Jivastra

Jivastra

Soulsipper Spiritovore

DESCRIPTION: The jivastra, called soulsippers by some planewalkers, are ten-foot-long incorporeal drifting creatures of glowing energy. To primes, they look uncannily fish-like, despite them bearing no relation to anything aquatic. Perhaps the shape is perfect for swimming through the Positive Material Plane, where they use their dorsal fins to catch currents of light. Eyeless and silent, jivastra have a fringe of gently lashing tendrils around their mouth, two of which are longer than the rest. When a soulsipper is attacked, it starts to sing a haunting melody that planewalkers call the Song of Acceptance. It sounds like crystal wind chimes in a breeze and chant goes the tune is unique to each creature. These songs are able to sooth the tempers of all kinds of creatures, allowing the jivastra to pacify its predators and try to avoid things getting nasty with planewalkers.

PREFERRED HABITAT: Jivastra are native to the soul fonts of the Positive Energy Plane. These vast, little-understood gardens of life force are where preincarnate souls gather in luminous clusters, before they are called into the Multiverse to be incarnated. Soul fonts are strange places, with no sky, no ground, or even no architecture recognisable to mortal senses. Planewalkers describe them as blazing open wounds of raw creative energy, within which jivastra drift like fish through a reef of living light. Within this ecology, the soulsippers graze on the preincarnate souls, perhaps performing some kind of fertilisation or cultivation function—but whose precise nature remains opaque even to the grayest of graybeards. On the rare occasions when they appear away from the Positive, it is as a consequence of following a group of planewalkers off the plane. It seems the intoxicating novelty of a living creature’s soul often proves too compelling to ignore, and jivastra can become stranded and unable to return to their home.

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIETY: Soulsippers seem to possess no language, and appear not to form social bonds, even with their own kind. Their existence is guided by an instinctive movement toward the nearest concentration of soul-energy, whether preincarnate or otherwise. When they gather in the soul fonts, groups of jivastra move in shoals, their behaviour reminiscent of a grazing herd. It is possible that their songs also act as rudimentary social signalling, perhaps an ancient reflex shaped by aeons of pressure from the soulmarauders that hunt them. Whether it represents communication, a plea for calm, or simply a defensive reflex is a question hotly debated by ruvkova scholars.

ECOLOGY: Jivastra act as both shepherds of preincarnate souls, and simultaneously as prey for soulmarauders. Some say that their activity pollinating or fertilising the soul fonts hints at a symbiotic relationship between the jivastra and the Positive Material plane itself. There’s speculation that soulscapers—the mysterious, intelligent architects of the fonts—deliberately cultivate jivastra as maintenance organisms, and their living tools are kept in check by the soulmarauders. Like their distant relatives the xag-ya, soulsippers detonate in a burst of uncontrolled positive energy when significantly damaged. This violent release may itself serve some ecological function too, perhaps seeding the surrounding region with raw life force. Their ability to change phase, and enter a kind of energetic hibernation in which they seem to disperse entirely from existence, may similarly represent a strategy for surviving the lean intervals between the blooming of soul fonts, allowing jivastra to endure indefinitely in a state of suspended-yet-still-sentient nothingness. Or perhaps they simply prefer to lie dormant in that state awaiting the vanishingly infrequent visits of mortals to the Positive. To a soulsipper, the living bodies that encase an incarnate soul are merely inconvenient husks; it is the bright, flavourful spark within that draws its attention, a delicacy compared to the flavourless preincarnate souls that constitute its ordinary diet.

Stats: [D&D 3e | PF 2e ] Bastion of Broken Souls [3e] p24,42-44; Homebrew conversion [PF2e]

Source: Margarita and Jon Winter-Holt. I thought these creatrues deserved a ‘real’ name as well as the nickname spoulsipper. The name jivastra is derived from Sanskrit jīva (living soul/life-force) + sutra (thread); the thread that stitches soul to form. I’ve pitched these creatures are CR 12 rather than the much higher original CR so they are more useful in play, and to better differentiate them from the higher level spiritovores.