The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
How do Wizards make a living?
dspringer1:
Random comments
Traveling via never-never can be a good way to travel the globe, but it can be very dangerous so you are pretty limited to the paths and routes. I can see the value for smuggling small high value items. And I suspect the routes that are safe are also controlled by the White Council - which would probably become aware and seriously annoyed if you make their paths part of your weekly drug smuggling run.
It would be extremely dangerous to try to use the never-never to get into bank vaults. Remember, the other side has to have an affinity. To get to a never-never spot that opens into a bank vault means you need to break into a never-never bank vault just to walk into a mortal bank vault. Not seeing how that is easier.
I suspect the White Council does help its members with identification issues. They have the expertise and contacts to make this work pretty easily and their members would be pretty clueless for the most part.
Robberies in general, especially robberies targeting illegal organizations like drug dealers or gangs require good intelligence and open you up to risk. After all, you physically have to enter their premises and take stuff. You have to collect intelligence - which might be noticed or wrong. And if you hit the same place multiple times, they will adapt. Small robberies minimize risk, but consume a lot of time per dollar gained. Large robberies get you a lot more cash, but require a lot more research and/or connections to make happen and a lot more danger when selling the goods (if not taking cash). And if your robberies are too spectacular, the wardens might get annoyed as they do like to keep mortals clueless about the presence of magic. Not a law of magic, but they can still make trouble for you.
I guess I am saying that crime is an approach that can work, but the wizard must be intelligent and skilled in how they go about it to manage the risk.
Bad Alias:
Gathering intelligence is what wizards do, so that shouldn't be a problem. Also, why rob when you can burgle undetected?
As for the White Council being annoyed or interfering with illegal activity, they wouldn't. That's what Harry's mom objected to. Harry and Luccio have an entire conversation about why the Council doesn't do anything as long as the practitioner isn't violating the laws of magic.
Kindler:
Most banks aren't prepared for a magical assault. A wizard could walk in under a veil or an illusion, hold the place up, step into the bathroom, and come out through a Way that takes him a thousand miles away in minutes.
The point is that you can escape REALLY easily. Mortal authorities will not be able to catch you unless you're careless or stupid. And, if you're a wizard-level talent (assuming you'd have to be in the first place), nobody would even know who was responsible in the first place. Hell, I'd make an illusion based on my worst enemy and wear a nametag. "My name is Sally Fields, and I am here to rob you. Also, I'm a horrible racist!" News headline:
"SALLY FIELDS ROBS BANK IN BRAZEN HEIST, DISAPPEARS WITHOUT A TRACE"
"RACIST ASSAULT BY SALLY FIELDS ENDS IN $250,000 STOLEN IN DAYTIME ROBBERY"
Gangs would be even simpler. Just go in disguised as a rival gang member. Put tracking spells on whoever you have to to find out where they keep cash. And it's not like they're going to call the cops. I mean, crap, we saw Gatekeeper put everyone but Harry to sleep across water, at the drop of a hat. If I could do that, there is pretty much nothing anyone could do to stop me. If I couldn't, I'm sure I could learn enough evocation to get it done. If I couldn't do that, it's all about trickery and illusion. If I couldn't do that, I'd shanghai some faeries into getting the cash for me.
There are so many options that it makes me wonder why there aren't more wizardly criminals.
morriswalters:
I have a very parochial view on this. A thief is a thief. When you steal something there is always a victim. I suspect if there were wizards, they would follow the lead of most of the human race and not be thieves. And if wizards would steal from mortals, then sooner or later they would steal from other wizards. Thieves are like that.
And in the Dresdenverse just because most mortals don't believe in magic doesn't imply that none do. Too many wizard thieves would sooner or later draw attention to what they were doing and someone would make it their business to make them stop. They might not care about murder and mayhem by the Reds, but get into their wallet and someone will bleed.
In terms of job opportunities, the Council runs a shadow government so wizard civil service is an option. How many people does it take to make HQ function, much less satellite offices.
Bad Alias:
--- Quote from: morriswalters on November 15, 2019, 07:54:53 PM ---Too many wizard thieves would sooner or later draw attention to what they were doing and someone would make it their business to make them stop.
--- End quote ---
I'm not suggesting a wizard be a career thief. Just burgle a million dollars or so from criminals. After that, one should be able to invest that money in income producing property and live well enough off of that, especially if the wizard does the occasional "wizard" job.
Other ways to make money:
Treasure Hunting: I think someone mentioned finding and recovering shipwrecks. But we don't need to limit it to shipwrecks. Any sort of ancient sites or treasures could be found by wizards when scientists couldn't otherwise. Even locating archaeological/paleontological sites that don't have any "treasure" would be a valuable service someone would be willing to pay for.
Bounty Hunting/Informing: Simple bail jumpers to those $25 million bounties the U.S. government places on terrorists. This could obviously get pretty dangerous, but the great thing about those $25 million (and a lot of crime informing) bounties is that you only have to provide information. Depending on your sources, this could be easy and safe or dangerous and hard.
My brother has proposed making or recruiting spirits of intellect and selling them to wizards so they (the recruited spirits and the wizards) could have access to the internet. The "making" them is based on Evil Bob's existence. I'm not so sure that's an easy or feasible thing to do, but I'm also not sure it isn't. The recruiting is based on enticing them with access to "all human knowledge," i.e., the internet.
Cheating at casino's is something suggested, indirectly, by the text. There's a line in one of the descriptions of Mac's about a practitioner who has "enough kinetomancy to" cheat at dice. With $139, one could place three bets on a roulette wheel and make about $400,000. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roulette#Full_completes/maximums. Betting $139 on a single 35 to 1 bet yields $5,004. A second 35 to 1 bet of $1,000 (the table maximum according to some gambling website) yields another $35,000. A $40,000 "complete bet" yields 392,000. I imagine their are other ludicrous bets to be made with similar results on other games of chance. There are several accounts of people using math and engineering to legally take casinos for over at least million (either dollars, pounds, or euros), and that's just on the roulette page I linked to. I don't know how long, and for how much, you could gamble before getting into one kind of trouble or another, but you could definitely make enough to live comfortably, if not extravagantly. I'm not sure if this would work in the DF because Vegas is a very supernatural city according to the Paranet Papers.
If you could make somewhat accurate predictions of the future that are only occasionally perfectly accurate, you could make playing the lottery a no lose situation and would eventually hit the jackpot.
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