Second Law of Magic

## **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 live in 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’d 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 without an operator’s manual. The learning curve for basic survival tasks can be pretty steep, and, without preparation or training, these tasks might not be mastered before they become absolutely crucial. In the end, your victim is 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 his 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. You run the risk of subverting the individual’s will however you look at it—the most you’ll manage is to shift the violation to another law (such as the **Fourth**).

### **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 from the casefiles, that question has several answers. First, a number of the creatures that you’re thinking about—ghosts, demons, faeries, and others—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 loupgarou 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 hunterspirit that knows how to keep the human mind “safe” and can drive the 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 its 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 are still 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.

Regardless of the origin, “natural talents” break down into two kinds. When the body actually changes (as with straight-up werewolves like the Alphas), the new form usually hews close to nature, too—actual wolves, for example, instead of some super-steroidal megawolf like a hexenwulf or loup-garou. 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. Lycanthropes (and others like them) leave the body out of the equation entirely; they connect their minds with the nature of the beast without taking its form, but still benefit from some beastly attributes. However you slice it, such natural talents never transform someone other than themselves, so the Second Law doesn’t enter into it.