No results. Currently, these are the groups of uncovered Undesirables:

Piles
Coffins
Flowers on Graves
Ectoplasm
Jelly Donuts
Urns
Orbs
Void

History

The burning of Wizards was first included in the Roadmap v1. The first burns occurred on All Hallows Eve 2021 in a cluster of sacrifices known as The Great Burning.

Blockchain

The Forgotten Souls contract was created on the 29th of October, 1402h UTC at address 0x251b5f14a825c537ff788604ea1b58e49b70726f. The initial contract cost 0.808 ETH to deploy (at the time, USD 995.53). Unlike most of the other collections, the Souls contract does not have a line of lore. The contract's ERC712 token name is SOULS. The first summon of the Forgotten Souls occurred on the 31st of October, 1547h UTC.

In the Runiverse

The first descriptions of the Souls and their hierarchies are given by ElfJTrul in Wizard Wednesday, Episode 14. The descriptions below are paraphrased from his descriptions:

Liches are the aristocracy of the undead, the gentry of the nightmare dominion. They take great pride in their noble titles. They are power-hungry leaders of the undead world. They maintain their power through political intrigue and corruption, but if that does not suffice, they send out their army of wraiths.

Wraiths are cursed warriors of the undead armies. The captains, the knights, the deacons and the devouts form the ranks of the wraiths. These are mortal enemies of the warriors of the Runiverse and they appear to be immortal to the usual methods of death-dealing.

Zombies are the mindless, rotting wanderers anchored to the earthly plane. They are neither dead nor alive but are forever hungry.

Revenants are zombie-like with increased awareness and sentience. These are beings who are enslaved to their own vices with a gluttony for blood and flesh. Some consider the Revenants as a Lich underclass, but there are rumours of Revenants ascending to Lichhood.

Ghouls are beings of unparalleled debauchery who engorge themselves with reckless abandon, drunk on improprietary and wanton ways. They are so vulgar and disgusting that they are not fit to inhabit Goblin Town.

Spectres are souls who wander the earthly plane but also occupy more amorphous dimensions, other spirit planes. They are generally formed from substances like shade, ectoplasm, and ether.

Phantasms are like Spectres but live wholly on the immaterial plane. It is speculated that they are creatures of the Void itself and disconnected from the affairs of the living.

Poltergeists are beings that live in the Machine realm. Technology in the Runiverse is often occupied by these beings, and glitches are considered "kissed by a poltergeist".

Trivia

Cult members have long recognized that most Forgotten Runes collections have special mints reserved for particular token IDs. Although a Soul's token ID is inherited from the Wizard burned to create it, Burn Order was used by Magic Machine instead to reserve Legendary mints. As a result, there was much anticipation for a Souls#Legendary Souls to manifest from the 666th Sacred Flame sacrifice. The expectation that burn 666 would yield this result was further supported by the lack of new Legendary Soul mints in over 7 months (with White Lady (6283) resulting from burn #565), leading to many holders of Sacred Flames to hold off on burning in hopes of minting the soul tied to burn #666. However, burn #666 did not spawn any special result, and instead it was burn #652 that spawned the 14th Legendary Soul, No results. On Wizard Wednesday Ep.48 it was noted that Dotta and ElfJTrul thought #666 was too obvious of a special burn, and likely to be [MeV'd] as a result so opted to not reserve a special result for it.
The only instance in which a The World Egg was burned was in The Burning of Dotta. The resulting burn however transmuted Hedge Wizard Dotta of the Carnival (6044) into a Special Soul, which seemingly had a pre-determined outcome. Angelic Dotta (6044)'s prop is a Banshee's Harp instead of a successfully transmuted The World Egg. To this day, nobody but Dotta and ElfJTrul know what outcome a successful The World Egg burn yields.
Hedge Wizard Dotta of the Carnival (6044)'s Jewled Hummingbird familiar has completely vanished upon burn, making it the only burn to have resulted in a Wizard losing their familiar entirely.