Law Magus

Law Magus is about specializing in the fundamental nature of the practice, where Sorcery is about specializing in one or two specific fields.<ref name=blurb1>Protection Divine----------------------------------Law Practitioners who deal with law work with karma, balance, and the greater, more fundamental architecture of practice in general. They gain exceptional power over those with low karma, their power is dependent on their own karma, and they can impose barriers, restrictions, and conditions that manipulate or alter an individual’s karma. Law mages work with a soft hand as they work with the spirits, but where the spirits a shaman deals with might be, metaphorically, spirits of a single color or type, Law Mages work with the blurred sum total of spirits as a whole (and as a greater power). - Pact Dice: The Practices - Wbow Version</ref>

Methodology

These Practitioners are Rules lawyering reality. If you want to know someone who knows the ins and outs of Karma find a Law Magus. Firm declarations, oaths, amnesties, pardons and permissions are used and abused by a Law Magi to accumulate Karma, turn the laws of Karma against their enemies, and become institutions with a Law unto themselves.<ref name=enS/>Law of the jungle for example is a natural law distinct from any human conception of justice or murder. Thus do many laws of magic ignore modern laws.<ref>The practice of law magic is based on working with karma and the base expectations of the universe. If Practice is about power, pattern, and establishment, law magic is heavily based on establishment. Law practitioners focus on the underlying systems of the 'ground level' of the universe and figure out the rules, loopholes, and protections therein. The means by witch[sic] one gets ahead using Law as a practice is in understanding the rules of karma to the point of being able to build cases, call on provisions, and otherwise abuse loopholes in ways that benefit the user.

"Law" is easy to confuse with justice or the general concept of doing the right thing, but in the same sense that Karma is about Right and Wrong in a cosmic sense, morally positive actions are not necessarily intertwined in the practice of Law. The universe likes certain establishments like Truth, but other things can play into this: sanctuaries, labels, rules of order for things like warfare or duels, or declarations that establish your future position clearly. Rituals include forcing opposition to have to deal with you last, if there are other valid targets on the battlefield, gaining karma over time while wounding that of opposition, or spending excess karma in a large ritual to influence the outcome of a major event. Lesser practices include making hurting a specific target impose a karmic penalty, or creating a sanctuary. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref> Some of the Rituals they undertake rearrange the order of a conflict, making it harder to happen or for them to be seen as the victimized and receiving Karma for it.<ref name=blurb2>

Law practitioners focus on the underlying systems of the 'ground level' of the universe and figure out the rules, loopholes, and protections therein. This is where you deal with karma and ensure you're in the clear there, periodically turning an opponent's karma around on them. Firm declarations, oaths, amnesties, pardons and permissions. Rituals could include forcing opposition to have to deal with you last, if there are other valid targets on the battlefield, gaining karma over time while wounding that of opposition, or spending excess karma in a large ritual to influence the outcome of a major event. Lesser practices include making hurting a specific target impose a karmic penalty, or creating a sanctuary.

Think: Being a (rules)lawyer. Building a case, calling on provisions, knowing loopholes and getting to where you can be the exception to certain rules. - Trying to write law magic, tips appreciated</ref> Given their ties into foundational elements of Practice they have some overlap with Incarnate practitioners,<ref name="phe1">Edited to add: Because of the heavy lean on 'establishment', you may draw comparisons to collectors or one certain 'collector' from Pale (establishing a collection - kind of like what Verity arranged), and to the pillars of humanity: Death, Fate, etc (which may fall closer to Theobald). It'd be okay to have a Law Mage touch on that sort of stuff. - Trying to write law magic, tips appreciated</ref> as they deal with the Pillars of Human Existence<ref name="phe1"/><ref>Law practitioners focus on the underlying systems of the 'ground level' of the universe and figure out the rules, loopholes, and protections therein. This is where you deal with karma and ensure you're in the clear there, periodically turning an opponent's karma around on them. Firm declarations, oaths, amnesties, pardons and permissions. Rituals could include forcing opposition to have to deal with you last, if there are other valid targets on the battlefield, gaining karma over time while wounding that of opposition, or spending excess karma in a large ritual to influence the outcome of a major event. Lesser practices include making hurting a specific target impose a karmic penalty, or creating a sanctuary.

