So recently I’ve been tooling around with a character concept for my lock and I’ve always had a fascination with Lawful Evil entities such as the Devils in D&D.
Is there any lore precedence for a Lock taking souls more through fine print than theft? Contracts with demons and the like? That sort of thing.
I’ve dug around but best I can find is some gag lines refering to how the soul consumption clause is never exercised.
There certainly exists precedence for pacts and magical contracts in Warcraft, but none that lay claim on the soul as I recall. Souls are generally stolen by brute force in Warcraft, as seen by the practices of the Legion and Warlocks, usually by sacrificing victims while they are still alive through violent means.
That being said, I don’t see it as an impossibility that a being of sufficiently great and terrible magical power, proficiency within demonic lore and specialized expertise within Inscription couldn’t create a contract that bound the actual soul, but it’d be rare and uncommon.
Your fellow Warlocks might regard you as a bit of an oddball though, and Inscribers will dislike you for giving their profession a bad rep.
I was thinking of taking up Inscription as that felt appropriate.
And yeah the whole idea would be soul harvesting more through wit than brute force.
“Steal souls? I’ll not stand for this slander! As you can see right here he initialed the addendum that grants me power of adverse possession vis-à-vis afterlife rights.”
A deadly tool, especially as given the available pool of candidates of people you could make contracts with would be mostly your more barbaric allies in the Horde, who may or may not be so strong in their wit or proper bureaucratic judicial understanding.
It gives me an amusing mental image of you trying to sell a contract to a dyslexic orc peon.
Typically contracts are voidable when signed by the legally incompetent.
Not sure how that might work with demonic contracts though but I do suspect their definition of ‘voidable’ is probably a lot more interesting.
Quite so, and unlike the folklore stories of devils, there is no supernatural cosmological law that is both binding and wish granting.
I would bet the only thing that matters is the magic inherent in the contract itself, and that the person is willing when leaving their signature/seal/paw print or whatever.
Now, the only downside is that you only have your own means to fulfill your end of the contract, but who’s to say you can’t convince an ogre trade their soul for a good foot massage?