# The Korrin Gate Crisis (Leyline Crisis) – DM Reference

> Working name: "The Korrin Gate Crisis"
> Public names: "The Leyline Crisis", "The Korrin Blackout", "The Gate Disaster"

## 1. Overview

- Roughly 15–20 years ago, a major city built over a trunk junction – **Korrin Gate** – almost got erased when its node went into terminal cascade.
- Cause (public version): "overuse and mismanagement of leylines during a regional conflict."
- Cause (true version): military tried to weaponize the trunk; pushed it into a **state of emergent consciousness**, then lost control.
- D’Serris and his team saved the city by:
  - Severing some subnodes (killing neighborhoods), and  
  - Performing a last-minute ritual that **shunted the emergent mind down into the Root**, smearing it across the network instead of letting it fully form and explode locally.
- That caged, half-born mind is the thing now clawing its way back via:
  - High-traffic nodes (like Avalon),  
  - Vulnerable people (Soren, Fouadriel, etc.), and  
  - Old war-artifacts (like Pappy, Titan Lance tech, etc.)
- The crisis justified building the **Root Oversight Array** and gave D’Serris his trauma + authority.

---

## 2. What Korrin Gate Was

- **Location:**  
  Large inland city built on a natural convergence of three major leylines. Think: inland trade hub, university city, fortress, industrial center.

- **Arcane role:**  
  - Served as a **primary trunk junction** for the whole region.  
  - Hosted a massive Node complex under the city:
    - Civilian taps (lights, wards, transit).  
    - Military installations.  
    - Secret research projects.

- **Political context:**
  - Tensions between neighboring states / factions.  
  - Arms race in **leyline-based weaponry**:
    - Instant bombardment rituals.
    - “Surge lances” (prototypes of what Titan Lance later formalized).
    - Sabotage of enemy subnodes.

---

## 3. The Build-Up

### Official story (what most people know)

- Korrin Gate massively over-tapped its node to:
  - Power shields, weapons, and industry during wartime.  
  - Add more and more “temporary” taps that were never decommissioned.
- Over years, stress crept higher:
  - Minor brownouts, weird glitches, small wild magic surges.
  - Complaints from engineers and druids ignored in favor of “national security.”

### Actual cause (DM truth)

- Deep under the city, a joint military–research team built the **Convergence Engine**:
  - A ritual / device meant to:
    - Tie together multiple branches of the Root.  
    - Focus Sap and **intent** into a single, coherent beam—an “arcane ICBM.”
  - The prototype weapon was the conceptual ancestor of **Titan Lance**.

- Side effect no one admitted publicly:
  - The Convergence Engine didn’t just move power; it **forced coherence** on Root flows.
  - The more they used it, the more the Root in that region began to:
    - Behave in non-random ways.  
    - Show recurring “patterns” in its hum.  
    - Push back when pushed.

- D’Serris at this time:
  - Junior engineer / battle-mage assigned to the **Leyline Stabilization Corps** attached to the project.  
  - Kept raising flags that the pattern logs looked “wrong.”  
  - Was overruled repeatedly by senior mages and generals who wanted results.

---

## 4. The Day It Went Wrong

### The Catalyst

- During a major offensive, high command ordered:
  - **Sustained overdraw** through the Convergence Engine to power a massive strike.
  - Multiple secondary taps were opened to feed it – including some not rated for that flow.

- On the monitoring side (where D’Serris is):
  - Every alarm they have is going off:
    - Flow far above spec.
    - Subnodes redlining.
    - Heartbeat patterns in the Root going from “pulsing” to “structured” – like a flat hum aligning into something like a voice.

### The Shift

- The node doesn’t simply **overheat** – it begins to **organize**:
  - Flows in separate branches sync up.  
  - Entire subnets start pulsing in time with each other.
  - The Convergence Engine begins drawing in **more** power than it should be able to.

- D’Serris and the stabilization team realize:
  - They are no longer just pushing power through the Root.
  - The Root (or something in it) is now using **their hardware** to cohere.

### The First failure

- Out on the surface:
  - People see lights flicker, wards ripple, then reality *stutter*:
    - Streets “double” for a second.
    - Voices echo words no one said.
    - Some people hear a single, overwhelming thought: **“I REMEMBER.”**

- In the Node chamber:
  - Sap pressure breaks containment on a few subnodes:
    - Korrin Gate loses entire districts in instant flares of wild magic.
    - One district becomes a glass crater.  
    - Another is frozen mid-motion, its inhabitants in a permanent stasis bubble (later evacuated with horrific side effects).

---

## 5. The Decision D’Serris Made

The options at that point:

1. **Shut everything down and let it blow**
   - Kill the Convergence Engine, cut the trunk, hope the emergent mind rips itself apart.
   - Expected outcome: Korrin Gate destroyed, shockwaves along the trunk, unknown global consequences.

2. **Try to "stabilize" it locally**
   - Contain the emergent consciousness in the Korrin Node.
   - Expected outcome: permanent haunted city, a god-egg in the basement, same problem later.

3. **Diffuse it across the Root (what they actually did)**
   - Use the Engine in reverse:
     - Force the emergent pattern **downstream**, away from the Korrin Node.  
     - Smear its coherence across as much of the Root as possible.
   - Expected outcome: Save the city; contaminate the entire network with a **thinned-out ghost**.