Think: Being a (rules)lawyer. Building a case, calling on provisions, knowing loopholes and getting to where you can be the exception to certain rules. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref> as well as knowing how to interact with any relevant Greater Powers.<ref name=blurb1/>

As the rules are something that all practitioners agreed to in their Awakening and what others deal with under the Seal of Solomon invoking these laws is essentially invoking binding.<ref>This was something she’d found out about in the Law texts. Law was a kind of binding. Attention to karma. Protections. Lots of early beginner practices had to do with truces. Stalling, postponement. A good Law practitioner could stall long enough to gather karma and turn the odds. It was a delicate, careful game, that required careful and detailed knowledge. - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.10</ref>

Related Others

• Sphinxs<ref name=stuff>Verona crouched in the rain, which was reduced in intensity by the wards others were drawing, her head hunched forward so the hood offered more protection, tilted so she could look up through the corner of her eye at it. To do otherwise would mean rain in her face. She felt like she had to put the pieces together using what the other side had. It made her reluctant to think of Law and Law-based Others. The ones who worked based off of the Seal. They tended to be pattern-driven, tied to the fabric of things. Some were manufactured, like stone lion statues that guided flows of karma and spirit around them, while acting as guardians. The hot girl totem spirits were like that. Shrine spirits were like that. Others were more natural: Petitioner spirits with their rigid rituals of questions, Sphinxes needing and being empowered by a failed question-and-answer ritual, the bogeymen and urban legends with their specific patterns and narratives they carried out. - Excerpt from Finish Off 24.7</ref><ref name=":3">The Gardener screamed, and Lucy turned to see her dragging fingernails through the finely cut patterns of flowers into skin, where it had been flensed away in fine detail to leave patches of petals and things behind.  She ruined it, howling.
  
  With Sight, Lucy could see the dark staining swelling around her, as bad as if someone was dipping into the Abyss.
  
  “She’s getting stronger?”
  
  “She’s like a type B Petitioner,” Verona said. ["] there are Others who quiz you or give riddles or whatever, and you can ignore them, avoid them, just don’t give the wrong answer.  But then there’s ones like, if you don’t have the right answer, or if you skip the riddle or try to be clever, they get righteous strength to smack you down with.  Sometimes they get to automatically eat you.  Like the original Sphinx.”
  
  “So what, we don’t play her death game, she-”
  
  “Gets powered up until she can force us to play, or punish us for skipping out,” Verona said. - Excerpt from Hard Pass 22.7</ref>
  • Isadora
• Alabaster Spirits<ref>“You have other advantages. Others of Law tend to be bound by those same forces they govern. And she is tied into this system and its laws twice-over.”
  
  “And Chuck is once-over?”
  
  “The Carmine? Yes. Once-over. What this means is that if you can find points to argue, they will count. Her integrity is literally her integrity, as your bones are to you. Things you could hold against her will count. If you want it to count against the price, you could. Question becomes… do you have enough?”
  [...]
  “Part of managing karma is being a custodian for karma,” he said. “And not having enough power to manage what you’re meant to manage? It’s like being a big bank and people you owe debt to start calling in those debts. Maybe you can get the money together, but you’ll pay steep interest. If you can’t get the money together, then it calls everything you’re doing into question.”
  [...]
  “Sure. And this Other that’s invested heavily into the Carmine is going to hear a good argument and quit it? Go back to being a moral, upstanding figure?”
  
  “She’s an Other of Law so we can’t rule it out,” Sebastian said. “It might be the easiest thing for her to do.” - Excerpt from In Absentia 21.3</ref>
  • judges
• Lost Kennet foundling Administrators<ref>“You guys work for Miss, don’t you?” the Vice Principal asked the administrators.  “You take any magic lawyer ‘can’t do that‘s and make them stick better?” - Excerpt from Go for the Throat 23.c</ref>
• Bogeyman<ref name=stuff/>
  • Teatime Bogeyman
• Urban Legend<ref name=stuff/>
• Petitioners<ref name=stuff/><ref name=":3"/>
• Stone Lions<ref name=stuff/>

Known Law Magi

• Hall Family?
  • Mason Hall-McCullough
  • Clark Hall
• Paige Thorburn
• Theobald,<ref name=PP>

Theobald's friends breed horses or collect pedigree dogs, but Theobald carries on a different family tradition. Every year, traveling across the world, he adopts a child, always six years old, picked from the most promising of the year's 'crop'- not just fitness, intelligence, and health, but also the ones who give the right answers to the more... arcane conundrums he puts them to. The notion isn't to apprentice practitioners, however, but to create forces of nature. He raises them with care and attention, imparting a breadth of knowledge ranging from etiquette to medicine and the handling of explosives and poisons. Each child helps raise the previous year's, and once they come of a certain age, he sets them out into the world.

