DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 40C: Malleck’s Last Stand
Nasira had turned her attention to the boy. She found that his heart was failing him. The process that was transforming him was obviously botched and incomplete and now it was killing him.
Hearing this, Agnarr couldn’t contain his rage. He was furious over the boy. With a grim look of determination he charged back out through the secret door.
Magic is cool because it brings a lot of flashy bling to the table: Balls of fire. Personal aerobatics. Magic missiles.
But what I think makes magic awesome is that it lets you explore unique and impossible situations, and some of the most powerful of these are moral dilemmas, because they provide a really powerful crucible for character to express itself. Who are you? What do you value? When put between a rock and a hard place, what will you choose to do?
What makes magical moral dilemmas special is their novelty. Most of us are probably familiar with the trolley problem, and we’ve each literally spent a lifetime figuring out our moral and ethical compass when it comes to the situations we encounter in our lives. We likely even have long-settled opinions on big issues, even though it’s unlikely we’ve ever personally had to, for example, make the decision to declare or not declare war.
There are nevertheless, of course, ways that we could challenge and explore these moral issues through play. (And, of course, our characters will not necessarily share our moral or ethical outlooks.) But we’ll be walking through familiar territory either way.
With a fantastical dilemma, on the other hand, the fantastical element immediately confronts us with a parameter we’ve never had to deal within our own lives, and likely have never thought about before. Even when there’s a fairly obvious and direct parallel between the fantastical dilemma and a set of real world ethics, the mismatched edges will often crop up and challenge our trite, preconceived answers in the most surprising ways.
For example: Is it ethical to use an invisibility spell to eavesdrop on a private conversation? And, if so, under what circumstances?
Here we could probably draw a fairly direct connection to wiretapping. But what if you’re just coincidentally invisible and people walk into the room you’re in? Do you have an ethical obligation to reveal your presence?
And consider the moral situation the PCs find themselves in with the Children of the Hand. What moral obligation do they have to children who have been fully transformed in monsters? Does the same hold true a child that has only partially been transformed? What if that child is in agonizing pain and no longer able to communicate?
To see how the PCs dealt with this, here are some minor spoilers from the beginning of the next campaign journal:
They regrouped in the laboratory. The boy, whimpering in pain, was fading fast.
“Is there anything we can do for him?” Tee asked. Nasira shook her head. Tee, wanting to spare him the pain, slid a dagger through the boy’s ribs and into his heart.
Even as Tee’s dagger was coming free, Agnarr was dumping Silion’s body out of the bag of holding, removing the iron collar from around her neck, and placing it on the boy. A debate immediately broke out: Some wanted to preserve Silion for a second round of questioning. Others wanted to do the same for Malleck.
“We need Malleck to tell us what he’s done with the missing children,” Elestra said.
“We know what he did with them,” Agnarr said. He was adamant that they keep the boy alive, and it looked like the iron collar was the only way to do it.
Here we see another magical element — the iron collar that preserves dead bodies so that they can be raised at a later time — add new facets to the dilemma.
You can draw some parallels to medical ethics, of course, but they’re not straight lines. Is this more like a medically induced coma, temporarily stopping someone’s heart when they have tachycardia, or illegal medical experimentation?
And while we’re here: What, exactly, are the ethics of keeping a bunch of dead corpses in a magical netherspace between dimensions so that you can periodically yank them out and question them under compulsive sorceries?
Asking for a friend.
Campaign Journal: Session 40D – Running the Campaign: The Villain Who Doesn’t Escape
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
You know, I don’t think I have ever once seen PCs in any campaign question – even for an instant – the ethics of espionage.
Torture, sure. Threats, even. But invisibility? Speak with dead? Mind reading? Supernatural truth serum? Breaking into someone’s house, tossing all their most personal possessions, tracking down and deceiving their loved ones, invading their dreams, then impersonating said loved ones back to them? Totally acceptable, even to answer the most petty and inconsequential of questions.
I could philosophize here about why even groups who balk at such things as killing in self-defense have (in every game I’ve run or played in) had zero compunctions against such things, but I don’t know that I could be confident of my theories. All I am confident in is the pattern I’ve seen: players want answers, full stop.
Co-incidentally, this topic came up in our last session.
While the party mused aloud on whether to use necromancy to speak with the dead and get answers out of a notable civilian who had just been killed, other NPCs questioned whether that would be proper – since the the party weren’t even his family members. Perhaps of note is that in our campaign Speak With Dead can only be used on any particular corpse once, ever. So they would not only be interfering with a corpse, but also taking away the chance for his family to ask questions.
They ultimately decided to find answers elsewhere. For now, at least.