Soul Gems in Pathinfder?

[Slayer Lord]

I'm working on designing a homebrew campaign set in the Elder Scrolls universe, and I've been trying to figure out how soul gems would work in Pathfinder, and I'd like to get some ideas.

For those who aren't familiar with the game, soul gems are used by the player to enchant weapons and armor, and to recharge weapon enchantments. In the lore, soul gems are a common, everyday magical item that everyone uses without a second thought, even though they are powered by captured souls: usually animals and monsters. Black soul gems, however, can be used to capture the souls of intelligent beings, which is highly controversial and usually associated with necromancy. It's also been implied that soul gems are used in magic rituals, traps, or constructs, and that a sufficiently powerful necromancer and some daedra can rip someone's soul out and put it in the gem directly instead of killing them first.

The obvious thing is just to treat them as a common material component with extra fluff attached, but that seems kind of boring. Could there be some kind of mechanical benefit to using them compared to other components? Particularly with item crafting. Are there any similar magic items, or fluff-heavy spell components in any edition of D&D that I could look at for inspiration?

Thanks in advance.

[ExLibrisMortis]

The Bind Elemental feat (Eberron Campaign Setting, Magic of Eberron) allows you to bind elementals to reduce magic item crafting costs, up to 20% for a colossal elemental. An equivalent mechanic for soul gems is easy to create.

[Gildedragon]

Iirc PF has a demon that eats souls and pops out gems that reduce crafting costs
And a couple spells that imitate that
In 3.5 there is thianium and khyber dragonshards that can be used to trap souls and one can use souls to reduce item creation costs as per BoVD iirc

[Eldaran]

Daemons use soul gems a lot in Pathfinder, so reading about that (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/daemons#TOC-The-Soul-Trade) is a good start.

[ZeroiaSD]

Iirc PF has a demon that eats souls and pops out gems that reduce crafting costs

Cacodaemon, yes. Commonly used for familiars, even.

[Azoth]

Cacodaemon, yes. Commonly used for familiars, even.

Unfortunately, use of them for soul harvesting is kinda so-so. The low DC for a CL check to raise someone and thus destroy your money is a bit of a turn off personally. At least on anyone you want to stay dead.

Upside is you can summon then at level 3 or 4 respectively.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/s/summon-cacodaemon

Makes them a good wand if used responsibly. If used even to harvest the souls of commoners it is a 4500gp item that can make you 5000gp, so a 500gp profit. Not impressive, but if used on mid level/CR enemies it will generate 25K worth of soul gems.

If you are a bit more haphazard at using something of that nature there is the Talisman of Soul Eating 5.4k pricetag on it. The necklace let's you use the Cacodaemon's Soul Lock ability 1/day indefinitely.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/wondrous-items/r-z/talisman-of-soul-eating


Perhaps an easy method to achieve the goal and feeling you have is to create a level 1 spell that functions like Create Soul Gem; but only functions on animals, vermin, oozes, and MAYBE magical beasts (with Int 2 or less). Give it a 5gp material component cost for the gem needed to house the soul, and remove the Evil tag from it.

This way even the newest of casters can use it by spending 5GP per casting to harvest 10-25gp worth of material to be used in magic item crafting. Unless someone spams it they will not generate enough income to feasibly craft high cost items. This keeps it to being used on low level gear or expendables.

For the recharge feature of Soul Gems in Elder Scrolls games it would not be too terrible to either create a spell or feat that allowed the recharging of charged items with soul gems. Determine the cost of a single charge and the value of the gem(s). Have charges restored at one time be the same as the total value of gems sacrificed that time. Extra go value is wasted.

(e.g. say I wanted to restore charges on my wand of CLW. The wand costs 750gp for 50 charges, so a single charge costs 15gp. I have 3 animal spirit soul gems 25gp value each or 75gp if I use all 3. If I sacrifice all 3 gems I can recharge 5 spent charges from my wand. 75gp(soul value)/15gp(charge value)=5.)