The Outer Gates are what keeps the world safe from such things, what locks them away and keeps them outside—and thus, such things are called Outsiders. They are so alien, so not of this world, that few methods of assault stand a chance of giving them more than a moment’s pause. And the intentions the Outside has for us are so dark, so dire, that the Seventh Law is the only one on the books that isn’t conditioned upon casting a spell. Even doing research on the Outside is verboten, setting aside actually pulling power from there.

The Gates are never fully closed. It’s through the tiniest of cracks that the darkest of things come into our world (like He Who Walks Behind). And when someone does pull power from there, forging a bond with a malevolent Outsider force, one of those cracks widens, just a touch. The human race is lucky that few have ever managed such an effort for long, thanks to the efforts of the White Council a particularly zealous enforcement of the Seventh Law.

The Gatekeeper’s Job Description

As much as the Gatekeeper watches over the flow of time and those who would meddle with it, such actions are really a side-project, related but separate from his main duties (as you might guess from his title). The Gatekeeper is our first line of defense against the Outsiders, performing perhaps the most important job in all of Creation. At the least, he maintains the alarm spells that shriek when the Gates budge, spends the lion’s share of his time walking the Nevernever looking for signs and portents, and may even act as an “off the books” emissary for the White Council with the major realms of the Nevernever. The Merlin may lead the White Council, but to many supernatural creatures, it’s the Gatekeeper who truly speaks on its behalf and commands the greatest respect.

If anyone knows how the Outer Gates came to be in the first place, they’re not talking.

In your game

Actually drawing down power from beyond the Outer Gates, in full intention and knowledge about what that means, is a pretty villainous thing to do. Even if you aren’t fully apprised of what you’re doing, this is the kind of ink-black magic that will stain your soul right quick.

This doesn’t mean that the Seventh Law can’t be relevant for players. The biggest villains of the Dresden Files may well be tapped into some kind of Outsider mojo, so there is, at least, that; and while the Gatekeeper is our cosmic First Responder for matters involving the Outside, he has been known to tap others from inside and outside of the Council when things are particularly bad.

But players can also stumble across the Seventh Law, thanks to the particulars of its wording—namely, the prohibition against even researching the Outside. A GM looking to put a particularly nasty choice in front of her players could easily “hide” a piece of knowledge within a forbidden tome of Outsider lore. And if a life is on the line, isn’t it worth the risk? (The Outsiders certainly hope so.)

Does Demon Summoning Break the Seventh Law?

The answer is: usually not. Compared to the Outsiders, most demons a wizard might summon are comparative “locals”, though they might have plenty of notions about how it would be a grand thing to hoof it on over to the Outer Gates and kick them open with a big welcoming party.

It’s still risky. Many times, Outsiders have masqueraded as standard spirits and demons, so the White Council tends to frown on summoning them unless they are quite confident in your competence and judgment (and how often does that happen, really?). As a rule of thumb, the Council sees it as a privilege allowed its own members, but off-limits for the rest of the supernatural practitioners out there. So even though it isn’t directly in violation of the Seventh Law (or any other), the Wardens get real antsy about amateurs messing around with summoning. Even non-Outsider demons are dangerous in their own right.

Think of this as licensing on explosive compounds. If you know what you’re doing, have a legitimate reason for their use (construction, demolition, mining, etc)—and you know how to be cautious, you can get them, even if you aren’t someone military, and you’ll have official (if occasionally supervised) approval to use them. If, on the other hand, you’re just some guy who likes storing a few kilos of plastique in his garage, the authorities are not at all amused to find out about you.

The Blackstaff

The Blackstaff is both the name of an artifact of great power and the nigh-secret office filled by an experienced member of the White Council (sometimes, but not always, a member of the Senior Council him or herself). Alone out of all others, the Blackstaff is given leave to break any and all Laws of Magic in order to take down the Council’s most dangerous enemies. No higher position of trust is accorded anyone in the White Council, though the Gatekeeper may be considered a peer in that capacity. Unknown to many, the current Blackstaff is not uncoincidentally Harry Dresden’s mentor and surrogate father-figure, Ebenezar McCoy.

But what does the actual Blackstaff—that dark length of gnarled, spellcrafted wood—do? Theories abound. Perhaps it acts as a “filter”, somehow preventing the violation of the Laws from having the usual darkening effect upon the spellcaster. Or maybe the spellcaster faces those as anyone would—but the Blackstaff prevents his transgressions from affecting the natural order at large. More exotic theories can be proposed—anything from the Blackstaff being a semi-sentient familiar to a bound up Outsider itself—but in the end, its very existence is a guarded secret, and for anyone other than the Blackstaff, looking into its origins might be taken as a violation of the Seventh Law by itself…

But enough about us, here’s…

The Sixth Law

So far in the Dresden Files, we’ve seen precious little of this Law in action, in great part because if someone is breaking it, he’s doing so in a way that fits right into Harry Dresden’s non-time-traveling story.

