http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicallyBindingContract

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In fiction, particularly fantasy fiction and Deal with the Devil plots, normal Leonine Contracts just don't cut it. Part of the reason for this is because it's usually pretty vague what kind of government most fantasy cultures use, so nobody really knows how contracts would work anyway. What do you do if the other party decides to welch on their end? Besides, we have contracts in Real Life, and they're usually pretty boring Walls of Text. So one sure way to get some excitement is to have a character sign one that is magically binding.

Where a normal contract is bound by regular laws, this one is bound by the laws of magic. Rather than being enforced by threat of punishment by a lawful governing body, this contract is simply physically impossible to break. Sometimes it is implied that the magic punishment for breaking a clause is somehow contingent on the permission being given by the one who signed the contract.

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Really, the easier explanation most of the time is that A Wizard Did It. The basic idea here is that magic is the law, and will punish anyone who tries to go back on a contract. In other cases, the question of punishment doesn't even arise  the magic compels signatories to abide by the terms whether they want to or not. Even the person who receives the benefits may be unable to release them.

Any character who makes such a contract  even if it's a Leonine Contract  has no choice but to fulfill it somehow. Loopholes are, as always, still permitted, and there may be a Curse Escape Clause. Physically destroying a contract can also absolve the penalties. In some cases, magic apparently only works with the magicee's permission. Even Releasing from the Promise may require such trickery; the other character often can't just let you go.

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Most of the time this is how the Deal with the Devil works. In all likelihood, this started out as a subtrope of Deal with the Devil but branched out as writers found they could apply the same basic concept to any magically-empowered contract-maker, not just Satan.

Note that another sub-trope of Deal with the Devil, the Faustian Rebellion, is rarely if ever presented as viable countermand to a Magically Binding Contract. However, should the person accomplish whatever Impossible Task was provided in the contract, then the The Devil has to follow his part too. In this trope, you gotta beat 'em at their own game. Characters who break one of these can become The Oath-Breaker. Compare Geas, which is more of a spell or curse.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Asian Animation

Happy Heroes: In Season 8 episode 16, Little M. makes a deal with a talking book that allows him to freely wish four times for whatever he wants, and he decides to use this ability to impress Big M. so that he doesn't think he's useless. He signs a contract that this is the case under two conditions: Firstly, he must not tell anyone about the contract, and secondly, if he uses up all of his wishes but still isn't able to impress Big M., the book will take one thing from him.

Card Games

Magic: The Gathering: The background of the plane of Ravnica includes probably the largest example on the list: the Guildpact, a magical contract between the ten Guilds that essentially governs the entirety of the plane. The main plot of the novels turns out to be a convoluted attempt to break the Guildpact. Which eventually works due to a loophole of breaking the Guildpact and a contingency plan to restore it. Geth, Lord of the Vault, specializes in making magical tablets into which contracts can be willed. If they break the contract, Geth controls them forever. These are actually very popular, and his agents take them all over New Phyrexia, so that two parties who don't trust each other can use one of Geth's tablets and be assured that neither of them would dare break the agreement.



Comic Books

Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld: Dark Opal talks Sardonyx into signing one for him; as you can imagine, it doesn't turn out very well for him.

Fan Works

Films  Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Rock Opera Beethoven's Last Night features such a contract between Beethoven and Mephistopholes, "which even Mephisto dare not violate." (This is not mentioned in the songs themselves, but explained in the album liner notes, which tell the story in greater detail.) They accomplished this by making the contract on the back of a page from the Bible. When in doubt, use Holy© for all your binding-contract needs!

Myths & Religion

Faust's contract with Mephistopheles has to be signed with blood, and can't be broken.

Podcasts

Tabletop Games

In Castle Falkenstein the Adversary and the rest of the Unseelie are bound by the Second Compact even though they were tricked into signing it by Auberon.

Dungeons & Dragons: The 2nd Edition Tome of Magic sourcebook had the Contracts of Nepthas. Anyone who breaks such a contract is struck deaf, dumb and blind. Ambiguities in the contract's language can be exploited.

