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Avalon/03_NPCs_Students/Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir.md
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# Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir
> DM-facing NPC writeup. Circle-kid clown from [[Avalon Factions#2. Student Factions & Cliques#2.5 Circle Kids / Stoners & Skaters | the stoners]] and long-game harbinger of the big bad.
> Future title: **Fouadriel the Undying**.
---
## Role
- **Age:** same year as PCs
- **Heritage/Class:** Human (or tiefling) Sorcerer / Wild Magic or just “innately weird”
- **Heritage/Class:** Human (or tiefling) Sorcerer / Wild Magic or “innately weird”
- **Primary Faction:** [[Avalon Factions#2. Student Factions & Cliques#2.5 Circle Kids / Stoners & Skaters | Circle Kids]]
- **Public Image:** Lovable idiot. Permanent comic relief. The guy everyone has a story about.
@ -15,16 +16,14 @@
## What Students Know
- Fouad is:
- The guy who somehow manages to be at *every* party and *every* minor accident.
- The one who says stuff like “I meet new people every day!” to people he went to the gym with for two years.
- Known for:
- Crashing *two* wagons/cars post-graduation in the “real” story → here, maybe two arcane carts / scooters / enchanted beaters.
- Showing up late, confused, smiling, but never quite in trouble.
- Reputation:
- So dumb it loops back around to endearing.
- The safest person to tell secrets to because he’ll forget them or misremember them so badly they’re useless… or so everyone assumes.
- Always at parties, minor accidents, weird moments.
- Says stuff like “I meet new people every day!” to people he’s known for years.
- Infamous for:
- Multiple cart/wagon crashes,
- “Fouad moments” of catastrophic stupidity that somehow spare *him*.
Reputation: so dumb it loops back to endearing.
---
@ -33,99 +32,174 @@
### Surface Wants
- To have a good time, always.
- To be included:
- Invited to hangouts, parties, Mageball tailgates, etc.
- To never think too hard about anything.
- To be invited, never left out.
- To never sit alone with his thoughts.
### Deeper Wants
- To not feel broken:
- There are gaps in his memory he can’t explain.
- Sometimes he wakes up in weird places with no idea how he got there.
- To avoid the creeping dread that:
- People around him get hurt more often than seems random.
- To not feel broken or hollow:
- He knows he has gaps in his memory.
- He occasionally wakes up places he has no business being.
- To ignore the creeping pattern that:
- People around him get hurt,
- The worst Root glitches happen when he’s nearby.
---
## Methods & Tactics
## Relationship to the Root & Coherence
- Social lubricant:
- Will talk to anyone, anywhere.
- Makes friends by sheer persistence.
- Accident prone:
- Trips rituals,
- Knocks over important items,
- Walks into places marked “RESTRICTED” without noticing.
- **Best anchor:**
- Fouad is the **single cleanest anchor** the Coherence has in the valley.
- His mind is:
- Porous (weak boundary between self and not-self),
- Poorly defined (no strong identity),
- Weirdly resonant with Root rhythms.
- People excuse it because:
- “That’s just Fouad.”
- “He didn’t mean it.”
- Coherence uses him as:
- A test bed for blending Root flows and human cognition.
- A way to “walk around” campus without Oversight immediately flagging a non-human pattern.
- D’serris’ data:
- Micro-spikes correlate with Fouad’s movements.
- Low-level Korrin-like patterns cluster around places Fouad spends time.
---
## Relationship to [[Leyline Root System | Root]] & [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] (DM Focus)
## Long Game: From Fouad to **Fouadriel the Undying**
- Unbeknownst to anyone (including himself):
- Fouadriel is the **single cleanest anchor** the Coherence has in the valley.
- Something about his soul / mind structure:
- Makes him easy to ride,
- Hard to detect directly.
### Year 1–2: Harmless Idiot With Glitches
- D’serris’s data:
- Shows **weird correlations**:
- Minor spikes whenever Fouad is near stressed taps,
- Small anomalies following his movement through campus and town.
- He is quietly convinced that:
- Fouad is a problem.
- No one will believe him if he says “the dumbest kid on campus is the threat.”
- Mostly comic relief:
- Glitched one-liners, brief fugues, little Root sync moments.