Still, it’s clear that mucking about with time is another one of those “don’t mess with the natural order” things. We just don’t know what the consequences are likely to be, even though we can speculate. There are the classics, straight out of science fiction—paradoxes, traveling back in time to stop someone bad from coming into power, altering the course of human history for better or worse, questions about alternate universes, the “elasticity” of time, all of that—but due to the nature of this sort of magic, it’s a difficult topic for finding concrete conclusions.

Similarly, we can reasonably anticipate what breaking this Law would do to the practitioner who broke it. We know what holding power over life and death can do to a necromancer; imagine the effect it would have on the personality of a chronomancer (for lack of a better term), who can skip right past death and go straight for the “cause something to wink out of existence” trump card.

It’s bad news, and worse yet it’s the kind of dark cloud that has an even darker lining. How do you catch someone in the act of time travel? How do you enforce the Sixth Law in a way that’s meaningful? How do you prove the crime so you can prosecute the criminal? Are the Wardens even equipped to take on a threat of this kind? And how much of our present day is already formed by the meddlesome acts of a wizard who thought he knew what he was doing? We’ve already talked about how the body and the mind are too complex to alter successfully, without trauma—now take that up several orders of magnitude to contemplate the complexity of time itself, and what a single, blundering human agent might do if he had the power to change its flow? What sorts of cracks might form in the universe at such an unnatural strain?

When it comes down to it, only a very small number of White Council members truly have the authority to do something about the Sixth Law (quite a number more might have the power, but this is explicitly a case of authority). The Blackstaff, a quasi-secret role filled by a senior wizard of the Council, is empowered to break all seven of the Laws should he see fit, but when it comes right down to it he’s essentially just a heavy brought in to fix the biggest of problems by any means necessary. The real guardian of time is the Gatekeeper, the senior member of the White Council entrusted with watching over the Outer Gates (we’ll talk more about those in the Seventh Law). While as far as we know he doesn’t have the blanket authority to break the Laws of Magic that the Blackstaff enjoys, he does peer deep into the flow of time, foreseeing events that are yet to come—or even receiving communications from his future self. Such communications are always very indirect and unspecific. The Gatekeeper can’t pass much real, factual information back from the future, assumedly because doing so would introduce a paradox, or at least cause events to unfold that shouldn’t. All he can really do is subtly nudge people who might be able to do something about those future circumstances in the right direction, and then let things unfold without his guiding hand upon them. In the end, we have to pray that’s enough.

Do these sorts of actions by the Gatekeeper break the Sixth Law, or merely skirt it? Probably not since he’s not “swimming against” the flow of time so much as observing it and warning about what he sees ahead. Regardless, it’s clear he has the authority to do it, even if the rest of us might not.

Slowing Down, Speeding Up

If a wizard uses magic to speed time up or slow time down, is he swimming against the flow? Probably not. Most magic that works this way is achieved by messing around with perceptions rather than actually laying hold on time itself and pressing the fast forward or slow-mo button. Mages have gotten short bursts of speed in the past by speeding up their own perceptions and then channeling some extra juice into their body to get it to move and react faster than usual. While that isn’t a violation of the Sixth Law, it’s definitely tough of the spellcaster who tries it—there’s plenty of risk of fried synapses or physical trauma from pushing the body and brain too hard, too fast.

In your game

Right now, drawing solely from the books of The Dresden Files, we don’t have a lot to go on as far as what it means to try to swim against the flow of time. This means, for the purposes of your own game, what time travel means and what sorts of problems it introduces are in your hands, to be decided by the folks sitting at your table.

Of course, the easiest decision is to avoid time travel capers entirely. And that’s a pretty good one to make; a lot of games can get completely derailed by time travel if it’s not a part of the core “mission” of the game. And the Sixth Law at least exists to encourage the players not to attempt it themselves, so you can still bring in a time-meddling wizard from the future (or the past!) as an antagonist. If this is your comfort zone, try to keep time antics pretty simple. Even one single incidence of it can be a big spider’s web—difficult to get out of, and liable to cause everything to shake about once you start to twitch.

But for some games it might be fun to move the Sixth Law front and center. Maybe your game is all about a secret, elite team of Wardens answerable only to the Gatekeeper, acting as his time police, charged with the job of taking on the threats that no one else can—all while operating under a prohibition against breaking the Sixth Law themselves. How do you fight fire with fire when you don’t even have a match?

If you’re looking for a grey area to explore, here’s one: the Sixth Law is a prohibition on swimming against the flow of time. What about swimming with it? It might be entirely kosher to jump forward in time (assuming you can figure out how to do it). But will your local Warden see it that way? And how badly will you want to head back once you get there? (Ultimately, Proven Guilty suggests that it’s not a violation, but how you play it in your game is up to you.)

Whenever someone in your game wants to break this Law, they should do it with the group’s consensus. Time travel has the power to wreck storylines more thoroughly than even a Third Law violation does, especially if you decide to bring in notions of alternate realities that need to be invented often on the fly and in the moment. If you’re the one looking to break the Sixth Law, you should be ready to step up and shoulder some of the responsibility to make this work without wrecking anyone else’s fun.

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.

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?