Take care when signing a contract with a Devil; depending on the contract, once you sign, you're either going to Baator when you die OR you're going to have to make increasingly evil acts just to keep the benefits. Tearing up the contract isn't an option; there are always clauses that lead to the signer getting harmed if they do this. In Exalted, Eclipse Caste Solars can sanctify any sort of agreement to be magically enforced by Heaven. Moonshadow Caste Abyssals and Fiend Caste Infernals can do similar things - for the Moonshadows, it's enforced by the Neverborn, while for the Fiends it's enforced by the Yozis. This isn't entirely surprising, as both Moonshadows and Fiends are corrupted Eclipse Exaltations. The Perfect of Paragon can make these contracts as well. In fact, he requires them of anyone who wants to live in his city. The raksha, thanks to a quirk in their nature, must abide by their sworn word, or be cursed. They know this full well, and are very, /very/ good at exploiting loopholes. The raksha can also make adjurations, oaths that empower a raksha who swears to them, so long as the raksha fulfills their conditions.

In GURPS, if you manage to summon a demon (fairly easy) and control it (not so easy), you can order it to do one task lasting up to one hour. The demon is bound to obey, but it will use any loopholes it is smart enough to think of, and get into as much trouble as possible along the way. Remember how we said Evil Is Not a Toy.

In Nomine has the Lilim, demons with the ability to read people's Needs (which really means wants most often) by looking in their eyes; if the Lilim can fullfil a target's Need she (Lilim are almost always female) gets a "hook" which she can later use to place a Geas on that person, forcing them to do a return favour or else suffer dissonance (for celestials) or physical harm (for humans). It is possible for a strong willed person to resist the Geas at the time when the Lilim tries to call in the return favour. They can also place a Geas on a willing target (including on themselves). Their Mother, Lilith, has the same abilities but her Geases cannot be resisted. In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas had Marc, archangel of trade, whose angels could sign a binding contract. Breaching the contract caused direct damage to the breacher. This is also present in the American version.

World of Darkness Changeling: The Lost has a borderline case with Pledges, supernaturally-enforced deals Changelings (and the True Fae) can strike with others. While the Pledge doesn't supernaturally force others to obey, most Pledges offer significant penalties, called Sanctions, which afflict an oathbreaker. These Sanctions can range from a -1 to all rolls, to owing the other party a favor, to death. If you're lost in Arcadia, land of the True Fae, and you're cold, and you start a fire, the fire won't warm you. You don't have a contract for that. Water won't quench your thirst, because it doesn't know what it'll get in return. True Fae can use these contracts- and more importantly, the loopholes therein- to make things normal-ish for themselves.

The Old World of Darkness' predecessor game, Changeling: The Dreaming, had a similar mechanic. Characters could willingly swear Oaths to each other. An Oathbreaker not only was a pariah, but suffered serious game-mechanic based penalties as well. The Oaths functioned as magically binding verbal contracts.

Mage: The Ascension has a flaw called Geas or Imperative, which first gives something that the mage can or cannot do and the result of the mage breaking that condition, the relative difficulty of abiding the contract and how bad the punishment is determining how big the flaw is in terms of freebies returned. So you can have an easy geas that asks that you go outside at least once per day and turns your hair rainbow if you don't, or one as horrifying as being unable to leave a particular spot or your avatar shatters. Obviously, the high end of these imperatives are downright unplayable barring very, very creative players who might use their spheres to abuse loopholes (astral projection not counting as their body had not left the spot or sending out clones as the original is still in the required spot), though these are usually high-level sphere effects that a starting character cannot possibly access with normal building rules.

In Mage: The Awakening, Mages can use Fate magic to bind a person to their word. Such Oaths are permanant unless their terms are fulfilled or fairly powerful magic is used to break them. The Oath does have the advantage that it confers the benefit of giving the person so bound a potential boost of will to overcome anything that might prevent them from fulfilling it. However, if they break the Oath, they are permanantly blighted with a curse whose power is proportional to that of the mage who cast it. At higher levels, mages can bind people to Oaths that they didn't actually make.

Video Games

Visual Novels

Used in the third route of Fate/stay night, although agreeing to it leads to a bad end a while down the road. In the prequel Fate/Zero, Kiritsugu forces Kayneth to sign a self-geas scroll to force Lancer to kill himself, otherwise Kiritsugu will execute Sola-Ui. Although the contract also prevents Kiritsugu from killing Kayneth and Sola-Ui, he uses Loophole Abuse and has Maiya snipe them from afar once the deed has been done.

In Juniper's Knot, there is a magical effect that echoes off the chamber when the boy strikes a deal with the Fiend.

with the Fiend. In Magical Diary, the promise of a witch is always binding - break your word and you lose your magic .

