The Interlocks That Check Themselves
Advanced Wizardry is unusually willing to say what its own magic will not do.
Advanced Wizardry is unusually willing to say what its own magic will not do. Across the spellbook and the trades, a working is repeatedly gated — and the gates are not all the same kind of thing, which is what this page is about.
Some gates are mechanical. The recognition charm only works if this person is truly hard working and actually doing a great job, and the reason falls out of how the charm is described as working: it casts a remembering zone around the person, and a zone that holds a memory has nothing to hold when nothing happened.[^1] The confession charm will have no effect if the person hasn't committed any crimes, and its effect is a guilt that will only be alleviated by confessing — no crime, no guilt to relieve.[^2] In both cases the interlock is not a rule bolted on. It is the mechanism, seen from the side.
Other gates are motive. The blessed-speech charm cannot be used for selfish means, for it will naturally not work.[^3] The countenance charm — which changes a person's aura to that of an extremely trustworthy one — carries the harshest warning in the volume: used with selfish ends or with the intention to take advantage of other people, it will fail with the direst of consequences.[^4] And the hero conjuration will only help if the fight is fair, just and proper.[^5]
Put the two kinds side by side and one of them has an evaluator and the other does not.
The mechanical gates need nobody to judge anything. A remembering zone with no memory in it does nothing because there is nothing in it. The guilt charm produces a discomfort with one exit and a person who did nothing has nothing to walk out of.
The motive gates need somebody to look at the caster and decide. And in exactly one case, this volume says who: the hero judges the fight before helping. Somebody turns up, assesses, and declines.
In the other two, nobody is named. It will naturally not work. It will fail with the direst of consequences. Naturally, according to what — and consequences delivered by whom?
⚠ And the two unattended gates sit on the two charms in the whole spellbook that most obviously invite abuse. One makes every word out of your mouth almost compelling and quite difficult to resist, so that listeners follow the speaker's suggestions. The other makes strangers want to trust you, with no requirement that you be trustworthy.
Falsifiable claim: in this corpus, an interlock binds if and only if the mechanism does the checking. Every gate that depends on the caster's motive is decorative, and the corpus reveals this by never naming an evaluator for one.
The test is mechanical and nobody has run it. Take every stated limit across the 165 pages and sort it into three bins — mechanism-checked, evaluator-named, motive-only. The claim predicts that the motive-only bin contains the charms with the highest abuse potential, and that no charm in it has a described failure mode beyond "it does not work."
- The sort has to be runnable from the pages as written, without inferring mechanisms the source does not state. Where a mechanism is absent, the entry goes in the motive bin by default, which is the conservative call.
- The prediction fails if a motive-only interlock turns out to have a described consequence somewhere else in the volume. The direst of consequences is currently the strongest candidate for that, and it is unspecified — if a later text specifies it, the claim weakens.
- It also fails if a mechanism-checked gate can be defeated. If somebody could produce the appearance of good work well enough to give the remembering zone something to hold, the two bins collapse into one.