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Dark Wizard of Donkerk - Question regarding Oaths of Fealty and succession (spoilers)

• Author: u/LeifCarrotson *

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8wy98b/dark_wizard_of_donkerk_question_regarding_oaths/

• Score: 9

• Created: 2018-07-08T02:01:05

Post:

In the text:

http://www.alexanderwales.com/darkWizardNaNo2016.html

the Oathkeepers are bound to the king by Oaths of Fealty. This presents a problem at the conclusion of the story (spoilers, obviously). First, Ventor is bound by his oaths to the deceased King Aldric even after Princess (then Queen) Sophia presents the crown. Later, the castle Oathkeepers are bound to the false King Rowan. One regrets it but attacks them, hoping he will be disabled instead of needing to break his oaths.

It seems that an oath of fealty should cease to be binding when the king dies or is proven a fraud. It should be to the crown, and they should have standard oaths of fealty that would handle this reasonably, preventing problems like the High Rectory getting a partial reset every time the crown passes down. They have had problems with fakes in the past, they have standard oaths, they have sages who would revel in the challenge of creating binding legalese that would prevent problems with succession.

How did Rowan convince the Oathkeepers that their oaths to Aldric were fulfilled, but that didn't apply to Ventor? And why couldn't Sophia convince them that their oaths to temporary "King" Rowan were eclipsed by their duties to her?

I can see Rowan doing something dirty like making them swear fealty to him, the King, then using that to command them to swear fealty to himself even after he was no longer king and to never tell anyone about that or something, but that still doesn't explain Ventor.

Comments:

u/alexanderwales [+22] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)

One of the big problems with the crown is that it can go to, say, a toddler, given the right circumstances. This is one of the big reasons that the Oath of Fealty is to a person, rather than to the crown itself; if it were to the crown, then commands could be issued from someone who wasn't fit to deliver them, which is to be avoided at all costs (and there are similar, less avoidable problems with senescence, with various strategies for mitigation).

Beyond that, there are a lot of reasons that a king might want his orders to not die with him. For one, that would mean that the king is even more of a failure point for governance than kings normally are, meaning that all someone has to do is assassinate him, and the oathkeepers are freed from their compulsion to keep doing what he said to keep doing -- especially a problem if one of the primary things the king fears is insurrection from the oathkeepers (and note that the sages and oathkeepers are remarked as being at least partly in opposition to one another). As a second point, wouldn't the king want the ability to have his orders continue past his death? If he had a disagreement with his successor, he would get the last word, and if he didn't want the last word, then he can leave escape clauses in his orders.

I'm also not sure that the rules of oathkeeping allow oaths to terminate like you're suggesting -- it's sort of a corner case. I made a list of rules, posted to this subreddit, and one of the things that I liked least were 1) oaths with end dates, e.g. "I will do x for two years and then stop doing x" and 2) oaths with escape clauses, e.g. "I won't drink, unless I really want to". So before I started NaNo, I cut those two possibilities out; oaths are permanent, without conditionals or end dates.

But Dark Wizard of Donkerk is still stuck in first draft, and there's a lot to clarify and fix. There should probably be the text of at least one Oath in there, just to give the flavor of it. And there was going to be a scene where Rowan comes to the sudden, horrible realization that his father is dead and the Boreal Crown hasn't actually passed to him, with some of his frantic efforts to cover that up and secure the Oaths of Fealty from the oathkeepers ... but I just never ended up writing it.

u/CouteauBleu [+7] We are the Empire. (7 hours later)

For what it's worth, I think the way it currently is (the story cuts to Rowan after his meeting with his sister) works better. It's not like we need to know the details of how the coronation ceremony went, and the general sequence of events is obvious enough.

u/CannotThinkOfAThing [+7] (10 hours later)

I actually think that could be a very enjoyable scene. It's pretty clear as it is though.

Do you think you might return to DWoD, either to edit it or to write something else in the same world?

u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (18 hours later)

I had always planned for there to be a sequel, referenced in the epilogue where they're talking about going on a trip around the world. If you look at the Saturday spotlight for DWoD there are a bunch of details that never made it into the final draft, and a bunch of things that I thought were neat that I'd like to get into. That's also the reason there are number of types of magic mentioned in the work and then never used or expounded on.

Unfortunately, I can only write about two thousand words a day at most, which means that I can't write everything that I want to. The "to edit" pile contains a lot of projects, and DWoD is 3rd or 4th down the list, which means that I have basically given up hope on ever being able to get to it. And I don't think that I would ever write a sequel without first doing an edit of it in order to hammer things down. (Most likely, someone else will edit DWoD to fix all the glaring typos, some inconsistencies, setup/payoff issues, characterization, etc. /u/couteaubleu has graciously offered, and I took them up on that, which is the most likely way that a proper edit will happen.)

(On mobile right now, but there's a list of unfinished works on my blog.)

There's a four-year-out-of-date list of writing projects on my blog, pt 1, pt 2. The intervening four years have seen more projects started than completed.

u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (20 hours later)

I wouldn't be too hopeful if I were you. I do intend to work on it this summer, and I'd give myself better odds than average for an amateur project, but... how do I put this... I wouldn't trust anyone else who told me the exact same thing.