To read someone else’s thoughts, you have to cross one of the most fundamental borders in all of creation—the line that divides one person from another. When you break into someone else’s mind to listen to their thoughts, you’re disrupting the natural order of things. Think of the mind as a locked house and you as someone without a key. Sure, you might need to get in there for the best of reasons, but at the end of the day once you’ve done it there’s a broken window or hinge somewhere. In short, the act is always violent no matter how “gentle” you are with it.

But even beyond breaking the sanctity of another’s thoughts, there are problems with what you find when you invade someone’s mind. Knowledge is power, after all, and when you get inside someone’s head you take a position of profound power over them. And in this case, we’re definitely talking the kind of power that corrupts. Not to mention it’s sort of the cognitive equivalent of seeing how sausage gets made—best left as something you don’t see and don’t think about too much.

Furthermore, there are plenty of secrets in the world that are meant to be kept. If there’s an “institutional” reason behind the White Council’s establishment of the Third Law, it’s all about the secrets. Plenty of wizards keep secrets they don’t want others hearing about, and discovered secrets have a way of getting out. Destroy enough secrets, and you end up destroying a lot of what keeps the world a civilized place—and civilization is one of those little innovations that helps keep most of mankind safe from the darkness lurking around the edges.

Finally, reading someone’s thoughts means you’ve got to open your mind up to “receive” the signal. The problem here is that you can’t always be sure what else you’ll pick up when you do that. Who knows what sort of nastiness could be “broadcasting”, hoping you’ll pick them up? And what will happen to you when you do? (In game terms, reading someone’s thoughts always makes you a viable target for mental attacks from both your victim and whatever supernatural nastiness might be in the area.)

Do Soulgazes Break the Third Law?

On the surface of it, a soulgaze might look a lot like a violation of the Third Law. You’ve locked eyes with someone, and suddenly you’re seeing all of their darkest, deepest thoughts—right?

Well, no. A soulgaze shouldn’t ever work that way. Remember first that the eyes are the windows to the soul, not to the mind. There’s a very distinct difference—someone’s soul is more about who they are and who they could be and less about what they’re thinking. But even beyond this, you can’t really control what you find out when you soulgaze someone, and what you do get is distorted by metaphor and strange imagery, and all of it comes at a price—they get to see you, however dark or uncomfortably revealing that may be. When it comes down to it, reading someone’s mind and looking at his soul are vastly different experiences, each with their own perils and risks, certainly, but with only one of them bringing the weight of the Laws down upon your head.

Dead Brains

A few spells exist out there to relive the last few experiences of the recently dead (we get to see one in action early on in White Night, by way of Harry’s apprentice). It’s pretty nasty stuff to live through—while you don’t (usually) die from shock or anything by doing it, it’s an experience that no one enters into lightly (even if they have a shot at living through the last few moments of a White Court vampire’s recent victim).

Is this a case of violating the Third Law? Not really: the dead person doesn’t have any active, present thoughts for you to invade, here. You’re essentially reading data from a dead drive. Not to mention, last experience is at least a little different from current thoughts.

In your game

While it’s hard to break the Third Law accidentally, it’s very easy to want to break it. A “justified” violation of the Third Law can short cut plenty of mysteries simply by rummaging around in the minds of the suspects and finding out what they know.

If a player is particularly committed to that kind of a course of action, and they understand what it means to break the Third Law, they should by all means be allowed to do so. But if that happens, every effort should be made to throw the book at them—in as entertaining a way as possible. The moment a player decides to “break” a mystery by peeking inside the heads of those involved, the story stops being about that mystery, and starts being instead about that choice and its consequences. Go nuts with it! With the secrets now out, others’ reactions to it may be worse than if they had come out naturally; everything starts proceeding towards greater chaos, right on the Lawbreaker’s doorstep (and as that hits a high point, the Wardens can show up).

Of course, all of this assumes that the character chose the right folks to go thought-peeking with. It’s a sad, sad day to discover that you’ve broken the Third Law to get what you thought would be the final, incriminating piece of evidence from a suspected killer—only to discover that his worst crime is thinking you’re being a jerk.

Inhuman Thoughts

So, if the Laws of Magic are only supposed to apply to humans, why not run around and peer into the minds of all the nonhuman problems you’re facing? Well, aside from a Warden troubled by your “grey area” activities, there’s not much stopping you—just give us a chance to call the pleasant brawny men with the white vans and straitjackets before you give it a try.

The real problem is this: as a human spellcaster, you only really have the faculties for understanding human thoughts. Try to tap into the mind of a faerie and you could find yourself a few minutes later rocking in the corner and laughing at how everything is made of rainbows. It only gets worse the nastier or more powerful your target is. Try to read the thoughts of a Red Court vampire and it’s even odds that you’ll shatter your psyche before you learn anything useful—assuming you can even understand whatever strange language their internal monologue is using. Try to read the thoughts of something ancient and you’ll probably find yourself a mind-wiped puppet in short order.

It’s kind of a disappointment, in the end, for the would-be mind-reader. All the minds he might be allowed to read, he can’t, because he doesn’t speak the language, and all the minds he isn’t allowed to read, he could—at the peril of breaking the Third Law.