The Dresden Files RPG

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 their 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 someone who’s tearing their life 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. To change someone’s mind enough to force a different course of behavior, you have to hit them with some pretty vicious psychological trauma. 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 them from walking to the fridge.

Why so violent? A lot of it comes down to the principles of free will. The thing that makes mortals fundamentally human is free will; when you enthrall someone, overriding their will with your own, you’ve robbed them of their essential ability to be and act human.

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 target you’re changing is a lot more complex than your understanding of it can manage. And 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 that complexity on with something as crude and simple as a compulsion, psychological trauma is inevitable. In the end, 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 something else up pretty bad along the way.

Non-Spellcasting Enthrallment

As enforced, the Laws of Magic are applied where human victims are involved, but similarly, they’re primarily applied where human spellcasters are the ones doing the deeds. This means that a White Court vampire laying her sex mojo on a tasty little morsel is not technically breaking the Fourth Law. This doesn’t mean that the White Council has to like it, but usually this is a case where the Accords trump the Laws, at least as far as the politics and legal maneuverings are involved.

For the purposes of game rules, such powers are already assumed to have assessed the costs for holding such sway over another’s mind. No Red Court vampire is going to get slapped with a Lawbreaker stunt for addicting someone to his narcotic saliva. To be frank, with all the other abilities that come along for the ride, he’s already made himself inhuman enough.

In your game

Like the Third Law, the Fourth works nicely as a temptation to do something bad for all the right reasons. Interestingly, though, the Fourth is more effective as a source of story. While a violation of the Third Law can “wreck” a good mystery by drilling right into the thoughts of the suspects, the Fourth doesn’t run as much of a risk there. If anything, it will muddle the situation rather than (literally) magically solve it.

One good way to look at the Fourth Law (among others) in action is to treat it like a wish granted by a particularly mischievous genie. Compulsions created in violation of the Fourth Law should be kept simple—remember, this sort of mind magic is brute-force and ham-handed. And any simple request is ripe for misinterpretation and other “loopholes” in terms of how it gets carried out.

If someone’s operating under a magically induced aversion to drugs, think about what sort of irrationality that might introduce into their lives, especially if they have a hard time finding somewhere away from the drugs entirely. At every turn, there’s something to be wordlessly, absurdly terrified of. Even if the magic was applied with a certain amount of finesse, this victim is on a short trip to some pretty crippling post-traumatic stress disorders. What sorts of things would such a person be driven to do, to deal with that constant fear? And what sorts of nasty things might catch a taste of that fear and come looking for a snack? And even if the surface problem (the drugs) is solved, how does the underlying behavior (addictive personality) surface now?

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General laws of magic, setting