vault backup: 2025-12-06 11:43:18

.obsidian/workspace.json

@@ -13,12 +13,12 @@
             "state": {
               "type": "markdown",
               "state": {
-                "file": "Avalon/05_Locations/Avalon Locations.md",
-                "mode": "preview",
+                "file": "Avalon/10_Canon/Leyline Crisis.md",
+                "mode": "source",
                 "source": true
               },
               "icon": "lucide-file",
-              "title": "Avalon Locations"
+              "title": "Leyline Crisis"
             }
           }
         ]
@@ -155,13 +155,13 @@
             "state": {
               "type": "outline",
               "state": {
-                "file": "Avalon/05_Locations/Avalon Locations.md",
+                "file": "Avalon/10_Canon/Leyline Crisis.md",
                 "followCursor": false,
                 "showSearch": false,
                 "searchQuery": ""
               },
               "icon": "lucide-list",
-              "title": "Outline of Avalon Locations"
+              "title": "Outline of Leyline Crisis"
             }
           },
           {
@@ -196,8 +196,11 @@
   },
   "active": "6e169ae6a9aed54f",
   "lastOpenFiles": [
-    "Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md",
+    "Avalon/10_Canon/Leyline Root System.md",
+    "Avalon/10_Canon/Leyline Crisis.md",
     "Avalon/05_Locations/Avalon Locations.md",
+    "Avalon/10_Canon",
+    "Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md",
     "Avalon/02_Sessions/session_5.md",
     "Avalon/09_Student_Handouts",
     "Avalon/02_Sessions/session 4.md",

Avalon/10_Canon/Leyline Crisis.md

@@ -0,0 +1,266 @@
+# 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. TL;DR for You
+
+- 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.
+