The Law practice Theobald uses is aimed at creating labels, specific to each child. He strips away the prior name and identity and turns them into whatever kind of assassin suits their innate talents and residual personality. Then, wrapping this new label and identity into karmic imperatives, he buries their karmic consequences behind riddles. To capture or beat them one must first unravel them and they move fast. Most often they operate in circles of practitioner and career criminal, but most have some form of law enforcement starting that process of unraveling them. Until that's done, however, they'll have a few more years in them. Theobald himself has a shroud of mystery around him, odd patterns and symbology that investigators have yet to link to him and what he's doing.

Theobald's primary goal is to create a True assassin. If he can refine the practice and ritual enough, matching the designs to the right child, as his father once did, he can create a killer that always executes its ritually designated target, by karmic inevitability and Law, if its target can be executed. That doesn't mean that assassin will get away after, but he can work with that, and it's a potent weapon. - The Assassin Maker</ref> People Person

• Verity,<ref name=enS>

Verity's family lives in a Victorian manor that has seen better days. Her uncle devastated the family by violating certain trusts and it's left to her to care for her ailing mother and rebuild the estate. To these ends, all she has are the family practices. She doesn't know enough about broader practice to call it Law magic, and to her it's just practice.

Verity builds an initial groundwork of small promises and oaths that build the initial trust, like restoring the downstairs hall and rebuilding the small library's collection. With the karmic currency earned (much greater than another practitioner might pick up because of the little things in the Law Magic focused texts, and family precedent), she first secures the property as a sanctuary, a place where she's safe and where good things happen for her family, and then she secures the staff.

She finds them as runaways, addicts, struggling ex-cons, travelers, and others untethered from family and circumstance. Jobs as servants, with strict hierarchy and stricter meanings given to that hierarchy. Once a maid, or a butler, or a groundskeeper, they struggle to find ways to get other positions or accommodations elsewhere. She builds the hierarchy as a pyramid, power at the top given over those below. Just below her: one favored servant as her right hand woman, and the manager of the head staff. Below them, the head maid, the head chef, and so on.

Verity's practice and her establishment rest heavily on the notion that for someone to be on top there must be others at the bottom, and, implicitly, the lower those on the bottom sink the higher she and the estate rise. By the time she's old and her children start to come of age (Now her at the peak, two children, four elite servants, eight heads of various parts of the estate/staff, and so on...) The house has thirty-two common maids and servants - hall boys, grooms, chauffers, and gardeners. And those staff are urged to ignore those who live in the cabins off to the edge of the property. Do poorly or embarrass the household, they're told, even an apron string out of order when the lady of the house is in a poor mood, and they'll be moved out there, to tend to the woods and the... dirtier work.

They think it's tree planting and farm work, but that work, for those who sink so low, is dirtier than they know. Below the tier of servants on the bottom is a tier of 'animals'. Failures, in Verity's eyes. Men and woman who were given, Verity would say, the privilege of serving, but who failed to work hard enough, or balked, or tried to leave. Those who live in the cabins tend to this lowest tier, humans who have been made animals, stripped of all clothing and possession, blinded and deafened, tongues removed, and/or limbs amputated. All with bodies branded. They moan and holler, and those who work in the cabins ensure they live, are fed and cleaned enough they don't get sick, because to fail to do so would mean those cabin workers would join the ranks of the 'animals'. If they serve in the cabins with enough discipline, then perhaps after a decade those cabin workers may be graced with the position of maid or gardener again, freed from seeing or thinking of the wretched bottom tier, or the dark Others that lurk beyond the sanctuary of Verity's estate, because the 'sanctity' of it comes with a commensurate darkness just beyond.

Verity has established the Law of her household, and she has designed it so the karma flows upward, from the lowest to the head of the household. The institution she's set up is such that if she were challenged or attacked, she could say 'not today' and it would be so. Or she could impart a wealth of bad karma with a simple branding, using the same symbol she put on so many of her bottom tier. Her implement serves, but she also has a lipstick container with no lipstick within- only a symbol and a heating element. If she gets close enough to press it to flesh, then it is a short, precipitous, and nigh-inevitable fall to becoming one of her animals. Such is her power, now. - The Enslaver</ref> Husbonde

• Lawrence Bristow (working knowledge of)
• Ms. Poole
• Sebastian Harless
• Musser family focused on claim
  • Abraham Musser

References

<references/>

Trivia

• Law doesn't mean "right" or "justice". Take for example the fact that