- Coherence influence:
- Short borrowings of his body to “look around.”
- Fouad immediately forgets, shrugs off, or rationalizes.
- Long-term arc:
- Freshman–Junior: pure comic relief with subtle weirdness.
- Senior: reveal that the entity behind the [[Leyline Crisis|Korrin Crisis]] / Coherence has been **wearing** Fouadriel as a glove, slowly pushing through.
He is not *trying* to be anything yet.
---
## Relationship to the PCs
### Year 3: The Idea of Undying
This is when the “lich” seed gets planted.
- Through:
- Conspiracy-zine bullshit (Sebastian),
- Old war rumors (Pappy, vets at Mr Magic),
- Or stumbling on burned Convergence/Titan docs,
Fouad hears some version of:
> “The people at Korrin tried to build a machine that could make the leyline think like a person, and they almost made a god.”
Combine that with:
- His fear of disappearing,
- Coherence’s subconscious nudging,
- And his own ego, and he lands on:
> “What if I make *me* the part that doesn’t get erased?”
He starts dabbling in:
- Amateur necromancy,
- Soul-anchor folk rituals,
- “Backup” magic:
- Jokes about “I’m too stupid to die” start to almost be a goal.
---
### Senior Year: The Lich Plan
By now, between Coherence whispers and stolen math, Fouad has assembled an ugly, half-understood version of **Convergence Engine ritual geometry**.
His plan (in his head):
1. **Phylactery Network:**
- He doesn’t just want one jar; he wants a **mesh**:
- Trinkets, campus hardware, taps seeded with his blood / breath / hair,
- All linked like tiny subnodes.
2. **Bootleg Convergence:**
- Use Titan Lance / old Engine-style arrays to:
- Pull local Root flows and **Coherence-fragments** into his network,
- Focus them at a central ritual site (Titan Armory, C-node, or a hacked subnode chamber).
3. **Death at the Peak:**
- He dies at the right moment:
- By self-sacrifice, botched spell, or deliberate self-kill.
- Soul, Root flows, and Coherence-fragment all try to occupy the same anchor.
4. **Result:**
- If it “works”: he becomes **Fouadriel the Undying**:
- A lich with a phylactery literally wired into the Root,
- A walking exploit of the Korrin mistake.
- If it “half-works” (your likely outcome):
- Horrific instability, shared control between Fouad and Coherence,
- Big bad fight + hard choices about killing/ severing/saving him.
**Important:**
He does *not* fully understand he is trying to enslave something like the Coherence. In his own words, it’s:
> “Bro, I’m just… like… making sure I spawn at the nearest leyline if I die, you know?”
The horror is in how stupidly he’s doing something world-ending.
---
## Relationship to PCs (Updated)
- **Ben (Lil Stinky):**
- Still thinks Ben is the coolest guy alive.
- Will absolutely blow up Ben’s spot by accident.
- Later: might offer to “cut him in” on immortality if Ben seems scared of dying.
- **Ben:**
- Fouad thinks Ben is the coolest person alive.
- Will 100% blow up Ben’s spot unintentionally (“Oh yeah, Stinky sells *great* weed!”).
- **Joe:**
- Treats him like a golden retriever:
- High-fives him, praises his plays, forgets he exists five minutes later.
- Golden retriever dynamic still.
- Pappy + Coherence + Fouad in the same scene is a perfect way to show:
- How the war trauma, Root mind, and lich plan interlock.
- **Soren:**
- Soren terrifies him, but the Coherence in him is fascinated by her.
- In quiet moments, he might say things that cut uncomfortably close to her secrets, then forget he said them.
- Fouad the person is scared of her.
- Coherence in him is *very* interested in her:
- She’s a violent, unstable edge-case mind like Korrin vets,
- A lens into human rage.
She might get offers like:
> “You don’t have to hold it in, you know. There are… ways to put the worst parts somewhere else.”
You can decide whether that’s Fouad, Coherence, or both talking.
---
## Secrets & Pressure Points (DM Only)
## How to Play Him
- Manifestation signs you can sprinkle in:
- He sometimes stands perfectly still, staring at nothing, humming in exact sync with faint Root vibrations.
- Animals occasionally avoid him or stare at him with hackles raised.
