Just suggesting, when you sell your soul to a demon/devil--you should be immune to Detect Evil since it senses the soul, in my opinion.

......Your soul is still in your body until you die or until the terms of the contract are completed. You don't lose it immediately upon making the deal. You simply lose ownership after death.

If you no longer have your soul in your body, then wouldn't a paladin detect the feind's soul instead? Making a bad situation FAR worse, for both the paladin and the person with out a soul.

Actually the devil dosent take your soul its more of. "I can do what I want with your soul when you die."

Its like I have acsess to you once you die and can make up whatever Damnation I feel for you.

There are two ways to look at it, and only a canon example can give us a clue as to how the transaction truly operates in this setting.

It’s either a contract that promises rights that vest on death, or it’s a sale and lease back. One confers ownership and possession at a later date, and the other grants ownership immediately, but not possession. In either case the owner does not lose immediate possession, but gives up possession in the future at some point.

Both are valid possible ways to look at this situation here. They’re fundamentally very different transfers of rights, with the same results in the fantasy setting with regard to presence of the “property” (soul) for purposes of detecting the “aura“ associated with the soul.

IMO.

S

Christian myths typically seemed to presume that without a soul you would die, that the soul has your memories and identity, etc. I say this due to the stories of compacts with the devil in which he claims the soul after death, implying it's "sold" but hasn't left the body.

I've read of myths in which, without a soul, a body lies like a vegetable, and if the soul is not retrieved within a certain time span, they die. On the other hand, I've also read of tribes that thought sickness could be ascribed to a missing soul, and the medicine man would try to catch the soul and administer it to the ill person, which implies it might be possible to be conscious and at least semi-coherent, yet without a soul.

It seems though in my opinion that the FR would lean more towards the "you die without a soul" world view, or at least it would reduce you to a vegetable, barring other factors such as posessing spirits or magical forces that can power a dead mass a la golem.

That's Greco-Roman mythology.

There are plenty of mythos where the soul can be outside the body and the person still functions. In some mythos, when you sell your soul to a demon, the demon lives in your body instead of you. In other myths, the demon takes the soul and hides it somewhere-if you're clever, you can get it back before you die.

I dimly seem to recall that acts of great evil can impress an area with a detectable aura of evil, and of course we know that certain magical spells can render the recipient objects or weapons with evil auras to boot. I'm not sure it's really the person's soul itself you're detecting as evil, rather you're detecting a less abstract and more tangible essence of evil itself. I believe undead have no soul, but are still "evil." Not sure on that. Are they animated by posession by evil spirits?

Presuming all that, I don't think that a person (who's most likely already evil,) entering into a compact with an evil demon, would produce a soul-less body that somehow no longer carries the taint of evil. (More likely the opposite, that act would probably make their aura more evil still.)

I do think it would be easily believable that the alignment of the devil or demon might override or strengthen the aura of the person - especially if the devil or demon is in fact properly posessing the person and acting through them.

Also, if the removal of the soul produces a "new personality" in that body, one with a different alignment, I can see how the aura could change in that case to match whatever the aura of the newly remade personality would be.

And of course, if it's in the demon's interest, or part of the compact, they might vest the person with some sort of inherent magic to make their aura undetectable... for a being of great magical power, that doesn't seem like it would take too much effort.

There are already ways to counteract Detect Evil, and if a DM would like to cloak a PC from detect evil, for whatever reason, we can sort those details out. Since a DM would be required for the selling of a soul to a devil, or any other related acts, I'm not sure what more I can say besides that we'll keep it in mind!

Since a DM would be required for the selling of a soul to a devil

Really?

...

I knew someone for got to tell me something. >.>