Web Comics

In Champions of Far'aus, Champions of deities have some sort of magic contract with them. While most of them do whatever their deity tells them to, Champions seem to be able to enable Loophole Abuse just by talking to their deity and changing their mind, although in #3, Daryl wonders what the punishment for outright disobeying an order is. The short story Spheres shows that disobeying an order creates a spherical . . . thing inside of their deity that, upon coming into contact with the Champion, causes Unimaginable pain and suffering that only their deity can dispel. The protagonists deities, Leilusa and Hyperion, have no intention of using the spheres to enforce cooperation, and destroy them almost as fast they form. Unless its the rare occasion they want to count how many times they were disobeyed for kicks.

Erfworld has literal magical contracts, complete with lawyer-speak and magically enforced clauses. A non-disclosure agreement literally prevents you from talking about which you are forbidden.

complete with lawyer-speak and magically enforced clauses. A non-disclosure agreement literally prevents you from talking about which you are forbidden. #Blessed: The contract bound both Joanna and the gods when she swiped right on a dating app. While she theoretically had a choice, the gods didn't, and were chosen by fate. Turns out the contract itself is intelligent, and this is the third time it has tried to fulfill the prophecy .

. Sluggy Freelance Spoofed in the Torg Potter parody of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Anything the Goblet says is magically binding. Even when the commands are completely irrational and have nothing to do with the Tournament. Once Torg figures out how to manipulate the Goblet with Muggle methods, he's able to get it to apparently say that Gandledorf has to sit on a cactus for the tournament's entire duration. The only visible power the contracts have is that everyone obeys them, so a fake one works as well as a real one. Worse yet, a wizard's name in itself is a magical binding contract, compelling the wizard in question to do whatever their name implies, which is why many wizards tend to change their name. Gandeldorf's name was allegedly Grad-fondle. Played straight (in "The Circle") with the contract between Lysinda Circle and Strakoistrat vampires: the Strakoi have a magically binding contract that without Lysinda's direct permission, no more than one of them can set foot in the New World. If they try to come within more than a few feet of land, the magic will repulse them.

In Tower of God, the Tower is full of magical contracts that are mostly enforced on people when they enter a given area, or even because they were born anywhere in it. For example, anyone entering the Name Hunt Station is compelled to be the slave of anyone who steals their name by the Station's rules, and not to attack the ruler, Kaiser, unless they fulfill specific conditions. Usually, the contract is enforced by the fact that the local Administrator, a minor Cosmic Being, will smack you if you don't follow it. When someone tries to attack Kaiser without permission, he just vanishes into nothingness, presumably by the Administrator's direct intervention. Other contracts are just physically impossible to break; that's why God-Emperor Jahad is impossible to kill for anyone from within the Tower. (He and others have a contract with the Administrators in a different sense: they make the contract, and it's enforced on other people and external reality.)

In Wake the Sleepers, the Assassin Madoc enters into a contract to assassinate Locke , which when bound by a Blood Oath binds him to complete the task.

Web Original

SCP Foundation, SCP-2221 ("A Friendly Agreement") . SCP-2221 is a EULA (End User License Agreement) that causes people who agree to it to become religious extremists. It does not affect anyone who is legally unable to form a contract (young children, mentally incompetent, slaves and D-Class personnel).

. SCP-2221 is a EULA (End User License Agreement) that causes people who agree to it to become religious extremists. It does not affect anyone who is legally unable to form a contract (young children, mentally incompetent, slaves and D-Class personnel). Whateley Universe: Reneging on "sorcerer's contracts" is possible for humans, just with unknown consequences. For more magical beings, it's literally unbreakable. They're even binding when the agreement is extracted from an unaware party through trickery or coercion, with some students not above using such tactics against others. However, there are loopholes in the system. Carmilla wriggles out of another student's attempt to hold her to a similar contract because what she signed with wasn't her actual signature, and was in fact a disguised "Hell No". Note that Carmilla's was actually the related "Deal with the Devil" trope, and it's repeatedly pointed out that Jobe should have gotten someone else to look over the contract. It's stated he got LUCKY in regards to dealing with a demon. Sorcerers' contracts can be formed by literally just shaking hands, and can be verbal. There is also the Fool's Circle: a magical circle which traps you inside it if you willingly enter. You do not have to agree to what is going to happen to you: you might do so because the magician is lying about the spell they will cast, or you might enter with a friend held at gunpoint. It doesn't matter. You voluntarily entered, case closed. Which is why students who learn about magic are told of the dangers.



Western Animation