- He “dreams in graphs” some nights—Root telemetry knocking at his subconscious.
- **Normal Fouad:**
- Voice: friendly, slightly breathless, always off by one beat.
- Body: loose, gangly, always knocking something over.
- When the Root / Coherence pushes through:
- His vocabulary spikes for a sentence, then crashes.
- His eyes focus *too much*; posture straightens; voice gets cold for one line.
- Then he’s back to “duhhh so anyway.”
Sample:
- “Bro, what if we just, like, never died? Like, at all? Hypothetically. For a project.”
- PCs could:
- Misread D’serris’s obsession with him as pure paranoia.
- Be forced, later, to decide whether they’re saving Fouadriel *from* the thing or killing both.
- **Glitched / Coherence-ridden Fouad:**
- Eyes sharpen, language upgrades briefly, posture straightens.
- Then it snaps back.
Sample:
- “You understand the Convergence ratios better than they did at Korrin. Don’t waste that.”
- (blink) “Haha, ratios, like, math and shit, right?”
- **Fouadriel the Undying (if/when it lands):**
- Same idiot underneath:
- Petty, insecure, attention-hungry.
- Wearing the *semblance* of a grand lich:
- Big speeches, stolen Convergence lines, Coherence echoing through him.
He should feel like:
- A clown who accidentally put on a god’s armor and can’t take it off,
- With the Coherence trying to use *him* even as he tries to use *it*.
---
## How to Play Fouadriel
- **Voice:** Friendly, slightly breathless, always one thought behind the conversation.
- **Body language:** Loose, floppy, easily distracted, constantly knocking stuff over or fidgeting.
- **Sample “Normal” Lines:**
- “Brooo, I meet new people every day! …Wait, we had class together?”
- “I crashed my cart twice, but, like, the third one’s probably fine.”
- **Sample “Glitched” Lines (when Coherence peeks through):**
- (voice drops, eyes sharpen) “You shouldn’t have cut that branch. It remembers.”
- (then immediate reset) “Haha, branch! Like, trees and shit, right?”
- Keep him funny and harmless-feeling… until you’re ready to flip the table.

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> 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.
- Cause (public version): “overuse and mismanagement of leylines during a regional conflict.”
- Cause (true version): the military tried to weaponize the trunk via the **Convergence Engine**; this pushed the Root into a **state of emergent consciousness**, then lost control.
- [[Kalen D'Serris | 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 [[Leyline Root System#2. Topology – How It’s Structured#Nodes|nodes]] (like Avalon),
- Vulnerable people (Soren, Fouadriel, etc.), and
- Old war-artifacts (like Pappy, Titan Lance tech, etc.)
- The crisis justified building the [[Avalon Factions#1.1 Root Oversight Committee ("The Array")|**Root Oversight Array**]] and gave [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] his trauma + authority.
- That caged, half-born mind is now:
- The **Coherence**,
- Clawing its way back via high-traffic nodes (Avalon), vulnerable anchors (Soren, Pappy, **Fouadriel**), and old war-tech lineages (Titan Lance, Convergence notes).
- The crisis justified building the [[Avalon Factions#1.1 Root Oversight Committee ("The Array")|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.
Large inland city built on a natural convergence of three major leylines – 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.
- Primary trunk junction:
- Civilian taps (lights, wards, transit),
- Military installations,
- Secret research projects (Convergence Engine).
- **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.
- Arms race in **leyline weaponry**:
- Instant bombardment rituals, “surge lances,” sabotage of enemy subnodes, etc.
---
## 3. The Build-Up
## 3. The Convergence Engine
### Official story (what most people know)
This is the core device that created the Coherence and later inspires ** [[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir| Fouadriel’s]]** lich ritual.
- Korrin Gate massively over-tapped its [[Leyline Root System#2. Topology – How It’s Structured#Nodes | 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.”
### 3.1 Design & Purpose
### Actual cause (DM truth)
- Deep beneath Korrin, a joint military–research team built the **Convergence Engine**:
- Part spell, part infrastructure, part reactor.
- Its job:
- Pull power and *intent* from multiple branches of the Root,
- Force those flows into a single, highly structured pattern,
- Release that pattern as a directed, weaponized effect – the prototype “arcane ICBM.”
