Po souls - i.e. the ones that turn into hungry ghosts and are the primary practical reason it's important to respect the dead - give no fucks about head trauma under ES's idea.
Hungry ghosts? You mean the braindead murder phantoms with the wits of a boiled egg? Sure, those will still rise, but you can kiss actual intelligent ghosts goodbye unless their reason for lingering doesn't involve criminality at all.
Also, mutilate and destroy aren't even synonyms; depending on the actual consequences of head trauma-induced soul mutilation, your proposed solutions might actively make things worse.
How? Worst case scenario, their ghost is angry. Thing is, they'd be angry if they died of being stabbed or poisoned, too. Meanwhile, lobotomizing criminals and then having their technically-living remains quietly suffocated while a priest chants and slings incense around erases like 90% of malevolent hauntings,
hun and
po alike. As for mutilation not equaling destruction? Fine, hope you like neurotoxins being involved in any major killing.
On further thought, this whole "brain damage = soul damage" thing is even dumber than I thought, since under that model
hun-ghosts become insanely easy to deal with - just land one solid hit and it'll spend the rest of eternity quietly shitting its pants in the corner (or pass right into Lethe, assuming it doesn't have any physical Fetters). If damaging a persons'
hun is literally
what brain damage means in the setting, then
hun-ghosts are hilariously frail and easy to twist to your own ends. The Underworld would be run by a mixture of First Age
yidak & living Necromancers, since at least they don't lose basic neurological function whenever they get a paper cut.
Having physical damage to the brain harm the
hun, if you decide to use it, should probably mean that if somebody's brain is damaged before they die, then their ghost (if they leave one) will need time to recover from the trauma, or have temporary amnesia or something. Making it easier to shut down hauntings in such a simple way is a bad move when Creation already has interesting and well-established ways of doing so.
