Timeline for In an Urban Fantasy Setting, Why Would a Magical Courier Be Hired Over Traditional Couriers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 14, 2022 at 19:45 | comment | added | Tim Morris | @Ottie "Magic TLS" gave me a chuckle. I should add that it would almost certainly lucrative for the couriers themselves who are highly trained and vetted individuals who have very little reason to even attempt to betray the system. Plus there may be a religious angle to it as well, but I have not mulled over that yet. I think the fact that betraying the clients mid-transit incurs a very serious and very immediate risk to bodily arm is something I will make key, though. | |
| Sep 14, 2022 at 12:02 | comment | added | Ottie | @MatthieuM. I think at this point it comes down to aesthetic preference; I just find that a reputation/honour based motivation eventually just boils down to "how can this person be bribed/blackmailed/coerced", which I personally don't care much for. Also I suspect I am just spending too much time doing security audit of internal networks, and this is really just "magic TLS for real packets". | |
| Sep 14, 2022 at 9:35 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | As for hunting down, I was thinking real-world hunting down; the courier lives in the real world, most of the time, and thus a rogue courier will be hunted down in the real world -- and once outside the guild may not have means to use the spirit world to escape. | |
| Sep 14, 2022 at 9:33 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | History disagrees that reputation isn't a great motivator. The templars were safeguarding gold for many, conveying it back and forth between their different branches as necessary. At any time they could have taken the gold and run, yet people still trusted them: they had a reputation for trustworthiness. | |
| Sep 14, 2022 at 9:17 | comment | added | Ottie | More generally: reputation isn't a great motivator, you can always find someone's price (not necessarily money). If this system is worth so much money it's because it is guaranteed by the fabric of reality (or the veil between reality and the spirit world), not human reassurances. | |
| Sep 14, 2022 at 9:10 | comment | added | Ottie | @MatthieuM. there can be no hunting down (otherwise the premise fails). And there can be no spare beacon: something wrong happens if you go in with two beacons. The couriers do come back, but... incomplete. Packages are altered and made unusable in the process. It's one way to interfere with your enemy's courier runs (the other being, obviously, to just destroy the beacon reality-side) | |
| Sep 14, 2022 at 8:36 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | The edit doesn't pan out: the courier could always have -- and should, really -- a spare exit beacon provided by the guild. What prevents betrayal is reputation, any rogue courier is hunted down by the guild itself, and brutally executed. | |
| Sep 13, 2022 at 16:58 | vote | accept | Tim Morris | ||
| Sep 13, 2022 at 16:36 | comment | added | Tim Morris | "Not safe, but secure" nice! I'll likely mark this one as the answer even though I like several of the answers. | |
| Sep 13, 2022 at 11:38 | history | answered | Ottie | CC BY-SA 4.0 |