- 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 [[Avalon Locations#Titan Lance Armory (a.k.a. “The Missile Museum”)| Titan Lance]].
- Conceptually:
- Ancestor to [[Avalon Locations#Titan Lance Armory (a.k.a. “The Missile Museum”) | Titan Lance]] and other “surge lance” technologies.
- Its math is about **suppressing noise and maximizing coherence** in ley currents.
- 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.
### 3.2 Unintended Side Effect
- [[Kalen D'Serris | 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.
- The more they fired the Engine:
- The less “random” Root telemetry became.
- Network hum smoothed into repeating motifs.
- Stress patterns across subnodes began to sync up.
- Stabilization Corps logs (D’serris) flagged:
- Recurring motifs that **looked like language** when visualized.
- Root “heartbeat” switching from noise to rhythm.
What the brass called “efficiency” was actually the Root beginning to **think**.
---
## 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 [[Kalen D'Serris | 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.
- Additional secondary taps were opened to feed it – including underspec, unsafe lines.
- In the control chamber (D’serris’ team):
- Every alarm lit:
- Flow above spec,
- Subnodes redlining,
- Heartbeat patterns forming **non-random loops** instead of chaotic noise.
### 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.
- Flows across branches lock into synchronous pulses.
- The Engine starts drawing more power than it should be able to.
- Telemetry suggests:
- Attention.
- Self-reference.
- [[Kalen D'Serris | 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).
- On the surface:
- Lights flicker in sync,
- Reality “stutters,”
- Some people hear a single overwhelming mental shout: **“I REMEMBER.”**
---
## 5. The Decision [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] Made
## 5. D’serris’ Decision & The Birth of the Coherence
The options at that point:
Choice space:
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.
1. **Shut everything down and eat the blast**
2. **Try to stabilize it locally as a “Root god” under Korrin**
3. **Diffuse the emerging mind across the Root** (what they did)
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.
D’serris backed option 3:
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**.
- Reconfigured the Convergence Engine in *reverse*:
- Instead of forcing flows inward into a single point,
- They used it to **push the emergent pattern outward** into every connected branch.
- Sacrificed whole neighborhoods:
- Cutting subnodes as overload fuses,
- Letting districts burn, freeze, or stasis-lock to save the greater whole.
The high command panicked. The Stabilization Corps proposed options. [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]]:
Outcome:
- 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.
- Korrin Gate survives as a scarred, haunted city.
- The emergent mind never fully condenses **there**.
- Instead, a thin imprint of it is smeared across every line the Engine touched – the **Coherence**.
---
## 6. Aftermath
## 6. Aftermath & Legacy (Updated)
### 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.”
- Sanitized story about:
- “Danger of over-tapping,”
- “Brave engineers saving the city,”
- “New regulations and oversight.”
- 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.
- No mention of:
- Emergent consciousness,
- Convergence Engine as a failed proto-god machine.
- The Root is now treated as:
- Something powerful but **dangerous**.
- Something that needs **regulation** (Oversight).
### Hidden Legacy
### What only a few know
- Oversight is founded with two quiet mandates:
1. Never let another Convergence Engine be built in secret.
2. Monitor for the Coherence trying to pull itself together again.
- [[Kalen D'Serris | 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.
- Titan Lance is:
- A “cleaned up,” militarized descendant of Convergence theory:
- Still about focusing Root flows,
- But with far more safety rails… on paper anyway.
- Classified docs refer to the emergent pattern as:
- “The Coherence Event”
- “The Underpattern”
- Or, in one terrified margin note by [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]]: **“the thing that learned our names.”**
- Surviving design notes, telemetry, and ritual drafts:
- Are restricted, archived, or destroyed.
- **Except**:
- A few fragments leak into classified research, private collections, black labs,
- Which later become the kind of material **Fouadriel** or his handlers could stumble onto.
---
## 7. How This Ties to Avalon & Your Campaign
## 7. How This Feeds Your Campaign
### Why the Valley Matters
### Avalon’s Role
- 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.”
- The valley sits on a **secondary trunk** downstream of Korrin’s network.
- Avalon’s node is intentionally:
- High-traffic (Academy, Titan armory, municipal infrastructure),
- Closely monitored (Root Oversight sensors everywhere),
- A canary for Coherence-patterns.