Avalon/10_Canon/Leyline Root System.md

@@ -0,0 +1,261 @@
+# The Root System – DM Reference
+
+> Canon for AAA. If something contradicts this later, this wins.
+
+## 1. What The Root Actually Is
+
+- **Big Picture:**  
+  The Root is a single, world-spanning **leyline organism**:
+  - Physically: a network of high-density arcane channels under the crust and through the air, like roots + mycelium + electrical grid.
+  - Spiritually: the “nervous system” of the world’s magic – semi-sentient, but not a person in the normal sense.
+
+- **Natural vs Artificial:**
+  - The raw leyline network existed naturally.
+  - Over centuries, mortals **cut it, braced it, and plumbed it** into something closer to infrastructure.
+  - The **Root Oversight Array** (D’serris’s thing) is the latest layer of software bolted onto that living hardware.
+
+- **Sap:**  
+  “Sap” is just the slang for condensed Raw Magic flowing through the Root:
+  - In-universe: glowy shit in crystals, pressure in taps, the stuff that explodes when mishandled.
+  - Metaphor: electrical current + bandwidth + blood.
+
+---
+
+## 2. Topology – How It’s Structured
+
+Treat it like a tree + power grid:
+
+- **Trunk:**  
+  Massive, slow-moving leyline that runs under/through the region. Southern Trunk is D’serris’s jurisdiction.
+
+- **Branches:**  
+  Large offshoots that feed cities, fortresses, Academies, Titan armories, etc.
+
+- **Nodes:**  
+  Places where branches are **anchored and shaped**:
+  - City Node, Academy Node, Titan Lance Node.
+  - Full of stabilizing anchors, crystals, sigils.
+
+- **Subnodes:**  
+  Local “breaker boxes” and fuses.
+  - Avalon’s A1–A3, B1–B3, etc. are subnodes off the Academy Node.
+  - Each subnode feeds a cluster of taps (dorms, labs, field, etc.).
+  - Subnodes can be throttled, shunted, or killed without taking down the whole node – that’s what B2 was.
+
+- **Taps:**
+  - Specific points where Sap is pulled off for use:
+    - Classroom conduits, Mageball field glyphs, Spin Alley lane runes, Mr. Magic’s pizza hellscape, etc.
+  - Controlled by **Runic Controllers** (hardware) and **Root Oversight** (software).
+
+---
+
+## 3. Flow, Capacity, and Failure Modes
+
+### Flow & Capacity
+
+- Each branch/subnode has:
+  - **Baseline Flow** – what it’s designed to carry.
+  - **Overcapacity Margin** – how much abuse it can take before things go sideways.
+
+- When total draw > safe margin, you get:
+  1. Minor: flickers, weird side-effects, illusions stuttering.
+  2. Moderate: wild-magic-like anomalies, local structure flexing.
+  3. Severe: **cascade** – Sap surges, containment sigils fail, subnode starts to crack.
+
+### What Happens When a Subnode Fails
+
+- **Controlled trip:**  
+  Oversight kills the branch cleanly:
+  - Everything it feeds goes dark / inert.
+  - Sap is redirected deeper into the Trunk or to sacrificial buffers.
+  - You get power outage, scary alarms, but no explosion.
+
+- **Uncontrolled failure (like B2):**
+  - Sap surges and finds its **own path**:
+    - Into nearby taps (overcharging wards, animating junk, whispering to psychically-open students).
+    - Into the physical world (crystallized Sap, explosive outgassing, temporal glitches).
+  - You can:
+    - Stabilize and re-anchor it (what the kids *tried* to do).
+    - Or rupture the branch so it burns out (what actually happened when they “destroyed” B2).
+
+- **Root Memory:**
+  - The Root “remembers” patterns of failure.
+  - Repeated stress in similar ways makes it more likely to respond *on its own* next time (whispers, manifestations).
+
+---
+
+## 4. The Oversight Array – What D’serris Can Actually Do
+
+### What Oversight Sees
+
+Think of it as a god-tier monitoring system with limits:
+
+- **Telemetry Only** – no direct mind-reading, just:
+  - Spell traffic that *touches the Root*:
+    - Schools of magic, approximate power, where/when.
+  - Node and subnode flow graphs.
+  - “Heartbeat” patterns: regular pulsing vs weird spikes/wobbles.
+  - IDs of oficially keyed users (students, staff, devices) when they authenticate to taps.
+
+- **Blind Spots:**
+  - Innate / personal magic that doesn’t use taps (small-scale, within your own aura) is fuzzy or invisible.
+  - Old, non-standard rituals that predate the grid can partially bypass it.
+  - Anything happening in a fully warded Faraday-style space (no taps in, no taps out) is opaque.
+
+### What Oversight Can Do
+
+From his command node, D’serris can:
+
+- **Throttle or kill taps/subnodes:**
+  - Reduce flow to specific areas (e.g., “cut power to Mageball runes”).
+  - Lock doors, shut off lab circles, brick enchanted devices tied to the grid.
+
+- **Inject commands:**
+  - Force safety protocols on hardware (“trip this breaker if flow spikes again”).
+  - Broadcast through certain taps (alarms, emergency lights, announcement illusions).
+
+- **He cannot:**
+  - Freely rewrite local reality.
+  - Target one specific random kid in a crowd without context unless they’re currently keyed into a tap as the user.
+  - Directly puppet people or read their thoughts – he only sees how they interact with the grid.
+
+This is important: the kids are right that he’s surveilling them; they are wrong when they assume “he sees everything we do.”
+
+---
+
+## 5. Consciousness in the Root
+
+### The Natural Root
+
+- Has **instinct**, not a human mind:
+  - Wants equilibrium: no part over-stressed, no branch murdered if it can be re-routed.
+  - Responds more strongly to **emotionally-charged** magic (fear, rage, awe).
+
+- How it shows up:
+  - Subtle nudges: whispers, half-seen shapes, déjà vu.
+  - Synchronicities: lights flicker in rhythm with someone’s heartbeat, plants grow toward certain kids, etc.