The high command panicked. The Stabilization Corps proposed options. D’Serris:

- Ran the numbers and backed option 3:
  - “We can’t contain it here, and we can’t eat the blast. Spread the pattern until it’s too thin to act.”
- Helped implement the ritual:
  - Severed sacrificial subnodes (killing power to, and in some cases killing, whole neighborhoods).  
  - Reconfigured the Engine to push pattern outward instead of inward.

It “worked”:

- The emergent mind did not fully cohere at Korrin Gate.
- The city mostly survived (minus the scarred districts).
- Casualty numbers still huge, but not apocalyptic.

But:

- A **fragmented consciousness** was now threaded throughout the Root.
- It could no longer manifest as one big city-killer… but it could **leak** into many places, slowly, wherever conditions were right.

---

## 6. Aftermath

### Public Narrative

- Official line:
  - “Korrin Gate was the result of reckless overuse of leylines during wartime.”
  - “Our brave engineers and mages stabilized the node at great cost.”
  - “New regulations and oversight will prevent such a tragedy from happening again.”

- Korrin Gate today:
  - Patchwork of rebuilt districts and scars:
    - The **Glass Quarter** where nothing grows.  
    - The **Hums** where people still hear echoes.  
    - The **Frozen Mile** that was eventually dismantled block by block.

- The Root is now treated as:
  - Something powerful but **dangerous**.
  - Something that needs **regulation** (Oversight).

### What only a few know

- D’Serris and a handful of surviving Stabilization officers know:
  - They **instrumentally lobotomized** a rising mind by smearing it across the world’s nervous system.
  - Oversight exists largely to:
    - Monitor for that mind trying to pull itself back together.  
    - Kill nodes / branches before they can become a new Korrin Gate.

- Classified docs refer to the emergent pattern as:
  - “The Coherence Event”  
  - “The Underpattern”  
  - Or, in one terrified margin note by D’Serris: **“the thing that learned our names.”**

---

## 7. How This Ties to Avalon & Your Campaign

### Why the Valley Matters

- The Avalon valley sits on a **secondary trunk** connected to the same network Korrin Gate was on.
- The Academy node is:
  - Newish (installed post-Crisis).  
  - High-traffic (students, experiments, Titan armory not far away).  
  - Labeled in Oversight docs as a **“sensitivity probe”**:
    - “If something like Korrin happens again, we want to see it early.”

- Titan Lance Armory:
  - Built as a formalized, “safer” successor to the Convergence Engine concept.
  - Its cradle can, in theory, be repurposed:
    - To try another diffusion.  
    - Or to deliver a killing strike to a localized manifestation.

### Why D’Serris Is Freaked Out Now

- Recent anomalies at Avalon (B2, Root whispers, etc.) **match low-level patterns** from the Korrin logs:
  - Heartbeat goes from noise → pattern, then back.
  - Student biometrics correlate with spikes.
  - Certain “voices” reported by kids sound *too* similar to witness accounts.

- When he sees:
  - Soren’s behavior around the Root,  
  - Joe’s Pappy-possessions in a grid-tied field,  
  - Fouadriel’s weird passive influence on Heartbeat graphs…

  …he doesn’t see “teen drama” – he sees **Korrin Gate, Act II**.

- His long-term fear:
  - The fragmented Coherence from the old crisis is trying to use:
    - **High-traffic nodes** (Avalon, Titan), and  
    - **Emotionally volatile adolescents** as anchor points.

---

## 8. How Different People Talk About It

You can use this for NPC color.

### D’Serris

- “Korrin Gate was not a blackout. It was the Root trying to stand up.”  
- “We pushed it back once. We will not get another clean shot if it happens here.”  
- “When I say ‘shut that node down’, I am speaking from experience, not paranoia.”

### Old-timer Mage / Professor

- “They played god with the world-tree and got their fingers bitten off.”  
- “We were told to keep casting while the sky hummed. I still wake up hearing it.”  
- “Oversight? I don’t like them, but I like melted cities less.”

### Normal Civilians / Parents

- “My uncle died in the Korrin Blackout. Don’t you dare mess with campus taps.”  
- “That’s why we have all those safety drills. That’s why the lights flicker sometimes.”  
- “They say it can’t happen again. They also said one city couldn’t overload a trunk.”

---

## 9. Player-Facing Version (Optional Later)

If you ever want to give them an in-game explanation (library article, teacher monologue), you can boil it down to something like:

> **The Korrin Gate Crisis (History Textbook Version)**
>
> About seventeen years ago, the city of Korrin Gate suffered a catastrophic failure of its leyline infrastructure. Years of overuse, wartime strain, and experimental tapping pushed the city’s main node past safe capacity.  
> 
> When it finally broke, entire districts were scorched, frozen, or warped by uncontrolled magic. Only the emergency response of the Leyline Stabilization Corps prevented total destruction.  
> 
> The Korrin Gate Crisis led directly to the creation of the **Root Oversight Array**, new regulations on high-capacity taps, and strict monitoring of major nodes—such as the one beneath Avalon Adventuring Academy.  
> 
> Official reports describe the Crisis as “a tragic but instructive example of the dangers of magical overreach.”  
> People who were there tend to describe it with fewer polite words.