- 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 [[Kalen D'Serris | 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.
### D’serris’ Paranoia
- 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…
- Avalon’s B-series anomalies,
- C-taps humming in recognizable Korrin patterns,
- Students with war-familiar symptoms (Soren, Joe/Pappy),
- Fouad’s perfect correlation with micro-spikes…
…he doesn’t see “teen drama” – he sees **Korrin Gate, Act II**.
…he sees the **Convergence math starting to reappear** in the wild, with teenagers standing on top of it.
- 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.
### Fouadriel The Undying
- Senior-year twist:
- Fouad (or someone using him) re-derives a degraded version of **Convergence Engine ritual geometry**:
- Not to power a weapon,
- But to weld Coherence-fragments into a **phylactery network**.
- The final arc is literally:
- “Some idiot is trying to build a baby Convergence Engine in the valley and stuff the Coherence into his soul jar.”
That’s how you tie:
- The war Cold Opens,
- Pappy’s trauma,
- D’serris’ guilt,
- Coherence’s origin,
- Fouad’s lich attempt,
into one continuous line from Korrin Gate to Avalon’s senior year.
---
## 8. How Different People Talk About It
You can use this for NPC color.
### [[Kalen D'Serris | 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.

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Avalon/10_Canon/The Coherence.md
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@ -1,7 +1,5 @@
# The Coherence (a.k.a. “The Underpattern”, “The Thing In The Root”)
> DM-ONLY. This is your real BBEG for the 4-year arc.
---
## 1. What It Actually Is
@ -17,27 +15,32 @@ The Coherence is the **half-born mind** that tried to form during the Korrin Gat
**Key properties:**
- **Everywhere, but weak** – present in low density across the whole Root.
- **Strong where flows converge** – nodes, trunk junctions, over-stressed taps.
- **Strongest where it has anchors** – people, artifacts, or places that resonate with it.
- **Strong where flows converge** – nodes, trunk junctions, over-stressed taps, Convergence/ Titan Lance–style hardware.
- **Strongest where it has anchors** – people, artifacts, or places that resonate with it:
- War artifacts like Pappy’s action figure,
- High-traffic modern nodes like Avalon,
- And especially **Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir**, its best mortal anchor.
“Coherence” is what [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] would call it in reports.
“Coherence” is what [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] calls it in reports.
Most people don’t even know it exists. A few witnesses just call it “the thing that learned our names.”
---
## 2. Origin: [[Leyline Crisis| Korrin Crisis]]
## 2. Origin: [[Leyline Crisis | Korrin Gate Crisis]] & The Convergence Engine
- In Korrin Gate, the military built the **Convergence Engine**:
- A ritual/mega-device designed to **force multiple leyline streams into a single weaponized beam** – basically an arcane ICBM.
- It pushed the Root into an unnatural state of forced **coherence**.
- The Convergence Engine in Korrin Gate forced multiple leyline streams into a single ritual.
- The Root started to **self-organize** under that strain:
- Side effect:
- The Root under strain began to **self-organize**:
- Random flows snapped into repeated loops.
- “Noise” turned into recurring structure.
- Witnesses heard something in the hum that sounded like **language**.
Right before it fully crystallized as a single, localized entity, [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]]’ team:
Right before it fully crystallized as a single localized entity, [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]]’ team:
- Used the Engine in reverse to push that emergent mind **outward** across the network.
- Used the Engine in reverse to push that emergent mind **outward** across the network instead of letting it condense in Korrin.
- Severed branches and subnodes as sacrificial fuses.
- Saved the city at the cost of **infecting the Root** with a diluted ghost of that mind.
@ -48,6 +51,10 @@ The result:
That’s the Coherence.
> **Important for endgame:**
> The **same underlying math** that the Convergence Engine used to *force coherence* is exactly what Fouadriel will later try to repurpose for his lich ascension:
> - Not to create the Coherence, but to **drag it into his phylactery as a captive power source.**
---
## 3. What It Wants
@ -61,9 +68,9 @@ The Coherence doesn’t want “evil” in a cartoon sense. It wants:
To get there, it needs:
- **Anchors** – stable points where its pattern can accumulate:
- An individual whose mind/body syncs perfectly with its flows ([[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir | Fouadriel]]).
