Dark Art: The Changing Face of Public Relations

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A lot of what humans know about the effects of freezing and phosgene gas on the human body comes from Nazi experimentation - the ethical debates are still raging. One side holds that it is inherently tainted due to the sheer evil acts that were committed to gain them, while the other holds that not using available knowledge to save lives is cowardly at best or hypocritical at worst. All the products end up Going Horribly Wrong, or worse, Horribly Right. Robots rebel, resurrections are botched, superpowers cause insanity and death. Basically, if you can build a Fantastic Aesop out of it, it's this. In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, multiple practices can leave Gaia Garou at risk of Wyrm contamination. Could dramatically change the status quo by altering social, economic, or military realities. This can be good if it would remove the weakness in a Terminally Dependent Society (and bring the corrupt leaders down with it), or bad if the change would cause widespread chaos.

Some Red Talons learn a gift that allows them to regain rage or gnosis when they spill another being's blood upon the earth. The gift is taught by decay spirits and banes. crawlersout: In this story, "dark" magic is magic that requires a "price" (usually emotional, but spiritual or physical aspects are possibilities as well) to perform. They're considered "dark" because they're much easier to abuse than "light" magic. It's actually perfectly legal to learn dark magic, it's just heavily frowned upon in magical communities that are highly conservative, such as Magical Britain. Some of the more useful and comparatively less objectionable spells, such as the Patronus Charm (which is fueled by happy memories) often return the "toll", and thus many are unaware that they qualify as dark magic. On the other hand, there are some spells whose "tolls" are so terrible that usually only the most evil of people would ever consider using them; the Killing Curse, for example, takes a piece of the user's soul. The three Unforgivable Curses, along with Blood Magic and soul magic, fall under this category. In Less Wrong parlance, this is used to refer to the use of faulty logic, fallacies and self-deception , Double Speak... in two words: Bad Faith . Even for ultimately good purposes, those arts are a double-edged sword. Truth, and logic, ultimately, always win. The fact that summoning demons is one of the first spells you learn at the Realm's Wizarding School contributes much to the awe and dread it evokes. (Although it is actually a no-nonsense and intelligent approach: the idea behind it is that most wizards will end up trying to summon demons anyway, so it is more sensible to teach them how to do it properly and to thoroughly warn them about the dangers than to ban or restrict the spells and let the would-be demonologists dabble into it on their own with partial knowledge.) Some people hold a(n extremist) Christian belief that even pretending to use magic in, say, a Video Game or Tabletop RPG is bad, even though such games are usually set in a fictional universe where the fictional magic is known to not actually be from the devil even in-universe.

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Basically, The Dark Arts are any science, discipline, magic, or martial combat style note (or all of the above, as a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot of Supernatural Martial Arts and Crafts From Technology) that is deemed by society in general and the establishment in particular as a Bad Idea. ® (For some reason, actual artistic techniques are rarely considered a Dark Art (though the Wax Museum Morgue comes pretty darn close.) Despite dissent towards witchcraft, The Catholic Church wasn’t entirely against magic. The church believed ceremonial Magic was evil, as they thought it relied on making pacts with spirits, while another type of magic, natural magic, was permitted as practitioners of it claimed to be using natural processes, not spirits, to do supernatural feats. These natural magics usually were composed of The Hermetic Arts and the primary types of magic used were Alchemy: The replication of geological phenomena through manual craft and early experimentation with medical herbs, and Astrology: The prediction of events and diving of information through the observation of celestial body movements. I have a blog in the works which is basically my thoughts and feelings around dark art, and its role in our current culture. Ultimately for me it’s about giving people a safe space to process their shit. The Balefire weave is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique whose use permanently damages the structure of the universe. Mere knowledge of it is supposed to be enough to be Stilled by the White Tower, since the world was once almost destroyed by channelers abusing it. The significant number of people knowing it we encounter in the series show that this ban is not so strictly enforced, but all of the good guys (and even some of the bad guys — and we are speaking of people who have no problems killing or torturing thousands of innocents at once) consider it something inherently wrong and to be used as a last-resort weapon only. It seems on the surface, that a definition of Dark Art should be relatively simple, since those that purport to create it share many traits as artists and interests as individuals. However, it cannot be said that all paintings of skulls are Dark Art, and since the presence of ‘dark’ themes are a constant in creative work throughout history, we must find a way to reconcile this with what is a relatively new field of work.

Answers to questions such as these have the potential to direct and focus those who make Dark Art beyond the creation of their next piece, or may conclude that such questions are irrelevant and we simply want to stand together to support the making of monsters. In other words, if there are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, you can expect someone to have thought it would be cool to make an easy to read how-to book on it. The "Dark" Art might not necessarily be evil or dangerous, but there's always at least some cause to consider these powers/skills inherently hazardous, if potent, and not to be left open for everyone to learn. Outsider magic (that is, most if not all functional magic) in Dishonored. Its practitioners are hunted and slain by the Overseers of the Abbey of Everyman. The Overseers are a fanatic religious police headed by corrupted people in league with an oppressive political power, but as bad as they are they might have a point on that magic. It looks extremely corrupting since people who get involved with it fall in two categories: In Wraith: The Oblivion, three Arcanoi are forbidden in the Western Underworld on pain of soul-forging - Intimation, the power to create and remove desire (because of its great capacity for abuse); Mnemosynis, the power to explore and manipulate memory (again, because of its capacity for abuse), and Flux, the power to affect the structure of inanimate objects, strengthening them, decaying them, and animating them (because of wraithly politics, rather than any potential to abuse others). In addition to necromancy, Redguard society considers most schools of magic to fall into this category. The sole exception is made for Destruction magic, because dealing more damage is always good to the Redguards and because it is considered to have fewer of the nasty effects of the other schools. In addition to Conjuration, which includes necromancy, Mysticism and Alteration/Illusion are also disliked due to their associations with soul stealing and altering reality ( literally or perceptions of it), respectively.The Calignes, spells that call on the All-Consuming Darkness. Just to learn one is a ding on the Karma Meter (and usually requires human sacrifice), and nearly all of them are morally repugnant to use. In Shadow Ops, the "dark arts" are "prohibited schools" of magic, which are rare but immensely powerful types of magic, or use of a "legal" school in an illegal way. These include Necromancy, Sentient Elemental Conjuration, Gate Magic, and Negramancy, with the illegal uses of legal schools being Whispering (use of terramancy to control animals) and Rending (offensive use of healing magic). If a human manifests powers in any prohibited school, they get a simple choice: death or military service, and in the latter case, if you don't shape up, they lobotomize you to make you more compliant.