The Dresden Files RPG

The Second Law

Never Transform Another.

The image of a witch turning someone into a newt is a popular and even amusing notion, but in the eyes of the White Council it’s a deadly serious matter—emphasis on deadly. The Council views such transformations as tantamount to murder, and they’re pretty much right on the money for one simple reason—human minds like to stay at home in familiar human brains. Transform someone into a newt, and you’ve just tried to cram a human mind into a newt’s brain; such an effort (if you’re even bothering to attempt it) usually ends in near-total destruction of the target’s self. Even if you could manage such a feat, the psychological shock the victim undergoes is bad enough that it would make no actual difference.

Not to mention a lot of transformations are pretty ham-handed by necessity. Warlocks attempting such a change usually aren’t well-versed in the ins and outs of human and animal biology, so they have to “fake it” with the new body, putting it together based on an intuitive understanding of how it all fits together. As a result, the new body doesn’t have much of a shelf life once the sustaining magic gives out, as improvised organs rapidly fail.

To take it a step further, let’s suppose you could manage creating the physiology of a tiger but wanted to keep your target’s brain intact—transforming him into a big-brained jungle cat. So how’s that work, exactly? Know of any successful human brain into tiger body transplantations in modern science? Very simply, it doesn’t work—as bad as a spellcaster might be at creating a known different body type out of someone’s flesh, creating an unknown body is even more trouble.

Suppose, however, that you’re able to pull it off—build a designer body, keep the mind intact, and keep the mind from freaking out and ripping itself apart inside its brand-new noggin. To an extent, you should be congratulated—you’ve managed to avoid actually destroying someone in order to accomplish your goal. But you’ve still stuck this hapless soul inside a new body that they don’t have an operator’s manual for. Will they even know how to eat, walk, or do other basic survival tasks? Probably not. In the end, your victim’s in a bad way however it shakes out—death in a variety of sudden messy ways, or at best, life imprisonment in a body that is not their own.

Fake Flesh

Those looking for grey areas and loopholes will be quick to point out that ectoplasm—real-seeming stuff of the Nevernever given a temporary form and reality by magic—can be used to build something that works a lot like flesh (after all, the Red Court uses it to make their outer fleshmasks, and some practitioners use nothing but ectoplasm to create constructs to house summoned spirits). You can certainly pull off a number of nifty effects that way, so long as you’re building on top of an otherwise unmodified human chassis. There are still some “operator’s manual” difficulties that can come from such a change, but there are plenty of ways to get around that. Unfortunately, several of them involve turning over part of the transformed person’s body functions over to a variety of nasty spirits to take care of autopilot duties.

In your game

Unless one of the players has a seriously strong desire to turn someone into a newt, the Second Law won’t make much of an appearance in the game except in the hands of a bad guy. The Second Law isn’t the sort of thing you can break accidentally, like the First. It takes careful planning and a significant amount of supernatural mojo (not to mention ritual time investment) to pull such a thing off.

As magical murder methods go, however, a Second Law violation is pretty “clean”—the body disappears, and who knows? Maybe that stray cat your victim got turned into will end up put to sleep down at the pound (assuming the body doesn’t just break down in a few days as it is)—though it might be even more entertaining for it to end up as some character’s house pet. Still, it’s a great twist to put on the usual “missing persons” case…

GMs should be careful about actually targeting such a spell at the player characters. The threat can certainly hang over their heads, but this is a lot like mind control—it rips away character ownership in a way that can feel pretty un-fun to a player. It’s much better to go after someone the player characters care about to bring a Second Law threat palpably home.

Shapeshifters

So why’s transforming someone else so tough, when a number of supernatural creatures transform themselves into other forms with no trouble at all? Like many things in The Dresden Files, that question has several answers.

First, a number of the creatures—ghosts, demons, faeries, and others—that you’re thinking about are straight out of the Nevernever. Shapeshifting isn’t much of a problem for these guys; their physical form is sort of optional to begin with, so reconfiguration is, relatively speaking, a breeze.

By and large that leaves us with humans who are able to take on alternate forms of some sort, and usually some nasty bit of loophole is in effect. The cursed shapeshifters called loup garou change their shape—involuntarily—by getting possessed by a ravenous demonic spirit, and others such as the hexenwulf form a pact (usually brokered by someone with real power) with a kind of hunter-spirit that knows how to keep the human mind “safe” and to drive their new body according to the host’s instincts. Sadly, the hunter-spirit’s nature tends to start bleeding into the human’s mind, whittling away their sense of self and replacing it by inches. In most of these cases, the transformation these people undergo is the result of someone else making it possible through a violation of the Second Law. Sure, their minds might not be destroyed by it—initially. But the long-term effects on their minds (not to mention the people around them) remain pretty toxic.

That leaves us with the margin case—natural talents like the guys and gals in the Alphas and the change-the-mind-not-the-body lycanthropes . These folks have a natural gift for taking on another form without wrecking their own minds in the process. It’s easy to see these as learned abilities—some shapeshifters may have the aptitude but still need training to access it—and perhaps in some cases it’s merely that.

Regardless of the origin, “natural” shapeshifters break down into two kinds. When the body actually changes (as with straight-up werewolves like the Alphas), usually the new form hews close to nature, too—actual wolves, for example, instead of some super-steroidal mega-wolf. And while there’s an initial learning curve to overcome with “piloting” the new body, it’s very much a case of practice making perfect. Other natural shifters leave the body out of the equation entirely, connecting their minds with the nature of the beast without taking its form, but still benefiting from some beastly attributes.

However you slice it, such natural talents are never transforming someone other than themselves, so the Second Law doesn’t enter into it.

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