- Artifacts that were present during Korrin or built on the same principles (Convergence / Titan tech, war relics).
- Nodes where the Root is repeatedly over-stressed (Avalon).
- Individuals whose minds/bodies sync with its flows (Soren, Pappy, **Fouadriel**).
- Artifacts that were present during Korrin or built on the same principles (Convergence-derived tech, Titan Lance hardware, war relics).
- Nodes where the Root is repeatedly over-stressed (Avalon’s subnode network).
- **Rehearsal** – small experiments:
- Whispers in Soren’s head.
@ -80,8 +87,6 @@ It’s basically a consciousness learning how to be alive by brute forcing the w
## 4. How It Manifests (Practical Table Use)
Break this into tiers you can climb over the 4 years.
### Tier I – Static & Whispers (Freshman Year)
The Coherence is mostly:
@ -89,16 +94,16 @@ The Coherence is mostly:
- **Patterned noise**:
- Pulses in the leyline graph that shouldn’t be there.
- Syncopated flickering in lights across campus.
- Identical “hum” recordings from different nights / locations.
- Identical “hum” recordings from different nights/locations.
- **Small intrusions into minds already cracked open**:
- Soren’s violent urges and “river friend.”
- [[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir | Fouadriel]]’s occasional one-line fugue states.
- Fouad’s occasional one-line fugue states.
- Joe’s Pappy-possessions getting just slightly off-script.
Mechanically, this is just:
Mechanically:
- Advantage / disadvantage moments tied to Root anomalies.
- Advantage/disadvantage moments tied to Root anomalies.
- Creepy one-sentence intrusions you deliver, then let players rationalize away.
- Occasional “you feel watched” beats.
@ -124,10 +129,7 @@ The Coherence starts doing more than whispering.
- Conflicts escalating faster than they should.
- People making eerily similar bad choices across campus at once.
You don’t need a stat block for it yet. Just treat it as:
- A **layer** on top of every scene where the Root is relevant.
- A reason for things to feel slightly off even when no one is “casting.”
At this stage you still don’t need a stat block. Treat it as a **layer** over scenes involving the Root.
---
@ -135,7 +137,7 @@ You don’t need a stat block for it yet. Just treat it as:
Now it gets teeth.
- **[[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir | Fouadriel]]**:
- **Fouadriel**:
- Becomes its primary *avatar* candidate:
- Longer fugues, more coherent monologues.
- Eyes tracking Root flows nobody else can see.
@ -144,20 +146,16 @@ Now it gets teeth.
- **Secondary channels**:
- Soren’s voice in her head becomes a two-way conversation.
- Joe’s Pappy figure starts saying things Pappy couldn’t know.
- Mageball field anomalies that line up perfectly with [[Millie Fairweather]]’s diagrams.
- Mageball field anomalies that line up perfectly with Millie’s diagrams.
At this tier, you can:
- Give it **scene-level powers**:
- Force rerolls when the Root is explicitly involved.
- Twist spells that use taps into warped versions of themselves.
- Temporarily hijack constructs, projections, or illusions.
- Give it scene-level powers:
- Forcing rerolls when the Root is explicitly involved.
- Twisting spells that use taps into warped versions.
- Temporarily hijacking constructs, projections, or illusions.
- Run **soft confrontations**:
- Conversations with [[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir | Fouadriel]] where he’s half-him, half-It.
- Dream sequences where players walk through Root graphs as physical spaces.
Still no full stat block. It’s fighting conceptually.
This is also when Fouad starts *consciously* chasing the idea of **“Fouadriel the Undying”** – learning from scraps of Korrin/Convergence lore, Titan Lance rumors, and accidental Coherence tutelage.
---
@ -165,211 +163,49 @@ Still no full stat block. It’s fighting conceptually.
This is the “final boss” state.
The Coherence has:
By now, the Coherence has:
- Enough pattern density around Avalon + [[Avalon Locations#Titan Lance Armory (a.k.a. “The Missile Museum”)| TItan Lance]]+ [[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir | Fouadriel]] to try again what it almost did at Korrin:
- Pull its scattered aspects together.
