The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection
Law Breaking Vs Black Magic [Spoilers for everything]
robertltux:
--- Quote from: huangjimmy108 on November 27, 2013, 01:52:16 PM ---
Thomas:
Thomas have dual souls. I suspect that doing black magic, the really tainting kind, will reduce his ability to control his demon half.
It is also have to be noted that a whampire's mind whammy, especially the wraith family brand is sort of seduction. In other words, their power entice a human, not compell them. As long as a whampire limits the intensity of his or her mind powers, it might not broken their preys free wil at all.
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The hinge here with Thomas is he can walk points along the line from "nibble on request" to "want more Toe-mas" to "I only wear silk and velvet because im a Playtoy" to "Music Of the Night" to "gee i think i broke her" so as long as he goes only to Bunneh he should be stay more or less human. I do think that Justine has tracked down a number of Bunnehs to keep him fed.
Serack:
--- Quote from: Tami Seven on November 27, 2013, 02:55:20 PM ---Perhaps one of the reasons why there are so few WCV Wizards (JB once said there were some, but I have yet to see any of them). The risk of being tempted to do Black Magic, the risk of being tainted by it, might be too big a price. Even the darkest of WCV hold onto their mortal souls to some degree. They all know that if the demon did take over completely, it would be worse than what happened to Thomas in TC. They would be nothing more than predatory, feral animals. Not mindless, but not civilized in any way and certainly not themselves.
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First the (unverified) WoJ on WCV wizards:
--- Quote ---Unverified WoJ from the 2011 Naperville signing:
'Are there White Court vampire wizards?'
Yes, there are. Thomas is middle-of-the-road in power and [ed: think I'm remembering this correctly] the strongest don't get as strong as mortal wizards [/ed], but they can pull off some strong tricks with their Hunger.
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We also have this WoJ:
--- Quote from: jimbutcher on February 22, 2010, 11:03:38 PM ---2) Wizards were a hell of a lot more rare in centuries past. Their numbers have increased along with the world population, but back then a given country was lucky if it had produced a single wizard-level talent more than about one generation in three.
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Ok, with those 2 quotes out of the way, I'd say we have few WCV wizards because wizards are rare, and with only so many WCV's out there, WCV wizards are even rarer.
And my hypothesis on why WCV wizards likely don't get as powerful as mortal wizards is a kind of, "my cup is already full" type thing, where the Mortal vessel already has this demonic power that is stretching the amount of power a Mortal vessel can bear, and then if they are a wizard on top of that, they can't fit much wizard power into the room that is left.
Another way of looking at it is when you have a video game that has particular "pure" archetype classes, and hybrids between them, the hybrids do not do the individual tasks as well as a "pure" class because they have to share their net stats with the other abilties they have... I'm not sure I expressed that well. So I will give an example from Old School Everquest.
Warrior class: Best tank in the game. This means that when something attacks him, he doesn't get hurt much, and he can dish out a pretty good mellee can of whoop-ass.
Priest Class: Best healer in the game. Has some spells that hurt undead bad. Has some innefficient spells that can hurt anyone.
Paladin Class: Hybrid between Warrior and Priest. Tied for 2nd best tank in the game. He can handle himself pretty well in a fight, but can't dish out as big a can of whoop-ass, and won't last quite as long, but he's still pretty dang tough. He also can heal, but a priest 20 levels (out of 50 total) lower than he is, could probably do a better job at it. He has spells that can hurt undead too but not quite as powerfuly as the Priest. He also gets a unique, super slow refresh ability that can instantly heal someone to full health.
The WCV wizard is the hybrid. He's not quite as good at wizarding as the fully mortal Wizard, but he can make up for it with some of his WCV tricks.
huangjimmy108:
--- Quote from: Tami Seven on November 27, 2013, 02:55:20 PM ---Molly's tainted just as Harry is. But like Harry, she has other factors to counter balance the taint. Her upbringing in a very religious family, her relationship with Harry and what he taught her, and her own sense of right and wrong. And now the taint might not be so much an issue as the mantle of the WL. Depends on which corrupting force is stronger and if she is stronger than both.
