Help with Institutional Magic Abuse

[the_mighty_agrippa]

Bestow Curse

Curse a charismatic opponent with boils and weeping sores.
Curse a successful business owner or banker with poor use of his skills.

 

[Quartz]

Epic magic. Have fun.

Magic items are your friend here: Sending and Telepathy may be high level but while items based on these spells require high levels to create, they don't require high levels to use. So each of your squads of low-level guards has a Charm of Signalling, and if they come across something dangerous / interesting / whatever the leader can activate the charm, and the watch-wizard - and others - can then scry the scene and direct or teleport in reinforcements as necessary.

 

[scrubkai]

Given that most towns have some sort of rat problem...
If you press a few Wererats in the "Security Service", they can use their Rat emphathy ability to spy on others.
No Rats aren't that smart, but they can identify simple things like meetings of large groups of people, or a group creaping through the sewers/places they shouldn't be.

As I DM, I would mention a few times that rats scamper into the darkness (or that there seems to be rats everwhere) and then stop mentioning it unless the players ask. Then whenever a group of people gather, (given you have some rule against 5+ people gathereing) or the players try to go places they shouldn't go, have a group of guards kick in the door. (Or even just hear about it happening to the last adventuring group that went in the sewers.) After a few times where they can't figure out how the guards figured this out, it will start to build a sense of big brother always watching you.

You could also do the same general thing with a Wizard/Raven Familure and a bunch of Ravens flying around.

Another thing to think about would be to have multiple "watcher" groups. Plus a standing gp reward for valid crime tips. That way even if the PCs charm someone in a security service, they still don't know if someone else is watching them, as there's another security sevice and even that shopkeeper they work with could be feeding information to the goverment.

 

[Allegro]

The bard spell Modify Memory can be particularly useful with the secret police. Implant the memory of being betrayed by a love one. Or implant a memory of cracking under torture and telling the police everything; then have the police torture the victim and demand the victim reaffirm everything they said. Another option is to compel people to find subversive activity with a geas, “find a neighbor engaged in subversive behavior and report it to me”. I’m pretty sure the reason bards are required not to be lawful is if they were organized they would rule the world 

Another way to enforce tyranny is to require every item worth more then 10 gold to have an official seal. Items worth more gold could have arcane marks associated with them to prevent forging. All citizens can be searched at any time by the police and offending items can be confiscated.

 

[szilard]

cantrips:

Arcane Mark should be standard use.

Mending can be used to authenticate identity. Take a small object. Break it in half. Give one half to one person and the other to another person. When they meet, have one of them cast Mending. If one of the halves is counterfeit, it won't work.

Message is an effective communication spell, good for coordinating groups of guards or individual agents.



first level spells:

Alarm (the silent kind) is great... with many, many uses for keeping track of people and places secretly.

Charm Person - obvious. Does the Watch need to be intimidating? Not if you think they're your friends...

Disguise Self - do you really need Dopplegangers if you have this and Charm Person?

Erase - good for getting rid of inconvenient evidence.

Silent Image - too many uses to list.

second level spells:


Alter Self - when a disguise isn't good enough.

Detect Thoughts - duh.

Locate Object - coupled with tokens that can be slipped onto people surreptitiously.

Invisibility - no comment

Rope Trick - an amazingly good place to stake out an area from.

Also note that Bards make good agents in a situation like this... with spells like Alter Self, Calm Emotions, Detect Thoughts, Hold Person, Invisibility, Suggestion, and Tongues as second level spells it is hard to go wrong. Beguilers are even better.



-Stuart

 

[Musrum]

Detect Chaos
Fascinate

You would also have a law whereby deliberately resisting a spell from a Police caster (e.g. attempting a Will save) would be considered resisting arrest.

 

[Arkham]

"Chain of Eyes" from Magic of Faerun. Everyone who brushes against you could be implanting a spy on you.
Heat Metal at check points. Hand over all permitted metal goods. If you try to sneak metal weapons or armor through, not only will the guards know, but it will start burning a hole in you too.
"Thought Police" wearing helms of telepathy walking by, reading the minds of everyone in the nearby buildings.

 

[Jack Simth]

Another thought -- Imps as familiars for the Forensic Spellcasters. Commune for free once per week? Sign me up. Really permits institutionalized Commune, whereas the XP loss would make it too hard to use regularly otherwise.

That can be more powerful than you might imagine.

Suppose you have 21 spellcasters with the Imp familiar going about their tasks (21 7th level casters - not hard in a large city).

Any given day of the week, you've got 18 questions (three sets of six).

Suppose you want to know who is going to commit the worst offense against the one in charge (however that's defined).

All you need is a pre-mapped set of questions to narrow the culprit down to 1. If you track everyone by name and description when they come in, and ask about it on a binary-search type pattern, you can individually identify who is going to commit the most grevious offense. To 1 in 2^18 (262,146). Well, 2^17 (131,073) as first you need to find out if it is someone on your list (which takes a question). Every single day, the person who is going to commit the "worst crime" (as defined by a lawful-evil government....) receives capital punishment arbitrarily. Publish how it works. Crooks will be vying to reform. You see, everyone wants someone else to be the one today... and to do that, they have to make sure someone else is going to commit a worse crime.... which means that, unless they can somehow coerce a worse crime out of someone else, they have to tone down their criminal behavior.

After a while, you're executing people who were just tossed out for not paying the rent... as they were going to be vagrants that evening.

 

[frankthedm]

Fobiddance areas in cities the people must pass through daily. Those commoners who are not LN die. {6d6 will save for half, CG or CE take 12d6]. It is not cheap, but one casting can last forever and it can only be dispelled by higher level casters.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/forbiddance.htm

 

[Tiberius]

Folks:

2. Communication magic would be great. If police can call in the big guns, adventurers will have to beware. Sending would be perfect, but is a little high level. Message, similarly, but the range is quite low.

To get around this, I wouldn't be surprised if the the society had developed some sort of magical device that could be placed at a certain interval (say on every xth streetlight) that would act as a repeater for Message spells.