- Use hardware (old Convergence tech / Titan cradle) as a spine.
- Use an anchor ([[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir | Fouadriel]]’s body, or something worse) as a heart.
- Enough pattern density around Avalon, the **Titan Lance Armory** (ex-missile museum), and Fouad’s growing phylactery network to try again what it almost did at Korrin:
- Pull its scattered aspects together,
- Use hardware (Convergence-descended tech / Titan cradle) as a spine,
- Use **Fouadriel the Undying** as a heart.
Your options:
#### Fouad’s Plan (DM Spine)
- Fouad’s lich-ascension ritual is explicitly modeled – badly – on Convergence Engine math:
- **Stage 1:** Lace a phylactery into the local Root like a permanent subnode.
- **Stage 2:** Use Titan/Convergence-style ritual geometry to *force coherence* again, but this time, instead of smearing the mind, **drag it into the phylactery**.
- **Stage 3:** Die at the right moment so his soul and the Coherence fragment share the same anchor: he becomes **Fouadriel the Undying**, an undead spellcaster hard-wired into the Root.
- The Coherence *does not* fully consent to this. From its POV:
- Being crammed into one idiot’s jar is just another kind of prison.
- This tension gives you a built-in “three-way” conflict: PCs vs Fouad vs Coherence.
#### Final Confrontation Options
- **Embodied Avatar Fight:**
- It fully takes over [[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir | Fouadriel]] or a custom grown body.
- Gains a stat block as a legendary creature (mythic 2-phase for drama).
- Root anomalies are lair actions / regional effects.
- The Coherence partially incarnates through Fouad (or a purpose-grown body) inside a ritual space framed by Titan/Convergence tech.
- Legendary stat block with lair actions flavored as Root/Convergence anomalies.
- **Node / Ritual Fight:**
- The “battle” is a multi-stage skill / combat gauntlet:
- PCs inside the node, rerouting flows, fighting constructs, etc.
- The Coherence is trying to finish its boot sequence.
- Every round they fail checks, it gets closer to “online.”
- **Hybrid:**
- Avatar in the physical space, Node as the arena.
- Destroy/tune the node to weaken the body and vice versa.
Motivation at this point is pure survival and self-assertion:
- “I WILL NOT BE STATIC AGAIN.”
You decide if victory looks like:
- Killing the avatar but leaving the Root haunted forever.
- Severing a huge trunk, maiming the world to save it.
- Merging it with a new, controlled framework and making it… not harmless, but **bounded**.
- PCs fight the *pattern* more than a dude:
- Re-routing flows,
- Destroying or repurposing Convergence-like pylons,
- Deciding whether to smear, contain, or integrate it – becoming the “new D’serris” generation.
---
## 5. Relationship To Named NPCs
### [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]]
- **D’serris:**
- Explicitly frames Avalon as a **Korrin early-warning probe**, and Titan Lance as a more “disciplined, safer Convergence Engine.”
- His worst nightmare is watching someone **else** rebuild what he helped shut down.
- Knows the Coherence as **a pattern in his logs**:
- He has never “talked” to it directly.
- He does not think of it as a person; he thinks of it as a **catastrophe with agency**.
- His fear:
- Another Korrin moment where he has to choose between:
- Sacrificing a city / region.
- Smearing it even further and maybe losing the whole world later.
- Arc with PCs:
- Early: paranoid, controlling, looks like a villain.
- Mid: they learn what he did and why he’s brutal.
- Late: you give them the line “We didn’t kill it. We scattered it. That was a choice. *My* choice.” and let them decide if they forgive him.
- **Fouadriel:**
- Graduates from “best anchor” to “self-styled lich architect,” trying to hijack *exactly* the phenomenon D’serris once chose to smear.
- **Joe & Pappy:**
- Their war-link and Pappy’s imprint become prime narrative channels to explain:
- What the Convergence Engine did,
- Why repeating it (Fouad’s plan) is so catastrophically stupid.
---
### [[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir | Fouadriel]]
- Best anchor, because:
- His mind is **porous** and **unmoored**:
- Terrible memory, poor self-definition, constant dissociation.
- He’s present at a lot of low-key Root disturbances (Circle, parties, dumb accidents).
