Without going to my own Pantheons book right now, I will say right here that there appears to be some confusion here, at least from what I have seen in the last few Posts.Elthbert wrote:
Well I do have pantheons, but it is currently MIA with about 80% of My RIFTS books.... that is another story.
Could you direct me to the TONS of them regardless.
ANd utterly destroying someones soul is significantly differant than simpley killing them.
UNLESS the Rune Weapon in question is the specialized type of Rune Weapon specifically classified as a Holy Rune Weapon, ANY Rune Weapon of the proper type (Greater, Greatest) can be made into a Soul Drinker. Good aligned Rune Weapon is NOT the same thing, and AFAIK Holy Weapons cannot do "bad" actions of any kind; but note that they also don't seem to be self-aware and/or have a soul imprisoned inside them.
However, no matter how "good" or "evil" the intrinsic abilities of the Weapon are, the alignment of the person trapped inside determines the Weapon's alignment -thus, it is possible for a Scrupulous Personality to be part of an 'evil' Weapon (technically the Rune Weapon all by itself has no alignment), and vice versa.
I'm not 100% sure whether or not a Sword that can be handled by a PC of the appropriate alignment, can COMMAND the Sword to perform an action that it normally might not want to do.
And to me, as long as the Soul in question isn't actually tormented, I see no real moral difference between killing the body, and killing its soul.
(Besides.....one could argue that a Scrupulous individual, having his Rune Weapon eat a bad guy's soul, is actually doing a merciful act since, if he just killed the guy, he'd be consigning the bad guy's soul to the Hell of his or her personal belief system; with the Soul Drink attack they are just removed from the Megaverse, probably painlessly.)