double-post
Whenever magic is used to kill, some of the
positive force of life that mankind is able to
bring into the universe is truly destroyed—
removed from the universal equation. Kill with
magic, and the darker things inside and outside
of creation grow just a bit stronger. Whether
you’re using magic directly to rip the life out of
someone, summoning up force or flame to kill,
or even murdering someone without magic and
then using the energy created by the death to
power a spell, you are breaking the First Law
of Magic.
In First Law violations, even the grey areas
are pretty bad. If you summon up a gust of wind
to knock someone off a building, you definitely
broke the First Law, even if it’s “just” the fall that
killed him.
The Third Law, though it might seem to be
about a relatively harmless act, recognizes a
single, simple principle: a violation of the mind
is as much a crime as violation of the body—by
some lights, it’s worse.
To read someone else’s thoughts, you have to
cross one of the most fundamental borders in
all of creation: the line that divides one person
from another. When you break into someone
else’s mind to listen to his thoughts, you’re
disrupting the natural order of things. Think of
the mind as a locked house and think of yourself
as someone lacking a key. Sure, you might need
to get in there for the very best of reasons, but
once you’ve done it there’s a picked lock, broken
window, or busted hinge somewhere. In short,
the act is always a violent intrusion, no matter
how “gentle” you are with it.
Even beyond breaking the sanctity of another’s
thoughts, there are problems with what
you find when you invade someone’s mind.
Knowledge is power, after all, and when you
get inside someone’s head, you take a position
of profound power over him. And in this
case, we’re definitely talking the kind of power
that corrupts. Not to mention, it’s sort of the
cognitive equivalent of seeing how sausage gets
made—best left as something you don’t see and
don’t think about too much.
Furthermore, there are plenty of secrets in
the world that are meant to be kept. If there’s an
institutional reason behind the White Council’s
establishment of the Third Law, it’s all about the
secrets. Plenty of wizards keep secrets they don’t
want others hearing about, and discovered secrets
have a way of getting out. Discover enough
secrets, and you end up destroying a lot of what
keeps the world a civilized place—and civilization
is one of those little innovations that helps
keep most of mankind safe from the darkness
lurking around the edges.
Finally, reading someone’s thoughts means
you have to open your mind up to “receive” the
signal. The problem here is that you can’t always
be sure what else you’ll pick up when you do
that. Who knows what sort of nastiness could be
“broadcasting,” hoping you’ll pick them up? And
what will happen to you when you do? (In game
terms, reading someone’s thoughts always makes
you a viable target for mental attacks from both
your victim and whatever supernatural nastiness
might be in the area.)
Further on mind magic:(Your Story pg: 239)
In your game: While it’s hard to break the
Third Law accidentally, it’s very easy to want to
break it. A “justified” violation of the Third Law
can shortcut plenty of mysteries if you rummage
around in the minds of the suspects and find out
what they know.
If a player is particularly committed to that
course of action, and he understands what it
means to break the Third Law, by all means
allow him to do so. But if that happens, every
effort should be made to throw the book at
him—in as entertaining a way as possible. The
moment a player decides to break a mystery
by peeking inside the heads of those involved,
the story stops being about that mystery—and
starts being instead about that choice and its
consequences. Go nuts with it! The secret is now
out, but others’ reactions to it may be worse than
if it had come out naturally; everything starts
proceeding towards greater chaos, right on the
Lawbreaker’s doorstep (and as that hits a high
point, the Wardens can show up).
The Fourth Law
Never Enthrall Another.
A close cousin of the Third, the Fourth Law goes
beyond the simple invasion of another’s mind to
outright mastery over it. Here, enthralling is any
effort made to change the natural inclinations,
choices, and behaviors of another person. And
due to its cousin Law, it’s pretty easy to see the
Fourth as an extension of the concepts there—a
case of more equals worse.
It’s easy to see someone who uses mind magic
to turn a handful of free-thinking people into
his sex slaves as a bad guy, but this is definitely
one of those situations where the paving stones
of good intentions are particularly slick. Much
like the Third Law, the Fourth is an easy one to
want to break for all the best of reasons. Plenty
of people out in the world—possibly even your
friends—make bad choices. Magic could give
you the power to change those choices. Know
people who are tearing their lives apart with
drugs? A simple compulsion to make them
afraid of touching the stuff could set them on
the straight and narrow.
Of course, the problems here are substantial.
You have to hit someone with some pretty
vicious psychological trauma in order to change
his mind enough to force a different course of
behavior. Worse, you may not even realize you’re
doing it at the time. It might sound relatively
harmless to implant an aversion to, say, fatty
foods to help someone lose weight, but the effect
is a lot like wrapping someone’s legs in barbed
wire in order to keep him from walking to
the fridge.
Why so violent? A lot of it comes down to
the principles of free will. The thing that makes
people fundamentally human is free will; when
you enthrall someone, overriding his will with
your own, you’ve robbed him of his essential
ability to be and act human. You’re making a
monster.
This is where another of the Fourth Law’s
cousins—the Second—comes into play.
Changing someone’s behavior is a lot like
changing someone’s body. In both cases, the
victim you’re changing is a lot more complex
than your understanding of it can manage. If
there’s one conceptual thread that runs particularly
strongly through the first four Laws, it’s
that the mind is more or less equivalent to the
body in terms of what should and should not be
done with it. Like the body, the mind is vast and
intricately complex. When you decide to take on
that complexity with something as crude and
simple as a compulsion, psychological trauma is
inevitable. It’s much like trying to fix a computer’s
motherboard with a hammer. Even if you get
it working the way you want, chances are you’ve
messed up something else pretty bad along the
way, or opened it up to some worse consequence
So by my count, that one act of making someone kill themselves by removing joy breaks 3 laws.
1, To find out what makes that person joyful (Lawbreaker 3rd)
2. To manipulate that person's mind and remove those joyful thoughts (Lawbreaker 4th)
3. With the intention of having them kill themselves (lawbreaker 1st).
This person is playing themselves into NPC-dom if they aren't careful. Granted, your table may be playing with different interpretations of the Laws, but that one example was pretty brutal.
