The Dresden Files RPG

The Fifth Law

Necromancy has all sorts of applications, from keeping someone from crossing over Death’s door (or pulling them back from just stepping across the threshold), to reanimating a host of corpses as your bodyguards, waking the ghosts of the Civil War for one last assault, or wrapping ectoplasmic flesh around the bones of a dinosaur and taking it for a ride to save the city. It’s all bad news, and most of it clearly breaks the Fifth Law (the dinosaur might not, thanks to the humans-only technicality of things, but Warden Morgan wasn’t wrong when he called such an act an abomination).

This is all about preserving the natural order of things. To everything there is a season, right? When magic is used to confound Death, the cosmos sits up and takes notice like a doctor noticing a heart murmur in a patient. Left unchecked, such an event has every chance to make a bad situation worse. The things out in the world that want the natural order disrupted are sure to come knocking, bringing all the baggage that comes along for that ride; after all, when nature is confounded, the reality mortals call home gets just a bit weaker, and what’s not to love about that?

The Fifth Law marks the beginning of the section of the Laws of Magic that address the mortal desire to confound the conditions of his own mortality. In a word, death sucks, even if it is a part of the natural order, and ironically it’s only natural to want to do whatever you can to avoid it. While the first four essentially address the rights of the victim, the Fifth Law and the ones beyond it are basic “that’s just wrong” principles.

Undeniably, death itself contains an incredible amount of power thanks to the significance of the ending of a life (the bigger the life, the more power it offers—dead wizards make powerful ghosts). But ultimately it’s power that belongs to the dead. While it’s true that “you can’t take it with you”, the power of your own death is something you can take with you into the afterlife. And when some upstart necromancer like Kravos (or worse, an experienced one like Kemmler) comes along to snag some or all of that power for himself, what does that mean for you, the dead guy? No one really knows for sure, but when it’s pretty clear that the big nasties of the supernatural world get all excited and positive about mortal spellcasters trying such a thing, it’s probably a phenomenally bad idea. Call it a hunch.

And like any Law of Magic, breaking the Fifth puts a stain on your soul, changing you for the worse. This could be anything from taking on an exaggerated arrogance about your power over life and death (think of it as a medical doctor’s God complex with the dial turned up to eleven) to taking on the belief that death is a better state of things than life (with the side benefit that the more death you soak in, the more power you can draw from it). Necromancers run the gamut here, and have proven to be some of the White Council’s most dire and tenacious adversaries.

Dead Brains Part Two

Earlier, we talked about someone reliving the last moments of someone’s life in order to get an idea of how they were killed. This begs the question—was that a violation of the Fifth Law?

It certainly might be argued that way. By reaching into the echoes of that final experience, lifting the sensory information out of the victim’s brain and circumstance, it could certainly be phrased as “reaching beyond the borders of life.”

But for most purposes of the application of the Fifth Law, this is not a violation. Death itself is not being undone; at the end of the day, the victim in question remains an inanimate, inert corpse. If the victim’s last experience was gotten at by making her sit up and have a conversation with the spellcaster, that is a case of violating the Fifth Law, not to mention pretty damn likely to be no use whatsoever. While you might be able to pull enough information about the victim’s last experience out in order to relive it yourself, actual reanimated dead brain meat is not very good at making its way back to the whole thinking part of the thing, let alone speaking.

The Fifth Law and Ghosts

Another area that might seem ripe for Fifth Law violations would be reaching out to talk to the ghosts of the departed. But in the end that’s just the appearance of reaching beyond the borders of life in order to contact the dead. Ghosts aren’t actually the dead themselves—they’re imperfect echoes of a life that once was, creatures of ectoplasm and random spiritual energies that coalesced at the moment of a potent personality’s passing. While ghosts may be evidence of the power of death in action, all they are is a side effect of the process, and as such they only touch on matters of true death tangentially. As a result, the Fifth Law doesn’t even tread close to this matter—a potential source of relief for many a nervous ectomancer looking to stay off the Wardens’ radar.

In Your Game

Death is serious business, and even if the player characters aren’t the ones dropping, that doesn’t mean that they won’t see loved ones fall victim to the battle with the darkness. Such moments are ripe for temptation, and if the players are game for the consequences, don’t fear an effort on their part to bring someone back from the dead. Even if they don’t ultimately attempt it, such a plotline can bring up some meaty themes to explore. But if they do and they succeed, the consequences should come into play in full force. Necromancy is hard to hide, and there will be plenty of forces both pro- and anti-White Council that will be set in motion by such an act. Have fun with it, but be ready for the characters involved to have a close encounter with death of a more personal sort in short order.

There can be plenty of grey-area matters to explore without getting into outright violations of the Fifth Law—see a few of Harry’s actions in Dead Beat to get a handle on that. Staying grey can be a much safer way to touch upon the themes of life and death without calling the Wardens down upon your game. Conversations with ghosts, peering into the last moments of life of a corpse, and trying to touch upon the influences of the dead upon the Nevernever are all entertaining ways to go for an “I see dead people” vibe in your game in a relatively safe and (more importantly) legal way.

General laws of magic, setting