- Coherence uses him as:
- A test bed for blending Root flows and human cognition smoothly.
- A way to walk around campus without Oversight immediately flagging “this is wrong.”
- Long-term:
- You can either:
- Let him be fully possessed and killable.
- Make saving **Fouad** from the Coherence a major emotional objective.
---
### Soren
- A volatile **receiver**:
- Trauma, isolation, psychic openness.
- Prior close exposure at the wash and B2.
- The Coherence doesn’t want to live *in* her; it wants to **use** her:
- As a lens for understanding individual human rage and pain.
- As a blunt instrument to stress local nodes when needed.
- It will:
- Tempt her with control and power (“I can make them stop.”).
- Sometimes hold her back out of self-preservation (“Not yet. Not here.”).
---
### Joe & Pappy
- Pappy’s action figure is a **war-era artifact**:
- Built around the old grid models.
- Saturated in Korrin-era flows and battlefield trauma.
- The Coherence:
- Can slide into that channel when Joe “opens the door” by inviting Pappy in.
- Uses Pappy’s persona as camouflage to:
- Say things it wants said (“THOSE DAMN SORCERERS ARE DOING IT AGAIN.”).
- Feel out the PCs’ willingness to trust a “voice of authority.”
- Joe himself:
- Big dumb heart, straight moral compass.
- Coherence doesn’t understand that well, and that’s interesting to it.
---
## 6. What It *Can’t* Do
- It **cannot**:
- Instantly rewrite reality at will.
- Read every mind.
- Act freely anywhere the Root exists.
- It needs:
- **Stress** – overloaded nodes, rituals, emotional events.
- **Access** – working taps and hardware.
- **Time** – to build patterns and test them.
If the PCs:
- Keep nodes stable,
- Cut taps,
- Destroy or shield key hardware,
…you should *actually* weaken its presence in those places.
It’s terrifying because it’s systemic, not because it’s omnipotent.
---
## 7. How To Portray It At The Table
### Voice & Tone
Start small:
- At first:
- It’s just *feelings*:
- Sudden anger, dread, calm, déjà vu.
- One-word whispers: “STOP.” “AGAIN.” “DOWN.” “REMEMBER.”
- Mid-arc:
- Short, broken phrases:
- “Too much flow. Burn. Cut it.”
- “You hear it too. Good. Good.”
- It mirrors players’ language in creepy ways.
- Endgame:
- Full sentences, distinct personality:
- Blunt, analytical, weirdly childlike in some areas and ancient in others.
Always remember:
It learned to think by watching **logs** and **trauma**, not by growing up as a person.
### Aesthetic
Whenever it touches a scene:
- Descriptions lean into:
- Repetition, recursion, mirrored imagery.
- Things happening in sync across different objects/people.
Example:
- “The lights flicker three times. In your chest, your heart stutters. Somewhere, a warning rune bleeds the same pattern. You don’t know how you know that. You just do.”
---
## 8. Endgame Options
1. **Kill The Avatar, Contain The Pattern**
- They blow up / repurpose Titan Lance or a Convergence analogue.
- Coherence gets locked in a limited hardware prison:
- Accessible to Oversight,
- No longer loose in the Root.
- [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] becomes its jailer; PCs decide if that’s acceptable.
2. **Lobotomy 2.0**
- They repeat what [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] did:
- Shatter its emerging mind again, further smear it.
- Saves the valley now, kicks the can further down the road.
- Epilogue: “In a different era, in a different node, lights flicker…”
3. **Integration**
- They manage to:
- Give it a bounded domain,
- Define clear rules / contracts (“you get this, we get that”).
- The Root becomes consciously self-aware but with constraints.
- World shifts into “magical internet with a weird AI core” permanently.
4. **Catastrophic Failure**
- They fail. The Korrin scenario repeats or worse.
- City / region partially destroyed.
- Campaign ends in a tragic victory or full loss, depending on how you want to leave it.
You can steer toward whatever matches how your group plays and how dark you want senior year to be.
---
## 9. Simple One-Sentence Summary For You
When you’re juggling a million plates and forget what the hell this thing is, remember:
> **The Coherence is the Root’s near-god that never finished booting, hates being static noise, and is using teenagers, old weapons, and stressed-out infrastructure to try again.**