+
+### The Caged Thing (D’serris’s Mistake)
+
+- During the old crisis, something malignant / emergent was:
+  - Latched onto / coalescing in a trunk.
+  - Half-born mind, half-parasitic entity.
+- D’serris’ team **shunted it down into the Root** instead of letting it explode locally:
+  - It’s now **smeared** along the network, but clusters around high-traffic nodes.
+  - Think: virus in the operating system, not separate user.
+
+### Practical Difference
+
+- Root whisper = “turn the pressure down, reroute, nudge.”
+- Caged thing whisper = “break this, hurt them, get more access.”
+
+You don’t have to decide exactly which voice is which every time yet; just know:
+
+- Soren’s violent urges are a **mix**:
+  - Her own shit.
+  - Root amplifying.
+  - The thing testing how far it can push through her.
+- Pappy’s possession:
+  - Pappy was in a war-era Root-saturated environment; his action figure is basically a **keyed relic**.
+  - When Joe lets Pappy in, he opens a channel that the Root (and the thing) can hitch a ride on.
+
+Fouadriel is where this gets nailed down later: he’s the first point where the caged mind gets a **stable anchor**.
+
+---
+
+## 6. How Everyday Magic Uses the Root
+
+### Big Buckets
+
+1. **Grid Magic (Monitored):**
+   - Anything that draws from fixed taps:
+     - Classroom rituals, Mageball field, Titan armory, city wards, Mr. Magic’s animatronics.
+   - Logged by Oversight.
+   - Safer in terms of blowback, but visible.
+
+2. **Personal Magic (Mostly Unmonitored):**
+   - Innate sorcery, smaller-scale bard tricks, druid nature magic not explicitly tied into infrastructure.
+   - Uses local ambient mana + your own reserves.
+   - Harder for Oversight to see, easier for the Root consciousness to piggyback if you keep poking the same spot.
+
+3. **Hybrid Shit (Risky as hell):**
+   - People who hack taps to supercharge personal spellwork.
+   - Contraband relics that route Root flow into specific items (Pip’s network, experimental weapons, etc.).
+   - This is where you get your wild magic, aberrant effects, and “B2 blew up” tier accidents.
+
+### Student Tech Layer
+
+- **Sending-stones / crystals / “phones”:**
+  - Piggyback on low-draw taps.
+  - Oversight sees metadata (who connected, when, how much traffic, broad type), not the exact conversation content unless someone has applied specific spy-rituals.
+
+- **Wi-Spell / Arcane WiFi:**
+  - Campus has its own subnet.  
+  - Oversight can throttle it to free capacity for more important stuff.
+
+- **Games, entertainment, etc.:**
+  - Minor draw, only dangerous when a lot of them sync in one place (like Mr. Magic or Spin Alley).
+
+---
+
+## 7. When PCs Mess With It – Guidelines For You
+
+You don’t need hard mechanics, just consistent rulings. Use these:
+
+### Detecting Anomalies
+
+- Any magical PC paying attention can:
+  - **Arcana** to interpret flow/anomaly (“this is a surge,” “this feels like a reroute,” etc.).
+  - **Religion / Nature** to interpret Root-as-being (“it feels angry/hurt”).
+- Soren gets occasional **free vibes** because of prior exposure.
+
+### Intervening
+
+- If they try to “stabilize” a node / tap:
+  - Skill challenge: Arcana, Tools (tinker’s / mason’s), maybe help from Elias.
+  - Success: reduce flow, reinforce sigils; you decide if problem is fixed or just postponed.
+  - Fail: push anomaly up a level (minor → moderate; moderate → cascade warning).
+
+- If they try to **steal** from the Root:
+  - Short-term juice (advantage, bonus damage, etc.).
+  - Long-term consequence clock:
+    - More whispers.
+    - More anomalies following them.
+    - Oversight notices weird patterns and starts asking questions.
+
+### Oversight Response Ladder
+
+Rough escalation D’serris can take when he sees a problem:
+
+1. **Log + watch** – note anomaly, increase monitoring.  
+2. **Nudge staff** – send Larkvale/Elias “check this out” instructions.  
+3. **Throttle** – reduce capacity to specific zone.  
+4. **Lockdown** – hard lock on taps/doors, emergency protocols.  
+5. **Sacrifice** – kill a branch/subnode to protect trunk (what he fears having to do again).
+
+Where the PCs sit on that ladder is entirely about:
+- Are they helping?  
+- Are they causing more anomalies than they fix?  
+- Do they cooperate at all?
+
+---
+
+## 8. Quick Player-Facing Summary (Optional Handout Later)
+
+You can drop something like this into a “How Magic Works at Avalon” doc:
+
+> **The Root & The Grid – Student Version**
+>
+> - Magic in the valley runs on the **Root** – a huge living web of leylines under the ground and in the air.  
+> - The Academy is plugged into it like a **power substation**:
+>   - Big node under campus, smaller “subnodes” (A1–A3, B1–B3) feeding different buildings.  
+>   - “Taps” in classrooms, fields, and town that pull Sap (magical juice) out of the Root.
+> - Most big, flashy spellwork on campus **uses the grid**:
+>   - Mageball field, safety wards, labs, weird animatronics at Mr. Magic Pizza.  
+>   - Those are monitored by the **Root Oversight Array** – essentially magical IT and safety inspectors.
+> - Your *personal* magic – cantrips, small spells, stuff you do with your own reserves – mostly flies under the radar unless you hook it into a tap on purpose.
+> - If you abuse the grid (overload a subnode, hack a tap, or run sketchy rituals off campus power), you don’t just annoy your teachers – you risk:
+>   - Blackouts, wild magic, and angry maintenance staff.  
+>   - D’serris showing up on a projection and asking why the graph just went red.  
+>   - The Root itself taking an interest in you. That’s not always good.
+