Kemmler was a prime example of why the Wardens were created. He was the bad one, the one that broke the Laws and delved into Dark Magic with both eyes open.
The Wardens swords are their protection against Black Magic, a way for them to dispatch a Warlock without being tainted themselves.
First point of correction, Thomas (and other WCV) don't have two souls. They have a demon parasite attached to their soul. Does the demon have a soul of its' own? Most demons probably don't.
Would Thomas using Black Magic be affected by the Taint? That is the question I asked, but you do have a good point. If Thomas' mortal soul was corrupted by the taint of Black Magic it might very well give his demon the opening it needs to take nearly full control. The Thomas we know would be gone for good.
Perhaps one of the reasons why there are so few WCV Wizards (JB once said there were some, but I have yet to see any of them). The risk of being tempted to do Black Magic, the risk of being tainted by it, might be too big a price. Even the darkest of WCV hold onto their mortal souls to some degree. They all know that if the demon did take over completely, it would be worse than what happened to Thomas in TC. They would be nothing more than predatory, feral animals. Not mindless, but not civilized in any way and certainly not themselves.
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In PG, Murphy admits feeling tainted when she shot agent benton during FM. If this tainted feeling is more then just a feeling, it means that killing a mortal with or without magic carries a cosmic penalty by itself.
It does make sense in a way. Killing a mortal with free wil break their free wil, that mortal cannot choose anymore. Because breaking free wil = evil in the DV, penalty must be levied, magic or no magic.
Using magic to cause a death unintentionally carry a bigger penalty. If it is intentional the penalty is bigger and the penalty for using magic to directly and knowingly to cause a mortal's death is bigger still.
Molly the rag lady do the killing in such an indirect way that the victim still have a choice to act. The glamor she uses still allow her target to choose differently, limited those choices may be. I think her penalty for those acts is probably not much bigger than what Murphy expirience. She does do it more than once though, so the cumulative effect may be quite considerable.
As for kemmler and other worlocks. The point of my previous post is to empahsize that human's free wil is not so easily eradicated. It is not so easy to completely corrupt a human to the point that the human is not human anymore.
I suspect that any acts of compassion and kindness may strengthen the mortal's free wil and soul, much like having fun and doing good deeds suppose to rejuvenate Harry's soul more quickly after using soulfire. In Theory, constant and long term acts of free wil to avoid and resist temptation might strengthen a person wil to the point that he or she could control or maybe even banish the darkness in their soul. Turning that person into a saint. This , in my theory, applies to Harry, Molly and Thomas. Hell, perhaps even for Nicodemous.
123456789blaaa:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on November 25, 2013, 06:03:04 PM ---I think part of the point of DB is that Harry's rules-lawyering about Sue succeeds because of the point of the law against necromancy actually being "do not commit crimes against dead people" rather than "this force is inherently Evil", there is the bit (I think it's chapter 19 of DB, I posted the quote a few weeks back but am not finding it now) where he realised that Kumori using necromancy to save the life of the gangster who got shot was a good act and that he had previously been wrong about necromancy being an inherently evil force.
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This?:
--- Quote from: Dead Beat, Chapter 19 ---I sat in the backseat with my eyes closed and thought about what I'd learned. Kumori had saved the gunshot victim's life. If everything Lamar had said was accurate, it meant that she had gone out of her way to do it. And whatever she'd done, it had been an extremely difficult working to leave a mystic impression as intense as it did. That might explain why Kumori had done very little during the altercation with Cowl. I had expected her to be nearly as strong as her partner, but when she tried to take the book from me, her power hadn't been stronger than my own muscles and limbs.
But the Kemmler Alumni Association was in town with some vicious competition in mind. Why would Kumori have expended her strength for a stranger, rather than saving it for battling rival necromancers? Could the shooting victim have been important to her plans in some way?
