[Mkguild] House Broken Part 3

[Kit]

The thing everyone seems to be forgetting is that magic exists in this
universe. It is fully possible for someone to create a poison that would act
quickly and deadly. Virmir beat me to it, but I totally agree that slipping
someone an age regression tonic before a war would just be impractical. And
for the argument that people would want it for themselves, MK has other
secrets that it's guarding, such as a rather large deposit of mithril of
which rumor has yet to get out about.

And to Matthias: it's not really transformations which is what people fear,
so much as magic and the lack of control they have. Magic is viewed by most
of the ecclesia as demonic in and of itself, a weapon used by the dark. For
most other people, it's not quite understood and since people fear what they
don't understand, you end up with this. Yes there are mages everywhere it
seems, but to the common person, it's a mystical art where a person could
look at you and you'd die. I don't believe it's the transformation in
specific that people fear, it's the process of being marked by something
they don't get and not having control over it. The only control they have is
choosing whether or not they let the magic work on them, they have no idea
what the end result will be. Probably any other effect from a curse would be
equally mistrusted and feared, even if it was something so simple as a
change in eye color. Like most magic, transformation isn't particularly
common (outside MK anyway) and so it IS feared, but just remember that most
other magic is feared as well. So we don't need to be too careful about
limiting it outside MK, just don't make it blatent which should be self
evident.

Kit


On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Hallan Mirayas <hallanmirayas at hotmail.com>w=
rote:

>  > Also I would think it would be slightly more devastating (as well as
> > practical) to slip the king plain old poison while you're at it. ;)
> Just an FYI regarding poison, from "On Thud and Blunder" (
> http://www.sfwa.org/writing/thud.htm), an excellent medieval writing
> resource site that Michael Bard pointed out on the Wiki:
> "We have less scope where poisons are concerned, common though they are in
> fiction. Medieval and Renaissance princes lived in terror of these, but t=
he
> fact is that prior to modern chemistry, there were virtually no quick-act=
ing
> toxins you could slip to somebody unbeknownst, or on the point of a weapo=
n.
> Curare is about all that comes to mind, and that's South American. Indeed,
> I've seen a couple of Renaissance recipes for poisons to feed dinner gues=
ts,
> and the main question about them is how anybody ever imagined anybody else
> could ever gag down enough of that awful stuff to suffer serious damage.
> Arsenic was about the deadliest substance readily available, with a few
> competitors like hemlock, toadstools, and ground glass. The problem was
> usually to disguise the taste. In any event, while a person could
> occasionally be given a lethal dose, he would hardly drop dead at once. H=
e'd
> be a considerable and messy time about his demise. I rather imagine that
> quite a few deaths which were attributed to deliberate poisoning were
> actually caused by botulism or the like."
> Hallan
>
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