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Since we're on the subject, I did think about what to edit. The big changes I'd work from would be:

• Removing the prophecy entirely, for reasons you've already talked about. It's a crutch, it derails character motivations, most characters already have plausible reasons to do what they're doing (eg Henry could be going to the Important Place to retrieve his birth certificate).

• Spend a little more time describing Henry's time at the orphanage. As it is, Henry goes from naive cloistered weird kid to well-adjusted, popular, socially confident young adult with no transition. I think it would be interesting to show how his time at the orphanage and his experience reading an adult's memories made him more able to navigate social situations.

• Delay the realization that Fiona is Sofia a bit longer. It'd add some tension, make their relationship a bit more organic, and make Henry look less self-indulgent. (though it's not a major problem in the first place)

• Make the first confrontation between usurper!Rowan and Sofia happen in private, and last longer. I've already talked about why, I think your version goes way too fast, and misses some occasion to have characters express their differences, what they learned through their journey, the different ways the King affected his children, etc.

Other, smaller changes:

• Rename it to The Dark Wizards of Donkerk. Similar title, feels less generic, and suggests emphasis on the world and the society rather than a character-driven plot.

• Shorten the first arcs, before Sofia starts going out of the Castle and Henry goes to the orphanage. This is when the story really begins, everything else is setup and needs to be as short as possible.

• Add some foreshadowing for the evil Queen mom reveal.

• Spend more screentime addressing the fact that the Chief Mentalist is evil, maybe add more foreshadowing, or make it look like the story will be about him taking over the kingdom (making Rowan look more like a heroic figure for opposing him).

• Give Sofia more screentime to process her family's death, her new responsibilities, and what she learned about her mom, before she goes confront her brother.

• Make the final battle shorter, somehow. There's a lot of cool scenes in there, but they're all extraneous, and at this point it feels pretty inevitable that Sofia will win.

Also, I'll start a typo thread after I'm done with the r!animorphs ARG.

u/phylogenik [+2] (13 hours later)

Ooh, if multiple oaths cover non-overlapping things, and one desires to break each of them out of general contrariness... do they have any minimum level of sacrifice, below which the boon is rounded down to zero? Or alternatively, is the boon infinitely divisible? I think that's one of the things I was thinking of in my third thought here, making a thousand trivial oaths a day and keeping each of them. Likewise, depending on if the spirits care about revealed preference, believed preference, or "true" preference, using mentalism to self-modify into experiencing greater or lesser oath stress.

I quite enjoyed this book, thanks for writing it! :]

u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (19 hours later)

Under the hood, oaths are compacts with a spirit in the spiritual realm (hinted at once or twice, but I'm not sure outright stated). At a certain point of triviality, you would make your oath only to have it silently fail, since no spirit would make themselves party to the compact.

You can see an initial list of rules for oathkeeping here, though I ended up changing a few things in the final ruleset, namely removing conditionals and time limits. I can't recall if there's a reference to it, but I remember also wanting to remove the public display part of making an oath. (I'm pretty sure I've written close to a million words since finishing DWoD, so things get fuzzy.)

I just really disliked all the legalese, which I didn't think worked too well on a thematic or narrative level. Taking a magic system that was about the denial of desires and then twisting it into hyper-conditional legal statements seemed like a really /r/rational thing, but also super lame and contrary to the things I actually found interesting about the system.

Obviously there are some conditionals possible within the system, and conditional equivalents, especially with something like the Oath of Fealty, which implicitly includes orders give to those under the oath (which is its own can of worms, since you could reframe every oath as an order given under Oath of Fealty). But it's really intended to be extremely limited in terms of complex structuring so as to give little in the way of release valves or complex mental logic to know whether or not an oath is broken. Because the oaths are mediated by a human on one end and a spirit on the other, there are some natural "common sense" limitations that can be imposed, making it a bit softer of a magic system, but a bit less frustratingly wordy. I didn't want to deal with anything like the Optimized Wish Project, so I decided that I wouldn't.

u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (20 hours later)

But it's really intended to be extremely limited in terms of complex structuring so as to give little in the way of release valves or complex mental logic to know whether or not an oath is broken

An elegant way to put it would be that if your oath has release valves clauses, actually using these clauses takes power away from the oath. If you say "I'm not allowed to eat sweet things except on the Winter Solstice", and then you eat chocolate on the Winter Solstice, you lose all the power you had accumulated since the last year. If you eat chocolate any other day, you lose all your oath powers, period.

This would mean release valves are still possible, but the Rectorate has a strong incentive to never use them in their oaths.

u/mojojo46 [+2] (3 days later)

I'm curious, is there a reason you can't just publish DWoD using traditional channels? It's really quite good, even in draft form, and seems like it should be a good fit for the traditional publishing industry. What's the counterargument I'm not seeing?

u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (3 days later)

Traditional channels strongly frown on content that's already been published. It happens occasionally, but it's something of a non-starter for a lot of agents and publishers, mostly because if people can get something for free, they're a lot less inclined to pay for it (plus all the inherent rights issues).

For DWoD to ever get traditionally published, I would probably have to have an existing relationship with an agent or publisher, or it would have to somehow become a runaway success that would attract attention and make up for the inherent risks.

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