It didn't track. The victim was just one more thug for the outfit, and he certainly wasn't going to be doing anything useful from his bed in intensive care.
I had to consider the possibility that she'd been trying to do the right thing: using her power to help someone in dire need.
The thought made me uncomfortable as hell. I knew that the necromancers I'd met were deadly dangerous, and that if I wanted to survive a conflict with them, I would have to be ready to hit them fast and hard and without any doubts. That's easy when the enemy is a frothing, psychotic monster. But Kumori's apparently humanitarian act changed things. It made her a person, and people are a hell of a lot harder for me to think about killing.
Even worse, if she'd been acting altruistically, it would mean that the dark energy the necromancers seemed to favor might not be something wholly, inherently evil. It had been used to preserve life, just as the magic I knew could be used either to protect or to destroy.
I'd always considered the line between black magic and white to be sharp and clear. But if that dark power could be employed in whatever fashion its wielder chose, that made it no different from my own. Dammit. Investigation was supposed to make me certain of what needed to be done. It was not supposed to confuse me even more.
When I opened my eyes, thick clouds had covered the sun and painted the whole world in shades of grey.
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So it's more like he finds that things may be greyer than he thought rather than "Necromancy=not inherently evil".
On the other hand, later on we also get this quote:
--- Quote from: Dead Beat, Chapter 29 ---Maybe that wasn't the point. Maybe this was one of those things in which the effort meant more than the outcome. I mean, if there was a chance, even a tiny, teeny chance that Kumori was right, and that the world could be so radically changed, wouldn't I be obliged to try? Even if I never reached the goal, never finished the quest, wouldn't the attempt to vanquish death itself be a worthy pursuit?
Wow.
This question was a big one. Way bigger than me.
I shook my head and told Kumori, "I don't know about that. What I know is that I've seen the fruits of that kind of path. I saw Cowl try to murder me when I got in his way. I've seen what Grevane and the Corpsetaker have done. I've heard about the suffering and misery Kemmler caused—and is still causing today, thanks to his stupid book.
"I don't know about something as big as trying to murder death. But I know that you can tell a tree from what kind of fruit falls off it. And the necromancy tree doesn't drop anything that isn't rotten." "Ours is a calling," Kumori said, her voice flat. "A noble road."
"I might be willing to believe you if so much of that road wasn't paved in the corpses of innocents." I saw her head shake slowly beneath the hood. "You sound like them. The Council. You do not understand."
"Or maybe I'm just not quite arrogant enough to start rearranging the universe on the assumption that I know better than God how long life should last. And there's a downside to what you're saying, too. How about trying to topple the regime of an immortal Napoleon, or Attila, or Chairman Mao? You could as easily preserve the monsters as the intellectual all-stars. It can be horribly abused, and that makes it dangerous."
I faced her down for a long and silent second. Then she let out a sigh and said, "I think we have exhausted the possibilities of this conversation."
--- End quote ---
Now I know you probably think Harry is mistaken and close-minded here but I'd say that Necromancy=evil is what Jim is going for. There is the Mother Winter-Kumori-Death connection for one thing.
huangjimmy108:
About Necromancy:
I believe there is a WoJ that states good and evil in the DV is determine by how much that act violate free wil.
By that parameter, necromancy by itself is not evil. Unfortunately, when your magic is the kind that works between life and death, the most obvious way to apply it is to kill someone and try to raise them. The killing part is evil without a doubt, the raising part though is somewhat questionable. I think that so long as the necromancy working does not tamper with mortal souls with free wil, it is relatively neutral on the good and evil scale.
Mortimer plays with ghost and he is quite sane. Harry eats Kravos's ghost and he doesn't seem to suffer any ill effects. Raising an animal is also safe, because animal does not have free wil.
One thing, necromancy is extremely dangerous. Though necromancy by itself may not be evil, I, personally, will question the motive of someone who persues this particular diciplin of magic. Why the hell do someone studies necromancy if he or she is not trying to kill someone?
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